Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Apology for eaten emails and comments

These days, I need to be extra-vigilant in terms of filtering possible spam and malware. I also get a substantial volume of spam comments and emails each day. As a result, it is almost certain that I am occasionally missing legitimate emails and comments, deleting them from spam folders that I don’t have time to check through manually, or never even seeing them because they are automatically blocked on a different basis.

The blog’s spam filtering systems are fairly sensitive to links, so if your comments are being eaten try posting them without links.

Similarly, for email, I am more likely to open an email from an unknown sender if it is in plain text (not HTML) and includes no attachments.

iTunes updates

The decision of whether or not to update iTunes is always a wary one for me.

On the one hand, it is possible they are patching essential security bugs that are leaving one or more of my devices vulnerable.

On the other, it is likely that the update will include at the very least a gratuitous and confusing user interface change, and at most will be another transformation in the functioning of the whole program. I don’t want to need to learn new software every time Apple decides to mix things up again, and they have an unfortunate habit of eliminating good features and introducing deliberately frustrating ones.