Saturday: GMail and Sodastream

Saturday is a day in.

Sodastream

For my birthday, my sister bought me a Sodastream. Everything seems to be going late 1970's, with a coalition government, a flourishing music scene (Private Trousers, Hollywood Doll, One Day Elliot, Wet Dog), rising unemployment and, to cap it all, Sodastream gets re-launched. I bought a sample box and some basic flavours from Lakeland and have been going through the samples the last few days.

• Cola tastes like a superior own-brand Cola;
• The Cranberry and Raspberry doesn't seem to taste of anything really: not unpleasant, just undefinable;
• The Ginger Ale was about the worst, so far: didn't even taste of ginger;
• Lemon and Lime tasted of, well, lemonade but not lime;
• Zero Cola isn't bad considering it uses a sugar substitute;
• Apple tastes of apple, but with a slight aftertaste.

The most interesting seems to be XTreme, which is their Red Bull copy. Not bad, and tastes a bit better than the original. A good mixer with vodka, apparently. Worth getting a Sodastream for that alone.

PopTray & GMail

I've also been looking at how to connect to GMail programmatically. I wanted a small email notifier, something that just sits in the system tray on the PC and checks my email every so often. I found PopTray:

PopTray

This is quite a nice little program which works fine but has some limitations, e.g. it won't work with the VPN I sometimes use. It's also open source and written in Delphi, although a later version than I have. It also has a GMail extension, which I couldn't get working. I've downloaded the source and have been tinkering with it the last few days, becoming gradually more frustrated. There doesn't seem to be an open API or web service for GMail, which would be handy and the GMail plugin source is all HTTP Gets and Posts, very crude. I've even resorted to looking at the source of a Python application which does the same thing.