Chiperoni ku Basel

Month: September 2005

  • WordPress 1.5 theme cheat-sheet

    Brief overview of themes in WordPress 1.5

    Hat tip: weblogger.ch

    (update 21.03.2008) both of the above links no longer work 🙁

  • Wikipedia on Malawi

    The Malawi entry in Wikipedia has grown considerably over the past year.

    For example, there’s an entry on Malawian music:
    Music of Malawi

    and Malawian English.

    If you’re from Malawi or doing research on a topic related to Malawi… check the pages to see if you can contribute any useful facts and references.

  • sitbag

    This would be very useful on Sunday afternoons in the ICE train:
    a sitbag

  • Rhetorical question of the day …

    What would computing be without progress bars?

    I spent this weekend re-configuring my Ubuntu installation. It’s been about 6 months since I moved from Windows and I’m more than happy with Ubuntu and the Gnome desktop. I may try out Kubuntu sometime. Or try setting up an Ubuntu server.

    I’m still a newbie user but I’m slowly getting the hang of things as I go along.

  • Firefox 1.0.7 upgrade in Ubuntu Hoary

    workaround for Firefox 1.0.7 upgrade:

    execute sudo apt-get remove firefox firefox-gnome-support mozilla-firefox mozilla-firefox-gnome-support. Then, once that’s finished, run sudo apt-get install mozilla-firefox mozilla-firefox-gnome-support.

    source:
    The Firefox 1.0.7 upgrade in Ubuntu Hoary

  • Toys made from Tin and Wire

    The toy museum in Riehen is showing African toys made from tin and wire:

    Museen Basel

    Riehen Info

    According to a newspaper article, the above show focuses on toys from West Africa.

    A couple of years ago, a friend and I were discussing an idea to import these very original, handmade toys. I have seen some great toys in Blantyre.

    It also explains why some wire fences disappear so fast… kids finding new uses.

  • gazosa


    a random bottle shot…

  • What is Web 2.0?


    found this so-called meme map on Web 2.0 via Read/Write Web.

  • useful: Web Design Cheat Sheets

    Web Design Cheat Sheets for Illustrator, Photoshop, and co.

    via Swissmiss

  • From Mac to PC and Back

    Some useful tips to keep in mind if you’re moving Powerpoint slides from
    Mac to PC and back:

    • Quicktime-compressed images won’t work on the PC
    • Quicktime movies seldom work on PCs. Use MPEG or AVI instead.
    • Links to external graphics files will break. Embed all graphics.
    • Links to most media files will break UNLESS you copy the media file to the folder where the PowerPoint file is, and only then insert it.
    • Check Format, Replace Fonts to see what fonts are used in your presentation. You can safely count on Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and Symbol being present on every PC. Tahoma and Verdana will probably be present on any PC with Office 97 or later, but may not be there if the PC has only the free PowerPoint Viewer. Mac versions of PowerPoint can’t embed fonts.
    • Use only RGB color for your PowerPoint graphics. PowerPoint will convert CMYK or Pantone colors to RGB anyway. It’s better to do it yourself so you can control the conversion. In case that’s not a convincing argument, try this: PowerPoint may substitute a red X for CMYK graphics. Ouch. Stick with RGB.
    • Ungroup, then regroup imported graphics to convert them to PowerPoint shapes. Do the same to inserted charts if you don’t need them to be editable on the other platform.
    • Don’t squeeze your text too tightly into placeholders. Font substitution and slight differences in text rendering on Mac vs PC can cause your text to get truncated or spill out of too-tight text boxes.

  • Skyped

    the numbers say it all:

    • $26 In CASH per download.
    • 43x current year revenues.
    • works out to about $20 million/Skype employee

    source: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » SkypeBay done for $4.1 Billion.

    My comment:
    i hope Skype won’t change for the worse. Cos I like the tool and use it often.

  • evaluating Drupal 4.6.3

    I’ve finally downloaded and installed Drupal to get an idea if this would be a possible CMS for a small web project I’m planning to start.

    Installing the basic modules and setting up the MySQL database was straightforward. No problems here.

    What I’m finding more daunting is the CMS interface itself. There are a lot of modules and settings. And it takes some time to grasp the concept and terminology.

    For example, it took me a while to figure out how to create a simple menu. I found this posting that suggested using the so-called Menu on-the-fly module. I guess, I would have expected this to be part of the basic install. Or maybe there’s another simple way that I’m missing.

    I haven’t had a look at how to change the design of a theme or how to build my own theme.

    Drupal offers a lot of options and additional modules. But at this point I’m worried that the CMS interface is too complex for the end users I’m planning for. And probably too much effort to customize for a small web project.

  • hard copy version of your Flickr album

    get a printed version of your Flickr photos at:

    Qoop*

    This might be useful for friends and relatives that live very *offline*.

    via kottke.org

    (* what a company name! I wonder how it is pronounced… I think you should always consider what the name sounds like over the phone, or in an international context, or when the press decides to write negative headlines and makes use of word plays …)