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With the recent addition of a new TV I am hoping that I can come up with a universal remote capable of actually controlling the myriad of consumer electronics devices populating our living room. As we add components the number or remotes seem to proliferate yet none of them seem capable of controlling any other device effectively. I never was successful in getting the multifunction remote that came with my satellite box (a DishPVR) to control my A/V receiver. The multifunction remote that came bundled with the TV looks like it might have some promise as there are enough extra buttons one would expect it to be capable of controlling something else besides the TV.

Our new TV.

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Today I saw over at dunenovels.com that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson now plan to write a two volume follow-on to Chapterhouse Dune. Previously they had announced their intention to continue the series based upon the notes Frank Herbert had left prior to his death.

So far I have had mixed feelings about their works. I thought their Prelude to Dune series was weak, however, their writing seems to have hit a stride with the subsequent Legends of Dune series. While none of their books are as deep or ambitious as the original series they do make for some interesting reading. I am curious to see where they take the story as Chapterhouse Dune ended leaving a number of questions unanswered.

I got a chance to see Lost In Translation tonight. The film deals with two people who are not connection with their spouses. While abroad in Japan they cross paths and for a brief moment share something meaningful. I didn’t particularly care for this film as I thought it simply illustrated the challenge of finding happiness in our lives.

I thought the depiction of life in Tokyo to be right on based upon my own experiences from visiting. When Heather and I visited back in 2000 we found it somewhat overwhelming to be immersed in a different culture and language. Many of the experiences portrayed on screen by Bill Murray’s character mirrored our own experiences. We also noticed a number of American actors shilling for products - for example Bruce Willis seemed to pop up on every vending machine we saw.

While I was configuring postfix to act as a backup MX for Steve I needed a way to test it was configured correctly. Here is a quick cheat sheet how to send mail via a manual telnet session with a mail server:
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I recently ran into a problem with Internet Explorer 6 where the view source option suddenly stopped working. At first I thought it was a quirk related to applying the latest IE security patch but after a bit of googling I found that this is a known bug in IE. Apparently when the cache gets very large the view source option stops working.

Clearing the Temporary Internet Files made the problem go away.

With a minimum of effort I was able to configure the built-in messaging application on my Nokia 3650 smartphone to work with my home IPAP server. Connectivity isn’t the fastest, however, it works surprisingly well and being able to access and manage my personal email while on the go is handy. Going direct to my own mail server is way more convenient than screwing around with the email gateway / portal my wireless provider provides.

So far the only issue I have been unable to resolve is making a secure IMAP connection to a server (like mine) with a self-signed server certificate. So far I haven’t found out how to update the list of certificate authorities that the phone accepts as valid.