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Meet me on a walk

More often than not, I will find myself sitting at the desk, staring at the computer screen for hours at a time. When I work, I always strive for razor sharp focus, or to put it in a more common term: the zone. I’m usually not even aware of time. Hours begin to fly by …

I hate writing envelope addresses by hand

Luckily so do @rifeljm, @dgurnick and @morphix, the authors of envelopa.com. I just used their fine (free!) service to print 24 envelopes for season greeting cards I helped craft, together with my son and wife. The service lets you import addresses with no sweat, using CSV or pasted from a spreadsheet. Select your addresses, pick an envelope …

Run IE9 in Virtualbox for free

Update, 31. march 2013: this article is now out of date. Microsoft now offers free virtual machines and hosted virtualised solutions for cross browser testing at: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools  (thanks to Graham Ashton for the update). Like many, I ditched Windows for other operating systems a long time ago and never looked back. But being a web developer I need to be …

Logwatch: once a week is enough

If you administer Linux systems, it’s a pretty good idea to keep an eye on the logs. A handy tool that parses your system’s logs and sends you an email report is well known logwatch. By default it sends daily log reports. But to me this is too often. I want weekly reports. This is …

Razor-sharp coat hooks

Alexander Kmetec wrote an interesting story, about how a noisy workplace brings productivity down, and how this makes some developers desperate enough to look for cover in light-forsaken places, worthy of Office Space’s Milton Waddams himself. I agree with most of the premise of the piece, however: It doesn’t take two… It only takes one …

Transcoding video is… easy?

Not so long ago I complained how dreadful video transcoding is. Turns out I was just using the wrong software. Thanks to a simple Ubuntu Software Center* search I stumbled upon this gem: Arista Transcoder. I’ve only been using it for a couple of minutes and that was enough to pick the video to transcode, …

A WikiLeaks inspired tune – Is That What You Want?

Like many of you, I’ve been closely following the story of WikiLeaks. As it struggles to stay online after their domain-name provider had withdrawn service to the site yesterday – only one day after Amazon.com booted the site off its servers – the whistle-blowing website’s co-founder Julian Assange is on the run from Interpol. Julian’s …