Sicherlich ist Freunde nicht ganz der richtige Begriff, sondern Kontakte oder Bekannte wäre angebrachter. Wenn man ausgedehnte Hobbies zum Beruf macht, kommt man sehr schnell an diese Grenze. Jedenfalls scheint der Google+ Konkurrenzkampf etwas Fortschritt oder Klarheit hereinzubringen, denn man kann ja nun durch Listen schon bestimmen, wer Freund, Familie, Bekannter, Best Buddy oder Feind ist. Was den Datenschutz anbelangt bin ich etwas unbefriedigt, denn dem Werbemogul diese zusätzlichen Informationen zu schenken stimmt mich nachdenklich.

Warum aber soll man nicht mit mehr als 5000 Leuten in Kontakt bleiben? Möglicherweise ist das auch einfach nur eine Frage der Resourcen oder eine lediglich weit hergeholte Ziffer ohne Belang.

Natürlich wollte ich weder Freunde noch Seiten rauswerfen, um jemand Neuem Platz zu machen, denn das Problem würde frühzeitig wieder aufkommen. Eine einfache Lösung ist die relativ kürzlich eingefügte Funktion, sein normales Personenprofil in eine Seite umwandeln zu lassen. Das habe ich vor wenigen Minuten durchgeführt und hat bisher auch einwandfrei geklappt, leider mit einigen Einschränkungen. Es können nur Freunde und das Profilbild übernommen werden. Der Rest wie z.B. Beiträge, Fotoalben, Profilinfos, etc. nicht. Nimmt man den Hinweis ernst, wird das vielleicht künftig auch möglich sein.

Glücklicherweise kann man aber zuvor eine Sicherung seines kompletten Profils in seinen Kontoeinstellungen herunterladen. Man erhält eine eMail mit Fertigstellung und kann ein ZIP-Archiv auf seine Festplatte speichern. Nach dem Auspacken findet man alles schön übersichtlich sortiert und als HTML-Seiten und man kann es mit dem Browser betrachten.

Anfänglich hat mich etwas die Anzahl meiner Freunde erschreckt, denn die heissen als Seitenbetreiber nun Fans. Zu Beginn hat er nur noch knapp 600 angezeigt, aber im Laufe der Zeit kam die zuvor bestrittene Fünftausendermarke sukzessiv zurück. Die Umwandlung scheint also im Hintergrund weiterzulaufen.

Wer ebenfalls dieses “Problem” hat, dem kann ich auch die Facebook-Hilfeseiten empfehlen. Auch die deutschen Texte geben ausführliche Informationen und sämtliche Sicherheitshinweise. Ich glaube, Facebook lernt dazu – schliesslich kann man eine so riesige Plattform und Infrastruktur nicht von heute auf morgen verbessern.

Welche Vor- und Nachteile die Umstellung gebracht hat, wird sich im Laufe der nächsten Tage noch zeigen. Gegebenenfalls schreibe ich ein kurzes Follow-Up dazu.

Mit Hilfe des Archivs werde ich nun die Alben wieder komplettieren, TGIS (thank God it’s Sunday).

Since I got an invite (special thanks to Leuk and Jack Brendon Smoke) I really like it. Sometimes it is quite slow and some things are not working fully, but hey, it is beta and Google stated it.

The Wave is a powerful tool which I think will be a future kind of team collaboration. You can see in realtime what the other participants are typing or changing. A playback function shows you all changes step by step.

Many public Waves are available, where everybody can join and take part. Also, you can make your Waves public by inviting a special email address.

There are a lot of things to do until it matches a fluently workflow, but even in this state it is quite useful.

If you want to join, I am still having some invites left. Just leave a comment below with your email you want the invite to be sent to.

With OS X comes a handy tiny helper called DigitalColor Meter. You will find that in /Applications/Utilities/. You simply can set the wanted text output format and use Command+Shift+C to get the value into the Clipboard. The settings are autosaved, so on the next start you can continue as you are used to.

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How much time is remaining when the tiny battery icon has about 35% battery left?

The free application iBattery is the perfect solution for that by displaying the time is left for usage in hours and minutes.

You will stay tuned on how long your standby will be, how long you can talk, listen to audio or even watch video.

1. First of all monitor the fans and temperatures using tools like SpeedFan and make sure everything keeps in a normal range. Disable the screensaver and do something memory and CPU expensive like SETI. When the computer crashes and the last view shows values out of range, then replace the fans by better ones and in case of CPU overheating, remove and renew the heatsink paste. Maybe it got too dry and lost its thermal conductivity.
2. 

   Test the memory bars each by each. Take all out except for one and run a memory tester booting from CD or a USB stick.

   Remove the power chord when doing that! If you still leave it in, the power adapter gives some voltage to the mainboard and a short circuit will happen fore sure.

   When the test is completed and no errors are shown, that bar is ok. Turn off, replace by the next one and so on. Do not use a corrupted bar anymore.

   • If no error occured at all, put all bars in and run the test again. When now an error is displayed, the slot may be dirty or corrupted!
3. 

   Do a full harddrive surface scan. This is neccessary because Windows uses a pagefile to supply virtual memory. If the sectors are bad at this area, data is written, but not read correctly and placed into the RAM without any further validation. With a surface scan Windows will mark that bad sectors not to use them again. Go to the workplace, rightclick your main drive (mostly C:) and select Extras then Check drive and Surface scan. This may take a very long time depending on your harddrive speed and storage amount.

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Toastbook

Walking to the subway station I saw a an advert with a weird looking notebook on a big poster, but the design is very familar to me, so I decided to take a closer look.

It is a MacBookPro with a unusal thick screen and toasts falling into it. Next to it the hashkey “Toastbook”. This picture manipulation is not very professional, because the laptop’s frame looks quite unrealistic and the visible screen content is not designed by somebody having or using a Mac.

The promotion of trade and industry start2grow.de wants to help young start-up companies in the IT segment.

And now, “tada” (yes, this word was chosen by intention, and if you know why, then you are a real nerd, compliment!) one of the big sponsors surprisingly is Microsoft trying to pinch Apple.

Safari 4

The new Safari browser is my favourite browser since the the release 3. It is so fast, that no other browser can beat it and the display is really great.

Due to I am developing websites I love Safari, because it supports DOM, CSS and XML so well like really no other does. Safari and Firefox, are cool, but anyhow I am more familar with Safari.

Now, Apple just has released the Safari 4 with innovative features that are really cool. You may have seen some of them as plugins for Firefox, but now it is built in natively and it works so damn fast and reliable. I am absolutely juiced up.

The interesting part is, what’s new? You can read the details on Apple’s website, but let me tell you with my own words.

The tabs and its plus sign are now embedded into the title. That looks weird, but I needed some time to get used to it. In the end, it saves some space on the screen and that is absolutely what I do prefer.

A new overview is embedded as a grid icon into the bookmark bar and clicking on it shows a 3D thumbnail page of the most visited ones. Clicking on a icon zooms into the page with a really nice and fluently transition. It can be customized by nailing favourites or the amount of thumbs to be displayed.

The history search went much faster and you can browse through it using the great cover flow previewing the visited sites. So you fill find back much more easier where you have been before.

Apple did not forget the developers and the tools gained some features and display options like Javascript error detection and more.

If you need to find something, the search eventually inherited a live find feature during typing.

The zoom function is now completely different. Before it just scaled the font, but not the images. Now everything is zoomed in or out. This gives also a nice option to make screenshots of large websites.

It is still beta, but I love it! By the way, there is a version for the PC users available, too.

MacOSaiX

So often I have seen picture mosaics and I wanted to do one by myself, because I find them so amazing and fantastic.

A picture mosaic is one picture which is made of other pictures as like a screenshot is made with pixels.

Searching a short while lead me to the freeware tool MacOSaiX which does exactly that thing. In the screenshot I used a photo from a friend’s marriage. I have a collection of 500 pictures of this event and all of them are included to build this single one. If you zoom in you really can see every single photo clearly!

The program has many options and the export function lets you define really high resolution for professional poster printings.

Pathfinder with different options

Managing Files on your Harddrive is one of the most done tasks for people like me. I really got very familar to Finder, because it is quite powerful and I can achieve really almost everything with help of the OS X Automator application.

In former Windows times, I was using the Total Commander. It is lend on the design of the very old skool Norton Commander.

The Cocoatech’s Pathfinder, has like its relatives, two panes with different directories open and you can organize your files from left to right and vice versa. The thought of source and target principle is really practicable if you are once used to this.

I prepared a screenshot of the version 5.0.5.

The top one has almost all options and facilities open, to show you, how mighty this application is.

The bottom is the standard as I am currently working with.

Just imagine, that you have two completely different designed Finder windows implemented in just only one. Let’s say, one has a list view with cover flow and the other a icon view.

Also,  you have dozens additional tools like a task manager, detail viewer, terminal and many more.

Testing Windows 7

With the new update of Parallels Desktop 4.0 it is now possible to install Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

The first problem starts with downloading Windows 7 beta from the offical download site. The servers are absolutely overloaded. To get the 2,41 GB image I was using the free DownThemAll extension for Firefox.

The installation was really quite fast and run through without any problems. I have made some screenshots during and after installation.

The Parallels tool installation works fine. Coherence and other features do work well.

My first quick impression:

• Installation and boot is much faster than Vista
• Look and feel is almost like Vista
• Taskbar and Start menu looks a bit easier
• Seems to eat less resources at all

When to use Windows at all, I am still a big fan of Windows XP, currently with service pack 3. The new Windows 7 seems to work with the same fluence.

But better let us wait for the final version. As I remember from past, the Vista betas and the final edition differed quite much.

I did not expect to say it: Thumbs up, good job, Microsoft!

Skitch

Skitch is a wonderful freeware tool from Plasq helping you creating screenshots with annotations or simple image manipulations like rotation or scaling.

As you can see in the picture, I made a snapshot of my DJ homepage and did some simple things like text and shapes.

You can resize just by dragging or make snapshots even from your connected webcam. You have plenty of customizable settings and a history to see what images you have created.

Another cool thing is a time delayed screenshot as you can do with the Grab tool from the Application Utilities.

Skitch enables you to upload the visible picture to your own FTP server or many other preconfigured image hosters like Flickr or Plasq itself, where you can share it with the world or your friends.

On the bottom of the window is a puller where you can just drag and drop it on to the desktop, a folder or any other dragable application. The file is then named as specified in the textfield and created on your destination with the selected image file format.

There are many other features which would explode this article. Just have look at Plasq‘s valueable demo video. I am sure, after watching you will download, install and love it. Maybe that is the reason why they took a heart as logo.

iPod Control

Secret #1: Awake
If the iPhone is sleeping you can click the home or lock button to awake it.

Secret #2: Get home
At any point you can go back to the homescreen if just click the home button. 

Secret #3: Screenshot
Do you have something interesting on the iPhone screen and would like to share with your friends? Then take a screenshot by holding the lock button and the home button together. On success the screen flashes shortly white and the taken picture is in the iPhones Photo gallery.

Secret #4: Quit application
An application hung off? When holding down the homebutton for 6 seconds, the current app will be forced to close and you get bumped back to the home screen.

Secret #5: Reboot / Shut down
Sometimes it even makes sense to reboot a Apple product. If you think it does react slower as used or apps are closing by themselfes unusally often, you are having connection problems, etc., then force a shutdown. Hold the lock button and the home button together for about 10 seconds. On the top you will see a slider and if you move it, the iPhone shuts down. Once it is powered off, just turn it on by clicking the home button or the lock button.

Secret #6: iPod control
If you are listening to music with the integrated iPod, it is sometimes unwanted to leave the current running application only to go to the next track or pause. Of course it is easy when a headphone is connected, because it can do those functions without touching the iPhone. But, if no headphone is on? Just double tap the home homebutton! Then you will see a simple interface for the most important play functions. Rember, this does only work when iPod was lauched before and is playing music.

The solution is really simple with the Quicktime player. Just pause at the wanted position, size the window as you like and then drag the picture to a document or the desktop.

Grab a picture from video

Voila! When dragging to the desktop the file is named “Movie Clipping 1″ and stored with loseless compression as a png image. If you do some more, they will be numbered.

Credits: Picture taken from Pumping iron.