filtering

Yahoo Mail gets in-box filtering by contact

Yahoo has added a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that lets users filter the contents of their in-box to see only the messages from their contacts. This means that if someone's not on your contacts whitelist, you don't see their message.

Short of Yahoo Mail's built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any in-box clutter from people you don't know. However, there's some work involved on your part to build that list of contacts. To enable the feature, users must first create … Read more

Parents beware: Bing previews video porn

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has a highly touted feature that some parents may find troublesome. Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that lets you view and listen to part of a video simply by hovering over it with your mouse. Trouble is, it works with porn as well as "family friendly" videos.

I tested this feature quickly and with great caution on board a Virgin America WiFi equipped flight, being careful to shield the screen from fellow passengers and crew.

When I searched for a word that was sure to bring up porn, … Read more

A decade of drinkability

When I lived in Colorado, I drank water from the tap with abandon. It wasn't until I tried tap water from other places that I realized I had taken the crystal clear and fresh-tasting Rocky Mountain tap water for granted. I clearly remember drinking tap water that tasted like dirt once on vacation and recoiling in horror.

Now that I live in a big city with areas that are notorious for polluted water or old plumbing systems, I stand confidently behind my tap-mounted water filter and my filtered water pitcher. My complaint about the screw-on tap filter is that … Read more

Blocks too well

Web Site Zapper claims to block questionable Web sites from view, but it worked a little too well and blocked us from sites we indicated were acceptable.

Once activated, the program appears in your taskbar, but we found a lag time whenever we tried to access it. A tiny window appeared with very vague instructions such as Learn Bad Sites and Learn Good Sites. The Configuration menu lets you add sites you wish to block and sites you wish to allow. We entered URLs into each category, but when we tried to surf the Web, we were blocked from any … Read more

Do major record labels have a future?

Record stores are fading fast, the big labels--EMI, Sony/BMG, Universal, and Warner--are on their last legs, and commercial radio stations rarely play new music. The big music retail chains: Tower, Virgin, and HMV are all gone.

People still listen to music, it's how they hear it and find it that's changed. Oh, and they don't want to pay for it.

The Beatles didn't get a big, fat advance when they signed a record contract. They hooked up with EMI to make records; the band couldn't do it by themselves. Luckily for the Beatles, they had a terrific producer, George Martin, who encouraged John, Paul, George, and Ringo to keep growing. Without Martin the Beatles might have been just a minor footnote. He set the scene and created the right environment for the Beatles to bloom.

The artist/producer relationship is crucial, and back in the day, the great labels--Motown, Stax, Electra, Atlantic, Columbia, Blue Note, and Warner Brothers--had the best producers. The labels promoted the music and got it on the radio.

Nowadays, any 12-year-old could make a record in his or her bedroom, put it up on a site,and sell it. Up-and-coming local bands do the same--but without the input and direction from the right producer, the band won't tap its full potential. … Read more

No special features

This free browser works, but doesn't offer users any compelling reasons to replace their current program. GreenBrowser is set up in the basic style of popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The good news for new users is how intuitive the buttons feel and how quickly anyone familiar with those systems can adapt to GreenBrowser. Its homepage offers a variety of links to entertainment, technology, and news sites. The program also touts "special" features to auto-fill forms and prevent ads, but these have become standard in many browsers.

While GreenBrowser searched for sites and functioned properly, … Read more

Food for the future

I always believed the future to be a wonderful place filled with lots of flying things and robots who enjoyed working for humanity. While much of that hasn't happened, at least our food hasn't turned into bland tasteless pellets that we consume once a day for all of our nutritional needs. That would be a very bleak future indeed. While we may not be flying around in jet packs just yet, we still have a rich and diverse food culture that seems to have no end. If there were a future in which we all had to eat … Read more

Facebook's new apps filters lack polish

By now everyone should have the new Facebook, a redesign the company is touting as a leap forward from the previous version. In case you missed Rafe's hands-on with it last week, and our report from the press briefing the week before, the gist is that you can now filter the flow of information by groups of friends, and by application. The problem is that as a main feature, the application filtering isn't quite polished--and it shows.

Instead of putting all the information into one big stream and letting users pick how much of each type of news … Read more

Portable unit kicks in when GPS fades

Ahoy, GPS-stranded motorist. Stop banging the dashboard, and consider this timely reincarnation of dead reckoning to help you find your way out of "GPS-denied environments," or at least alert others to where you can be found.

Seer Technology is offering a miniature, self-contained, electronic navigation unit called NaviSeer that mixes GPS and DR in a complex gumbo of hardware and proprietary algorithms to deliver user location in real time.

It does this by blending the output from three gyros, three accelerometers (one at each axis,) a magnetometer, and a baro altimeter, and then running it through a Kalman filter.

The result: coordinates accurate to within less than a yard, according to Seer. And no, it "does not require sensors to be worn on the legs or feet."… Read more