In case you’re wondering, this is not another Hello World post, or maybe it should be, a hello world to microblogging!

What is microblogging? I think Wikipedia says it best:

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due to the limited space per message. Many micro-blogs provide short messages about personal matters, commentary on a person-to-person level, or a link dump.

The most popular service is Twitter, which was launched in July 2006 and won the Web Award in the blog category at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. The main competitor to Twitter has been Jaiku (although this has since been acquired by Google and closed public registrations).

Recently, however, new services with the feature of micro-blogging have been born. Digg founder Kevin Rose, together with three other developers recently launched a service called Pownce, which integrates micro-blogging with file-sharing and event invitations.

Microblogging services which seek to add to the minimalism of raw microblogging include Spoink, Plurk and Rakawa. Spoink released a multimedia micro-blogging service that integrates blogging, podcasting, telephony and SMS texting and supports all major mobile audio, video and picture formats. Plurk utilizes a rich interface and horizontal time-line to add a spatial dimension to microblogging. Rakawa.net documents and informs about daily accomplishments of the users based on the question “What have you achieved today?”

The popular social networking websites Facebook, MySpace, Xing and LinkedIn also have a micro-blogging feature, called “status update”.

The question is, what makes Hello TXT (hellotxt.com) stand out amongst the hordes of other microblogging services? Let’s assume you have a MySpace and Facebook account as well as a Plaxo, Twitter, Pownce and maybe some other social networking accounts. The biggest schlep with having so many social networking accounts, is updating your status on all of them the whole time. Hello TXT does just that (and a little more), you can link your Hello TXT account to a wide variety of other social networking services and  update your status on all of them at the same time by only updating it through Hello TXT’s webpage (hellotxt.com) or mobile page (m.hellotxt.com), IM Robot, SMS or Email.

Hello TXT currently supports Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Pownce, Jaiku, blinko, Bebo, Linkedin, Hi5, Tumblr, Identica, Plurk, Yammer, Jisko, YouAre, Hictu, Gozub, BeeMood, Meemi, Fanfou, Feecle, Mexicodiario, Numpa, Frazr, Brightkite, Rejaw and more services are being added all the time.

Happy Microblogging!!

I was about to skip the Google Chrome age as I thought it was just another browser trying to take a cut out of the browser pie, Firefox was already a good enough browser … how wrong I was!

Discovered a blog entry on Google Chrome and after reading it, immediately decided to give it a shot … actually it was the comic strip that made me install it:

So far I’m loving it, since it’s a multithreaded browser, WEB2 pages load in parallel making it extremely responsive (WEB1 also loads faster as images and multimedia content loads in parallel), a proper garbage collection system making its memory management system one of the best I’ve seen so far, Firefox used to crash my PC when I leave GMail open over night, otherwise my PC just became horribly slow with Firefox’s memory usage going into excess of 3GB (Internet Explorer is a lot worse, not even going to mention it here)

They’ve made it geek friendly by adding a feature where you can monitor its memory usage per page, per plugin, to access this page, just go to “about:memory“, it’ll show memory usage of Google Chrome as well as any other browser you have open. JavaScript / AJAX is extremely stable in Google Chrome, guess their V8 virtual machine they’ve developed for JavaScript is doing a good job.

I can go on all day about Google Chrome, do yourself a favour, read the comics and install it.

Just hoping they’ll hurry up with the native Linux version, sign up here for updates on the Linux version of Google Chrome.

PS, does this thing have a spellcheck?

I’ve just noticed a new tab in my GMail settings section, it’s a tab called labs where Google is adding experimental features to GMail.

So far I have:

Quick Links Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more - definitely a feature I’ll be using, it’s almost like a build in digg for Gmail.

Superstars Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the “General” Settings page - finally, the boring yellow stars was starting to limit me.

Pictures in chat See your friends’ profile pictures when you chat with them - will give it a shot, actually prefer the minimalistic version of the chat box.

Fixed width font Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font - this will be great for viewing emails containing ascii art.

Mouse gestures Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows - never been a fan of mouse gestures.

Signature tweaks Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures. Can’t use this and the “Random signature” Labs feature at the same time - finally!!!

Random signature Rotates among random quotations for your email signature. Can’t use this and the “Signature tweaks” Labs feature at the same time - no thanks, I prefer my signatures static, boring and clean.

Custom date formats Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07) - at last, this feature is welcome anytime!!!

Muzzle Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends’ status messages - might turn it on to turn of annoying status messages.

Old Snakey Kick it old school with Old Snakey! Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘&’ from the main page to play a game of snake-procrastination just became a lot easier.

Email Addict Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat - hopefully I’ll get some work done with this feature, haha.

Hide Unread Counts Hides the unread counts for inbox, labels, etc - that’s what I use filters for, if I want email to automatically be marked as read, I’ll rather set it up in a filter.

Let me know if you find any new features, I’ll probably turn most of them on just to test drive drive it and leave the useful features on after beta testing all the existing features.

I don’t care what Linus Torvalds says, Tux needs to lose a little bit of weight!

In case you’re wondering where the original idea for a penguin came from, here’s a letter from the original Linux Kernel mailing list posted by Linus Torvalds explaining why he chose a penguin as the Linux mascot and not some unfriendly macho beast like creature:

Re: Linux Logo prototype.

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)

Thu, 9 May 1996 17:48:56 +0300 (EET DST)

.
Somebody had a logo competition announcement, maybe people can send their
ideas to a web-site..
.
Anyway, this one looks like the poor penguin is not really strong enough to
hold up the world, and it's going to get squashed. Not a good, positive logo,
in that respect..
.
Now, when you think about penguins, first take a deep calming breath, and
then think "cuddly". Take another breath, and think "cute". Go back to
"cuddly" for a while (and go on breathing), then think "contented".
.
With me so far? Good..
.
Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), "contented" means it has either just
gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring. Take it from me, I'm an expert on
penguins, those are really the only two options.
.
Now, working on that angle, we don't really want to be associated with a
randy penguin (well, we do, but it's not politic, so we won't), so we
should be looking at the "stuffed to its brim with herring" angle here.
.
So when you think "penguin", you should be imagining a slighly overweight
penguin (*), sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped.
It's sitting there with a beatific smile - the world is a good place to be
when you have just eaten a few gallons of raw fish and you can feel another
"burp" coming.
.
(*) Not FAT, but you should be able to see that it's sitting down because
it's really too stuffed to stand up. Think "bean bag" here.
.
Now, if you have problems associating yourself with something that gets
off by eating raw fish, think "chocolate" or something, but you get the
idea.
.
Ok, so we should be thinking of a lovable, cuddly, stuffed penguin
sitting down after having gorged itself on herring. Still with me?
.
NOW comes the hard part. With this image firmly etched on your eyeballs, you
then scetch a stylizied version of it. Not a lot of detail - just a black
brush-type outline (you know the effect you get with a brush where the
thickness of the line varies). THAT requires talent. Give people the
outline, and they should say [ sickly sweet voice, babytalk almost ]“Ooh,
what a cuddly penguin, I bet he is just _stuffed_ with herring”, and small
children will jump up and down and scream “mommy mommy, can I have one too?”.
.
Then we can do a larger version with some more detail (maybe leaning
against a globe of the world, but I don’t think we really want to give
any “macho penguin” image here about Atlas or anything). That more
detailed version can spank billy-boy to tears for all I care, or play
ice-hockey with the FreeBSD demon. But the simple, single penguin would
be the logo, and the others would just be that cuddly penguin being used
as an actor in some tableau.
.
Linus

The explanation for the name TUX can also be found in the mailing list archive:

Re: Let's name the penguin! (was: Re: Linux 2.0 really _is_ released..)
.
James Hughes (jamesh@interpath.com)
Mon, 10 Jun 1996 20:25:52 -0400
.
(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) --> TUX!

Not everyone wants to be associated with an overweight penguin burping after a meal, no wonder a few of the more hardcore Linux distros chose to move away form the overweight penguin image (not saying SUSE is hardcore, but Novel always wants to do things differently anyway), I suggest they slowly slim down TUX until he looks like a little innocent penguin kid, instead of a bulky blob!

SUSE slightly broke the association by choosing an overweight chameleon:

FreeBSD chose the chubby devil:

Gentoo chose a chubby ‘g’ it seems:

Debian decided they had enough of chubby mascots!
They gave their logo design job to pre-school kids in order to keep the design open source:

Now that I drifted totally off topic, let’s get back on topic, how can TUX or SUSE reveal those 6 pack abs (or in the case of SUSE, the chameleon, maybe 3 pack abs?) Doing a thousand sit ups a day probably wont do anything about their situation, not convinced?

Take a look at Mark Pfeltz’s abs, he broke the world record for most sit ups in 59 hours, he did 45,005 situps, but you still can’t see any abs:

I tried to take him on obviously, but after an hour and just over 1000 sit ups, I figured that I’m wasting my time, think of how much work you can finish in 59 hours.

The point I’m trying to make is that great looking abs has nothing to do with the amount of sit ups you do and has everything to do with the amount of body fat in your body, instead of wasting 59 hours, Mark could’ve spend that time doing strength training to burn that layer of fat and maybe even some aerobic type workouts to burn more body fat. That’s just another reason why all of these magic ab machines you see on television, fail, they may make your abs rock hard, but they don’t do anything about the layer of fat covering it. In the case of TUX, he’ll need to change his diet a little bit, spend less time in front of the computer compiling Linux kernels and get some exercise to burn that body suit of his.

Tom Venuto wrote a fantastic article backed up by science on why body fat tends to sit around the waist with men and around the thighs with woman, take a look here!

You can’t out-train a lousy diet! Here’s my advice: TUX needs to understand that life is about more than eating fish all day long, SUSE can eat all the flies it wants, I don’t like flies, FreeBSD must release a couple of souls from their computers, he’s working too hard, gentoo needs to use some style sheets in order to shrink down that ‘g’ and for Debian it’s already too late! In general that means, cut back on calorie intake while increasing the amount of training you do (burn those calories) to create a calorie deficiency in your body. Once your body fat percentage starts to hit the single digits, you’ll start seeing those beautiful abs smiling at you! It’s that easy, yet that difficult!

Think I’ll leave the specifics of burning calories for another day . . .

I’ve compiled a list of interesting geeky quotes, enjoy!

[00] It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

[01] The less command was doubtlessly inspired by the more command; less works more or less like more, but it has more features, which in this case disproves that less is more.

[02] The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.

[03] Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there’s Google.

[04] The more I C, the less I see.

[05] COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.

[06] Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.

[07] Windows is like bullies, the bigger they are; the harder they hit you.

[08] Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

[09] Microsoft is not the answer, it’s the question and the answer is NO!

[0A] Microsoft: You’ve got questions. We’ve got dancing paperclips.

[0B] Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.

[0C] Hacking is like sex. You get in, you get out, and hope that you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.

[0D] The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones.

[0E] Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code.

[0F] The term reboot comes from the middle age (before computers). Horses who stopped in mid-stride required a boot to the rear to start again. Thus the term to rear-boot, later abbreviated into reboot.

[10] There are 10 types of people in the world: “Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

[11] If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

[12] Linus Torvalds: Real men don’t use backups; they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies.

[13] I owe the government $3,400 in taxes. So I sent them two hammers and a toilet seat.

[14] The box said ‘Required Windows 95 or better’. So, I installed LINUX.

[15] Computer are like air conditioners: they stop working when you open windows.

[16] Better to be a geek than an idiot.

[17] I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[18] 1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d

[19] The best accelerator available for a Mac is one that causes it to go at 9.81 m/s².

[1A] I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly.

[1B] My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.

[1C] It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

[1D] I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said: ‘Outlook not so good’. I said: ‘Sure, but Microsoft ships it anyway’.

[1E] The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

[1F] If brute force doesn’t solve your problems, then you aren’t using enough.

[20] If Python is executable pseudocode, then perl is executable line noise.

[21] One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

[22] If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0

[23] The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

[24] On my income tax 1040 it says ‘Check this box if you are blind.’ I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.

[25] Because you’re a computer scientists, you have no need to go to the college bar.

[26] My pokemon bring all the nerds to the yard, and they’re like you wanna trade cards? Darn right, I wanna trade cards, I’ll trade this but not my charizard.

[27] The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it’s twice as big as it needs to be.

[28] Roses are #FF0000 , Violets are #0000FF , All my base belongs to you.

[29] In a world without fences and walls, who needs Gates and Windows?

[2A] Hand over the calculator, friends don’t let friends derive drunk.

[2B] Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue…

[2C] Unix, DOS and Windows…the good, the bad and the ugly.

[2D] UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

[2E] Ethernet (n): something used to catch the etherbunny.

[2F] You know it’s love when you memorize her IP number to skip DNS overhead.

[30] Alcohol & calculus don’t mix. Never drink & derive.

[31] How do I set a laser printer to stun?

[32] Concept: On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape button.

[33] It’s not bogus, it’s an IBM standard.

[34] Beware of programmers that carry screwdrivers.

[35] The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.

[36] COFFEE.EXE Missing - Insert Cup and Press Any Key

[37] LISP = Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses

[38] We are sorry, but the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.

[39] Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted!

[3A] If it weren’t for C, we’d all be programming in BASI and OBOL

[3B] Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner!

[3C] Best file compression around: “rm *.*” = 100% compression

[3D] Hackers in hollywood movies are phenomenal. All they need to do is “c:\> hack into fbi”

[3E] BREAKFAST.COM Halted…Cereal Port Not Responding

[3F] The name is Baud……James Baud

[40] Why doesn’t DOS ever say “EXCELLENT command or filename!”

[41] All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

[42] Once I got this error on my Linux box: Error. Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue.

[43] Old programmers never die; they just give up their resources.

[44] Clinton:/> READ | PARSE | WRITE | DUMP >> MONIKA.SYS

[45] A typical Yahoo! inbox : Inbox(0), Junk(9855210)

[46] Artificial intelligence usually beats real stupidity.

[47] Bell Labs Unix — Reach out and grep someone.

[48] FUBAR - where Geeks go for a drink

[49] I degaussed my girlfriend and I’m just not attracted to her anymore.

[4A] Black holes are where God divided by zero.

[4B] Please send all spam to my main address, root@localhost :-)

[4C] Here’s my IP address: ‘127.0.0.1′, please hack me :-D

[4D] If I wanted a warm fuzzy feeling, I’d antialias my graphics!

[4E] Real programmers can write assembly code in any language!

[4F] All computers run at the same speed… with the power off.

[50] Sorry, the password you tried is already being used by Dorthy, please try something else.

[51] Sorry, that username already exists. (O)verwrite it (C)ancel

[52] Please send all flames, trolls, and complaints to /dev/toilet

[53] You have successfully hacked in, Welcome to the FBI mainframes.

[54] I’m sorry, our software is perfect. The problem must be you!

[55] If Ruby is not and Perl is the answer, you don’t understand the question.

[56] Having soundcards is nice… having embedded sound in web pages is not.

[57] As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.

[58] A typical yahoo chat room: “A has signed in, A has signed out, B has signed in, B has signed out, C has signed in, C has signed out..”

[59] When someone says “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,” give him a lollipop.

[5A] Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.

[5B] How’s my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL

[5C] Yes, friends and neighbors, boys and girls - my PC speaker crashed NT!!!

[5D] root:> Sorry, you entered the wrong password, the correct password is ‘a_49qwXk’

[5E] New linux package released. Please install on /dev/null

[5F] Unix…best if used before: Tue Jan 19 03:14:08 GMT 2038

[60] Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft…and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor!

[61] I’m tempted to buy the slashdot staff a grammar checker. What do they do for 40 hours a week?

[62] It takes a million monkeys at typewriters to write Shakespeare, but only a dozen monkeys at computers to run Network Solutions.

[63] If Linux were a beer, it would be shipped in open barrels so that anybody could piss in it before delivery.

[64] Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle.

[65] I had a dream… and there were 1’s and 0’s everywhere, and I think I saw a 2!

[66] You sir, are an unknown USB device driver!

[67] C isn’t that hard: void (*(*f[])())() defines f as an array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions that return pointers to functions that return void :-)

[68] People say that if you play Microsoft CD’s backwards, you hear satanic things, but that’s nothing, because if you play them forwards, they install Windows.

[69] Passwords are like underwear. You shouldn’t leave them out where people can see them. You should change them regularly. And you shouldn’t loan them out to strangers.

[6A] Use The Best…
Linux for Servers
Mac for Graphics
Palm for Mobility
Windows for Solitaire

[6B] That’s a PEBKAC problem. (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair)

[6C] Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free.

[6D] A thousand words are worth a picture, and they load a heck of a lot faster.

[6E] I see fragged people.

[6F] Someone once said a million monkeys using a million keyboards could reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Thanks to MySpace, we now know that to be entirely false.

[70] Geeks = Know more about computers than their computer teacher, so everyone comes to them for computer problems.
Nerds = Have no life and only worries about school, no one talks to them.
Jocks = Know a lot about sports but not much else.
Geek’s Wife: Completely depend on the geek for tech support. Tend to be pretty good looking.
Nerd’s Wife: nonexistent
Jock’s Wife: only there for money, most likely having an affair with another jock

[71] SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0

[72] One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept - because everybody’s been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

[73] Insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over again expecting different results.
windows fatal error 1001 file not found
windows fatal error 1001 file not found
windows fatal error 1001 file not found
windows fatal error 1001 file not found
windows fatal error 1001 file not found

[74] Photons have neither morals or visas.

[75] Real programmers don’t document. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

[76] My computer beat me at chess, but I beat it at kickboxing.

[77] Geniuses do not think more than other people. They think less.

[78] Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.

[79] Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.

[7A] Grabel’s Law: 2 is not equal to 3—not even for very large values of 2.

[7B] To err is human, to arr is pirate, stupidity is not a disability, find somewhere else to park!

[7C] A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

[7D] You are NOT what you eat… you are what you don’t poop.

[7E] Old programming adage: “Good programmers write good code; great programmers steal great code.”

[7F]

10 HOME
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10

This is a question I get asked quite often from people stumbling on my new blog, “What are those Moving Blocks?” Or I’ll get some funny suggestions like a mini doomsday counter, horizontal Tetris thingy, some type of unseen Google ad, subliminal advertising tool and many more, keep them coming though, I’m getting some pretty cool ideas for my quest on world domination :P

They are obviously referring to my Binary Clock sitting in the top left corner just below the temporary logo.

After the inquiry on what it is, I usually get, “So how do you read the time on it?”

That’s actually really simple, the first row represents the hours in binary, the second row is the minutes in binary while the last row is the seconds in binary. It works as follow, a red block is considered a one while a black block is considered a zero, you read it from right to left and the value of each trailing block is the previous block’s value times two. Simply count all the red blocks times their respective position value for each row to get the hours, minutes and seconds respectively, let’s work out the time in the image as an example:

Counting only the red blocks will give the following values:

H: [32][16][08][04][02][01] => 08+04=12

M: [32][16][08][04][02][01] => 16+08+01=25

S: [32][16][08][04][02][01] =>16+04+02=22

And there we have the time 12h25 and 22 seconds.

Hmmm, think it is time to build a hexadecimal clock running from 000000 to FFFFFF and simply displaying a block of colour, 00h00 will be displayed as black and 23h59 will be very close to white, as the time goes on, the colour will change accordingly, lunchtime will be displayed as a reddish gray and as lunchtime passes by, green and blue will gradually blend in with the red until it’s a new shade of red.

Comment with any suggestions on interesting ways of keeping time, would love to hear from my fellow geeks :P

Getting your mail from GMail into Outlook is pretty straight forward, Google wrote some neat documentation on getting mail through POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) into Outlook or whichever mail client you prefer to use.On the flip side, who is still using the old outdated way of accessing their mail through desktop email clients? GMail offers you a free email account with a stunning interface and the option of accessing your mail through a well developed cellphone client running on any phone supporting JAVA and the option of importing mail from other POP enabled email accounts compared to the expensive solution of downloading every single mail into Outlook and needing a Windows Phone / PDA to download mail and synchronizing it with your Outlook account.

There are two ways of getting your Outlook mail into GMail, the tricky way is setting up a local mail server using the Mercury Email Server and getting GMail to do a POP fetch through through your local email server, Ben Shoemate wrote a long blog entry on this method here. Some of the problems I experienced with this method is firewalls interfering the whole time, especially the firewall on my D-Link router. Due to my laziness, I opted for the brute force method, if anyone has done it this way before, leave a comment and share your experience.

The brute force method is simply forwarding all the mails to your GMail account, but it gets a little more complicated when a client asks you to get 1600+ / 250MB+ of email from Outlook into his GMail account!

Fortunately, somebody was determined enough to write some software to do this, all hail the Google Mail Loader!!! A simple piece of Python script interfacing through TK developed by Mark Lyon.

The procedure is simple, convert your Outlook PST file into the MBOX format, load it up with GML and get yourself a Martini while you wait. The easiest way of getting your Outlook mail into the MBOX format is simply importing all your Outlook mail into Thunderbird and moving all your mail into the default Thunderbird Inbox.

Once you have all your mail in one place, exit and look for the Inbox file, I’m using portable Thunderbird for this experiment / job, found my Inbox file in “ThunderbirdRoot\Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Inbox”

Fire up GML and start filling in the fields, the SMTP server settings you can change to the same settings your Outlook is using for its outgoing mail, the default SMTP server didn’t work for me, the Email File referred to is the “Inbox” file generated by Thunderbird, File Type you need to play with, the mBox Less Strict option worked well for me, the Message Type is whether you want the mail you’re sending to end up in your GMail inbox or Sent Items and the last field is the destination GMail account.

The errors you’re seeing is mail blocked by AVAST Anti Virus due to Trojans and Viruses lurking in the attachments, unfortunately the power went out just before I got the chance to save the log file, could only get a screen shot before my UPS’ batteries started running low, damn Eskom and their load shedding nonsens :(