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11Feb
Let me tell you today about good and bad things I discovered the last few days. I begin with the Nokia E71 mobile phone, which is praised as best phone with mail integration. This piece of software is just bullshit as the mails don’t arrive after usage of 1-2 days. Do you think now it is a problem of my phone? I changed it with my co-worker who has the same phone and when you setup an IMAP mail with automatic retrieve every 30 minutes it will stop working. It is the same with my mail and also gmail. If you search in the internet for such problems, you will sooner or later get the response to buy another mail client software as the Nokia mail is not working properly. Now I’m waiting for my iPhone as this is working properly (Another co-workers use it).The good thing I’ve discovered is google’s map service. I love it! Two years ago I met my wife for the first time in Paris and we had dinner in a small restaurant somewhere in Paris. 2 weeks ago we wanted to celebrate on our marriage in the same restaurant but couldn’t find it. After 2 hours walking around, we gave up and ate in the another restaurant. Back to Zurich I tried Google’s street view to play “Sherlock Holmes”. We had a photo before our “first” dinner from one of the bycicle stations in Paris and we “drove” virtually through the city to find the place. Just after 15 minutes we found it and thanks to Google we also found the website of it. So, thank you Google for saving our marriage life!
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07Feb
According to the amount of restaurants I went to, maybe I would have been in Tokyo. But everybody spoke French and I also saw a high tower made by steel. Was is the Tokyo Tower or Tower of Eiffel?For business I had to go once again to Paris to give a training to my collegue from Tokyo. He has been staying there for 6 months. Apart from him, my wife is also Japanese, so we went many times in Japanese restaurants. While you’ll find in Zurich 2-3 of them, Paris is nearly full of foreign cooking temples. Paris people also love Japanese food, as we saw a long queue Friday evening in front of a ramen shop.
We both enjoyed this week very much and follow our next plan to visit New York.
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31Jan
If you want to change the partitions on your computer, you may think that you have to delete them before changing their sizes? Or you want to create an image from your hard disks as backup? Or you reset the Windows password from some users because you forgot them? Or you want to defragment your harddisk but it’s not working properly because some blocks are in use?Here’s the answer: Hirens Boot CD. Download the ISO file and burn you own boot CD.
Many partition tools, backup tools, recovery tools, testing tools, hard disk tools, password tools, cleaners, optimizers, network tools, process tools, startup tools and antivirus tools. The right tool for every PC user. Also possible on a USB stick.
Tags: Windows
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03Jan
I’m always surprised that many people don’t know how to handle computer images.
There are simple rules you have to memorize. A picture consist mainly of the size and the resolution.Size
In computer language when we define the size we do it in pixels. My PC screen is quite big, 26″ which is about 66 cm. My screen size is 1920 pixels width and 1200 pixels height. Normally we say my screen has the resolution of 1600 x 1200. Strange isn’t it? We use the word “resolution” for the size. Don’t ask me why. If you think about printing out an image, please use centimeters instead of pixels. Here I just explain you about pixels, digital images for computer use only.
- Average size of computer screens: 1024 x 768
- Older standard of computer screen size: 800 x 600
- Getting common now: 1280 x 1024
These sizes are all normal format 4:3, widescreen or 16:9 are also getting common. These sizes are like 1280 x 960 for example.
Resolution
Here we speak of dpi (dots per inch) which is, like the name’s already telling you, the amount of dots or pixels per square inch. Here you have simple three values you have to memorize.
- Computer screen has 72 dpi
- Ink printer has about 300 dpi
- Laser printer has about 600 dpi
Format
You can save your file in many formats. Use “gif” for clip arts with less colors, “jpg” for everything else. The ending “png” is more developed as “jpg” but less common. With “jpg” you can choose quality of the picture, from 0 to 100%. 60% is normally enough for computer screens, 80% is good.
Example
My wife took a picture with her camera. If you open it with an image editor it’s telling you the size is 2736 x 3648 pixels with resolution of 72 dpi. The file size is 2.4 MB. If you wanna print it out, change to 26 x 20 cm and 300 dpi. Now the file is 4 MB, much bigger than before. If you wanna put it on your homepage you take for example 768 x 1024 pixels and 72 dpi. Here 60% is enough and then the file size is just 238 KB. More than 10 times smaller than before. 10 times faster for your visitor to see the pictures. This is very important.
Conclusion
It’s important to put your image in the right format. Don’t forget that you can not make your image bigger and bigger. If you take a picture from the internet which has size 100 x 100 pixels, you can not print it out on a A4 paper. You also cannot enlarge an ant to the size of an elephant, don’t you!?
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26Dec
First I have to say that my homepage is also not the best, but when I checked some homepages out there, I always find tiny things you should avoid doing it. Something I once learned is that a homepage is just the first page of your website and you shouldn’t use “homepage” if you talk about “website”, but for me it’s already so common that I don’t hesitate to use it wrong way.- Keep it simple: Don’t confuse visitors with too much information on the first page. Keep it simple and clean. The visitors want to say “Cool” and NOT “Oh my god”.
- Make a good impression: The first page is like the visit card of you. If the visitors don’t like it, they will also not continue clicking on your homepage.
- Easy navigation: Make a tree with all your pages and if you have a lot, use sub-trees in it. Make it as simple as possible for visitors to find what they are looking for.
- Make it attractive: The visitors want to get something from your homepage. If you don’t put your know-how, links, software or text on it, nobody will visit it.
- Easy fonts: Use simple and good-to-read fonts. Not more than 2 differents and don’t use red font on orange background.
- Very important – Pictures: A digital picture has a size which is defined with pixels and a resolution. If you don’t know what I talk about, read my next post “Image handling”. 1600 x 1200 and 72dpi are the maximum for a picture on a website. If it’s not a picture from Angelina Jolie naked, use smaller size. 1024×768 for example. I use 800×600 and 72dpi as a JPG with quality 60%. Everything I’ll explain in “Image handling”.
- Under construction: Never write “Coming soon..”, “Under contstruction” or “will do it later”. Nobody believe you!
- Multiple browser: Test your homepage with Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari. Sometimes it’s looking awful on some browser and it can be fixed with just chaning one row of code.
- Check it properly: Click on every link on your homepage. Is it working like you want? Ask your friends to test every link and read every text.
- Write a date: If you write a topic, always write a date. I hate homepages with content I don’t know their actuality.
- No SPAM: Never write your email address on your homepage. If it’s necessary use “name (at) lastname.com”. Using a contact formular is better.
- Stay legal: If you make a comercial homepage which you earn money, don’t steal pictures, videos or text.
- Get know your visitors: Install Firestat to know who visit your homepage and know what they are looking for.
- Be fast: As faster the homepage as better it is.
- No sound: Don’t let play automatically sound, I hate that!
- No frames: Don’t use frames, Google can’t find you with them.
- Correct size: Make your homepage for 1024×768 windows.
- Check other sites: A good example is probably my wedding homepage.
These rules are my opinion. If you you don’t agree with them, please let me know. Thank you.
Tags: Web