03.28.07
Tagged as Reviews, Spam
I’ve posted before about my ongoing battle with spam, and some of the weapons I’ve found useful. There was a time when I administered my own email server, with carefully chosen realtime blacklists and a regularly updated set of SpamAssassin rulesets. That was pretty effective, but far too time-consuming—not to mention the expense of having a dedicated server.
Eventually I moved to a shared hosting plan with DreamHost, and tried their built-in spam protection for a while (which also uses SpamAssassin). It was OK, but a bit too conservative—far too much spam was getting through, even when I customized the level at which a message was considered spam. I eventually decided to combine DreamHost’s filters with Gmail, and wrote a blog post and a wiki article about my technique. For a while, that worked beautifully, but something must have changed in Gmail’s filtering setup, because soon I was getting a lot of false positives. One especially annoying category was Amazon Marketplace purchase confirmation emails: without fail, Gmail marked every single one as spam, and since each one came from a different seller’s email address, there was no good way to prevent this from happening.
Next I tried CRM-114, which rarely gave false positives (except from one particular sender whom I had to whitelist), but also never really achieved an acceptable level of confidence. Every day it appropriately marked most of my spam (which I forwarded via procmail to another account) and let the majority of my legitimate email through, but also marked around 5-10 messages a day “unsure.” I then had to train it by forwarding those messages to myself, along with a special command to tell CRM-114 how it should have categorized them. I kept expecting it to get more accurate than that, but after several months I gave up.
And that leads me to the present day. For the past week, I’ve been using a hosted spam filter managed by Postini. Since Postini is designed for large companies, I’m actually going through a reseller called Spam-X, which allows me to filter just one address, as long as I pay for a year in advance. One address comes to $27/year, which is more than worth it for the time it saves me.
In the first week, with just the default settings and a basic whitelist, Postini has caught 419 spam messages, with 4 missed and 2 false positives. Those false positives were both sort of special cases: one was a message telling me I hadn’t won free tickets to a movie, followed by an advertisement; the other was from my bank, telling me there had been some suspicious activity on my account. Both addresses are now whitelisted. I’m still getting the occasional message that hasn’t passed through Postini’s filters at all; apparently some spammers don’t maintain their DNS servers very well. If it continues, I may write a quick procmail filter to reject mail that doesn’t have Postini’s headers.
There are a few features I’d like to see added, like keyword whitelisting, but overall I’m impressed by the feature set. The filters can be tuned to five levels of aggression, and in addition to the general filter you can customize filters for sexually explicit content, racially insensitive content, get-rich-quick schemes, and “too good to be true” special offers. If a legitimate message is mistakenly marked as spam, you can have it delivered to your mailbox as though it had never been blocked—and when you do, Postini asks if you’d like to add the sender’s address to your whitelist. For email discussion groups, you can whitelist “To:” addresses as well as “From:” addresses. I also like that Postini blocks mail before it even gets to my web host’s servers, let alone my local system. I had to change my DNS MX records, but once that was done, I could almost forget about spam altogether.
Verdict: highly recommended. I’m emailing like it’s 1999.
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11.04.05
Tagged as Music, Reviews
Pixies were undoubtedly one of the most influential bands of the late eighties, and in fact arrived just slightly ahead of their time: just as they were breaking apart, Nirvana was breaking alternative music into the mainstream. All in all they left behind four studio albums and one EP, and since their demise a CD of B-sides and one of live performances in the BBC studios have been released, as well as a handful of collections, rarities, and some limited-edition recordings of their 2004 reunion tour. What was missing was … well, this DVD.
Pixies is an exemplary DVD retrospective, one by which future music DVDs can be judged. On a single disc it collects all of the band’s videos, one complete concert, and two documentaries—one follows them on an early tour of Europe, and the other is a retrospective featuring live footage, interviews with the band, and an assortment of musicians and critics discussing the band’s impact and importance. The videos range from early demo reels to more polished MTV-style stuff, and the documentaries couldn’t be more different, either: one’s just tosses you on the bus to tour with the band, while the other is all talking heads and inset album covers. My favorite bit was the concert footage—I often find myself cringing at my favorite bands’ live work, especially the frequently hopeless attempts to duplicate on stage the tight harmonies and intricate soundscapes made possible by high-priced producers and computer software, but the Pixies sound almost exactly the same live as they do on disc—a little more stripped down, maybe, a little more raw, but basically the same. And unlike a lot of self consciously pensive musicians these days, they all look like they enjoy what they’re doing—Kim in particular is clearly having a blast throughout.
If you’re a Pixies fan, this disc is essential—it’s not just another shameless cash-in, it’s a great up-close look at a band at the peak of its powers. There’s a lot of material here, every bit of it worthwhile. Don’t miss it.
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08.23.05
Tagged as Music, Reviews
Several of my favorite musicians have released good albums this year—like Ben Folds, Foo Fighters, Sleater-Kinney, Aimee Mann, and The White Stripes, to name a few—not to mention a shockingly good unofficial online release by Fiona Apple and a compilation of EPs by Belle & Sebastian. But a new (to me) musical discovery may turn out to be my favorite album of the year: Andrew Bird’s majestic and strange The Mysterious Production of Eggs. I’m now happily and confidently recommending this album to every single person I know—it’s that good.
It’s hard to describe Eggs in terms of influences and similar artists, because there just isn’t anyone similar to this. Vocally, Bird comes in somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Thom Yorke, but with none of the tendency to over-emote (or, on the other end of the spectrum, mumble). Musically, Bird seamlessly mixes the country and swing of his past projects with rock, folk, and classical influences. At times the instrumentation reminds me a bit of late-period Tom Waits (which is good), but mostly he stays a little closer to the pop end of the spectrum while mixing things up enough to keep the listener on his toes.
Bird’s lyrics shine, too—every song could be read as a poem. But along with the music—gorgeous melodies, shimmering harmonies, and Bird’s stellar violin, guitar, and occasional whistling—it’s irresistible. I can’t recommend this album highly enough.
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01.16.05
Tagged as Gadgets, Reviews
I’d been looking for some new headphones for a while. I had a pair of Sony MDR-EX71s (mine were in white, imported from Japan, to match my iPod), but wasn’t entirely happy with them. They sounded pretty good, for the most part, except for maybe a little too much treble, but the in-ear design wasn’t as comfortable as I would have liked, and taking them out to answer my cell phone or talk to someone was such an annoyance I often just skipped it. Also, the cord: either too short (without the extension) or far too long (with it), and it amplified every bump or brush as I walked around town. I got about a year of use out of them, and certainly they were worth the $50 I paid for them, but it was time for a replacement.
So at MacWorld last week I picked up a pair of Sennheiser PXC-250 noise cancelling headphones. I ride the bus and train every day to get to and from work, so outside noise is a major issue for me. The Sennheisers reduce constant, low-frequency noise by about 15dB, which the ear perceives as half the noise, without affecting irregular, high-frequency sounds—like car horns and sirens. Even without hooking the ’phones up to my iPod, the noise cancellation on its own is great for reading on the bus or in other noisy environments. This feature does require 2 AAA batteries (without which the headphones still work, as normal headphones), and as a bonus the noise cancellation circuit seems to work like a headphone amp—turning on the noise cancellation increases the volume and makes music sound clearer and more expansive.
There is, as some reviewers on Amazon have noted, a certain degree of hiss accompanying the noise cancellation. This is, of course, white noise—that is, it’s part of the noise cancellation feature. Personally, I think the reviewers who make a big deal of this are missing the point. In any situation in which you’d be likely to use noise cancelling headphones, this slight amount of hiss isn’t likely to be an issue.
The part that actually does the work of noise cancellation and amplification and holds the batteries is external to the headphones themselves. Some have complained about this, because it means there’s a somewhat large tubular piece between the headphones and whatever you have them plugged into. If you’re walking around town, that’s one more item clipped to your belt or taking up space in your pocket. Personally, having tried systems that crammed the whole works into the headphones, I’m in favor of any design that means carrying less bulk over your ears. The PXC-250 headphones are sleek and light, and don’t weigh you down or make you look like Princess Leia. The padding on the headband is a particularly nice touch.
The most important consideration, of course, is the sound, and that’s where the Sennheisers really shine. Listening to my music through these headphones has been like hearing my favorite albums for the first time—the bass is crisp and pronounced but not overpowering, the treble is clear and bright, and the midrange is perfectly balanced. In short, these are the best headphones I’ve ever owned.
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