Saving for the Next Investment

Working at my office already since October 2007 and at the moment at home with a temporarily borrowed 20 inch iMac under Leopard I got more and more fascinated by the efficiency of the every days work flow. Now that Apple has recently released their new improved iMacs I got to the point that I decided to turn another dream into reality: I will soon buy an 24 inch iMac. What I am still waiting for? A few Pounds are still missing on my account (but since I slowed down buying lots of vinyls on eBay this does not take anymore long time) and the upcomming release of Snow Leopard, the new Mac OS which is due in June. So I presume that as soon as I return early in July from my planned trip to Germany I will place the order for my dream computer! Can’t wait for it! Hurray! :-)

Merging PDF’s Under Mac OS

A small nice tool to merge PDF’s under Mac OS: Combine PDFs by Monkeybread Software. It’s freeware.

IBM T30 (RIP)

This morning the hard drive of my IBM T30 and as the fan of my T30 was already in its days with its on problems I decided to go for a new ThinkPad model. On Lapstore.de, my favorite place to buy used ThinkPads, I decided to go this time for a IBM ThinkPad T60 with 15 inch SXGA+ display, 2GB of memory, 120GB of hard drive, dual layer DVD burner and a few other nice ingredients. 900€ including shipping. Not bad. Looking forward to my new working tool…

Update: Somehow I managed to boot the T30 again. Could make a more recent backup. And it seems that the hard disk runs quite stable after having warmed up during use…

Comparison

There is still a chance of 2^-128 that our isPrime function will give you the wrong answer. To give you an idea of how small this chance actually is, the chance that you will be killed by a meteorite while you read this sentence is fdar larger. Still alive? Okay, so don’t worry about it.

(Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier in Practical Cryptography, p. 204)

Firefox and Thunderbird

My favourite cross-platform WWW browser and e-mail client are Firefox and Thunderbird. Available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Both programs can be extended with add-ons. My favourite add-ons are the following.

1. Addblock Plus (Firefox): Makes most ads go away.
   
2. Flashblock (Firefox): Don’t start Flash annimations automaticaly which in turn helps a lot against unwanted advertisement.
3. Enigmail (Thunderbird): Encrypt easily your e-mails (needs GnuPG).