September 2008

Sure Outlook has great spam-filtering, but what if you are relying on Outlook Web Access instead?  You will waste a lot of time moving messages to the Junk folder.  Or even consider the amount of bandwidth saved by having the server do filtering rather than the client.  Thankfully it is quite easy to setup a spam filter based on the ZEN IP blocklist provided by http://www.spamhaus.org.

1. Install the Anti-spam components following these directions if they already aren't.
2. Open "Exchange Management Console".
3. Expand "Organization Configuration".
4. Left-click "Hub Transport".
5. Select the "Anti-spam" tab.
6. Right-click "IP Block List Providers" and select enable.
7. Double-click "IP Block List Providers".
8. Go to the "Providers" tab.
9. Click "Add".
10. Enter your choice in the "Provider name" box (I recommended "Spamhaus Zen").
11. Put "zen.spamhaus.org" in the "Lookup domain" box.
12. Leave "Match any return code" checked.

The following screenshot shows pretty much all these steps:

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Doing this cut me to about 17 spams per day, rather than the ~170 I was getting. 

Vista seems to have an annoying habit of creating several "Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* ##" entries in my ipconfig results, which means I have to scroll up to see the actual entries I want to.  That is a pain to do on a laptop with a touch pad, but also I think it was contributing to connectivity problems when switching between wireless and wired connections.

If you want to remove them, there is a method that seems to be harmless:

• Right-click My Computer, go to Manage.
• Go to Device Manager
• Click View on the top of the window, and check Show hidden devices.
• Now expand the Network adapters tree, and you should see several entries that start with isatap.(something).
• Disable (right-click, Disable) several of them, and verify that all your networking things still work.
• If that didn't cause any problems, you should be able to safely delete them (right-click, Uninstall).

Now your ipconfig readout should be a little more sane.  This problems seems to be caused by IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling of some sort, which you can read about here.

As I had feared would happen for a long time, my kick pedal (well actually my cousin's kick pedal) broke.  So I made a new pedal out of 1/2" plywood.

First step was disassemble the broken unit, trace the foot part, and cut it out:

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Then I drilled holes for the hinges (which were essentially the only deviation from the design of the original), holes for the orange piece, and a hole for the magnet.  It was accurate enough to just eye-ball all the locations from various angles instead of measuring things. Which got me to this stage:

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And the final assembled product (which works just as well as the original):