Chiperoni ku Basel

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  • Weekend Thoughts

    I just installed GIMPshop on my (no longer new) MacBook. And the interface looks a lot simpler.

    And I received a Skitch invite. I don’t like the pink heart icon much. Kitsch.
    But I somehow managed to get past that and watch the introductory video (!). The features look very useful. It offers a direct upload to Flickr. Looks like a good tool for quick screenshots. OS X’s Grab only offers TIFF, which isn’t recognized by the Flickr Uploadr for some reason or other. And which means opening GIMP or GraphicConverter or Preview. 20 clicks more.

    BTW, I’m sitting in a train to northern Germany and there are quite a number of free seats for a Friday evening… (and a power plug right next to me: hope it works). I guess, the strike warnings caused a lot of people to reschedule.

    (Insert pause to take a snapshot of setting sun near Karlsruhe, will be uploaded when I find adequate WiFi access)

    Quite a few regional trains have been cancelled. The official reason given via the pa is “wegen Notfall” (Translation: cos of an emergency).
    Why not say strike? Emergency sounds like accident or natural catastrophe (can’t spell, too much German on my brain).

    Wondering out loud:
    Would the new PR approach be more direct and advise the German railway company to use the word “strike” or would it find a roundabout way to describe the situation?

    (I forgot to take “The New PR” book with me.)

    (I like the size of my 13″ MacBook. Just right for travelling.)

    Anyway, “the new PR” book has got me thinking a lot more about buyer personas.

    Who am I writing my marketing collateral, company blog posts, and technology announcements for? What kind of things are they interested in? How does a buyer persona search for a new service provider? Keeping your target audience in mind while writing is nothing new. Buyer personas, though, are on a more detailled level, describing a character and a typical work/leisure setting.

    And it also reminded me of Bogo’s talk at the STC Transalpine conf in Zurich last April. He stressed the importance of agreeing on personas to develop adequate tech. documentation and user interfaces.

    I signed up for Redbubble.com a couple of days ago. It offers a service to upload, sell and print artwork via the web all-in-one. Payment is transferred by Paypal or cheque. There’s a minimum price for the printing and production costs. And you as the seller of the artwork can decide on the markup (i.e. your gain/income/profit). I stumbled across this service via Ozczecho’s Flickr profile. My first impression of Redbubble.com is very positive and IMHO this could develop into a viable Flickr and Etsy alternative.

    Still on my list of fun to dos:
    Buy a DSLR
    Set up an Ubuntu laptop
    Learn more Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts (zoom in and out with command + option and ^ or ‘)
    Install WordPress 2.3
    Try out Pixelmator
    Write a book (LOL)
    Go on vacation

    Disclaimer: at times Chiperoni.ch is my personal online thinktank and my half-geek playground.

  • Introducing social software into corporations

    for future reference:
    An adoption strategy for social software in enterprise.

    Though the first comment makes me wonder a bit… why would you force somebody to go to a wiki to get a text. Surely using a tool is about making things easier.

  • Light blue

    This week’s favorite link:

    Hellblau

    Interestingly the English equivalent is much shorter.

  • Bah bah black sheep

    I’m thinking of getting this

  • Weekend ahead

    Autumn-like weather and a bad cold, but it’s still a Friday! And just for the record, I don’t mind fast forwarding to spring.

    More search phrases – but not really a surprise to me given the quality of content here at Chiperoni.ch 😉 :

    • Dilbert project tracking – points to an old blog post on pre-emptive planning. I guess the Dilbert comes from the blogroll link pointing to the corresponding blog.
    • And a search for something like marketing mix nutella will inevitably lead to this page, cos of my numerous marketing text snippets and my amazing collection of Nutella alternatives.

    Thank you, Google for brightening up my day!

  • Search phrases

    Dear regular readers of Chiperoni.ch,

    On Sunday I continued reading the “New PR” book and i’ve got 3 pages of wild notes waiting to be blogged… but I’m too tired for PR just now. Oh no, i hope it’s not blogging fatigue 😉

    Search phrases that led people to my blog today:

    • i want to listen to capital fm malawi – Well, here’s the link to my blog entry on Capital FM’s daily internet show. I listened to today’s version about the increase in fuel prices. Apparently MW minibus fares are increasing by 20%.
    • 2007 pictures blantyre malawi africa – Best place to view lots of Malawi pics is the Malawi Flickr group.
    • hiking basel mountain – Sorry, no mountains in Basel. Unless you’re from northern Germany, then Chrischona might qualify. But the Jura and the Alps are close enough and extremely beautiful. Here are all of my posts labeled hiking.

    Other half-geek news:

    I’ve been reading about the new Canon 40D.

    And if I ever run out of things to do, there’s a new version of WordPress to install and explore…

  • My kind of blue



  • Reflection

    Today’s fave…

  • z’Basel am Rhy

    Today’s favorite find!

  • Different

    Stumbled across this 5 mins ago:
    group94

  • Motion sickness

    Text snippet:
    Interestingly, susceptibility to motion sickness increases with fitness.

  • GPL and Movable Type

    Interesting:
    What a GPL’d Movable Type means for WordPress

  • Lego face

    Seen in Martin Gyger’s Flickr stream:

    These lego faces are fun!

    Just like web icons… you can see the pixels when you zoom in.

  • USA Stats

    A lot less monolingual than you think it is:

    Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak a Language Other Than English at Home: 19.7%

    via
    USA erklaert

  • Mobiles for the world’s poorest

    via the BBC:
    A 2005 study showed that an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people could increase GDP growth by 0.6%.

  • Too much



    I don’t usually write about politics, but this poster campaign crosses a line. In my humble opinion it’s racist and backward.

    I don’t understand why so many Swiss people are ignoring it. Some say it’s just the usual pre-election noise.

    As suggested here, I’m going to send back all of the brochures clogging up my mailbox.

    See also this BBC article

  • Adding a contact form

    I’m trying out cforms II for a work blog.

    See Contact

    WordPress plugins are getting more and more elaborate…
    took me a while to get this form to display cos of the various options.

    Lorelle has an overview of contact form plug-ins.

  • Monday fun

    Some fun links to start off the week:

    Australia from memory

    The usefulness of Web 2.0

  • Flickriver

    Scrolling Ad Infinitum:

    I discovered a new Flickr tool called Flickriver…
    It loads all images into one long html page, i.e. you simply scroll down to view all pictures for a tag or group:

    My contacts

    My faves

    Malawi group

    Canon ImageBrowser to FlickrUploadr:

    BTW, I’ve found a shortcut how to add photos from Canon ImageBrowser to Flickr Uploadr. In the ImageBrowser, open Preferences and add Flickr Uploadr to the list of external editing applications. Once you’ve added it, you can send images to Flickr Uploadr while in preview mode using Edit > Edit with Registered Application > Flickr Uploadr.

    Alternative to Satellite:

    I stumbled across lumis Gallery. The concept is similar to Satellite, i.e. you can host photos on Flickr and reload them on your own server within your own layout. It seems to have more features…. It requires PHP 5 and a Flickr account.

    Today’s personal faves:

    helmet required

    Bernoulli-Silo

    bridge detail

    schoggi-kuchen mit lychee glace

  • MAMP or pre-installed Apache

    For local WordPress fun, I might install this package:
    MAMP

    Although Apache is already available.

    The pre-installed Apache can be accessed like this:

    • Go to System Preferences > Internet and Network > Sharing
    • Select Personal Web Sharing or click Start.
    • Copy & paste the URL listed in the lower part of the dialog box into a browser. The corresponding HTML and image files are located in Sites.

  • Installing Tomcat on a MacBook

    Today I installed Tomcat on my MacBook. In order to run a website with Java servlets locally.

    Here are my non-developer notes, for my own future reference.

    To check if Java is installed, open Terminal and type:
    javac -version

    In a previous session, I had already installed the Apple developer tools, which includes JDK 1.5.

    Note: you’ll need to list the location where Java can be found:
    export JAVA_HOME=/usr

    Download and unpack the Tomcat zip files to a directory.
    Open conf/tomcat-users.xml and change the user and password settings.

    Go to your Tomcat directory and type ./bin/startup.sh

    Open a browser and type http://localhost:8080 to see a Tomcat welcome screen.

    In the final step, I modified conf/server.xml. Luckily I had my Windows setup to refer back to, or I would have been really lost at this stage…

    tomcat

  • White Space

    (half-geek plans)

    Maybe I’ll try out this WordPress theme over the weekend:
    Whitespace WordPress Theme

    And I’ve still got to figure out how to install and configure a Tomcat on a Mac.

    And I still want to install MacFuse and MacFusion

  • close up of my running shoes



  • Bush League

    Interesting read:

    Cy on his Malawi experiences

    The contrast between rural and urban areas in Malawi is huge. I remember an article I read (probably The Nation or The Daily Times) during my last stay, on how people in a remote village in the northern region near Rumphi can get reception for their mobile phones if they climb a certain ant hill. There was a photo of a group of people with a solar panel. And somebody was quoted as saying how this is improving communication with family members all over the world.

    (BTW, if anybody in Malawi remembers this article and has access to the archives, I’d appreciate a digital copy. Should be an issue in Feb or March 2007… i’m asking for the impossible)

  • Embedding Google Video and Autoplay

    quick note:
    If you’re embedding a Google Video and you don’t want the video to start automatically, check the embed code for flashvars="autoPlay=true" and delete it…