All Things Nerdy | allthingsnerdy.com

On December 20, 2007 I blogged about how to effectively get rid of almost all SPAM that still makes it into your Yahoo! Mail inbox. The article was titled SPAM be gone @ Yahoo. Apparently, no one cares that I figured out a better way that what Yahoo! has come up with to block SPAM from entering your email inbox…and its free no less!

How did I come to this conclusion? I have registered a whopping 4 hits on that blog entry since 12/20/2007. I guess you all like wasting time clicking delete.

Enjoy reading about how to enlarge your penis and make tons of money on the the stock market.

Like many, I use Google Reader to process way to much information everyday.  So much so that it feels like an addiction and probably is.  But that is not the purpose of the blog post.

Some feeds just have too many items that come through each day and overwhelm the other feeds so much so that I feel like I am always reading the feed with many entries.  I wish there was a way to throttle back the amount of entries that come through on a given feed.

If you use Yahoo Mail (may apply to other ISP and web accounts) as I do you may have noticed there are a ton spam message getting through their filters. Now of course this might be some of my own fault: i.e. allowing suspect places to have my email address in my youth. BUT, “what can I do about spam” you might say?

I have noticed a trend, at least in my emails, that the spam message is not addressed to you directly. This can work for our benefit! How? Well all you have to do is apply a filter to your email messages and send messages that weren’t addressed to you to another folder so that you can review them later. Mine is called Likely SPAM. I review this every so often and find that 99.99% is actually SPAM. The exception is the case if you belong to an email group such as a Yahoo Group. The message will get caught by this filter and is not SPAM. But this is a rare case.

See the screen shots below for help setting this up in Yahoo.

1) Goto Mail Options

2) Click on Filters on the left side and then click on the ‘Create or edit filters’ link

3) Add a new filter with the following parameters with your own email address in the proper field and the specific folder you want to save the possible spam message to. Then click the Save Changes button and enjoy a large reduction in SPAM coming to your inbox.

Guys, in case you didn’t know already, I am a news junky. I utilize Yahoo’s My Web to save all pages that of interest that day. You can benefit from my wasted time and addiction by subscribing to my My Web xml feed here.

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/user/OTQWs84CZuXv5mWeIDM-/urls.xml

Does anyone know of any web apps that allow you to search another individual’s My Web? This would come in handy because of course I can search my own My Web but it would benefit you even more if you search my My Web. Anyway just food for thought.

Do you know Plaxo?  You should. 

Plaxo is an online address book, calendar, and task manager that syncs with Microsoft Hotmail, Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Mac, Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and your mobile phone. 

The initial idea behind Plaxo was to have other contacts signed up for the service as well and therefore your address book would be updated automatically if the person ever made any changes to, for example, their phone number.  Oh but it can do so much more than that.

There is no need to mention their excellent online interface because as soon as you get Plaxo set up you won’t even noticed that is working.  It seamlessly works in the background to sync all of your data.

I currently sync Plaxo to Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Work Outlook - Exchange Server, and Home Outlook.  My Home Outlook is then used to sync to my PDA/phone (T-Mobile Dash: excellent phone by the way).  It works like a dream and cannot imagine my life without it. 

I definitely will not neglect to tell you all of this is covered under their free service!  See the Free vs. Premium services breakdown below.

Probably the most beautiful (powerful) web apps I have seen.  It looks and acts just like a desktop app.  This is the future of apps.  I have said it before and I will say it again, operating systems will not be needed for many things even in the near future.  To a remedial extent, this is true today.

What about Scrybe?  It is a calendar, list, and power notepad that allows off-line access and automatic syncing when you are online.  It ease of user interface is only paralleled by its designer’s foresight for thinking of the smallest details.

Welcome to Scrybe

Absolutely, positively the best personal financial management tool out there. This beats Microsoft Money and Quicken hands down. Its destroys any other web based money management app without question.

Yodlee offers a free money management tool that is perfect for the person who wants to get all their finances in a row. It has all the essential tools like Microsoft Money has, but without all the extras that you don’t need. It is like a light has shown down upon me.

Thank you Yodlee MoneyCenter, thank you.

Try it today, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I am, in fact, writing this post in Windows Live Writer.  This is a new blogging tool that allows you to use a powerful editor, that is beautiful to the touch, to create and maintain your blog. 

Although this tool is from Microsoft and the wonderful Live initiative, it can be used with many different blogs other than Spaces (obviously since you are reading this on wordpress).

After a short install and a no-brainer setup, I am happily blogging on a WYSIWYG editor that appears just like my web site’s theme.  You can throw in images and easily manipulate them on the fly.

Simple, Simple, Simple.  I love it.  This is a must try for Windows users.  This tool will make you want to blog again.

DNS, the Domain Name System, translates the human addresses of websites and servers (like wikipedia.org) to the numerical address used by computers (207.142.131.203).

So you use DNS every day many times per day.  Each request much go out and find the IP address mapped to that particular name, this time can add up.

Enter OpenDNS:  they are a free service to allow your computers or routers to access their servers that have innovative ways of providing safer and faster browsing.

After setting this service up on my router I could tell a noticeable difference.  Give it a try, you have nothing to lose.  For more information check out their FAQ.
OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster DNS

Lightroom is the new photo management software from Adobe Labs.

It has some very advanced features that true photo buffs will love but lacks some of the features that an average photo management user might like, or at least lacks the ease of use - because I did not see them upon inspection.

Either way you should keep your eyes on this project as it is still in its infancy (my replacement for beta).

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom