If you want to search by zip code, provide distance-from calculations or verify the city and state when someone enters a zip code, you’ll need a zip code database.
For MotorsportReg.com, I originally used a free but outdated USA zip code database with latitude and longitude. I know it’s outdated because my application sends me [...]

Need passport photos? Need a lot of passport photos? The going rate is between $5-10USD for a couple of 2″x2″ photos. For my recent trip, I needed around 20 of these pictures for visa and permit applications and I’m a cheapskate. Read on to see how you can make your passport [...]

Goal: have a single master source of email, contacts and calendar data accessible from any number of devices including desktop, laptop, internet cafe, and mobile device without using Outlook.
My Software:

Mozilla Thunderbird + Lightning calendaring extension plus:

Lightning Toggler - shows/hides the Lightning month/task options in the folder pane so you can switch between calendaring and email [...]

When I started my consulting firm years ago, we used a lot of Sun hardware. All Sun boxes provide dedicated console access through a serial port (or an RJ45 version of one) allowing you to remotely admin or plug your laptop in without needing a graphics card, monitor and keyboard. PC-based Un*x also [...]

We have a web-based IMAP client running in a subdirectory on our mail server and I wanted to force all usage to be protected by SSL. Google turned up a lot of hits but none of them worked out of the box. Here’s the mod_rewrite snippet which is inside of a <VirtualHost> block:
[...]

I use Thunderbird as my email client and have been converting my accounts from POP3 to IMAP to access my mail from multiple devices (Laptop, Internet Cafe, Phone, etc).
Our fantastic anti-spam solution, DSPAM, occasionally misses a message. With a POP3 account I would forward it to a special address on our server configured to reclassify [...]

In preparation for my trip, I did pretty extensive research on computer hardware to find what I was going to haul around with me to stay connected.
I couldn’t find this information elsewhere so I’m posting it for posterity. It’s a basic comparison of how the IBM X-series notebooks stack up against each other and [...]

In rebuilding our mail server last month, I added Courier’s IMAP server enabling us to keep mail on the server instead of always downloading it. You might want to do this if you access your email with multiple devices and you want to see all your emails regardless of whether you connect via Thunderbird, [...]

I’m cleaning out my inbox as I transition from POP3 to IMAP and I thought I’d share this bit of tortuous research I went through a few years ago. In California, it is legally possible to take traffic school more than once every 18 months. It is not the default policy, but if [...]

What a nightmare. My longtime mail server lost power at the colo facility about a month ago and when it came back up, it only recognized one processor. It’s been bloody slow since so this weekend I went in with an extra gig of ram and two servers worth of spare parts to [...]