Playing with Gmail

Been doing a little playing around with Gmail and regexes of late. A few things to note: (a) fetchmail is great, (b) if you want to backup your entire gmail account on Windows, this Life Hacker Guide is great but be sure to read the comment about port 995, (c) Google appears to only allow a certain number of pop messages to be fetched per connection, meaning you'll have to rerun fetchmail a bunch -- I don't think this is an error in how fetchmail is set up, (d) if you are looking for a good way of stripping attachments, try mboxscrub.pl from O'Reilly (though likely you'll need to modify the regex for the beginning of a new message (in the elsif condition), I think "/^From /" without the trailing dash is correct. It is amazing how much poorly structured data is in a few years worth of email.

GPSBabel (wonderful)

I bought a Garmin 305 a while ago (their new model looks even better) in the hopes that a gadget would spur me to exercise and to play around with geocoding photos. It has mostly worked. It did get me to exercise more and getting data on my runs is very satisfying but its windows software is sluggish and not that great. Plus it uses its own weird format making using the data elsewhere a bit of a pain. Fortunately, GPSBabel exists and was really easy to install. Just a quick "apt-get install gpsbabel" and the addition of "blacklist garmin_gps" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to make sure gpsbabel's usb driver is used instead of the default one on my debian/knoppix system. Then I use "gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o kml -F out.kml" to create a KML file that is more useful. Woohoo! Will post more on geocoding photos (which it is fabulous for) in Windows and Linux later.

La Paloma *

based on the recipes found in Cocktail Jen (from Esquire) and The New York Times

3oz fresh grapefruit juice
1oz fresh lime juice
simple syrup to taste
soda
Optional: 2oz tequila (I used Conmemorativo)

Most recipes recommend starting with a grapefruit soda (Jarritos is recommended with others using Fresca or Safeway Select). I like the fresh fruit as long as it is well strained to get rid of the pulp. It also allows you to make the drink lighter and less sweet (especially for the non-alcoholic version). Some serve it with a salt rim, such as the version in the photo (credit to Urban Mixer), but I leave that off and serve it in a tall glass with lots of ice.

* I've been on a bit of a tear making interesting drinks at home. Mostly non-alcoholic though alcohol could go in most of them. Anyhow, I figured I would post some of the recipes here to spread the joy of a refreshing summer drink. Where they are consciously based off the creations of others, I'll post links.