Finally, the word is out. Apple (Steve) has announced at the “hot news feed” that the iPhone (and iPod touch) will be opened up to developers in February 2008. I think this is a wise decision. In stead of fighting developers, bricking phones and constantly being at the defense, the effort of Apple is much better put to use by working together with the (free, unpayed, expert-level, hours-on-end-concentrating, 24/7) programmers out there.
Essential Color Design Tool
For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can’t distinguish green from red, although they are regarded as high contrast to eachother.
Do you want to test how your design looks to colorblind people? Now you can, with Color Oracle, a tool for Mac OSX and Windows which transposes the colors of your screen to reflect what it would look like if you were color blind. In fact, it can simulate 3 different kinds of color blindness.
From the site: “Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see. Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software that you are using. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.”
23 Kicks Flickr’s ass!
Since WordPress has a 50MB space limit for images uploaded to the blog, I was looking for a place to host my galleries. Some friends of mine have Flickr accounts but I really hate it’s cluttered and non-intuitive user interface.
Yesterday evening I found a very good alternative to Flickr, which actually is much cooler. It has all the features Flickr has, but it’s user interface is much, much more intuitive, and less cluttered. It’s fast, free and has a very cool upload feature which lets you edit the photo’s as they’re uploading! It’s an amaing feature you’d have to see for yourself.
And where can you find all this wonderfull stuff? It’s at www.23hq.com. Try it out, it’s completely free, has no userspace or download limitation, and no spam is sent to you. The only limitation to free accounts is that you can upload maximum 30 photo’s per month. But don’t worry, you can upload 300 photo’s the first week to get your account started.
Leave that Flickr account and join 
!
Welcome
Hello reader,
Welcome to the new location of my weblog. The old data is not completely transferred yet, I’ll be doing that from newest to oldest post by hand, because there is no way to do that in the old blog software. This is one of the reasons I am moving away from that blog. I may be running into all kinds of problems, and it may take a while, so if you are looking for existing information, bare with me.
If you can’t find the content and tips you are looking for, please check out the location of my old blog at http://blogger.xs4all.nl/rrolfje.
AFP breaks when messing with your Public folder!
Hi, just a quick reminder to myself and users of the AFP protocol (Apple File Protocol) who are wondering why it is not working. For some strange reason, if you start messing (deleting) the “Public” folder of any user which is on the system providing the AFP share, you will break the AFP protocol.
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1 week Gran Canaria
Last week in Gran Canaria, I…
It can be done on Windows, too!
If you’ve ever had the “pleasure” of configuring and sharing a printer between Windows machines, you probably know how tedious it is to get one machine to send a print job to the printer connected to another machine. And don’t even get me started on how to do that on a Linux machine, or any mix of these two systems.
Disable Windows Native Zip support
If you have large or many zipfiles in a folder, windows seems to lock up when opening the folder containing the zipfiles. This is because Windows is “smart” and decides to pre-scan the zipfiles and display them as folders. Installing free zip tools like zipgenius will not change this behaviour, although you would expect that.
To unregister the Windows zipfile support service, use the following command (Start -> Run…):
regsvr32 /u zipfldr
To enable the Windows zipfile support again (I can’t imagine why), use the command:
regsvr32 zipfldr
Source of this brilliant tip is dans blog, which I found after some googling ofcourse.
Funny pricelists
Some bike repair shops have funny price lists on their walls:
| ENGINE REPAIR PRICE LIST | ||
|---|---|---|
| PING-PING-PING | € | 35.00 |
| PLUNK-PING-PLUNK | € | 55.00 |
| CLUNK-PING-CLUNK | € | 125.00 |
| THUD-KLUNK-THUD | € | 200.00 |
| CLANG-THUD-KLANK | € | 325.00 |
–
| LABOR RATES PER HOUR | ||
|---|---|---|
| IF YOU WATCH US | € | 55.00 |
| IF YOU GIVE US ADVICE | € | 65.00 |
| IF YOU HELP OR ASSIST US | € | 85.00 |
| IF YOU WORKED ON IT BEFORE | € | 105.00 |
Lathe Spindle rebuild, part 1
Past few weeks I noticed that the spindle bearings of my lathe were becomming warmer than I liked, particularly when working with higher rpm. Last weekend I decided to take the spindle out, clean the old grease out, and rebuilding it. It turned out to be more work than I expected. The tight fit of the pully made me use the hammer-and-wood trick on the spindle, which I did not like. After a few hours of tapping and fiddling, the pully came of. The spindle gear and the left hand bearing were no fun job either.
Anyway, the whole thing is apart now, and I cleaned out all the grease. I test-fitted the spindle sundaynight, but I can feel a slight “bump” when turning it, I think the grease must have picked up some dirt, most likely a wood chip from the bench. So I have to take it apart again, it has to be perfectly smooth.
After I re-fit the spindle, I have to adjust it with my micrometer to have a play of between 0.004 and 0.005 mm, no more, and no less, while being able to turn it by hand. Sounds like an interesting excercise which will take up more than a few minutes 🙂
