April 2007
15 posts
What I think of the riots in Estonia
(see postitus on saadaval ka eesti keeles)
Through the past year, I’ve been away from Estonia for quite a while. I’ve been to shorter trips to the US and Europe, and I’ve also lived abroad in chunks of one or two months. At the same time, I’ve read and listened to memories of Estonians about the 20th century history, such as the Second World War and the Soviet times that...
nPost — a jobs site with entrepreneur interviews...
Here’s an email I got from nPost. I’m a big fan of history and the whole time dimension on the Internet, and so it’s cool to see interviews from as far back as 2000 on their site. For example see this Oddpost one from the time before it was acquired by Yahoo. Though I’m not sure if that content is original, licensed or otherwise “acquired”, but interesting...
TiVi desktop and mobile
TiVi is “yet another softphone”. They sent me this email a long while ago, and I’m cleaning my inbox and posting some reviews :)
Site is still up. The mobile site at http://m.tivi.com is nice and easy, you can locate things easily there ;) The full site is here.
TiVi comes from Latvia. This also shows on the site a bit, I tried to use the English version but somehow ended up...
Toasted clocks on OS X Dashboard
The clocks on my OS X Dashboard are toast. Some are missing background and some clock hands are replaced with ? (a placeholder for missing image). And it’s different after every reboot. When I add new clocks, they appear the same. How do I fix these? :(
Update: a new copy of “World Clock.wdgt” seems to have fixed it.
Global 800 number providers?
Interesting question I got. I don’t know the answer. If you know, post a response here.
Hello Jaanus,
I’m looking for a “cheap” service that would enable me to
have toll free number in most countries
This would enable most customers from all over the world to call me for free (for them)
So I can have a list like this on my web site :
USA :...
Generic reposter code now available — repost your...
Vacation is the best time to write code, isn’t it :)
I got my act together and somewhat cleaned up the generic reposter code that powers miscrandom.com. You can now immerse yourself in its wikipage with links to downloads and all that. And I made this fancy pic for it too that tries to explain a bit of reposter’s modus operandi.
So… if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I...
Fixing the volume icon on a mobile hard drive
Following devil’s comment, I tried to fix the volume icon on my LaCie. One collateral of reformatting is that you of course lose all the bundled content, but I made a backup of everything and especially the volume icon.
The first thing I tried was simply opening the icon file in Preview, copying it and then pasting to the volume. The result is this.
I’m not sure what’s...
Twitter, Jaiku, and my touchable lamp
It’s so fun to watch all the frenzy around Twitter, Jaiku and other similar more esoteric services that are so hot these days. Everyone is writing up miles-long blog posts trying to sound smart about them and to conceptualize about what they all mean and all that.
I won’t jump on that bandwagon. Why? Because none of them matter. Or rather, that one of them will, but we have no way of...
I'm not Janus Friis
Really. I’m not. Breaking news. So please don’t send me email that you meant to send to Janus Friis. If you do, I’ll delete it. I won’t forward it to him or anywhere else (unless it’s really important, personal, emergency or family etc related — and business opportunities do NOT fall in any of these categories). If you even can’t tell the difference...
Using a mobile hard drive across Mac and Windows
I figured I needed some more disk space and it should be mobile, to match my other mobile adventures. So I got myself a LaCie Ruggable drive. First, congratulations to LaCie, smart marketing with the “rugged” stuff. Take an existing hard drive, put a rubber band around it, label it “rugged” and sell it for more money than other people would. But as you see in my case, it...
Apple widgets crash with weird network setup
I witnessed a spectacular crash of all my stock tracker and weather Dashboard widgets in OS X this morning. When I opened Dashboard in a weird network situation, they crashed one by one. Since I had five Weather instances, I also witnessed five Weather crashes.
I’m blaming my weird network situation. Yet it’s one that travellers encounter fairly commonly. The widgets work fine when...
A friendly form to enter credit card details
Typically when using a credit card to pay on the Internet, you enter the card number and such in a blank text form. Here’s a more fun form from a random airport wifi provider, where the form follows the layout of the card, including the security code on the back. Thus people who are less familiar with credit card forms can more easily make a connection. Us nerds are used to all sorts of...
Mac OS X USB stereo headset weirdness [update: and...
Another OS X hardware/software weirdness. My USB stereo headset suddenly went mono. This means that it only plays crap mono sound and the sound devices widget in System Preferences tells me “no controls for this device”, instead of where should be the left/right balance gauge. So is my headset toast now and tells OS X it’s mono, even though it isn’t? (All the same after...
User-friendly Germany
A few weeks ago, Jim Courtney posted about user-friendly technologies in Germany. I don’t have too much to add, these just caught my eye, considering that I’m living in that region and big on driving, traveling and usability. Yes, these technologies exist, and the parking thing seems to be standardized (I’m not sure if there’s any legal standard, but I’m talking about...
Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress"
One of the recent books I’ve completed reading is Dan Brown’s “Digital Fortress”. I’ve found it useful to document the books I’ve read here so here goes this one.
There’s a story to everything, and before the story about the book, I thought I’d share a meta-story about why I picked this book in the first place. I knew I had some long flights...
