Peter's Blog 13.3.2004

Bought 12 Belkin palm screen covers.

Bought 12 Belkin palm screen covers. Don't like them, screen looks cloudy, worse than tired old one. Greyness may be air bubbles that will settle down, I'll persist with it for now.

Also bought a Canon CanoScan Lide 20 Scanner to immortalise old family photos. It does 600x1200 scans and does a pretty good job for £40. I enlarged a baby photo of my wife from postcard to A4 and it looks pretty good. Tried the OCR software out ofcuriosity and that was reasonable. Not sure I have a use for it.

Been reading Linux email HowTo.

Been reading Linux email HowTo. I didn't realise servers passed messages around directly via SMTP, I was under the impression (based on ignorance) that it was like news and there was a kind of email backbone you had to plug in to via your ISP. I was also under the impression that there were seperate mechanisms for sending and receiving mail but basically everything goes into an SMTP server that either delivers it or relays it to another server. Nice, simple.

I think this means that I could receive email directly on the linux server. I could use my host redirection to send email there for spam filtering and maybe virus checking. Then I find a POP3 server to allow me to read it.

Pros:

• Something to play with

• Spam filtering

• CV

• Could use it to send work email

• Hook for remote control

• Notification: could forward headers or text me

Cons:

• Have to trust server

• Port open to the world

• Have to stop relaying and other nasties.

• I must get dyndns updating working. My IP address has not changed for about a month but a power cut could change that.