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A few months ago I changed over to a Linux desktop at work. Because we have exchange I using evolution. Sadly, it's at best a weak replacement for a mail client. Its local message store is barely functional and falls apart horribly with sizes resembling anything that any real user will have.

So, a little while ago, our exchange admins turned on IMAP, I switched to Thunderbird and things were better. Or so I thought. It turns out that, except for Bayesian spam filtering, Thunderbird is just an outlook replacement.

What? Isn't that what I wanted?

No. I want it to be better. Why should I have the exact same capabilities when I can have more?

My current problems are focused around message filtering. Apparently there's a number of things that Thunderbird just doesn't do quite right. Like the fact that it only filters on the Inbox. So, if you're doing serverside filtering before downloading mail you can't re-filter on the client. That just seems silly.

But, the part where it could really be improved is in the general handling of filters. Thunderbird is built on the standard mozilla engine. So, it provides a nice javascript-y programming interface. How hard would it be to add capabilities like regular expressions or the ability have it actually execute code on particular messages? And there aren't even plug ins that do that.

Sure, I could write one, but, if I had the time to do that I wouldn't need the capabilities it would provide.

And that's one of the catch-22's of open source.

A few Woot offs ago, I got in on a bag of crap. For $8 I got a couple weeks of great waiting in great anticipation of what I would get. Finally, I got it. (18 HP over the ear headsets?!).

There were something like 12 or so various Sansa mp3 players of well known flavors. I gave most of them away or sold them for a nominal fee. But this left me with an interesting conundrum. I wanted one. . .but I only do oggs.

So, I grabbed a 4G e260 (like $20 all over) and decided on trying rockbox.org. Short of the fact that it doesn't natively support the USB stuff I've been enjoying it. As you might expect, it naturally supports mp3s and oggs and 13 other formats -- on ipods too! It comes with all sorts of games, including doom if you grab the wads somewhere. There's some applications, like "lamp", hard to figure that one out.

All in all, getting a cheap mp3 player on rockbox's list of supported hardware and installing it is well worth the few minutes. It'll make your couple of bucks go much farther.