Unto the pure, all things are pure

National Geographic prides itself in sending photographers armed with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment across vast distances to take great pictures. Big deal! I think it's a bigger challenge to see what you can capture from one spot on planet Earth , with just one cheap lousy camera. What you see here are pictures all taken from one place, my home. From the meta data you can tell that a cheap Nikon was used before 2007 and a cheap Canon was used after that. Both are below $300 and not SLRs , and if cameras with those specifications are still built today, they would probably cost $50. In the pictures shown here: All are real living things, except for the thing in the sky and the paper snake, the latter taken by a 5-year old. All are taken in their natural environment except for one, and that is the civet cat which is caged. All living things are live (other than the obviously dead lizard which was not the subject anyway) and in their natural pose except for one.  S...

SMTP, has its name suggests, is simple. It is, really is, until you have a need to deploy one yourself today. It was way easier twenty years ago when the Internet was a benign place, and every Windows XP came with a solid SMTP server out of the box, and enabled for unrestricted relay for all! In this age of abundant cloud services, why would one still need to set up your own MTA? In my case, it was because of the limited SMTP capability of a couple of (very) old webcams I have. One works only without encryption. One works only if the password is less than 64 characters. SendGrid is a reliable free service for up to 6,000 mails a month. But it uses a super-long password. My intention was to use SendGrid as the relaying MTA ("smarthost") because of its sender reputation . It is easy to configure an MTA to do the actual delivery, ie make it connect to the MX server of every addressee in each mail and deliver the mail. However, such mails sent will likely be treated as spam...