USB Sticks sind klein und demfall einfach zu verlieren. Hat man dann noch sensitive Daten darauf, kann es ärgerlich werden, wenn jemand diesen findet. Wer will denn schon die Urlaubsbilder im Internet finden.

TrueCrypt habe ich mir zuerst angeschaut, war aber für mich in der Handhabung doch etwas kompliziert. Das beste Tool bis anhin ist “Rohos Mini Drive“. Der Stick wird verschlüsselt, mit normalen 128bit oder für die Paranoiden mit 256 bit. Das es gratis ist, brauch ich wohl nicht zu erwähnen.

3D Grafiken ist für viele Leute ein rotes Tuch. Man denkt, dass nur eine super teure Software und langjährige Erfahrung nötig ist, um etwas in 3D zu produzieren. Falsch gedacht.

Google SketchUp ist das Tool, mit dem man ohne grosse Probleme etwas erstellen kann. Es ist gratis und kann unter http://sketchup.google.com/intl/de/ heruntergeladen werden. Schon nach 30 Minuten habe ich einen ganzen Raum “gezeichnet” und nach 4 Stunden dachte man, dass ich das Tool schon seit Jahren benutze. Es ist extrem intuitiv und einfach gestaltet, so dass es von Jedermann gebraucht werden kann.

Also kein mühsames Umstellen der Möbel mehr.. Ein Export zu Google Earth lässt das Geschaffene auch an Freunde und Kollegen verschicken. Egal wie oft man über Google schimpft, sie produzieren doch manchmal etwas Geniales.

Falls ihr euch gerade überlegt einen Xtreamer zu kaufen, lasst es lieber. Diese Firma bringt alle 2-3 Monate neue Produkte raus (Xtreamer, eTRAYz, Xtreamer Pro, iXtreamer, Xtreamer Ultra), aber die Firmware die auf den Geräten läuft ist Kacke und wird seit Jahren nicht verbessert. Dann erzählen sie immer von neuem Release und coolen features aber schlussendlich beheben sie 2-3 bugs. Ich hasse diese Firma wirklich!!! Popcorn ist zwar teurer, aber es lohnt sich.

Geht auf xtreamer.net und klickt auf “Hot News” unterhalb des Logos. Fällt euch da nichts auf? Seit Oktober 2009 haben sie 9 Produkte rausgebracht und 6 Software. Deren Produktepalette ist so gewaltig, logisch das da die Softwareentwicklung auf der Strecke bleibt…

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.

I am 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 1920 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% quality 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!?

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.

1. 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”.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Easy fonts: Use simple and good-to-read fonts. Not more than 2 differents and don’t use red font on orange background.
6. 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%.
7. Under construction: Never write “Coming soon..”, “Under contstruction” or “will do it later”. Nobody believes you!
8. 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 changing one row of code.
9. 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.
10. Write a date: If you write a topic, always write a date. I hate homepages with content I don’t know their actuality.
11. 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.
12. Stay legal: If you make a comercial homepage which you earn money, don’t steal pictures, videos or text.
13. Get know your visitors: Install Firestat to know who visit your homepage and know what they are looking for.
14. Be fast: As faster the homepage as better it is.
15. No sound: Don’t let play automatically sound, I hate that!
16. No frames: Don’t use frames, Google can’t find you with them.
17. Correct size: Make your homepage for 1024×768 windows.
18. Check other sites: A good example is probably my wedding homepage.

These rules are my opinion. Thank you.

In a few days I will have my birthday and because I was a very good boy I already bought it myself. Most people (my parents, sister and wife) can’t understand why I’m so excited, but for me it’s a very cool present. Synology are making harddisk cases with including RAID technologies. Imagine a big box (actually not so big, but bigger than usual) wherein you find 4 harddisks. These drives are interconnected and if you save a file on it, this file will be divided and saved on all of them, but in a way that if one harddisk fails, the file can still be read. This is called a RAID5. If you save a file on two hardisk like mirroring this is called RAID1.

In a summary, I bought disk space with 4’000 Gigabyte with RAID5, which can be integrated in a network. I also bought a I-can-play-everything-movie-box. Connected to the box above and to my plasma, I never have to worry again to play my Anime on the small PC screen. After downloading Animes with bittorrent, they will automatically be saved on the big box (called BigMamma) and after turning on the Plasma-TV, I just need to press the play button to enjoy them..

On the right picture I’m holding a 1.5 TB harddisk from Samsung.

I found two solutions, for mac and windows, if you want to limit the bandwidth of your browser. The best solution for firefox on windows is the add-on “Firefox Throttle“. The developer says it’s useless but I think it is very easy to use. Of course it is much easier of the mac. Just use the local built-in firewall with the commands in the terminal. This limits your port 80 with 8Kbyte/s (just change the values if needed).

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 8KByte/s
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

I already had two reasons for doing this. I didn’t want to steal bandwidth from my office when I downloaded big files and also bandwidth of my wife’s laptop at home to avoid argument With the following command you can delete this “rule”.

sudo ipfw delete 1

I installed a web server (apache2) in our office which is accessable over the internet from outside. With “.htaccess” and “.htpassword” it’s secured with login and password. But the transmission of these parameters is of course in clear text, so everyone could read if the person has the knowledge. With the “digest authentication” method, it will be encrypted with/to MD5, your password will not be transmitted in clear form through the internet. The best howto I found is here: http://finelycultured.com/2009/09/using-apache2s-digest-authentication/

Suddenly on my Windows XP SP3 PC it wasn’t possible to write/format my USB Stick anymore this week. “Write protection” on the USB, for what? Even with the second USB Stick I had the same problem, so I thought what’s wrong? After surfing an hour in the WWW I found the easiest and the best solution for me here: http://situsnya.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/write-protect-usb-devices-in-windows-xp/ Of course you could use the same method to secure all your USB devices.. ;D

I want to digitalize my DVDs on my external harddisk and I think I’m not alone with this idea. But how can you backup copyright-protected DVDs? In Switzerland it’s legal to make backup for myself, even if I need to break the protection. So I was looking for a tool which helps me with this issue. “DVD Decrypter” is the right tool.

Are you also nerved about the Windows message “Cannot delete file: It is being used by another person or program” when you want to delete or rename a file/folder? This time’s over now, just install the tool “Unlocker” and it will automatically unblock the file/folder. Works pretty good, poor people who don’t know this.. ;D