Hi out there, Recently my wife and I went to Rome for 6 really enjoyable days . We made all the usual sights (Fontana di Trevi, Spagna, Vatican City including St. Peter, Castell di Angelo, Colosseo, Foro Romano) – picture will follow soon on the pictures page. To follow here are some tipps: January is a good month for Rome if you don’t some rain (or even hail) showers and thunderstorms. However, on the whole, the weather was nice and flights as well as good hotels are quite unexpensive. Do as the Romans do – if you wait for a…

Hi everybody, When I recently checked my Google AdSense-account there appeared a site ‘semalt.com’ which seems to have displayed my adverts. After some googling I found out that it is obviously some kind of analytics page. However, I have neither subscribed to their service, nor do I have any connection to that page. So I am wondering what this is all about? Do they want to decrease my google ranking through having links on pages that are probably plain link pages? BTW, you need to have a username to access the page. Some tipps for AdSense-users: Regularly check your account…

Hello everybody and a Happy New Year! Today I was part of a short quiz (called ‘Allein gegen Kratky’, meaning being alone against the show’s host) in the biggest radio show in Austria (Ö3-Wecker) and actually won ;-). You can hear it on http://oe3.orf.at/programm/stories/2592474/ (German link), look for the 10th of January. It was a very interesting experience, everybody being very kind and nice there. Just funny to see, what goes on behind the scenes while they play music (I had the chance to watch the show for about half an our directly in the studio), sometimes having to react…

Hi everybody! I have just started a new website: journeys.idstein-online.com. On this page, I will add photos of the journeys my wife and I took over the years (or will be taking in future). I have started with Scotland 2006 (unfortunately, Scotland 2002-photos were made with a ‘non-digital’-camera) and will add the comments to the photos in the coming days/weeks/months and add additional albums (London, Crete, Lake District and Hadrian’s Wall, Cornwall) in the future. Unfortunately, photos from before 2006 will be few due to a system crash / harddisk crash in 2005 (since then, i regularly do backups). If…

Hi all, Last week, the European Central Bank cut the interest rates for loans from them to 0.25 % (from 0.50 %). Do the really think that this is a good idea? I realise that they want to raise inflation, however, flooding the market is not the right tool for this any more – instead of raising inflation they are raising stock exchange indexes. If we want to raise inflation, we have to give money to the people who really need to buy something from the real economy – the poor ones. So, instead of flooding the markets with more…

Hi all, If you are using FreePDF, you might have come to the problem that it suddenly stops working – you have to reboot the computer and suddenly all the documents you wanted to convert to PDF pop up. Well, there is an easier and faster solution than rebooting – go to the FreePDF main directory (e.g. “C:\Program Files (x86)\FreePDF XP” double-click on fpassist.exe – et voilà: the tool is up and running again. Find information in English on the 2-click solution here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/03/0115241/heises-two-clicks-for-more-privacy-vs-facebook

Hello, As some of you might have already read or heard somewhere, there are currently rumours of a rather scary virus/trojan that remind me a little bit of the e-mail-hoaxes I received in the 1990s (this virus will kill your harddisk and then spread to all your e-mail-contacts… – you know what I mean?). However, this is actually spread by a well-known security consultant, Dragos Ruiu, and this makes things different (Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/). So, I am wondering, if a security guy is fighting this thread for 3 years now, that means everything could be infected by now… desktops, workstations, laptops, tablets, smartphones,…

Hi everybody, Everyone who ever had to give a pill to a cat knows, that this can become a quite tricky issue. Cats usually have a rather good understanding, how to avoid swallowing a pill, and it usually comes to some kind of ‘brute force’ that might damage the relationship between the cat and the pill-giver for at least 2 hours or so :-). Since one of our cats have to take heart-pills every day now, I developed an idea, how to give the pill in a way the cat actually enjoys taking it. Here we go: Take one of those…

Hi everybody, Recently, I installed a new version of FreePDF (also known as FreePDF XP, its earlier name). Unfortunately, the latest version does not include the PDF toolkit (pdftk) any more (which is necessary for giving a watermark to the PDF-file – e.g. a letterhead paper), so it had to be installed manually and the pdftk.exe and the library libiconv2.dll had to be moved to the FreePDF main directory. Unfortunately, after doing this, I encountered the error 5, whenever I tried to use the profile with the watermark. After some checking, it turned out that FreePDF needs a special version…

Hi all, Today I have a book-tip (or, actually, several book-tips) for you. I recently read all the books (that’s currently 4) written by Kate Morton, a rather young Australian author. She has a very lively way to describe things. After reading ‘The Forgotten Garden’ you might not believe that there’s no ‘Eliza Makepiece’ (well, I checked with Google, she’s pure fiction – however that means that Mrs. Morton might have become a very good fairy-tale teller as well ;-)). After reading ‘The Distant Hours’, I really would have loved to read ‘The Mudman’ (in German translated as ‘Modermann’, which…