News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

When I walked into the house after spending the Labor Day weekend in Prescott, I heard a clicking noise coming from my office. Bad news — my computer’s hard drive had died.

Most of my important information and data was backed up, but I still had to reinstall Windows and reinstall all the programs I had been running.

Since I have to start over again, I have decided to try to live in the open source world as much as possible. Unfortunately, I can’t get along without Windows quite yet. But I don’t need MS Office; I’ll use Open Office exclusively instead.

I don’t need Outlook; Thunderbird is a better mail program.

And I don’t even have to synch my Palm phone with Outlook; I can use the Palm Desktop that came with the phone.

It’s kind of like moving Mom to a new apartment this weekend. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also an opportunity to get rid of stuff you don’t need and start fresh.

I’ve been getting a lot of “Image Spam” lately — usually stock tips telling me about a great new opportunity. The spam filter in Thunderbird can’t detect them, because there is no incriminating text to key on — just the image which could be anything, as far as the spam filter is concerned.

I’ve found a way in Thunderbird to catch these images and relegate them to the Junk folder. Here are the instructions.

It’s possible that it will catch valid messages, so you should check the junk folder before you empty it.