Introduction

Hosts:

MrX

Dave

Morriss

We recorded this on Saturday March 11th 2023. This time we

met in person, first at a pub called The Steading close to the

entrance to the Midlothian

Snowsports Centre where we had something to eat and drink -

though they only serve breakfast items before 12 noon. Then we adjourned

to Dave’s Citroen car (Studio C) in the car park and recorded a

chat.

The last of these chats was over Mumble in September 2022, so it was

great to be away from home and to meet in person again after a long time

of COVID avoidance.

Topics discussed

Google Docs - Dave and MrX use this to build shared notes to help

organise these sessions

There are issues with cut and paste when using Firefox – it doesn’t

work!

It can be fixed by selecting about:config in a new

tab.

Change the attribute dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled

to true.

Is email still relevant in 2023?

Google Wave

- Google’s possible email replacement seemed not to have lasted very

long

Alternative access to Gmail using the IMAP protocol

Folders versus labels. Tom Scott’s video “I

tried using AI. It scared me.”

Dave’s experiences with email:

Digital

Equipment Corporation’s Vax VMS used DECmail, which needed DECNet networking.

The UK Academic network (JANET) initially used its

own Coloured

Book protocols, including Grey Book mail. This ran over an X.25

network.

Gradual transition to TCP/IP and SMTP mail (over JANET Internet

Protocol Service, “JIPS”).

In early Unix days (Ultrix) there was MH

(Message Handler)

Later, this was replaced by nmh.

A GUI interface was available called xmh

A very flexible open-source front end called exmh was

crafted using Tcl/Tk

Using procmail

allowed an enormous number of capabilities, like sophisticated

filtering, spam detection and automatic replies.

Now using Thunderbird,

and has been for maybe 15 years.

MrX used Eudora in the past, but mostly uses Outlook now.

Both agree that many useful features of email, available in the

past, have gone. Both of us still find email relevant however!

Calendars:

MrX misses the calendar on the Psion Organiser

Dave used to use an X-Windows tool called ical on

Ultrix (no relation to the later iCalendar standard). Moved

to Thunderbird and its calendar called Lightning.

Both have used the Google Calendar, Dave uses a Thunderbird add-on

to share family calendars

Lifetime of storage media:

SD cards can last a fairly long time, but getting the right type is

important. Using older-style cards in new projects might turn out to be

a false economy.

Hard disks can last a long time if the right s