New Blog for OS X application reviews went live
I am proud to announce that my new endeavour has gone public.
The Spinning Beachball covers applications for Apple's operating system OS X. You will find in depth reviews and tips for your Mac life there.
I am planning about 2 in-depth posts per week for starters. Come by and have a look. There might be a few things to win over the next posts.
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Try to Avoid the Dark Knight in German
I just saw the German trailer for the awesome movie The Dark Knight and I was shocked to the bones. The dubbing is the worst I have heard and seen in years.
My god, how can they ruin the best movie produced in a long time with such emotionless dubbing? It was pure pain to sit through the trailer knowing the original performances. The Joker was ultimately uninspired and had a voice that didn’t match Heath Ledgers voice in any way. And the other voice actors were similarly passionless.
So here goes my warning for anyone reading this: Try to avoid the German version of The Dark Knight by any means possible!
Over and out.
Blog Posts Transferred
I finally found the time to transfer all posts from the old BabylonDreams blog over to their new home at this address. I only transferred posts I attached a certain value to, so not everything is mirrored 100%.
If you miss a post or something is broken, please send me a message via the contact form. Thank you and enjoy diving into all the new/old content.
Parallels 3 and Messiah on Mac Revisited
Today I tested out the new Parallels 3 with Messiah again, just to see if there are any improvements with the new 3D support. To my surprise it wasn’t the speed improvements that made the biggest impact on me — it was the mouse support. It finally works! No more shooting objects into space or having no control over the attribute boxes. It just works.
Now all I need to find out is, why OS X sometimes locks up my dongle and how I can make Parallels mount the dongle again. If any of you know about this issue, then please let me know, because the Parallels support team sucks (meaning they have yet to reply to any of the mails I sent them)
Largest Lawsuit Against Spammers Ever
Seems like we are finally getting somewhere with our fight against spam. Project Honeypot — to which I am a proud contributor — finally has collected enough data about spammers to file a huge lawsuit against those lowlifes that make your inbox choke every day. I know they certainly do it with my inbox. I receive about 200-500 spam mails per day. Luckily my spam-filter is top notch, so it requires only about 30 seconds a day where I think about spam.
You can help Project Honeypot too if you have a website or blog or — even better — own a webserver or hosted account that allows you to donate a MX entry. It doesn’t cost anything is virtually maintenance free and doesn’t strain your bandwidth. But it helps the fight against spammers. So it is a no-brainer, right?
Just hop over and sign up for your account, so you can help fighting spam, too.
Yikes!!! Is It End of April Already??
Oh boy, I guess this blog has fallen asleep and died slowly without me noticing. Sorry for that. I was (again) buried in work and didn’t feel the urge to sack even more on my plate. Bad me, I know. But that is just how it is with my blogging rhythm I guess. I won’t go an apologize for it anymore. There is no point in it. It is just how this blog works I guess. For the next days I will try to care about it again.
Anyway, I still have a few unpublished articles which I intend to make public. So keep looking for them in the next few days.
Twitter for Colloquy
I don’t know if you already know this service called Twitter. It can be described as a IM independent status message, so you can notify people of your current doings if you like.
Coda Hale created a Quicksilver action to post conveniently to Twitter. Ted Leung thought it would be nice to have Growl notifications in the mix and Matt Matteson thought it needed a bit more sparkle by adding iChat support. Well, now I add two more options to the mix.
Read More...Playing Wii Is Hell
Well, not the actual playing, but beware of waking up on the next morning after you had 5 hours of fun playing Wii Sports and Play. They should sell it with a big red warning sticker that says: ”Geeks beware!!”
Or in other words: I feel every muscle. Hehe.
Man this console is pure fun and everyone should get one. Honestly. The one thing they missed is some exercises to warm you up, because that could seriously help with avoiding suddenly feeling muscles you never knew you had. Man I have gotten untrained I think I will go and caress my hurting body a bit. Maybe play a bit more Wii ? They say training is the best treatment against sore muscles, don’t they?
GTD With POPfile and Mail.app
I know that this is not the next part of my Directory Structure series, but unfortunately things got in the way and so I wasn’t able to finish part two up. Sorry about that, I will have it ready for next week. But for today I finished up another quite interesting topic. Just read on, this is a quick one.
As there seems to be an ever growing demand in streamlining your productivity and in David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, I thought I’d show you how I set up my E-Mail client (Mail.app in this case, but doable with any client that supports either smart folders or normal folders), so I get a very fast and pretty automated GTD solution. This solution is based on several posts from 43 Folders, Lifehacker and Hawk Wings with a little bit of my own spin.
Read More...Google Image Labeler
It is not really a 3D or VFX related topic, but I thought I post about it anyway, because it ia way to much fun. Google has released something they call Image Labeler. For Google it is a way to improve the accuracy of their image searches. But for us, the users, it is a nice game. And I have to applaud Google for coming up with it. It is fun, it is short enough for a little work break game and you get overall rankings and can play with a little high-score incentive.
But I am getting ahead of myself. What is Google Image Labeler?
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