Brad McConahay

While helping one of our customers figure out how to do an email auto-responder, I ran into an interesting way to do it with either Google Apps or a regular Gmail account. The following article outlines the process of setting it up:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/gmail-autoresponder.html

Basically, it allows you to take the “canned response” feature available in Google Labs, which is pretty useful itself, and set up a filter to have it automatically send an email response if an incoming message meets a certain criteria. This makes for a very flexible email responder. It means you could set up an email alias to have people send messages, and then use a particular canned response to automatically return an email reply only to them. Or you could set up a particular reply in response to certain key words in an incoming message. Anything you can use a filter for in Gmail can also be used to send back a canned response.

The only drawback I found was that you can’t set it to send from any specific email address even though you may have other accounts associated with your Gmail account. It will only send the automatic message as being from the main account associated with that mailbox. But if you can live with that, then it’s a great solution.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

The wife gives me grief for occasionally “ego surfing” on Google. I suppose it sounds like a really self-centered thing to do, but since I’ve been promoting my original music and various web sites since 1995, I’ve always been curious to know what pages my name might turn up on. I have other excuses too, but I’ll save them for the wife.

The search usually turns up the same basic list of ham radio, original music, and weather station pages, but something new and odd will turn up from time to time. The last time, I found my music listed on a Japanese site that may or may not be called “goo”.

Click here for … goo?

From what little I can read on the page, I apparently sound like Chick Corea and Return to Forever. While I am a huge fan of Chick Corea, I don’t consider myself in the same league. Who knows, maybe it says something like “he could never be as good as Chick Corea and Return to Forever.” Flattering none-the-less.

The new discovery this time out was finding my old general MIDI songs for sale on a CD in the Netherlands.

Click here.

You can find me in the huge listing of artists right in between Boyz 2 Men and Brahams (yuck and yuck, respectively) as having “27 nummers” on the CD. Thanks to Babel Fish, my suspicion was confirmed: nummers means numbers! (duh) You know, I don’t honestly recall ever having put 27 general MIDI files on the web. Maybe 10 or 12. What gives?

Since I’ve yet to find another person on the Internet with the same name, let alone somebody with the same name who also posted original MIDI files on the web, it has to be me. So curious. I guess I’ll try to buy the CD if I can even figure out how…

I recently decided to replace my little portable shortwave radio, the Sangean ATS-505, with something better. My #1 requirement was to get something that didn’t have the “chuffing” problem. When using the tuning knob, the sound is muted between every frequency. My main use is to tune through the amateur radio bands, so chuffing is very annoying. Getting better sensitivity and a backlight color other than puke-green were secondary wishes.

After a lot of online research, I thought maybe the Sangean ATS-909 would do, but I would still need to do the anti-chuffing modification. Then I ran across RadioLabs and their “Super 909“. This is an ATS-909 with many great modifications. New filters, a better speaker, a blue backlight, increased sensitivity, anti-chuffing, and removal of the tuning knob detent for smooth tuning. There were several favorable reviews of the Super 909 version of the radio on eHam.net, so I pulled the trigger.

I labored a bit over whether or not to pay $100 more for the mods, but ended up deciding it would be worth it. Well, I was right. With regard to both sensitivity and audio quality, it outperforms the 505 by leaps and bounds. I could only hear the strongest signals with the 505 and a longwire. With the Super 909 and the telescoping whip, I hear so much more. And with a longwire or active antenna, it rivals my ham HF gear. Granted, this isn’t the best comparison – I wish I could hear the difference between it and an un-modded ATS-909. Speaking of which, they will mod your existing ATS-909 with these modifications if you already have one.

As odd as it sounds, my only complaint was the way they offered free ground shipping on the Super 909. They had it set up as the only shipping option. I would gladly have paid more to get the radio here more quickly. Since it was traveling from California to Ohio, it took almost two weeks to arrive. Very aggravating.

But I’ve been enjoying listening to the HF ham bands without having to go into the shack for several weeks now, and I’m damn happy. I highly recommend this modded version of the radio. Good job, RadioLabs!