Stamp Collecting for Beginners and Philatelists
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This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.
May 2002
Pop-UpsAds are a necessary fact of life, but when ads take over the operation of your browser, the way popups do by launching new browser windows, it's time to find a remedy.
Luckily there are a few programs around the Net that kill popup windows before they appear on your desktop.
Panicware offers Pop-Up Stopper either as a free, home-user version, or in the Pro, commercial usage license. Both do the same good job of stopping pop-up windows cluttering your desktop with ads for casinos and contests.
Pop-Up Stopper
http://www.panicware.com/product_dpps.html
Another choice to kill pop-ups is Naviscope, but it's really a little package of efficient Web tools. And Naviscope's collection of tools is designed to make surfing the Net faster by giving the user more control of incoming data in the form of graphics, etc.
Technically, Naviscope is an HTTP Proxy that sends your browser through the Naviscope servers to get to the Net. It's this proxy that allows Naviscope to block pop-ups, banner ads, cookies and other things, such as pre-fetching.
Naviscope
http://www.naviscope.com/
Pop-Up Killer was one of the most popular ad blockers, until the developer closed up shop in March. It should be available again shortly through another site, but for now, all you can do is check the original homepage for news.
Pop-Up Killer
http://software.xfx.net/mainindex.htm
Click "Products" on the left-hand side navigation menu, then scroll down to the PopUp Killer text, or use
Pop-Up Killer
http://software.xfx.net/utilities/popupkiller/index.html
Mauritius
The little Island of Mauritius is home to two of philately's treasures: the 1847 "Post Office" Penny Orange, and the Twopence Blue. And it's about time these classic stamps had a site of their own.
The Classic Stamps of Mauritius site will show you how the stamps came to be, the philatelic details of these stamps, and what Mauritius, itself, is all about.
Getting around is simple. A small line of links runs across the top of all the pages, directing visitors to Home, Island, History, Museums, Forgeries, and others.
The story of Mauritius' rare stamps is supplemented with a healthy array of graphics of covers, forgeries, and the like. Further, the site includes a library of links to many other sites dealing with the stamps of Mauritius, which earns this one a research bookmark.
The site is laid out cleanly and is an excellent online reference and informational center for these important issues.
Classic Stamps of Mauritius
http://www.stampsmauritius.com
Online Books
Ken Trettin, the editor of "The American Revenuer," wrote to remind me about e-text and the online book resources on the WWW. Generally, e-texts are plain text digital file versions of mainly non-copyrighted books, plays, poems, etc., that are stored, indexed and available online from various servers around the world.
Today there are two large hub sites, Online Books and Project Gutenberg, and though there's a big overlap of the offerings at each site, they do have slightly different catalogs. When looking, check both.
While searching, Ken found "The Story of the Pony Express: An Account of the Most Remarkable Mail Service Ever in Existence, and Its Place in History," by Glenn Danford Bradley, and "The Galleries of the Exposition: A Critical Review of the Paintings, Statuary and the Graphic Arts in The Palace of Fine Arts at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition" by Eugen Neuhaus.
