As you can see, I ordered the silver+natural lcd model because it looked the best in my opinion. So I was really excited when the small Fedex package arrived just 3 days after my order. When I took the watch out of the package, I noticed quite a lot of dirt inside the scratch-resistant protection from the manufacturing process. But the dirt all stuck to the foil when pulled off and no scratches were on the watch, so I guess that’s not a reason to complain.

After unpacking the package and adjusting the wrist band length, I began to set the time. There, I encountered a little problem I didn’t expect this watch to have. It doesn’t support 24 hour display format of the time. Here in Germany, it is very common to say 15 o’clock for 3pm. But oh well, I can live with this minor handicap. The watch itself looks very nice on the arm. From the pictures of the Tokyoflash site, I’d expected the watch to be too thick, but on the arm, it look just fine. It feels a little heavy, but that’s probably because I haven’t worn a watch for so long.

You can clearly see the complex LCD with all the elements, which makes reading the watch much harder than the images from the concept. I suppose I need much more practice to get used to the segments. It is easier than those sample images from the Tokyoflash website though. So except for the little segments, the four touchscreen areas also distract a little from reading the time. The touchscreen is not that sensitive if you’re used to touchscreen phones. You will need to hold you finger for a second to make sure that the watch will react to it. On the other hand, it is probably good that it won’t interact to fast screen wiping gestures.

The last feature to test is the EL back light, which works just as intended. All in all, the watch is really nice. Even with the downsides, it is definitely worth the money. The uniqueness and no physical buttons at all are just great!

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.

After having used high-res screen devices like the HTC Touch Diamond or the Motorola Droid, I’m pretty sure that something was wrong with the screen of the HTC Desire, it simply didn’t look like a 800×480 screen to me. Well, I dropped the seller an email, saying that the phone my cousin got is broken. But today, I got my hands on a Google Nexus One, which I immediately examined for this weird behavior. The Nexus One got the exact same problem. Is that coincidence? I started asking other people whether they are seeing the red pixels, too, but most of them replied no.

I started to dig deeper and found an interesting article on arstechnica.com describing this problem. Basically, the Desire/Nexus One screen only has 2 colors /pixel instead of 3. So the screen is a mesh of red/green and blue/green pixels instead of every pixel having red, green and blue. The whole thing is based on quite a lot of rules of human eye reception, like

1. Green is a color the human eye is most sensitive to, the screen has the full amount of green pixels.
2. As the human eye is more sensitive to contrast than color, having a high display density should make this effect invisible.
3. Having the color information only on every 2 pixels is a very commonly used procedure in compressing video to save space without visible quality loss.

But there is one problem with not beeing able to show all 3 colors at the same time. To show one white pixel, you would need to turn on 2 pixels, as red, green and blue has to be on to mix a white. This wouldn’t be a problem it the colors weren’t alternating between red and blue. So instead of having a nice black with almost invisible blue side, you get a eye-catching ugly red/blue border on every white to black transition.

Well, I sure hope that is the only device HTC will build with such an ugly screen, if not, I’d recommend people to switch to that nice Retina Display of the iPhone 4.

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.

aptitude install php-apc

Afterwars, edit the /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini and replace it with the following:

extension=apc.so
[apc]
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.ttl = 7200
apc.user_ttl = 7200
apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc.XXXXXX

Now restart Apache with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and APC is up and running.

Next you will need to setup mod_expires to configure client side caches. mod_expires is usually already installed when you use apache2, so you will only need to enable it via a2enmod expires. After that, find the default vhost configuration file (usually /etc/apache2/conf.d/default-config) and add the following lines:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 300 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 day"

Now restart Apache again with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and client side caching is ready to go.

The next step is installing a WordPress caching plugin with APC support, like W3 Total Cache and setting up Page, Minify and Database Caching with Opcode APC, which is so easy I don’t even need to explain it any further.

There is one optional step, which helps improve page loading time on site with a lot of static content (like images). As connections are limited per hostname, having a lot of images will cause the site to load really slow, as the browser has to wait until the current images have finished loading before it can load new ones. To solve this problem, simply create multiple ServerAlias in your virtual-host file and serve your static content from them. It is strongly recommended that you use a hostname wrapper in this case, which generates the same Alias for each file. You certainly don’t want a user to start loading the same file from different hostnames, as that would actually slow down the page speed. There are several ways to solve this problem. I created a function that calculates a number from the filename and use that as a subdomain where the file is being loaded from.

With this steps, page loading time dropped from 10-20s to 1-2s on my web projects (Full page load with images and scripts). It feels really nice to see the page load up so fast.

But if you really want a keyboard for fast typing, it’s no match for the diNovo edge, nor the diNovo Media Desktop. I guess I’ll keep the Arc keyboard to be my home server keyboard, as it is really compact.

Some people bring their own food to the university, but I like my lunch to be a hot meal, not some cold sandwich or similiar. So that’s not a solution for me. Until a few days ago, I didn’t had a choice and tried to avoid to eat at the university. Now everything changed, thanks to the Get2Card. With it, you can eat 2 for 1 at a lot of restaurants in Berlin, just like “Schweinske”, right next to the TU-Berlin. Their meals start from €5.00, so with the Get2Card and someone else who’s just as hungry as you, you can eat for €2.50 in a real restaurant, with someone serving you. The portion is about twice to tripple of the Mensa-Meal, so you get a really good tasting meal, with more than twice as much meat, salad and a side dish for as cheap as a Mensa meal. Did I already mention that it tastes really good as the meal is freshly prepared for you and not kept-warm like in the Mensa?

When you think about it, a real restaurant can make money when they sell food for €2.50 to you. It’s fresh and tasty and there is a waitress serving you. How come the Mensa, which gets financial support from the government, can’t offer it for the same price? Where is the money going? I mean the Mensa only offers meals with less than half of a portion of the restaurant for the same price without any service, but they’re still unable to make it eatable. Something fishy there… As for me, I’ll never go to the Mensa again.

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.

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