iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I’ve been looking for a modification for my new-to-me car to help make it my own. I searched around the forums that deal with the Acura CSX and the Honda Civic and quickly realized that the simple “bolt-on” modifications available for the Honda Civic don’t work with the CSX as it has a slightly larger engine that was borrowed from the Acura RSX.

I started to home in on the engine’s air intake as a good place to focus my efforts. An air intake that allows more air to pass into the engine can increase the power (a little bit), this is done by decreasing the amount of effort to draw air into the engine and ensure there’s always enough. Less restricted air intakes also tend to improve the sound of the engine by allowing more induction noise to be heard.

Some Acura CSX owners had tried applying other Honda Civic-intended air intakes, but they would tend to trip the Check Engine light. The solution a lot of owners were coming to was modifying the airbox top cover to fit a generic cone-type air filter. The modifications involved trimming away most of the cover’s plastic and attaching a standard 3′ flange cone-type air filter to the now exposed tube. This not only involves a better filter but allows air to be drawn from more locations than the restrictive tube that leads to the front of the car – this could be the cause of the cars not-so-great throttle response.

Many Acura/CSX forums detail this DIY process, CSX DRIVER (login required – probably the best how-to), Acura Forum and this YouTube video of an obnoxious kid.
Read more... (574 words, 11 images, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)

Running a mail server is hard work. This is largely because it puts you on the front line of the battle with the internet’s biggest scourge: spam. My recommendation: don’t do it.

When I setup a new web site and domain, or when I am helping another organization setup their Email etcetera my preference is to sign-up for Google Apps and Gmail Email.

What is now Google Apps started with “Gmail For Your Domain” and now includes Gmail, Docs (documents), Groups, Sites and Chat. The standard edition is free for 50 accounts or less, above that it’s $50 per user per year.

The best part is Google handles all the spam filtering, gives users a number of Gigs of storage (7Gigs the last time I checked) and handles all the redundancy, backup etc, but it is worth noticing their no enterprise-esh recovery options.

There is even a Canadian connection in that Lakehead University in Thunder Bay was one of the first major domains to migrate everyone’s E-Mail. Many of the faculty objected to their Email being routed through the united states, but at least they were able to setup their iPhones with their work Email on Christmas day.

The most compelling reasons is that you get your mail via the best web interface going, as well as POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers that are all encrypted. Plus I’m a big fan of Google calendar system — I’m a big fan of calendar’ing systems in general.

Google Docs can be a bit of “lifestyle” change, but if you are interested working on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online it’s a great service, espcially if you want to either work with others collaboratively in a work-flow or for sharing with an audience.
Read more... (973 words, 6 images, estimated 3:54 mins reading time)

Gina Trapani of smarterware.org / lifehacker.com now has a new series of weekly videos and blog posts at FastCompany.com called “Work Smart”. If you’re STILL one of those people who feel positively overwhelmed by your E-Mail inbox, or you feel that your iPhone/BlackBerry has made you worse at acting on E-Mails, not better, Gina has some simple advice for you.

Here’s her actual article over at www.fastcompany.com/article/work-smart-conquering-your-e-mail-inbox

Here’s how you can add your “at messages” to your Mac Mail.app 10.5 or 10.6 (or Thunderbird or Outlook Pro, etc.) via Twitter search’s RSS feed.

I’ve become a twitter re-tweet junkie. To get my fix I added an RSS feed of twitter’s search results to Mail.app. Here’s how I do that:

1. Go to search.twitter.com and search for @your_twitter_handle (ie. @mattclare)
   
2. Grad the RSS feed URL found on the right of the results page.
   
3. In Mail.app’s bottom right (or in Thunderbirds’ or Outlook’s account preferences) add a new RSS feed.
   
4. Paste in the RSS URL. You may want to also check to have it appear in your RSS feed. and press “Add”.
   

That should be it! Now whenever your account gets re-tweeted, “replied to” or otherwise mentioned you should see it in your inbox. Sure our inboxs are all already too full, but at least these messages will be short.

Since I just went through the process of setting-up my own self-managed VPS (virtual private server) system I figured I’d share my experience in the hopes that it will help someone else with some basic command-line comfort looking to gain control of their web hosting or being the process of scaling up.

This is the start of what I hope will be a brief series of blog posts describing the process.

I went with a VPS system because of the considerable cost savings over a full dedicated system and the ability to scale-up from a low-power system to a high-powered system. In fact, I did just that when I initially opted for the 128mb system, but found that I need 256mb. My VPS (and previously shared host) is A2 Web Hosting and they’ve been pretty good to work with.

Here’s what mattclare.ca is currently running, I’ll go through each elements and how I’ve configured them:

• CentOS 5 Linux Operating System

  Including:

  • Installing the basic files and packages
  • Securing SSH and the rest of the server
  • The Apache web server
  • MySQL database
• Google/Gmail for mail (and calendaring, etc.)
• JungleDisk/Amazon Webservers for backup