The Cloud. Personally I hate the word, yet I'm using it every hour of the day (when I'm not asleep). Especially my Android device helps me appreciating cloud services, to have all my emails, calendars, tasks and notes available within a few seconds. These cloud services often provide decent search capabilities and I assume they take care of making backups at a regular basis. Previously, a hardware failure could end up being disastrous without a decent backup policy, nowadays it has become merely an inconvenience. The degree of inconvenience depends on the cost of a hardware replacement.
Remember The Milk offers several methods to integrate your task list in Google Calendar. One of the methods is to put a task gadget in the sidebar (it's the same gadget you can embed in GMail as well). Another method is to add a special calendar, which results in checkmarks at each day. When you click those, a popup appears with all tasks due for that day. The final method which is relatively easy to find is in the Info tab of the Settings page. There you'll find a link pointing to an iCalendar resource, containing all your tasks (possibly represented as events).
About 1 year ago, I switched to identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service. Most of the open source folks moved from Twitter to identi.ca, it had (and still has) a quite some advantages over Twitter. See this article for a comparison among these two services. There was not much to lose, I could still forward my tweets to Twitter. But after one year I've pretty much had it with this service. There are quite some nice people out there, but the service was getting on my nerves. What follows here is a rant, you've been warned.
Sinds een maand of twee gebruik ik Google Agenda (Google Calendar), en was sindsdien op zoek naar een goede manier om mijn online agenda te synchroniseren met m'n mobiele telefoon. Dit is een betrekkelijk eenvoudig toestel, een Sony Ericsson C902. Een normale telefoon met Java en een ingebouwde agenda, niets bijzonders. Ik heb verschillende oplossingen geprobeerd, maar het was lastig om iets fatsoenlijks te vinden.
Since two months I'm using Google Calendar, and I've been looking around for a nice way to synchronize my online calendar with my mobile phone. This is a fairly simple device, a Sony Ericsson C902. It's just a Java enabled phone with a simple built-in calendar tool, nothing special. I have tried different solutions, but it was a bit tough to get it right.
These were the solutions I have tried, the last one is the most satisfactory solution which I'm using at this moment.
Na jaren Konqueror gebruikt te hebben ben ik ongeveer een half jaar geleden overgestapt naar Firefox. In Firefox worden de websites vaak wel goed gerenderd en is er een berg van extensies die het online leven aangenamer moeten maken. Vooral voor webontwikkeling is Firefox (lees: Firebug) onmisbaar.
In diezelfde tijd dat ik aan de slag ging met Firefox was er een nieuwe browser hard aan de weg aan het timmeren op het Linux-platform: Chromium. Een hele tijd later na de aankondiging heb ik 't er toch eens op gewaagd, en ik moet zeggen dat ik erg onder de indruk ben van deze browser.
I did a little comparison between Twitter and identi.ca, two micro-blogging sites available today. The list is pretty random and may contain errors, or may miss some items. And both sites are introducing and ditching features which could invalidate the list below. But feel free to let me know if something needs to be changed (I'm @bram85 on identi.ca and Twitter), or use the comment section below.
| identi.ca | ||
|---|---|---|
| Open source |  |
|
| Groups | |
|
| Tags | |
|
| OpenID | |
|
| Jabber (XMPP)* | |
|
| Notices to SMS** | |
|
| Autosubscribe followers | |
|
| @Replies filtering | |
|
| Update protection | |
|
| Theming | |
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| Mobile interface | |
|
| Non-english interface*** | |
|
| RSS feeds | |
|
| ATOM feeds | |
|
| FOAF feeds | |
* Regarding Jabber support, Twitter used to have this, but silently ditched it.
** Differs from country to country. It appears that the range of Twitter is more limited than identi.ca's.
*** Twitter offers only one additional language besides English, Japanese. Identi.ca offers a wide range of languages.
Voor een kleine vakantie naar Zuid-Duitsland dacht ik dat het wel handig zou zijn om wat kaarten van de te bezoeken steden op m'n telefoon te hebben. Natuurlijk heb ik Google Maps wel geïnstalleerd, maar dat wordt een duur grapje als ik dat in het buitenland ga gebruiken. Na een beetje onderzoek ben ik er in geslaagd om offline enkele kaarten beschikbaar te hebben.
Dit zijn slechts wat aantekeningen voor mezelf, en het gaat er van uit dat u een werkende J2ME-telefoon hebt, een PC met Linux (of een ander Unix-achtig beest) en een werkende verbinding tussen PC en de telefoon (USB of Bluetooth).
For a little holiday to south-Germany I thought it would be handy to have some maps on my phone of the to-be-visited cities. Of course, I have Google Maps installed, but I'd rather not use it abroad due to the insane fees for data roaming. So after a little investigation I was able to have offline maps on my phone.
These are merely notes to myself, and it assumes you have a working J2ME enabled phone, a Linux PC (any other Unix like OS would do) and a working connection between PC and phone (USB, Bluetooth).
About 2 weeks ago a new beta of Opera Mini hit the internet: 4.1 beta. With this new version, Opera claims that the browser would be about 50% faster than 4.0. Of course I get skeptical with such numbers, so I had to check that out.
But gosh... they really did it. That browser is noticeably faster than 4.0, pages load seconds faster. They did some magic at the server side which improved things quite a lot.
