Is this email spam?

I get a lot of spam. In some cases, I’ve provided an address to a site/service I genuinely want to use, and not been careful about opting out of their helpful add-on email offerings. In some cases, my address has been scraped or guessed by someone who doesn’t give two hoots about my email preferences.

Replying or clicking unsubscribe can be a bad idea if you get a one-off piece of spam, as it verifies to the sender that the scraped/guessed address is live: this may result in your address being prioritised in future campaigns, and potentially shared with or sold to other spammers. The safest approach in this case is to delete the mail without clicking any links. If you get repeat messages from the same source, or in the same style, either blacklist the address, or set up keyword-based filtering to avoid seeing the same kinds of mail in your inbox again. Check your mail client’s documentation for information on how to do this. If you’re getting unwanted messages from a legit service you really did subscribe to, feel free to click the “unsubscribe” or “mail preferences” link in their signature and change the categories/frequency of the messages they send you.

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Too many tabs

Sometimes I need to have a lot of tabs open when I work. Things can get messy and slow. I have a few different strategies to manage them all. Here’s my top three.

  • In some cases, I’ll use different browsers to ringfence the tabs/bookmarks related to a particular job, and use the browser’s memory/history to re-open the tabs I need for that project when I resume.
  • I use OneTab, so that if I’m doing research and have a number of interesting tabs open that I’d like to come back to later, I can create a date-based list of just the useful stuff (rather than my browser history, which would show everything). A nice touch is that OneTab doesn’t include my pinned tabs when it makes its list.
  • A colleague recommended Tab Suspender, a Firefox plugin that puts individual tabs in your browser to sleep if you haven’t looked for them for a bit so that the resources on that page (including adverts) stop chewing your CPU making other tasks slow. It’s made a world of difference. There seem to be a wide range of similar plugins available.

Have you found other handy ways to bookmark/archive/manage your browser tabs? Comment below!

Virtual Reality

Inspired by the apparantly untrue tale that eBay was invented to let founder Pierre Omidyar’s then fiancée trade Pez dispensers, one of the first things I used the site for was to track down a beloved toy from my youth: the View-Master. And despite how the world and technology had changed in the intervening *cough* couple of years *cough*, it was still a bit magical to look at those 3D images again.

Roll on another *cough* couple of years *cough* (it’s very dusty in here, isn’t it?), and View-Master has arrived in the 21st century with a virtual reality (VR) compatible version of their iconic viewer – complete with a little clicky lever on the side for interaction/navigation. 🙂 You’ll need an iPhone/Android phone and apps to do anything with it: it’s pretty much a plastic version of Google Cardboard, but has springs and latches and a wriststrap to keep your phone that little bit more protected (though they do call out that the View-Master is not designed to be a protective case).

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Cyrillic characters in LaTeX

This one caused some headaches here, so recording the solution in case it’s useful to anyone else.

I wanted to include a Cyrillic string (copied and pasted from an email) in a LaTeX document whose default fonts didn’t support Cyrillic, but when I saved and compiled the file it was replaced by a string of question marks instead. After much poking around and experimentation, and with some assistance from Dave who is even more proficient in LaTeX than I, this solved it:

  1. First off, make sure you’re saving your document in UTF-8. (In WinEdt, this is set under Document > Document Settings… > Format.)
  2. In the document preamble, define the font family for cyrillicfont to one that matches your main package’s font (or that is close enough, but supports Cyrillic):

    \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
    \usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
    \usepackage{polyglossia}
    \setdefaultlanguage{english}
    \setotherlanguages{russian}
    \newfontfamily{\cyrillicfont}{Times New Roman}

  3. In the document body, add your Cyrillic content in the second pair of curly brackets of:

    \foreignlanguage{russian}{}

Pokemon Go!

We’ve been playing Pokemon Go (PG) with the boys for a week now, and we’re having great fun. It’s proved an excellent incentive to persuading small people to go out for a walk, and we’re clocking up steps on our FitBits like never before. The walks take a fair bit longer than usual as we have to pause regularly and zig-zag along our nominal route to hit as many pokestops and gyms as possible, and to catch wild Pokemon(s?). We’re also having fun spotting other folks playing, and chatting with cheery strangers who think it’s cute to see a family out gaming together. I’m not sure when I last saw a phenomenon like it. If you haven’t started playing yet but think you might like to, here are a few tips from our experiences. Continue reading “Pokemon Go!”