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Now after the HTC Desire is finally available in Germany, my cousin immediately ordered one, which finally arrived last saturday. I couldn’t resist testing the 1 GHz Snapdragon compared to the Motorola Milestone I own. But I never got to doing that…

When I looked at the HTC Desire’s screen, I found it to be looking really odd. I could see red pixels between black and white transitions, which is really irritating when reading text. When looking at a pure gray image, it looked like I was looking at a white background through a mesh. It gave me the feeling of looking at a cheap $100 low-res phone where pixels still could be seen.
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If someone would offer you Office Ultimate 2010 for only €52, there is only one explanation for the price: bootleg! No need for discussion, unless… it’s Microsoft’s own offer for you! You heard it right, Office Ultimate 2010 for €52. I mean, 93% savings, isn’t that something we only know from those illegal pirated software spam mails?

But this time, it’s a legitimate offer from Microsoft. It’s called “das wahre Office” here in Germany and offers Office 2010 for the unbeatable price of €52 to students. You can only buy Office Ultimate 2007 right now, but as soon as 2010 is released, you will get a free upgrade. I’m a big fan of Outlook with Exchange, so well I guess the €52 are well spent here. Don’t hesitate, the offer is limited to the end of june 2010!

Not only Microsoft is offering these increadible cheap packages, if you use Adobe Software for example, they offer 80% savings for their CS5 packages on their education store. Adobe even allows commercial usage of their software, so if you happen to design websites with Photoshop or create videos with Premiere Pro, the production premium set is available for around €350 on several online shop.

Well, making your blog really fast is quite a nice thing for your visitors. And lately it’ll even fall under SEO, as Google now takes Page Speed into account for ranking your website. So how do you get your freshly installed wordpress site really fast? It’s actually really easy.
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Well, I’ve complained quite a lot about Logitech already, so after my problems with the diNovo edge started, I finally switched to a Microsoft keyboard, at least for the period until the repaired diNovo edge returns. I wanted to switch the brand for quite some time now, but there was simply no alternative if you are used to low profile keys from your notebook or diNovo keyboard. Luckily this finally changed as Microsoft has presented an ultra-flat keyboard called the “Arc Keyboard”, which features quite a nice design while being really small (and 60% cheaper than the diNovo edge). Well, the Arc keyboard looks really great. You can’t complain anything about its looks, but does it work as well as the diNovo edge?
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Perfect? Is that even possible? I guess not, but my newest server is pretty close in my opinion. The Focus was to get power consumption and price as low as possible while maintaining performance and safety. My current home server is an averages PC with an AMD64 and 2 GB of RAM while having a RAID 5 with 6 hard disk. As you can imagine, my power bill is incredibly high, so I definitely want a more energy efficient solution this time.

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Green IT is a big topic, that’s why more and more computer power supplies get a 80 PLUS label for showing off their superior efficiency. But if you every decide to run a Intel Atom based PC, use a PicoPSU, just power your notebook or charge your phone, you won’t really find out how efficient the power supply is. I came across this problem while searching for an efficient power supply for my new Atom-based home server. First, I wanted to use an 80 PLUS 350W power supply, but after reading some reviews, I found out that they are totally inefficient (<50%) on low load (<50W), which the targeted power consumption of my new home server is supposed to be. So I googled and found the PicoPSU, advertising >93% efficiency. Wow great, but wait, it needs to be powered by 12V DC. How efficient is the converter from 110/220V AC to 12V DC? No word on the manufacture site. I tried to google for efficient converter, so I gave up… until the case of my new home server arrived, a Gigabyte MIB T5140. Read more »

I just got my new Android cell phone, the Motorola Milestone/Droid and I have to say Android is great! It’s so much better than Windows Mobile. A lot of the functionality comes from the Android Market. So while I was downloading Apps from it, I couldn’t find any tools for managing my analog dual-sim-adapter, so I decided to write one on my own. The Android SDK seemed to be very well documented, so I thought I give it a try. And guess what, I found the resulting program to be useful enough that I purchased a Market-Account for $25 and published it there. Find out more on the MultiSim section of my website.

Windows 7 is said to have great biometric support. Well, it does, if the Fingerprint Reader would be working. I own a Medion MD 85264 for years now and it was really problematic to setup, especially in XP and Vista. So I was really astonished when I plugged the Fingerprint scanner and Windows 7 installed the drivers right away. A quick look at the device manager revealed that the device was powered by an Authentec AES2501A. But if you tried to actually use it, Windows 7 complains that there is no management software.
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A few weeks ago, my T-Home Entertain VDSL 50 stopped working, for no reason at all. My VDSL modem, the “Speedport 300HS” suddenly couldn’t sync anymore. I thought T-Com is probably doing maintenance, so I waited for a day, but it still wouldn’t sync. So I called the T-Com, asking what the problem would is. They told me everything should be fine, but I can order a technician, who can come to my place to check the line. The only condition is, if my line isn’t broken, I’d have to pay €100 for the technician.
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During my last semester, I participated at a seminar. My topic was “Games on the cell phone”. I’m putting the text I wrote online. It’s in German, but if someone is interested, feel free to have a look.

Spiele auf dem Handy (PDF)