I am an active Google Reader user and today I thought ‘What does the “Discover” button do?’. Rather than thinking about it for too long I just pressed the button and guess what, it discovered a few really interesting blogs based on my reading habits. There you go…
On Saturday, I went to the store to finally buy a new external drive. For 150 I got a 500GB Sungoo NASD. While being there, I also picked up the new cat in town – Mac OS 10.5 named Leopard.
Back home I installed the drive first. I connected it to my Mac and Win machines. All worked well and I was pretty satisfied.
Then I installed Leopard. About 1h later I had the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death”. Reboot – BSOD – Reboot … Search the Internet … I found out that some applications don’t seem to run under Leopard but I haven’t had installed any of them. Reboot – quickly before the BSOD I managed to start the install again. This time I didn’t upgrade but choose “Archive and Install” (note the little options button on the “Select the drive” screen).
1h later and I had a stable system again. Only my NASD disappeared – so I tried to reinstall the drivers – ok – set up the drive – it stalls. After searching the net again, I learned that the NASD software is from Ximeta and their drivers don’t work with Leopard. On their support website you learn that a new driver is planned for Q1/2008.
I’m a bit frustrated as I wanted to use the drive for the new Time Machine feature. I hope Ximeta will bring out the new driver sooner due to public demand.
This can be cool stuff.
Video Searching by Sight and Script
Researchers have designed an automated system to identify characters in television shows, paving the way for better video search.
Jospeh Weizenbaum is a computing pioneer and known amongst many for his ELIZA project. Now there is a film about him: Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work.
Hi, I mentioned before that I use Google Reader for reading some blogs. Today I found that Google allows me to share my “starred items” with you. Thus, I made them publicly available and also added a script to this site showing the last 10 items in the sidebar.
Today I spent a lot of time on the web and I stumbled upon a lot of things:
First, there is the “Get Things Done” line I followed. Starting from the book by David Allen I quickly came to Sylvia’s GTD Homepage and then to the GTD with Gmail Whitepaper. I was previously looking for a tool to manage my to-do lists online. This seems to be a good way.
Next, I checked out a few things to organise myself better using Outlook – the preferred tool at work. First, there is David’s little booklet. Then there is this post on Tickling email in Outlook. I still need to work through this during the weekend.
Coming back to GMail: To improve the usability of GMail even further, I installed scripts described in “Adding Persistent Searches to GMail” and “A Greasemonkey Christmas”.
And there was an article in the c’t magazine about Writer2LaTeX. So I installed OpenOffice and Writer2LaTeX. Now I still have to test the system.
Finally, I found out about the Google Reader – a tool to read RSS feeds – via persistent.info. I entered those feeds I read regularly. I noticed that it takes a moment to update the list – longer than the live bookmarks in Firefox.
Another couple of blogs that seem interesting: Lifehacker and 43Folders.
And some fun: Woogle – Words in pictures. Try, for example, “cool stuff in computer science” 
In October 2003 I helped my dad to set up a Raid system using SuSE 8.2. I wrote up my experiences and published it on my old website. I was very surprised but also happy to find out that it also helped others. A few days ago I received an email asking me for permission to update the document and to publish it. Of course I did not deny this request. Frankly I am delighted to see this happening.
For reference I also included this Raid-Howto on this site under Misc. For backwards compatibility I also had to provide files on the original location as I want to move my site www.ralph.miarka.de to here too. Unfortuntely, I never managed to translate the document from German to English.