Jeremy Zawodny asks “Is your email inbox a stack or a queue?”

Both kinda suck. Looking at how my Thunderbird is currently set up, I leave inboxes set new-top (stack), and list and historical folders new-bottom (queue), to better reflect the order of arrival of messages. Reading a stack feels somehow awkward to me; FIFO just seems more natural. As others have noted, a stack often results in not-quite-new messages getting pushed below the fold and lost for days. On the other hand, if you sort new-bottom, you feel buried by the weight of all those old messages, and it’s hard to find the starting point in boxes with a lot of traffic. That’s probably why I use stack for inboxes. Maybe I’ll switch my inboxes to new-bottom for a while, and see how it feels.

Why hasn’t someone done a horizontal ‘timeline’ summary folder view, as in Photoshop Album and many other visualizations? A horizontal bar with one vertical tick per day. The height of the tick would represent number of messages per day. The tick could be bolded or colored to indicate unread messages that day. Mouseover zoom and scroll, as in WordCount. Thoughts?

For some reason I couldn’t find a good WordPress post bookmarklet, so here’s mine. was already set up to accept post_title and content; I added support for feeding the referring url into the trackback url field. This requires a small change in bookmarklet.php and edit-form.php.

I bought a Buffalo LinkStation 250 the other day. It seemed like a good way to add a bunch of storage to the home network. The device works as advertised, but there are a couple of glitches that need to be sorted out:

• The device writes file time/date stamps incorrectly. On mine, everything is stamped with some date in Jan 2002. I spoke with Buffalo about this, it’s a known problem, and they are working on a software fix. This is a real bummer, and I’m surprised that this wasn’t noted in the CNet review. I wouldn’t recommend the product until this is fixed.
• I have an Epson CX5200 connected via the LinkStation, and printer sharing works, but printing is VERY slow compared to when the printer is connected directly to my PC. There is a delay of ~30 seconds before the printer kicks in — a real pain if you a printing multiple docs. Maybe they can fix this with a driver update…
• The printer sharing doesn’t support multifunction devices, so when I want to scan something, I have to plug the printer back into the PC directly. Bummer.

Even though WP Comment Auth seems to work, I still end up having to “moderate” WordPress comment spam. The Three Strikes plugin works like SpamAssassin to automatically reject comments that score above a certain threshold. I applied couple of hacks noted by others to send notification when a comment is blocked, and also to display the comment before it’s rejected, in case it is in fact legit. Here’s my version of the plugin.

It’s about time someone invented a two-pronged push-pin, but the packaging leaves a lot to be desired. Six per package, and for $4.95?! Looks like a big waste of plastic. Why not just go all the way and wrap them individually? I had a brief conversation with the designer, he thinks that “These pins don’t lend themselves well to 100 in a pack for $0.99 to be sold to middle America.” Hmm. Design doesn’t belong on a pedestal. I suggested that he put them in a box. Go figure.

More packaging overkill: I ordered a teensy 4-cell Thinkpad battery, which weighs about 6 ounces and measures about 1.5″ by 7″. It came in a nicely padded IBM box, which was itself in a larger box from CDW :379->img:. The laptop itself was also double-boxed :381->img:. Feh.