I often get asked about why I use Vim as my primary editor, there is no particular reason for this, except that I ended up learning it when I moved over to Linux full time many years
ago. I ended up liking it because I could edit my small source files on my quad-core machine without needing to wait forever for the file to open.
Sure Vim isn’t a bad editor, it’s highly extensible, it’s easy to shell out to the, err well shell, its everywhere so when you ssh into some obscure server you can just type vim (or
vi) and you’re good to go…
This month I advised people of a well-known but oft-forgotten trick to avoid spam to your GMail account by using a plus-sign and some arbitrary
text (or the name of the company you’re dealing with) in your email address, and shared with minimal interpretation a web app I’d developed:
fnorders.com. I also made my first attempt to publicly call out the library of the Bilkent University for ripping off
the design of the website of the Bodleian Libraries.
This technique’s about a decade old, but a lot of people still aren’t using it, and
I can’t help but suspect that can only be because they didn’t know about it yet, so let’s revisit:
You have a GMail account, right? Or else Google for Domains? Suppose your email address is dan@gmail.com… did you know that also means that you own:
dan+smith@gmail.com
dan+something@gmail.com
dan+anything-really@gmail.com
d.an@gmail.com
d..a..n@gmail.com
…
You have a practically infinite number of GMail addresses. Just put a plus sign (+) after your name but before the @-sign and then type anything you like there, and the
email will still reach you. You can also insert as many full stops (.) as you like, anywhere in the first half of your email address, and they’ll still reach you, too. And
that’s really, really useful.
Often, you end up having to give your email address to companies that you don’t necessarily trust…
When you’re asked to give your email address to a company, don’t give them your email address. Instead, give them a mutated form of your email address that will still
work, but that identifies exactly who you gave it to. So for example you might give the email address dan+amazon@gmail.com to Amazon, the email address
dan+twitter@gmail.com to Twitter, and the email address dan+pornhub@gmail.com to… that other website you have an account on.
Why is this a clever idea? Well, there are a few reasons:
If the company sells your email address to spammers, or hackers steal their database, you’ll know who to blame by the email address they’re sending to. I’ve actually caught
out an organisation in this way who were illegally reselling their mailing lists to third parties.
If you start getting unwanted mail from somebody (whether because spammers got the email or because you don’t like what the company is sending to you), you can easily block
them. Even if you can’t unsubscribe or just because they make it hard to do so, you can just set up a filter to
automatically discard anything that comes to that email address in future.
If you feel like organising your life better, you can set up filters for that, too: it doesn’t matter what address a company sends from, so long as you know what address
they’re sending to, so you can easily have filters that e.g. automatically forward copies of the mortgage statement that come to dan+yourbank@gmail.com to your
spouse, or automatically label anything coming to
dan+someshop@gmail.com with the label “Shopping”.
If you’re signing up just to get a freebie and you don’t trust them not to spam you afterwards, you don’t need to use a throwaway: just receive the goodies from them and them block
them at the source.
Certainly, you can have… THIS email address.
I know that some people get some of these benefits by maintaining a ‘throwaway’ email address. But it’s far more-convenient to use the email address you already have (you’re
already logged-in to it and you use it every day)! And if you ever do want a true ‘throwaway’, you’re generally better using Mailinator: when you’re asked for your email address, just mash the keyboard and then put @mailinator.com on the end, to get e.g.
dsif9tsnev4y8594es87n65y4@mailinator.com. Copy the first half of the email address to the clipboard, and then when you’re done signing up to whatever spammy service it
is, just go to mailinator.com and paste into the box to see what they emailed you.
A handful of badly-configured websites won’t accept email addresses with plus signs in them, claiming that they’re invalid (they’re not). Personally, when I come across these I
generally just inform the owner of the site of the bug and then take my business elsewhere; that’s how important it is to me to be able to filter my email properly! But another option
is to exploit the fact that you can put as many dots in (the first part of) your GMail address as you like. So you could put d…an@gmail.com in and the email
will still reach you, and you can later filter-out emails to that address. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide how to encode information about the service you’re
signing up to into the pattern and number of dots that you use.
This review of Payphone originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.
Payphone, Oxford OX1 3HY, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Not just a regular payphone, this is an iconic K2 kiosk almost exactly to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s original 1924 design, and in fact the only example of such a thing in Oxford
(although this particular one wasn’t originally from here): the other ‘red telephone boxes’ in Oxford are all of the latter, smaller K6 design. This particular phone box is a piece of
architectural history!
The Tuck Shop, 39 Holywell St, Oxford OX1 3SB, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Cheap drinks and sandwiches. Little space inside: becomes unnavigable when there’s a queue. Often run short or out of small denominations of coins (more often than you’d expect for a
convenience store) and start accepting exact change only (although don’t expect to find that out until you reach the front of the queue).
Oxford Print Centre, 36 Holywell St, Oxford OX1 3SB, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
A range of print services and reasonable prices, but somewhat disorganised: for my largest order, I was given a collection time and arrived only to find that they hadn’t yet started on
it!
Barclays ATM, 21 Turl St, Oxford OX1 3DH, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐
Three cash machines, although more often than not one is broken. Very often run out of £10 notes and often out of cash entirely or receipt paper. No sensible queuing space, so when
there are queues they often send up on the road. A common target for card skimmer thieves: I’ve been caught out once here!
Cardews of Oxford, 131-136 The Covered Market, Oxford OX1 3DZ, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Spectacular selection of teas and coffees served by knowledgeable staff: if you’re looking for tea leaves or coffee beans, you can’t do better. Also sells various cookware, although
sometimes a little pricey for what it is.
St Aldate's Post Office, 102-104 St Aldate's, Oxford OX1 1ZZ, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐
This Post Office used to be plagued by long queues for its service desks. Now they’ve replaced half the service desks with a greater number of self-service machines, and yet it somehow
seems to have even longer queues as a result. The new system is unfathomable (Do you need self service or not? If not, you need to take a ticket for which you first need to go to a
different kind of self-service machine…) and so they’ve had to give somebody the job of standing at the entrance and trying to direct people to the right tool for them.
If you manage to accidentally get past this helper then you’ll find yourself lost, with no idea where you’re supposed to go or what you’re supposed to do.
Use a different post office or, better yet, do as much as you can online. For your sanity.
Named for Oxford’s twin city in Germany, Bonn, and that – and the war memorial that acts mostly as a seat among the undersupply of benches – is the only interesting this about this
plaza. You can’t sit and eat here because you’ll be mobbed by pigeons. You can’t hold a quiet conversation here because of the foot traffic that ploughs through during daylight hours
and the buses that growl by into Queen Street.
It’s just: an empty space that could desperately have enjoyed more love than went into giving it a couple of sad-looking trees. Nothing more, nothing less.
Gloucester Green Market, 78 The Heyes, Oxford OX1 2BU, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The weekday market offers the best multi-cuisine street food experience you’ll get almost anywhere: stalls as far as the eye can see serving Italian, Japanese, Indian, Goan, Ethiopian,
Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese… the list goes on. Take an explore and try something new on a Wednesday or Thursday soon.
The non-food stalls are a mixed-bag. If you know what you’re looking for, you might find it. If you don’t, you might find something anyway, but don’t hold your breath.
