A few weeks ago, I was in searching for an article comparing mobile phone rates, during that research I stumbled up onto a quite remarkable weblog. It is called MyDealz, and is written by a student from my neighboring town Würzburg. The blog concentrates on all kind of electronics stuff, which is available for a real bargain somewhere. It really pays off having adding the .rss into your reader. I bought my HP notebook because of a special offer I saw at that weblog.

Now this post might win me a neat TFT display, cause the blog author is currently running a campaign to promote his weblog.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 14:55 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

A quick one for my early readers: The first episode of the series "Helden des Campus" about which I wrote earlier, is available online now! I got to admit, that I'm really delighted. Quite professional for an amateur production .

The first episode shows main actor Daniel making is first steps towards personal freedom by finding a flat (of course it comes with nice flat mates). And of course getting really wasted at a party there on the very first evening - with all its consequences. Stereotypes?

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found, Media at 03:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

Ever wanted to include a basic survey to your blog? If your Blog script or provider is not offering the required functionality for you, you might want to have a look at Netvoting.com. This new web 2.0 platform, which is currently been tested in a closed beta does not only act as a community to share votings, but also offers little widgets for your blog to include. Writing this article for Trigami, I have had the chance to participate in the beta and get a look at the platform.

The community is set up with all current Web 2.0 features, like folksonomies and user profiles, the possibility to connect to other voters, groups and comes with a kind of standard web 2.0 design. So it is quite easy to play around there, and the handling is easy, too. Of course the connecting element in this are the votes you can offer there, and in which you can participate. The downside of this element is, the fact that every vote you cast can be viewed by other users of the community. I’m not sure how the privacy of this information will be handled in the full version. But the creators should really create a feature to create some privacy here, e.g. only let connected people see your votes. For me personal the community would be pretty much useless, without such a feature, since I don’t fancy strangers knowing every vote I cast there. I also won’t need the feature of this voting widget, since s9y comes with a very own plugin to create polls.

Well, we will see how this community develops once it’s launched! Probably interesting to come back once there is a little live there. If you want to have your own look you might want to register here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 00:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 19:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

How long can it possibly take to break a brand new computer? Well, you might guess a day or a week, or be optimistic and say two years, directly after the end of the warranty. It took me exactly 10 minutes to get my brand new HP 6720s notebook out of business. I got it broken before I had set it up properly! All I had to do was to close the notebook, while it was still installing, but the Windows Vista energy management was already running. The installation failed because of the power down process so Vista wants a reinstall. But HP no longer buts recovery discs into the package and due to some bug I can't access the recovery partition. Didn't think that I would need the HP service that fast...

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 19:14 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)

Although the service and the according s9y-plugin exist for quite some time, it took me until today to include it into my Weblog. It is a simple tool, which tries to allocate avatar pictures to comments. There are two methods to accomplish that. First it looks up, whether an avatar icon for the given email address is stored in the Gravatar database. If it is not successful there, it checks the given homepage URL for a favicon. Since the service is free and there are quite some pages using it, I would like to encourage all comment writers to register at www.gravatar.com.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 18:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

August this year I bought myself a pretty new phone. A S/O/N/Y P1i, not the smallest phone, but a smart one with touch screen, and loads of interesting applications. Of course I need a lot of memory in this phone, to store a map of Europe for navigation, to have pictures to show my friends, and to listen to loads of mp3s. The phone came with a 512MB Sony Memory Stick M2, surely not too much memory for all those things. And Memory Stick M2... I've got plenty of SD cards, even a spare 2GB one, but well, Sony had decided to have their own format So I got myself a bigger 4GB card, probably 2GB would have done the trick, but since I had to buy a new card anyway...

I've got this beautiful docking station, which connects the phone to my PC, and the M2 card can be addressed as a drive through it. But the speed is really depressing, less than 1MB/sec. That means it would take 1-2 hours to fill the whole card!!! How can those engineers equip the beautiful phone with such a slow interface???

But of course there is a workaround, inserting the M2 into my memory card reader (of course I need that special adapter from M2 - MS Pro Duo first), I can access it with a maximum speed between 3-4MB/sec. But there is still a problem - the cards eject mechanism and the cards size! So far I have dropped the tiny card countless times and had to search for it, since it tends to disappear in disorderly environment. After one of those incidents at Vlogeurope07 even a video was created, to document the problems. Do any of those product creators think about usability?

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 22:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

On Mörschi's Farewell party we had an interesting idea. We know already plenty of those travel blogs, where people report from there journeys. Of course Matthias will have one of those, too. But we will be writing a weblog for him reporting all those things he is missing, while staying abroad. So far I set up the weblog on blogspot.com and invited some of his friends to join the blogforce there. I also wrote an introductionary post, and wrote a little post about the Farewell party. Let's see how this project develops!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Local Stuff at 21:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)