Bloggers@large

Neulander I think it must be at least three years ago that I was haunted/fascinated by a song. In fact I know it was the song “Clocks” by Coldplay. For some reason the song triggered something in me in such a way that I had that song in my head for weeks. To this day it is actually one of the few songs that I actually happen to know the lyrics for – and that was 2003! Well, I have a stumbled on another – stupid – song. I mean it is one of those glitzy vague ‘new-pop’ish’ ‘plastic’ tunes. […]

Happy B’day Steve! Thirty years ago in Los Altos, California on April 1, 1976 Apple Computer was founded by three special men: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Their aim: to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at $666.66. They were all hand-built in Jobs’s parents’ garage, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was delivered in June that year, and paid for on delivery. The original Apple I was simply a motherboard, it was nothing near a full computer as we know it today. Eventually 200 […]

LOL, ROFL, LMFAO and all that! I have been a major fan of ThinkGeek and even more since I bought my “I see Fragged People” T-shirt there, got the “No, I won’t fix your computer” T-shirt from my girlfriend, together with the retro-LED watch (for Xmas). I mean: they sell THE BEST and the most USELESS gadgets you can think off. But these one really cracked me up big time: “It’s Amaaaazing!! Mike!” Buzzaire – Metered Dose Caffeine Inhaler Next best thing to an IV 😉 Here at ThinkGeek, we’ve done our best to find new and advanced ways to […]

Who needs deodorant? Are you a man who drinks cocktails? With a little umbrella? Shaken, not stirred? Do you use facial cream? Do you have a perm? Are you trying your best to live up to the expectations of women by being a ‘metrosexual’ ? Aww man, you’re wipped! Forget about shaving your chest, legs and waxing your back or using deodorant. It is time again to let those old genes from our ancestors flow through our veins again and throw off the pretence of being civilized. We all know what we want and need! Yes, we want to run […]

Charlie Foxtrot – Roger! In millitary terms a ‘CF’ – aka Charlie Foxtrot – aka ‘clusterfuck’ is a disastrous situation that results from the cumulative errors of several people or groups. If there is one case where this word is appropriate, I would say it is the Ahold court case. In short: Ahold is one of the world’s largest supermarket operators and one of the world’s largest foodservice and retail companies. In 2003 Ahold suddenly got into financial troubles because of fraud within its US Foodservice subsidiary. After an investigation it turned out there were more troubles and this made […]

USR PP 5000 I could not believe it, but apparantly the mother of all cool organizers – the US Robotics Palm Pilot – has been around for 10 years! Off those 10 years I have been a Palm user for 7 years. The first one I ever bought was a ’97 US Robotics Palm Pilot 5000. To me it was actually the start of my gadget addiction. The 5000 series originally shipped with a whopping 512kb of memory. Like all Palm Pilots it had the annoying habbit that you lost every bit of information the moment your batteries were drained. […]

Hostage situation I am surround by idiots. Last night I went to pick up a new batch of contact lenses at my local optician (I have those lenses that I change monthly and I always get a 6 month supply). The store where I get them, has been taken over by some big European optician company and ever since, the service has gone downhill. For instance: they used to automatically re-order my lenses and then either call me or send me a card telling me they were ready for me to pick ‘m up. Well, that changed where I have […]

S.O.S. ! Ok, last night I found out my NAS seemed to have garbled the complete contents of my harddisk. After doing some research I concluded that the data should still be on the disk. However, it seemed that I can not restore the data – even after hooking it up to my Ubuntu Linux box. So I searched for some recovery tool, and I have stumbled upon a tool from Stellar Phoenix hard drive data recovery tools, called Stellar Phoenix Linux. I downloaded the trial, installed it and hooked up the disk. After a scan it shows what I […]

Sinking ship? Is my Network Attached Storage a sinking ship? It sure has proven not to be reliable. About a year ago I bought a Linksys NSLU2 that turns my Maxtor OneTouch 250gb external harddrive into a NAS (network attachted storage). Besides the downsides (it is only USB 1.1 and you have to format the disk since the Linksys uses Ext/3), it now proved a major source for data loss! From time to time it seemed that files I had copied to the disc weeks before had gone or just didn’t exist there anymore. I kind of ignored the problem […]

Civil war Today marks a black page in history: the three year anniversary of the war in Iraq. Even though Bush knows better, he still tries to paint a picture of success. It is rather insulting: the country has been plunged into a civil war but the Bush administration says it is not. However; former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi says recent sectarian violence is a sure sign of a nation at war with itself. The United States claimed that Iraq illegally possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and had to be disarmed by […]