Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

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 Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

September 2000

Design Errors

Emmanuel Delperdange's site is a gallery of design errors and opens with the well-known, six-fingered President Roosevelt of Monaco.  Some other outstanding errors are Denmark's math errors, the old GDR's Schumann issue highlighting the music of Schubert, and the seven legs for four horses on the US' Ft. Kearney issue.

Design Errors at
http://user.glo.be/~edelper/genhtm/page3.htm

Password Keeper

A free, small and simple program to keep all your passwords safe and secure and in one place.  It's a small password protected applet, and with a shortcut on your taskbar, you can have easy access to all your stored passwords.

Passkeeper at
http://www.isys.hu/staff/brad/passkeeper.html

One hint: if you forget your "Passkeeper password" you're flat out of luck. There's no backdoor or workaround, so try to remember that one at least.  You can always write that one on the back of your hand.

I Live at The P.O.

Eudora is a great e-mail program that is now available in Sponsored mode, Paid mode or Light mode.  

Paid mode features a wide array of filters, sorting and mailbox options, along with spell checking, stationery and multiple online e-mail personality set-ups that has made Eudora an extremely popular and reliable e-mail program.  

Sponsored mode features everything in the paid version and is free to use, but the company recoups costs by running an ad window on the left-hand side with the program navigation tree.  Thus, the ads sponsor your usage.

Light mode is the freeware version which lacks the enhancements of the other two modes, but the nice thing about the 4.3 is you can change modes on-the-fly to see which version best suits your tastes.

Besides being free, Eudora is a good replacement for Microsoft Outlook, which because it's so well intergrated into the Windows operating system enables many script viruses to automatically open and run.

Eudora
http://www.eudora.com/

Machin-Nuts

Robin Harris got hooked on Machin varieties, but before he made his customized album pages, he needed a through understanding of his subject.  The result of his study was "Machin-Nuts" which you will enjoy as much as I did.

The depth of information is impressive and the clarity of presentation a joy.  You'll find a virtually complete list of all major varieties, somewhere in the order of 1,333 of them covering regionals, denomination, colour, value size, perf changes, printing method, etc.  

"Machin-Nuts" at
http://www.adminware.ca/machin.htm

I love Machins, but this is an obsession.  It's nuts.

1st Page 2000

Evrsoft, an Australian company, offers a free WYSIWYG html editor that does just about everything you'll ever need to do on your stamp site.  

The program has four general user settings, geared to the user's experience and the technical complexity of the site: easy, normal, advanced and hardcore.

It features customizable keyboard shortcuts and toolbars, a feature to save snippets of html in a myCode library, stacks of Javascripts for those who need them, as well as support for SSI, Perl, Cold Fusion, et al.  

Naturally, there are tag lists, menus and a HEX color picker, plus a few things called "Wizards," but I was surprised by their spell checker and the handy extended character list.

And "1st Page 2000" does not add any other bits of code to your finished html pages that can wreck havoc in some environments, as some other programs do.  So, before you buy, try this one.  Heck, it is free.

1st Page 2000
http://evrsoft.com/1stpage/