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.
I never thought that something like this would happen to me, but when I arrived at Beijing International Airport a few days ago to travel to Nanning to visit my relatives, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I got out of the car, took both suitcases out of the trunk and start looking for my backpack. OMG, my passport is in my backpack, how am I supposed to fly without identification? I looked at my watch, 12:35, my plane is taking off at 14:00. That’s less than one hour to return home, run up to the 15th floor, get my backpack, run back down and race back to the airport. Did I mention that the traffic in Beijing is incredibly dense?
Li-Ion batteries are practically everywhere. They are used for mobile phones, notebooks, even cars. But most people don’t really know about them and give out wrong hints on how to use and charge them. So here are two important facts about Li-Ion batteries you should know:
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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?
On my birthday this year, my girlfriend surprised me with a short trip to “Schöna”, a small village in the Saxon Switzerland, around 200km from Berlin. So what’s so special about the Saxon Switzerland? Well, you have a huge green forest and some really weird high stones standing there. It looks really beautiful, especially when you standing on top of one of the stones. There are only cliffs around you so you can look really far in every direction. They are usually only around 100m high, so you can climb them pretty fast. With our bikes biggy-backed, we drove to Schöna and started off with a bike tour to Czech Republic.
Currently, Flash does not natively support prevention of multiple instances, so a workaround is needed. Why would anyone want to prevent multiple instances anyway? Well, I use Flash as a Chat client, so allowing a user to run multiple instances would mean that they could join the chat multiple times, which is not really a wanted feature. So how do I prevent users from joining the chat multiple times?
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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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Last weekend, my girlfriend and me went to Wandlitz for a short trip. Wandlitz is a small town close to Berlin and has two lakes around it, namely “Wandlitzer See” and “Liepnitzsee”.
We decided to hike around the “Wandlitzer See” the first day, which was pretty nice at the beginning, where there was a promenade. But after 1km, the promenade turned into a normal road and started to drift away from the waterside, which is not exactly what I imagined of a hiking tour around a lake would look like. Anyway, I found a quite interesting sign next to an intersection after walking around half the lake lying on the ground, most probably knocked over by some car, saying “Watch out for children!”. I hope the children are still doing well unlike the sign…
As my new community project is using a lot of Javascript and Flash Communication, I rely on Flash’s ExternalInterface. ExternalInterface allows me to create simple functions in Flash, which are callable from Javascript. I developed everything using Firefox, where everything worked just fine, but when using Internet Explorer, I encountered the problem that no ExternalInterface functions would register, breaking the Flash/Javascript Communication completely.
After endless hours of testing, I found out that for ExternalInterface to work in IE, 2 conditions have to be met.
There seems to be an issue with transparent PNGs (with alpha channel) in IE 7, too. I had some ugly black background in the pictures even though other PNGs worked just fine. The reason was that it the div was hidden first. I guess IE 7 has some serious issues with invisible divs.
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.