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…

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, 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 everybody, Recently, I found another way to watch UK-TV outside the UK, and it even supports livestreaming of Channel 4 and Five (however, only the livestreams, no on-demand like IPlayer, 4oD or ITVPlayer are supported). This time, there is no need for a UK-Proxy or a VPN. Just go to www.filmon.com and you have a quite wide variety of UK-Channels available. Since it seems that they already had some legal fights with the broadcasting stations, I am rather positive that this will be an option that is available for a longer time. If you want an easier way to…

Hi folks, I wonder sometimes if in many years from now we will be called the ‘Generation Quality-Killer’. I just noticed that ‘The H’, one of the most current and best resources regarding IT-news, is closing down. And this really makes me wonder how a page, where billions of people are exchanging tritenesses obviously is making money and a quality site like ‘The H’ does not get enough revenues to survive. Somehow, we are living in very sad times and this does not only regard the Internet, but also to a lot of other products (planned obsolescence) or buildings. In…

Hi everybody, Since Google is killing iGoogle in November this year, I have searched the net for alternatives. If you not yet have found what you are looking for as an alternative, you may look for these pages: http://www.ighome.com is currently my site of preferred choice. Especially if you do not want the look and feel of iGoogle changed, this may also be the site for you! The alternative I tried before, was http://www.netvibes.com, which offers a lot of possibilities, but has a quite different look and feel. Nevertheless, this may right be what you are looking for. Let me…

Hi everybody, During the last days I tried to update my IE9 on my Windows 7-machine to IE10 – actually, I did not want to initially, but Windows was quite insistent on shutting down trying to install it – and always failed with error 9C59. As you may have found on the Internet, none of the tipps of Microsoft actually work – I succeeded with the following steps (and several trial-and-error attempts and a lot of restarts :-)): Download and run the Microsoft fix-it-tool (http://support.microsoft.com/mats/program_install_and_uninstall/) Download the Microsoft System Update Preparation Tool and run it Uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer 9…

Hi, This weekend, I tried to run a polipo proxy as background task on Windows 7. That’s not that easy, because I did not want to have a dos-command-prompt-window open, even if it was minimized, but wanted it to be hidden. First, I tried to set it up as a service, however, for some reason that did not work (even if I used the Windows XP Resource Kit-tool srvany.exe), because for some reason it did not want to start the polipo.exe. Alsow, the daemonize-parameter also did not work on Windows 7 (it crashed the proxy). Then I tried to start…

Hi, Yesterday was ‘Internet’- and ‘Copyright’-evening on Arte (a German/French tv station), and after a documentary about Google books there was another documentary about the legal process against the ‘The Pirate Bay’-founders in Sweden. Unfortunately, it started quite late and I wasn’t able to watch it until the end (but, it could be watched again over the Internet: http://videos.arte.tv/de/videos/tpb-afk-the-pirate-bay-away-from-keyboard–7415440.html). First of all: Yes, I have quite some sympathy for these guys, and there are a lot of reasons, why Internet-sites like ‘The Pirate Bay’ work. However, I also respect the copyright, so yeah, it was definitely not right what they…