I have gone through the links and deleted those that are no longer active and or not used (by me) very often. The two big casualties are Sunshine Mary and Traditional Christianity — both blogs are now in limbo. There is a link about salvation which is a page on SSM’s blog and that will stay up. I have also drastically pruned the standard blogs, particularly in politics and theology.
I have moved email to Sylpheed on my machines, instead of evolution because:
- Evolution wants to use gnome-keyring to store passwords. I don’t like that.
- Sylpheed has the best filtering system I know of. I am able to set up mailboxes for listservs, and I am able to automatically delete mail from certain people. This is useful.
- Sylpheed does not render html (or pretty stuff). This is very useful, because it stops a pile of phishing attacks. I have it set up so that html is an attachment — which I can choose to open.
The disadvantage? It is not pretty. If you want pretty, I recommend Geary.
What none of these programmes do very well is interface with evolution servers, or corporate servers. There is a non-free plugin for evolution. The alternative is to hold your nose, get a mac, and use microsoft office, which is what the IT people at the university recommend.
This also has the virtues of being able to understand the silly word macros that a lot of people use to make “everything work together”. I firmly wish Word had stopped being developed when it was version 4 or 5 for the mac — simple formatting, fast, and able to fit on two floppies (a bit like the wordpress interface now). LIbreoffice is much better for writing complex documents — and for very long projects, Scrivener exists, and is probably the best reason to have a mac.
But this world is fallen, and Microsoft is more of a dinosaur than a malevolent force for evil. That mantle has probably gone to the firefox foundation.
