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.

DB is so fu**ed up!
Yesterday i had to travel to Munich by train again. My train to go back home was scheduled for x:31.
The moment when i reached the platform (in time, ~ x:27) the display changed to "train approx. 5 min late".
My experience told my the this wouldn't be the last bad news. At about x:34 the display changed again and announced the arrival of another late train at x:36.
Hm, that was the time i expected my - late - train. At x:36 the other train arrived and left one minute later.
A woman's voice (don't remember if it was charming or not, i was already too angry) told us that our train will be 10 min late and leave x:41.
I had a talk with a DB person (a poor minded guy), when i told him that i would have bet that the original 5 min dely wouldn't stand he answered that if i knew that already i know more than he (which was obviously not too difficult). And when i told him that i might miss my followup-train he blamed ÖBB for not waiting.
At x:41 the train arrived and left x:43.
As i was already in bad mood i asked the guy in the train if the followup-train will wait for us and he told me that our delay is announced and they will come back with detailed information later.
He wasn't seen anymore, 5 min before we arrived at the train station where i had to change they told us via speaker that we are late (as if we didn't know that) and that they have no detailed connection information.
No need to say that my connection train didn't wait, as we were 11 min left. I lost a complete hour.

What makes me really crazy is
- They always announce delays piece by piece. I bet they knew that they won't make it in the originally announced 5 min, but they don't tell their customers the truth. They lie on us!
- Generally i like traveling by train (read my previous postings regarding "business travel mode"), but this really bugs me!
- This situation hit me ~ the last 5 times i took DB.
- The DB blames OBB for not waiting for DB delays. Well, nice try, but don't do that to an austrian.
If the DB is not able to manage their trains properly why should OBB ruin their schedule?
(btw: What's the difference between germans and austrians? The germans have nice/intelligent/... neighbours!)

"Zero inbox" & "Business travel mode"

1) i read Merlin Man's "Zero inbox" column some weeks ago and the changes i've implemented & which are working great for me are:
- My inbox is NOT my todo list. i try to "process" everything asap (somehow aligned with GTD). i have a separate todo list (using my Palm Treo).
- I have 1 archive, not 15 like before (one for each project, team, topic, ...) . I still find everything (even easier then before) searching by date, sender/receiver or using Google Desktop.
- I've implemented a macro that archives emails by shortcut. Email-triage is a pleasure now instead of the pain it was before.

2) From time to time i have to travel to our company headquarter which takes me ~ 3 hours by train (one direction). I found that i prefer working from workplace (or even better from home), but that those rare business trips give me 2x3 hours of great productivity. No interruptions, just my notebook & me 3 hours locked in isolation without the opportunity to do something else. Something Tom DeMarco describes as "flow". I'll try to get into "Business travel mode" without traveling in the future. (In Business travel mode i wouldn't have the chance to blog too :-)).

AON Kombipaket
To all my austrian readers:

AON Kombipaket scheint ein unglaubliches angebot zu sein.

Für 19.90 im Monat gibt's
- TikTak privat
- ADSL 2Mbit flat
- 3 SIMs zu 5Cent in alle Netze

Ähm, für sowas ähnliches zahl' ich zur Zeit
- 16€ TikTak privat
- ~30€ ADSL 3GB
- ~20€ Telering Ätsch

Da erspar' ich mir doch glatt 2/3!

Calender sync weirdness!
On my search for a perfect calender sync solution i tried the following:
- sync gCal with Plaxo
- sync Outlook with Plaxo
- sync Plaxo with !Yahoo
- sync !Yahoo with Palm Treo via their freely available tool

Surprisingly this crazy setup works.
I only feel a bit uncomfortable that my calendar data is now spread across 4 different locations.

I'm aware that Palm Treo is a bit old shool and Google will provide everything & the kitchen sink for the upcoming Android phones.

Any comments welcome.


ps: don't try to hack one of my accounts mentioned above :-)

Promote another Google service: Reader

I have to confess that i'm a late adopter of the RSS trend. I was used to check various websites for news frequently. I never used any feed reader.

But Google made me believe (again)! Google Reader alows me to follow a (in the meantime huge) number of websites. It's a big time saver and i can use it from everywhere.

Highly recommended!

By accident i found that there have been several "false positives" in my spam folder (gmail).

Tip:
Check spam folder from time to time.
Don't rely on email only for your social life - spam filter might kill it.

I really don't want to play math on this topic:

18.000 children die each day because of hunger.
Some sources say 1€ can feed a person a day.

http://www.caritas.at can feed a baby with 1€ per week.
Makes lousy 52€ a year!
52€, something we might spend one evening being out.
52€, gym's montly fee.
52€, one tank stop with your car.

Come on - save life - donate!
http://www.caritas.at

interesting feature http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01813772773883050246
update: changed blogger template to "layouts" and added a webpart "johann w's shared items". enjoy!

~1 week ago my Palm Tungsten T3 died. I always treated the device hard (carrying around in my trouser pocket, in humid areas, ... so it wasn't really that unexpected.
I checked for replacements and ended up with a Palm Treo 680. There's a recent promo where a GPS is sent for free, so the deal seems pretty fine. Amazon did a great job again and two days later i got my new smartphone delivered. Even if the Treo is not that cool in the days of the iPhone i'm pretty satisfied until now.

Something i was guessing since a pretty long time now becomes more attention: all the biofuel hype is not worth a lot http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/big-bad-biofuels.php.
These days austria increases the precentage of biofuel in any gasoline, politicians tell us that this is to save the planed, agricultural groups say this is the future of farming - they're all so blind.....

proud to announce: helene's photos!

as said i love google calendar for it's simple but powerful user interface and it's integration with gmail. what i really miss is synchronization with outlook and my palm t3.
vast numbers of users request a simple sync tool from google but they seem to be deaf and leave this basic functionality to 3rd parties. nasty!
if i find time i'll come up with a summary of my findings!