Kategorie: Allgemein

Tiddly Wiki

Do you have a file ‚todo.txt‘ on your desktop? It’s time to drop it.

There is a much better alternative to keep track of your Todos, your Reminders, your backlog or your personal notes. This alternative is called TiddlyWiki and is a complete wiki engine in a single html file. It uses a lot of javascript and stores every entry in this html file. I have mine on an USB stick, so I can use it everywhere I go.

TiddlyWiki is really great, take a look at it here.

Hint: turn on the autosave feature and you don’t have to save your changes manually every time.

Firefox 2

I recently installed the new Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2.

There are a few new features that impressed me. Here is my (incomplete) tour of the new features of Firefox in Version 2:

First: All my plugins work without problems as they did in the previous Versions (IETab and Adblock, to name the most important).

Firefox 2 comes with new Tabs:

FF2_Tabs.png

The Close button is now on every Tab (like in Safari), and there is a complete list of open Tabs on the right. It was a bit unfamilliar at the beginning, but i got used to it very quickly.
If you mistakenly closed a tab with „Ctrl+W“ (I often close the wrong tab …), now you can press Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen it.

With Firefox 2 you can use an external RSS reader when clicking on the RSS Icon in the address bar.

FF2_RSS_Options.png

Now I can use my RSS Reader straitforward, no manual searching of the RSS Url in the Page Source and pasting it into my RSS Reader is necessary. That’s really I feature that saves me a lot of time.

The last new feature in my list is the spell checker:

FF2_spellchecker.png

Seems like the time of typos in forum entries are gone. Or maybe you can say it that way: „Firefox 2 users do cleaner posts…“ (Remark: this post was written with Safari, typos can occur frequently and are for demonstration purposes…) .

An interesting aspect is the Javascript performance of FF2, especially in combination with the ongoing Ajax hype. Here is a comparison between FF2 and IE7.

As a conclusion: Firefox ist still the browser of choice on a windows box. With Firefox 2 I hardly have to reconsider Safari on my Mac.

Oh, I forgot to mention the main reason why Firefox is better than the rest: Take a look here.

Why do I have to restart my PC?

What really makes me a bit angry, is the fact that I have to reboot my PC (or Mac), when I do a software update.

I just did a small update on my Vista (RC1) box. This update fixes some problems with Word 2000 (or was it Word 2k3? I can’t remember..) on a tablet PC.
First, I have no tablet PC.
Second, I don’t even have Word 2000 installed.
Third, this wasn’t an important update (as the screenshot signs), it was optional.
So why do I have to reboot my PC after this update?

reboot_vista.PNG

I mean, we live in 2006 and since Windows 95 many discussions were going on obout these rebooting problems.
For sure, OS Vendors were heading in the right direction in the 90’s, but now we are standing still.
I can remember when you changed the IP Address in Windows 95, you had to reboot (inserting the Windows CD before, of course …). Maybe thats why they had chosen ’start me up…‘ as marketing slogan…

This isn’t a Microsoft centric problem, on the Mac it is the same. I remember an iTunes update, after that I had to reboot my Mac.

Of course it’s better than in the late 90’s. But with Vista and/or Mac OS I still have often to reboot my PC. I think we should restart the whole reboot discussion.

Vista-RC1

I just installed Vista RC1 on my PC.

After a few weird messages I finally got a working Vista installation.

The GUI looks really great, but I still have the feeling that a I’ve seen much of that before…

Anyway, I think Vista is a big hit. Here is my WEI

tbc…

Grabensee

Pictures taken at a walk around the Lake:

P8190080.JPG

P8190081.JPG

If you look close at the 2nd picture you can probably see the monster of Lake Grabensee – it looks a bit like this one. Nina said it was an animal like this. But I think she’s wrong.

getrieben…

… so heisst das Buch von Andreas Altmann, dass ich soeben zu Ende gelesen habe. In letzter Zeit habe ich einige Buecher von ihm gelesen, und alle haben mich bisher fasziniert. Er erzaehlt von seinen Reisen und den vielen Geschichten die er dort erlebt hat oder erzaehlt bekommt. Und wenn er von Orten berichtet, an denen ich selber auch schon war, dann merke ich wie authentisch seine Erzaehlungen sind. Und so wecken diese Geschichten immer wieder mein Fernweh.

Aber dieses Buch ist anders. Es handelt mehr von ihm selbst als von seinen Reisen. Dieses Buch ist auch um einiges intensiver. Die Geschichten hoeren nicht auf, wenn man das Buch beiseite legt. Sie bleiben im Kopf. Manche weil sie einfach zum bruellen komisch sind, andere weil sie schwer zu verdauen sind. Oft legte ich das Buch zur Seite um die gelesenen Zeilen zu verarbeiten.

Schon im Vorwort warnt er, dass der „..moralisch einwandfreier Zeitgenosse, der zartnervige ..“
besser nicht zu diesem Buch greifen sollte. Was anfangs wie ein Werbeslogan auf mich wirkte, entpuppte sich im Laufe des Buches als extrem treffend, viele Themen sind unangenehm und sicherlich fuer einige zu unangenehm, zu weit weg vom moralischen Mainstream.

Aber die Gechichten berichten vom Leben eines Zeitgenossen, der Grenzen ueberschreitet, an die andere nicht zu denken wagen.

Fuer mich ist Getrieben. Stories aus der weiten wilden Welt eines der wenigen wirklich guten Buecher. Altmann wuehlt auf, regt zum Denken an. Er versucht nicht einfach nur lieb und nett seine Geschichten zu erzaehlen, er wirkt in vielen Phasen verrueckt und gleichzeitig mutig. Oft kann ich seine Ansichten nur wenig verstehen, oft hat er einfach nur recht. Gerade dieser Widerspruch macht seine Buecher lesenswert.

Hier noch die anderen Buecher von Andreas Altmann, die leichter verdaulich und trotzdem empfehlenswert sind:
Einmal rundherum. Geschichten einer Weltreise.
Notbremse nicht zu früh ziehen! Mit dem Zug durch Indien
Der Preis der Leichtigkeit. Eine Reise durch Thailand, Kambodscha und Vietnam

Image Resize Powertoy

I like to have some of my favorite photos as wallpaper on my desktop. But the photos are often much bigger as my desktop resolution. And here comes the problem. Windows XP’s feature to scale the Picture is a bit weird because it doesn’t keep the aspect ratio. So I often get a disorted picture.
But today I found the Image Resizer Powertoy on Microsoft’s PowerToys site.
This does exactly what I need. Thumbs Up!

Comments

The comments on this weblog are working again. It was a bit tricky to fix the comment and authentication feature, but now everything is ok (I hope so).