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I recently got a new laptop for work ( I’m being forced to use Windows, but that’s a different story, haha. Cygwin + zsh makes it bearable but I really miss WMII ).

Anyhow, I was having terrible monitor flicker with my external monitor. I noticed that the flicker would appear anytime I hooked up my power brick to my laptop and it would magically stop anytime I unplugged it.

At first I just chalked it up to Dell’s shoddy construction as I never had a problem with my Viao. However, after crawling the web I finally stumbled across this solution:

Are you having problems with a flickering external monitor on your laptop?

Does the flicker go away if you remove the laptop charger?

If you answered yes to the above questions, you probably have a ground loop. Slimplified this is because the monitor is grounded (using a 3 prong coord) and the laptop is not grounded.

The power brick was grounded but I guess the laptop wasn’t ( which makes sense as the connector is one of those round jobbies which can only have two “prongs”.

I wrapped some tape around the ground prong and then like magic the flicker stopped I still don’t understand why I had no problems with the Viao though, so it could be a problem with the laptop’s construction … maybe the connectors aren’t shielded ( or something )

You can read the entire blog post that I quoted above on Mr. Gnome’s Blog.

Although there are a bunch of open-source mailing list managers out there, if email marketing is key to your business, you might want to consider using a email marketing service instead.

Feature Comparison

¹: Requires one time fee
²: Requires monthly fee / per-usage fee

Pricing Comparison

Information valid time of posting

Monthly Plans

subscribers vs. price per month

If anyone has experience with these vendors, I’d love to hear about them!

One of my clients wants to send out email newsletters and possibly get into the e-basting market. Being the LAMP, pro-open source person that I am, my first thought was to hit what I could find. The three major players that I found were:

• poMMo : The post modern mailer
• PHP List
• DaDa mail/DaDa mail Pro

Feature Comparison

¹: Via a plugin

Overall Thoughts

By far, poMMO had the best interface; everything was nicely laid out. I especially liked how you could adjust the throttling with AJAX-y slider. PoMMo also supports resume and sends all messages in the background, a very handy features of large lists. If you run into trouble, though, you’re on your own. The project is no longer under active development, it has some PHP5 compatibility problems, and its forums are overrun with spam.

PHP List has a lot of great features and is still being actively developed. It’s interface is very simple, with no frills. You’ll find yourself digging through a lot of configuration files, though (personally I love config files, but not everyone does ) as many of features cannot configured via the web interface. In addition, when mailing, a window pops up showing you the status of the current mailing. While this is nice, if the window goes poof, the mailing stops dead in its tracks, with no option to resume.

DaDa mail has two versions: free and Pro ($50). Both have the same feature set, but free has limits that Pro does not. The interface, like PHP List is very simple and plain Jane. There a bunch of plugins which build upon DaDa’s feature set, but the site choked up 404′s for some of the plugins (never a good sign). DaDa does have the options to pause and resume, but it’s unclear if it will resume in case of a crash.

Points to Ponder

Hosting your own system, while cheaper the short run, may not be the best option. As you send out more and more emails, your incur the frowns (and possibly the wrath) of your hosting provider. In addition, you run the risk of being marked as a spammer. The delivery success rate will probably not be as good as a service that specializes in mass email mailings. They build relationships with email providers, gaining their trust and work hard to keep their success rate at an optimum.

If you have a small list, grab one of the above projects and blast away. However, if this is going to be a critical part of your business strategy, you might want to opt for a email marketing service instead.

We’re in the home stretch, whooo hooo!

Thanks to everyone for your support and help!

Just 2.5 days to go

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