Bye-bye my old friend XS4ALL
After much deliberation (actually, about two years of discussions between me and @merelzwart) I finally bit the bullet and cancelled our internet account with XS4ALL to fly into the future on dazzlingly fast fibre power with UPC for half the price :-/. I know, that emoticon just now should have been a smiley, but I have mixed emotions about the change of provider.
TweepMatch™
I love Twitter. In fact, I can barely imagine life without it nowadays. Although it is definitely a "Weapon of Mass Distraction" (which is how Obama recently described the iPad), it has also enriched my social life, not only on a virtual level. I've made new friends, keep up-to-date better with existing friends and even got a couple of paid assignments through Twitter. If you follow the right people for you, then it really can be a lot of fun. But how do you find those people?
GMail: Send and Archive – keep your Inbox tidy
Do you use GMail? If so, have you ever checked out the GMail Labs features, to be found under the little green beaker icon up in the right-hand corner? You should, as there are some great time-saving, productivity-increasing, visually-pleasing plugins to be found there. My personal favourite is 'Send and Archive'. Since activating it, my Inbox usually contains no more than about 10 messages and is sometimes even empty whereas it used to be piling over with 1000+ messages.
Media Centre Remote Controls (for Mac Mini)
I've been using a Mac Mini as a media centre since 2007 and am very happy with it. The hardware set-up has expanded during the past few years, including replacing the crappy 4:3 Samsung LCD with a Full HD 42" Sony Bravia LCD (which I adore!) and once I had finally ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes, the CD's were moved into boxes in the basement, freeing up valuable space in the living room. Besides music, the external hard drive is filled with films and series (mostly in DivX format) which the family watches using VLC. The problem with using a computer for all this is that it's hard to find a suitable interface for use while you're lying on the sofa, especially if you don't want to share the sofa with 6 different remotes.
Read on for my experience with quite a few different remote/interface solutions.
Bits of Freedom T-Shirt
It was a while ago now (but at the time my blog was in hibernation) so please excuse me for belatedly posting that the T-shirt I designed for Bits of Freedom (Dutch digital rights watchdogs) is available in both black and white. The text is in Dutch I'm afraid, but if you want to support a good cause (despite not understanding what the T-shirt says), you can order one at T-Junk for just €20.
Spotify
A couple of months ago streaming music service Spotify finally rolled out here in The Netherlands. After a few days of using it, I signed up for the €10/month Premium service so I didn’t have to listen to the adverts after every ten tracks or so (they really annoy me, which is the main reason I never listen to commercial radio stations). A few months into using the service, I shall share some of my thoughts on it.
iPhone taking forever to sync
A while ago I noticed that my iPhone 3GS was taking ages to sync with iTunes. By 'ages' I mean more than 90 minutes. I couldn't pinpoint when the problem exactly started because to be honest I don't sync that often (usually purchasing and installing apps through the phone itself). I came across this website which offered a solution for many people experiencing the same problem.
According to the author, corrupted apps (especially those installed through the phone rather than through iTunes) are often the culprit. So I followed his steps to remove all apps from the phone and reinstall them one-by-one by syncing through iTunes. Doing this of course meant I lost all my app data and settings. I didn't really mind too much about high-scores though, except for in Angry Birds (which has to be the best game for iPhone so far!). It seemed to help as my final sync completed within a matter of seconds rather than hours. But a day later the slow syncing problem had returned - this time even worse.
