Metropolitan Opera and Rhapsody

I just saw that the Metropolitan Opera has has just made available 100 past radio broadcasts on Rhapsody. I'm listening to a great 1958 Otello right now. With this, the theater broadcasts, and the satellite radio station, the Met is really doing amazing things these days.

using Gmail IMAP access for email backup

Gmail recently enabled free IMAP access, an extremely useful feature for many reasons. For me, perhaps the best feature of IMAP access is an easier and better method for backing up old email to a Gmail account. Now, email backup is a simple process:

1. Import the old email into Thunderbird. (Other clients may also work.)
2. Enable IMAP access to your Gmail account in Thunderbird.
3. Drag and drop the old email folders into your Gmail account.

That's it! Your folder names will show up as labels in the Gmail web interface. The copying process in Thunderbird takes some time, but you can safely let it run and go do something else.

Previously, one could backup email into Gmail using a program like GMail Loader. A key advantage of the IMAP technique is that the original email dates are preserved in the Gmail database. With GMail Loader, the date when a message was imported shows up during search (though the original email date remains in the headers). Use of the import date messes up both search and Gmail's threading features.

Generally, importing email into Thunderbird is a pretty easy process. I successfully imported and backed up some old Eudora email and mail in the MH format (by converting to mbox format with the packf command). The only downside of this whole process is the time one inevitably wastes reading ancient emails :).

"Long-Form" News Aggregators

I've had a lot of spare time recently, and one thing I've been doing even more than usual is reading in-depth newspaper and magazine articles. There are a bunch of good aggregators for these kinds of articles on the web, and I thought I'd point out my favorites:

• Arts and Letters Daily, the classic
• NewsDog (of course)
• The Informed Reader, which summarizes about three articles a day
• Other Magazines in Slate, updated once or twice a week
• Brijit, a new site that seems promising

If you needed help procrastinating, I hope this does the trick. Let me know if I'm missing out on some other similar aggregator.