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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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Being a student at the TU-Berlin is quite nice. Our campus is right in the city, so it’s quite easy to go shopping right after your classes. We have a canteen called “Mensa” for the students too, serving really cheap food. You usually pay around € 1.90 for some meat, plus € 0.30 for some potatoes or rice and another € 0.30 for a little salad. € 2.50 for a meal, sounds good right? Unluckily, there is a catch. The food tastes incredibly bad. Most students know that, but the alternative is the workers canteen, which offers quite nice food, but for € 4.00 a meal. So what about students like me who don’t have the money to eat the expensive food every day but don’t want to puke after each € 2.50 meal from the Mensa?

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Usually, when you need to send a letter, you would probably walk to the post office to buy a stamp, or maybe a full set with 10 or more. In Germany, post offices are usually really full and it takes quite some time until you can buy your stamps. The Problem is that the post offices here are also a bank, so there are a lot of customer doing bank business there. They do offer vending machines for stamps, but they printed ones are really ugly and not self-adhesive, so you have to lick them, which I can’t stand a bit personally. So is there a better way to get your stamps?
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Adobe Photoshop is pretty much the standard program everyone use to edit images. It is a great piece of software, but unlucky, incredibly expensive. It has a lot of features, but sometimes, I just want to quickly crop an image or change its contrast and it is annoying to wait ages for it to load. Anyway, while searching for a way to allow users of my German Anime community (animechat.de) to edit their avatars online, I stumpled upon pixlr.

WOW! I never knew that it is possible to edit images that comfortable in my browser. The best thing is that it starts instantly. No need to wait at all, I can just open it up and use it. Perfect. If only Photoshop could be like this… Anyway, pixlr supports a lot of features, not only the basic ones like Painting and Cropping/Resampling. You can use Layers and apply quite a lot filters to your image. I strongly suggest you giving it a try.

It also offers an API to integrate their image editor to your page for editing Images on your website. I am using it on my community now. You can see some more screenshots of pixlr on the tutorials on the community site.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I have released qTranslate 2.0.2 for you all as my little Christmas present. Thank you all for supporting me, especially those who bought me really nice gifts, send me greetings cards or donated some money! Thanks a lot! I really appreciate it!

I’ll be playing “Junta” and “Siedler” over my holidays all day long.

When I opened my mailbox today, I was quite astonished when I found a greeting card from Italy there. It is from “Daniele” (did I spell it right? If not, mail me). Thank you a lot for the card, I was really happy today when I received it. The same goes to “Andrea”, who bought me something from my Amazon.de wish list today. I’ve been developing qTranslate 2 these days, which got pretty frustating because my notebook is way to slow when I try to debug javascript, so I am saving up for a desktop PC. But I will keep doing my best, thank you for your support!

To survive the ongoing price war in Germany, almost all big companies have reduced their service level to a minimum. What used to be free has become quite pricey. Service numbers are a good example. They used to be free or on a 0180-2 basis (€ 0.06/call). But lately, they were swapped against expensive 0180-5 (€0.14/min) or even 0900 (usually above €1.00/minute) numbers. It wouldn’t be so bad if the service would actually improve as expected if you pay money to talk to the service personnel, but in reality, they get even worse. Long waiting lines and user unfriendly interfaces make you pay for wasting your time. Luckily, there usually is a way to get rid of the pricey part.

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All my friends know that I am a huge Logitech fan. I own 9 mouses, 4 keyboards, 2 Bluetooth headsets, 2 remotes and 1 Bluetooth music receiver made by Logitech, which almost all are still in use (just for the record: MouseMan iFeel, MX 700, MouseMan Traveller, LX5, V500, MX 1000, MX 1000 Bluetooth, MX Revolution, MX Revolution Bluetooth, S510, 2x diNovo Desktop, MX 5500 Desktop, Mobile Freedom, Mobile Traveller, Wireless Music, 2x Harmony 885).
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I always say that you can easy distinguish a computer amateur from an expert by looking at his taskbar. If it has only one row, he’s an amateur. An expert knows the advantage of multi tasking and needs a lot of space in the task bar to navigate through the programs.
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Today, I finally got VDSL. Actually, I was supposted to get it 2 weeks ago, but T-Com managed to have a shortage on the VDSL2 hardware (and refused me to pick some up from one of their stores where there was hardware) and then after I got the hardware, they needed 1 week to activate my VDSL2 line. I think I paid at least € 10 to call their support hotline preventing them to test what else can be done wrong. I wonder how long others had to wait. Anyway, I’m now a lucky guy who didn’t get VDSL25 but VDSL50 with 50Mbit down and 10Mbit up! So now, it’s time to test the line.

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