I just stumbled over a this ad for someone to do the internationalization for (probably) chumby.com. I hope this means that they will start selling the chumby outside the US soon

Title: Ruby On Rails I18N Developer
Skills: I18N, Ruby on Rails, mySQL
…
Job description:
…
Chumby Industries is looking for a Ruby On Rails/I18N Contractor to deliver results for the internationalization (I18N) effort on the server.
This candidate would be responsible for externalizing all the text strings (both static and dynamically generated) that the website uses so that Chumby could later change the language of the site based on location.

Skills required:
Previous I18N efforts on browser-based platforms
Strong web-based development experience
Ruby on Rails experience
mySQL database experience
Familiarity of layout issues involved with I18N

Two days I got my chumby. Chumby Industries tries really hard to keep foreigners from buying one of their nice toys: they only accept US credit cards and shipping only to a US address. But I’m lucky, one of my colleagues from Mountain View ordered one for me.

My experience so far was great.

Step one: configure WiFi
It detected my local network without a problem. I had to enter the password and was ready to go.

Step two: activate chumby
Create an account at chumby.com and click on “activate chumby”. It shows a 4×4 matrix of dots you have to copy to your chumby to connect you account with your device. This is a nice idea. It’s very simple, easy to use but effective. And surprisingly that’s it.

Step three: add widgets
Just one click. Sometimes the widgets need a some configuration but everything is explained right there.

Minor annoyances

• only two brightness settings: high & low
• you have to press pretty hard on the touchscreen

Plans:
Find a German power supply (should be easy) and start coding a widget

Yesterday was Girl’s day and our office hosted a few girls from schools in and around Munich. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I installed version 2.5 of Wordpress (which is great!) but the menu in the admin interface uses up a lot of screen estate. That’s why I just patched wp-admin.css to save some of this precious space in the admin interface. Just follow the above link and replace your version found in wp-admin/ if you think the menu is too big. Read the rest of this entry »

I just stumbled over an announcement about OLPC Germany. Last Tuesday was my first chance to play with an OLPC laptop. Everything but the keyboard feels incredibly solid and well made. The only thing I didn’t like was the user interface. I found it quite non-intuitive but perhaps this gets better if I spend a little more time with it. And if not: I can always put Ubuntu on it.

One thing is for sure: as soon as these laptops become available in Germany, I will buy one.

I was thinking about buying a NAS (network attached storage) server for some time and looked at different products. My requirements are low power consuption, RAID support, and disk encryption.

My current favorite is the TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS. It has:

• low power consuption (ok, sleep mode: 18.8W; in operation: 44.6W)
• RAID support (way more features than I would ever need: Single disk, RAID 0 (Disk Stripping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 5+ Hot spare, RAID 6, and JBOD (Linear Disk Volume))
• no encryption

But I couldn’t find any other NAS server with a good price (less than 500€) and this combination of features so I guess I have to live without encrypted disks. If you have any experience with this box or know about another box which has all these features, please leave a comment.

According to an article by wired Apple added a special feature to their sexy metallic keyboards: accidental touches won’t activate caps lock. It’s the first step in a process to remove this useless and annoying key from all keyboards.

I’ve remove my caps-lock key from a couple of keyboards already. But I did not know that a campaign called anticAPSLOCK existed which tries to ban caps-lock from future keyboards. Nice idea!

Thanks to Sonja I found out, that bloglines launched the new beta for their feed reader under beta.bloglines.com.

It looks very similar to the old app with a lot of added AJAX. But they fixed at least one major annoyance: if you open a feed with a lot of unread messages only the ones you have actually seen are marked as read. Nice, very nice… And bonus points for calling it “βloglines”

Update 6.9.2007:
As far as I could tell βloglines has all the original features but one: the “keep new” checkbox. I use this very feature quite often to mark important posts and was thinking about switching back to the old version but my prayers were answered today:

What happened to “Keep As New”?
We have renamed “Keep As New” to “Pinned”. It can be toggled by clicking on the pin icon in the lower left of an article (or using the “n” hotkey). Your previous “Keep As New” articles should all be transparently available in the Beta as “Pinned” articles.

The video demonstrates a new way of resizing images invented by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan.

More information can be found here. I tried to download the paper mentioned in the video, but with 1.18K/s the 20M would take 5h and I don’t want to wait that long.

I guess others are downloading the paper, too

Am I the first person who would like to add a bcc to all outgoing mails in GMail? I just spent some time searching through the settings and looking for a Greasemonkey scripts or firefox plugins which might do the trick. But I found nothing. Not a single tool.

Update 17.9.07:
Thanks to “themaniac” I installed this Greasemonkey script which works perfectly. I was a little bit vexed because I couldn’t find a way to configure the address where the bcc should be sent to. The simple solution: a popup asks for the address the first time a mail is sent

There is no bcc header but the address I use to receive the bcc’ed mails appears in the received header, so I added these lines to my sieve script to move these mails into the Sent folder.

# bcc'ed mail from gmail
if address :contains "Received" "xxx@yyy.de" {
  fileinto "INBOX.Sent";
  stop;
}