I'm getting more and more uncomfortable with the amount of information Google has about the world - and me.
GoogleFlu for instance estimates flu trends based on web searches (when a lot of ppl in a certain area look for flu-related terms it's likely that there's a flu outbreak there). Even if this can be helpfull in some ways i'm wondering which other trends Google can predict and how this knowledge can be use for their purpose.
It has already been speculated that Google can forsee development of (stock) markets, but even political developmenta are an issue.
Beside that "global view" i have some privacy concern. As i've stated in the past i'm a big Google fan and like their offers (mail, calendar, docs, reader, notebook just to name the daily-used). But what if Google goes evil sometime in the future (Their company mantra is "don't be evil")? If i just knew an alternative (don't suggest MS live or Yahoo pls. :-)) ...

I just realized that i haven't promoted launchy yet. it allows to launch programs and open documents with a view keystrokes, it requires little configuration, it allowed me to clean up my win-xp desktop completely (it's ridiculous to see some ppls desktops where hundrets of .lnks wait to be clicked), i never play around with winxp's start menu to somehow "optimize" the vast number of entries - it just works. wonderfull. recommended. can't imagine to work without it.

Relativ entspannt verfolge ich die Kursstürze an den internationalen Börsen. Nicht aus genialer Weitsicht, sondern aus div. privaten Gründen habe ich meine spärlichen Aktieninvestments in den letzten Monaten deutlich reduziert. Aber diese Posting widme ich v.a. dem brokerjet.at Newsletter der weise meint "...kann der ATX gegen alle Prognosen den Widerstand bei 3.200 verteidigen, wäre das ein wichtiger Schritt um einen Absturz auf 3.000 Punkte zu verhindern ...". Aha, 3.200 ist also mehr als 3.000, solchen Leuten vertraut man/frau sein/ihr Geld gerne an!

a friend of mine was hit by the (check google) famous "routenplaner-server.com" / "michael burat" / "katja günther" scam.
a bit frightening first (lawyers involved), but entertaining at the end (reading all those funny letters ppl. wrote).
i for myself set up the green (robin hood) hat and sent emails to lawyers association and the bank involved. just for fun :-).

warning (obvious): don't enter personal data to sites you don't know/trust.

In an attemp to unclutter, i'm putting all media (worth it) into digital & onto hdd.
I have already converted most of my Audio CDs to mp3 using CDEx
My fabulous setup for video conversion is:
- the VHS video recorder (JVC) is connected via SCART to my DVD/HDD recorder (Phillips)
- the DVD/HDD recorder is connected with my notebook via SVideo + Audio via Haupauge Hybrid USB Stick
- i'm recording with VirtualDub
I plan to store everything on a NAS and play it via DreamBox & var. PC. Let's see how things proceed....

If anybody knows a good print-on-demand / book-on-demand service (better than the usual suspects http://www.bod.de, http://www.lulu.de) please let me know!

From now on i'm the proud owner of a Dreambox 7025. The main motivation for investing in another piece of entertainment gear was, that my previous setup (DVBS receiver + HDD recorder) from the pre-DVBS aera was painfull to use. With the DB i have everything in one box (+ 1 remote control!). After fiddling around a bit with flash images, cams, emus & keys everything works like expected (at least for a short period of time. long-time results pending).
Expect my old gear to show up on eBay soon :-).

http://live.sysinternals.com is a place to get all the cool tools from sysinternals.com which needed to be downloaded & unzipped separately until now.
DownThemAll allows to get them all into your prefered utilities directory directly.

PS: currently i find it more productive to read blogs than to write one, so pls. excuse the low frequency of new posts.

PPS: unsere-neue-orgel.blogspot.com deserves a better pagerank, so i link it here :-).

http://www.storyofstuff.com, an amazing clear & straight video!

Two weeks ago i treated my 1/2 year old Palm Treo 680 a bit too hard and the display got damaged. After searching Palm's webpages i found that they would repair it for ~130€+shipping which was definitely to expensive. Google lead me to www.pdaparts.com which offered refurbished displays for ~80$+shipping. I was a bit unsure what a refurbished display would look like, but after checking some reviews i took the risk and ordered the part. ~10 days later the display arrived (in perfect shape) and using the repair video on pdaparts' site i repaired my Treo. The $ to € conversion rate made the deal pretty cheap, i was billed 77€ totally. Great service, great quality, great instructions (and i'm a little bit proud that i'm able to do that kind of repairs myself :-))!

As GOOGLE is still not providing a ToDo app (a lot of rumor about it, but no solution yet) i looked for online ToDo / GTD applications and tried RememberTheMilk, TaDaLists and Todoist. While RememberTheMilk seems to be most hyped i prefere Todoist after a short periode of usage. Simple, straight but powerfull.
I completely miss Palm Treo sync, but that's another story.
If you have additional suggestions i'd love to hear.