Philipp Lenssen from the Google Blogoscoped blog does some iterations on the Google Mail userinterface while he investigates the question “What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?“. He ends up with a userinterface which is very much like the hotmail I knew before I replaced it with my current gmail account.
Have fun reading.
p.s. Did you notice that the gmail space has increased to around 5GB lately? Google continues to amaze (frighten?) me at how much data they can store.
Since the comming of rss feeds, the world is a better place for online people like me. I can select interesting newsfeeds I’d like to read, and compose my own newspaper. For newssites, this requires a new skill. For them to keep me as a reader, they need to keep the rss feed up to date, and with items I’d like to see. Because I can do research on the spot, the news items better be balanced, verified and unbiased (unless it’s funny ;-). Recently I dumped the nu.nl rss feed because of the constant re-posting of only slightly modified articles.
Last week, I hapily installed OSX 10.5 (Leopard) on my trusty Mac Mini. The upgrade from Tiger went without a hitch, and the system even got a bit “snappier”. For a week, I had no major issues with Leopard. The Dock dissapeared once, and I had a non-reacting keyboard once when waking from sleep mode. Other than that I am a happy Leopard user.
Up until a few das ago, when I tried to access my newly acquired 500GB Iomega Network Storage. The Iomega drive is a network connected drive, formatted as FAT32, and accessible through the samba (SMB://) protocol. With Leopard, I could see the drive in the network, and I could double click on it’s shares, but when (if) the share connected, I could not drag files onto it, or see what is on the disk. Unmounting takes ages, and sometimes requires me to “killall -9 Finder”.
If you are using luntbuild for your continuous integration builds at work, you probably want to remove anonymous user access. In stead of adding that feature to the administrator “Properties” page where I’d expect it, you have to hack the Spring configuration in the webapps directory of luntbuild. Sigh. Here we go:
A few weeks ago, my Dad and my Brother both bought identical Windows Vista machines, at the same shop, at the same time. Although the hardware specs of these computers were terrific, the performance of Windows Vista was “moderate” to say the least. An even bigger problem was that some of the older XP programs my dad had been using did no longer work on the shiny new Vista machine. The shiny 3D effects had to go in favour of something that “just worked”.
For me as a european consumer, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when travelling to the U.S., or buying American consumer electronics.
For Apple, as a big company with complete control over it’s retail prices, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when the conversion rates sneak up on the consumers and you “forget” to adjust your 1-to-1 Euro-to-Dollar conversion in your stores. Time to wake up the European Apple consumers.
Last week I’ve been complaining about the capped volume on the iPod nano and the inability to circumvent it. At the end of that very week, the iPod earbuds solved the problem for me by breaking down. The rubber rings started comming off, and the right speaker produced only 10% of the sound the left speaker was producing.
I decided that this was enough reason to go looking for a nice set of in-ear headphones (earbuds) which would sound nice, and also improve on produced volume.
A while ago the drives in my fileserver (PPC Mac Mini) began dying on me, one after one. The disks were somewhat old (approx. 4 years) so I replaced them with 2 new Maxtor 500GB USB drives, and restored all data from my backups. The server came up and looked and worked like it had never died, but now had more diskspace.
After a few months of trouble free operation, one of the Maxtor disks seemed to have died this morning. I had kept the receipt, so I thought I’d get the drive and bring it in for repairs, because after all, this is well within the warranty period. While disconnecting the drive, it occured to me that I could never bring that harddisk in for repairs, particularly if I was not able to access it.
I know you’ve been playing with your ultra-cool iPhones, but did you realize that it only is 6 years ago that Apple showed is the first iPod? It’s amazing how fast technology advances nowadays. Today I read that 128GB flashdrives are not far away, so how about an 128GB iPhone, or even a MacBook with a solid state disk? We’ve got a nice future ahead…
Since Sony invented the walkman, the trains, trams and busses have been flooding with people wearing earphones. At first, they irritated everybody with the “ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…” sound comming out of their ears, and now, many early walkman owners are starting to show hearing problems. The European Union has stepped in to protect our ears, and have set some limits to how much sound a personal music device can produce.
In theory this is a terrific idea, but in practice, it doesn’t work. Most manufacturers, like Apple are simply limiting the absolute maximum the device can use by measuring how loud a very loud mp3 plays at max volume. Then, they apply a software cap on the volume slider and that’s that. As a side effect, people who like to listen to inheritly low-volume music (classical music or some talkshow podcasts) are very limited in where they can use this device.
