Oliver Erlewein on December 20th, 2008

The good samaritans over at MacHeist are giving away some software for our beloved Macs! So get over there and get your free stuff! On Christmas day there’s even more to get. Have I mentioned I love the guys over at MacHeist?

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Oliver Erlewein on December 9th, 2008

Just diligently downloaded the beta 2 of Firefox (Mac OS X). Yes, yes I know…. but I am this way. I test betas of Firefox, CrossoverOffice, WordPress and others. And I do give feedback to these projects. Probably one of the banes of a tester! But I think it’s a little like voting. If you [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 22nd, 2008

Most people that know Rebecca and me will say that we love food and eating. Maybe it has something to do with being German but I think that’s not all. Food is something important in our lives. It reminds us of home or better it makes us feel at home. When I was living in [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 22nd, 2008

In my previous keyboard post I discussed what a good keyboard is. I have come to love the new chiclet Apple Keyboards. The low profile height, the right angle and low travel are ideal for me. I do understand though that they do evoke love or hate and not much in between. Because bacteria love [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 21st, 2008

Gmail is my absolute favourite webmail client. I have gotten used to the somewhat unaccustomed way of managing mail. Security concerns are present but I have somewhat dealt with my paranoia. Google churns out new Gmail features on a regular basis. The newest one arrived in my mailbox today. It is Themes for Google mail. [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 19th, 2008

Sometimes when doing web pages or testing text input you wish you had the Lorem ipsum text handy. It is the de-facto standard for temporary text input. There are two sites that can help with that. Have a look at http://lorem2.com/ and http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/. Both allow for different configurations depending on what you need.

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Oliver Erlewein on November 11th, 2008

SSH is one of the staples when administrating *nix servers. One thing many people know but don’t use is that Blowfish SSH encryption is much faster than AES encryption. This comes in very handy if you are scp-ing large files or piping something over SSH.The speed difference is significant. It can be around 4-5x faster [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 8th, 2008

I updated my Ubuntu 8.04 work desktop yesterday to Ubuntu 8.10. I must admit it’s exciting pressing the button to upgrade. Being Windows “trained” for so many years you don’t trust anything that upgrades your system automagically. Well and after about 20 minutes it had….drumroll…..gone wrong. The system complained about graphics xyz and only started [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 5th, 2008

Yesterday our good friends Melanie & Brian celebrated the launch of their New Zealand Immigration DVD in the Wellington Film Archive. So far I’ve not yet seen the whole DVD but the excerpts were great! It looks very professional and I promise next time I am going along for the trip. The on-locations look wonderful. [...]

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Oliver Erlewein on November 1st, 2008

A few months ago Equinux was nice enough to send me a TubeStick to trial in New Zealand. I was hoping to be able to watch FreeView (DVB-T) on my Mac. The bad news is that it currently doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t find one channel. I suppose it is because NZ doesn’t use [...]

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