Archive for August, 2005

Gmail Lets You Set From: Header

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Gmail now lets you configure the From: header of the mails you send. This is great news if your “official” mail address is something other than “…@gmail.com” and you only use Gmail as your back end for storing, reading and writing mails. With the proper From: header (as opposed to the Reply-To: header, which has always been configurable), people won’t accidentally add your Gmail address to their address books. This in turn means that it is easier to switch to a different mail system if you should become unsatisfied with Gmail.

This is a pretty generous feature from Google, considering that they are really removing a lot of lock-in into their system.

Updated: Added screen shot:

Setting From: header in GMail

Update: As Paul points out in the comments below, Your Milage May Vary depending on the user interface language set in Gmail. Its seems, though, that you can switch to English (US), add a new “From:” address, switch back to your favorite language and still use the new address.

The 152 MByte Mouse Driver

Sunday, August 14th, 2005

Yesterday I bought a Mighty Mouse at the Apple store in Ginza. (And while I was here, I also got myself a nice PowerBook…) The below screenshot shows the installation dialog for the driver software.

Mighty Mouse installation dialog

WTF, 152 MByte for a mouse driver?! My first hard disk (in an IBM PC AT) only had a capacity of 20 MByte!

Welcome Foreigners!

Wednesday, August 10th, 2005

Welcome Foreigners! Drink & Eat more! Spend Less!

Yakiniku restaurant in Akasaka.

Service for Tracking Web Site Changes Through RSS?

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

Is there a service that notifies you of web site changes and lets you subscribe to the alerts through RSS? Not necessarily full-fledged screen-scraping, just something saying “Site X has been updated, click here to visit it.” I want to track sites that get updated infrequently and don’t have an RSS feed, such as Tokyo Damage Report or James Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month.