I guess this should go here

[JimM]

If it's not right Hawk, or violates anything, feel free to move it or remove it as you see fit.

FOR SALE

Rail Videos (all VHS tapes)

Montana Rail Link - Pentrex
Pittsburgh Mainlines - Pentrex
The Blue Mountains - La Grande to Huntington Vols 1, 2 (La Grande to Hinkle) and 3 (Winter in the Blues) - Video Rails
CSX Southern West Virginia Coal - Pentrex
Those Incredible Alcos - Pentrex (Volumes 1, 2 and 3)
Rails to the Twin Ports - Pentrex
Classic Chicago Railroading - Pentrex
Conrail Hotspots East - Pentrex
Eastern Kentucky Coal - Pentrex
LTV Mining Railroad - Pentrex

Any reasonable offer considered..Keep in mind that the shipping needs to be covered as well (VHS tapes are heavy!)

Jim - PM me if interested.

[Hawk]

The only thing I see is that you posted a live link to your email address, opening yourself up to email harvesters.

For your own sake, it might be a better idea just to have interested parties contact you via PM.

[JimM]

Okey Doke....that better??

[Hawk]

I wasn't complaining or anything. Just trying to help you out.
You'd be the one getting the spam. Not me.

[Chessie8638]

I can give a sort of review.

I have the first 3 on DVD and I can tell you they are some of the best from Pentrex and Video Rails. The Blue Mountains is my favorite rail video I have and it's reason I started to like railroads when I saw it way back in 1992 as a young child and recently just bought it again on DVD. Pittsburgh Mainlines is also a must have. It covers all the railroads in the Pittsburgh area. If you want to see where the P&LE route came from and see it in prototype, you want to watch this video.

Hopefully someone will grab them to enjoy.

[micaelcorleone]

Chicago would interest me, but not on VHS.
I recently mothballed our last video recorder (had 3 at their best times) and substituted it with a bluray player. The wind of change.

[JimM]

I wasn't complaining or anything. Just trying to help you out.
You'd be the one getting the spam. Not me.

Actually, I don't get a lot of spam (by design)....not that I like it when I do get it....but I use a utility called "Mailwasher" to go through my email before it gets here, and it selects emails that it feels are spam, marks them for deletion, and if I agree with it or want to add something or remove something, I can...I can even bounce it back to the sender indicating that the email they used isn't a valid one. Then, once my selection is right, I can 'Process email', and it deletes the ones I have marked, keeps the others, and launches the email program and I only get the ones I wanted....it saves a lot of grief. I can even preview the emails ahead of time in case I'm not sure...even checks for viruses (doesn't do anything about it, just alerts you that it may have one). It's a pretty neat utility.

So, I think, that's why I post my email without thinking, but a PM is better like you said...that way if someone wants any of the items, and makes an offer, then it'll be a more private situation.

You're always on top of things!

[buzz456]

Another way to handle this which i saw on another forum in to say something like 'johnsmith at worldnet dot net'. Then it's not in a form to be picked up by usual span collecting.

Buzz

[JimM]

Yeah, that'd work too....it's getting tougher and tougher to stay ahead of the bad guys and the general PITAs (Pains in the....well, you get it). I recall the old days when you didn't need spam filters, virus protection, or malware scanners....they weren't even considerations.....oh well....can't live in the past I guess.

Jim

[Hawk]

Another way to handle this which i saw on another forum in to say something like 'johnsmith at worldnet dot net'. Then it's not in a form to be picked up by usual span collecting.

Buzz

Actually, from what I've read, those email harvesters have figured that out too.

One thing they haven't figured out yet is the ability to read an email address from an image, like this:

email.jpg

[Toldrabald]

Actually, from what I've read, those email harvesters have figured that out too.

One thing they haven't figured out yet is the ability to read an email address from an image, like this:

email.jpg

If they can crack crazy colored captchas there certainly is an automated software around for this as well, question is if it used widely or not

[Hawk]

OK! I guess I misstated that. It's not that bots can't read an email address in an image. They can, but it can take a bot 15 to 60 seconds to scan an image to read the text.
The way bots work is they use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology along with a tool called MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory). OCR scans an image to read the text. MATLAB is used to filter out the background noise that is part of the CAPTCHA.
Bots intentionally look for CAPTCHAs. They also are designed to look for live link email addresses as well as the words at and dot and the at symbol.
For a bot to scan a forum and try to read every image in a forum would be far to time consuming just to find an email address in an image. So they just don't do it.

In this forum alone there's probably close to 4,000 images, either attached or linked to. Multiply that by 15 seconds (at best) per image and you get about 60,000 seconds, or 1,000 minutes, or about 16.6 hours. Kind of a waste of time to try and hopefully find one or two or 20 email addresses.