– How am I doing in Austria? –
Time flies — on Sunday this week, a year will have passed already. The earthquake and tsunami, and the reactor failure that followed, all happened on 11 March 2011.
Has it really been a year already? My heart goes out to my friends in Japan, and to all the affected people. Time does not fly for these people, who live every day with the immediate problems and the fear of the unknown long-term effects troubling them. Continue reading ‘Do you remember Fukushima?’
I’ve read a lot of Cory Doctorow’s novels and short stories lately. They’re available for free through various e-book readers like Stanza (iTunes link), and of course also as regular books on Amazon etc. If you want a real eye-opener, then grab one of his stories!
Several months ago I met a guy at work who studies Scandinavistic, and he learned Swedish. Ever since, we’ve met once a month to eat and chat – in Swedish of course. This is fabulous practice for both of us and today I noticed that, five minutes into the conversation, I was even thinking in Swedish! Continue reading ‘Multilingualism’
It’s weird sometimes.
I sometimes feel like this twenty-something cosmopolitan guy with a sweet girlfriend and a taste for crazy board games, sci-fi movies, and submarine novels. Life is fun.
But I’m also nearing forty, married, a father of a two-year-old, with an old car and a mortgage on a suburban flat, a boring bank employee maintaining IT systems. I’m fine with that too, I like my life.
Why this duality? What does that mean?
I’m pretty sure my next smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop won’t be from Apple. My future hardware will be powered either by Android or by Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). And here’s why. Continue reading ‘Apple, begone!’
I like my iPhone, but there are some annoying details that Apple doesn’t want users to change. Luckily, this is where jailbreaking comes to the rescue. Here are some Cydia apps that make the iPhone easier to work with.
Google+ is the new social network that everybody is talking about. Well, maybe not everybody but at least the entire tech press. They are limiting the new user registrations for now, but I have gained access and it looks nice! Find me at http://torben.g-b.dk/+
I’m observing a few items on eBay these days, mostly out of curiosity. It’s remarkable how ignorant and counterproductive most people are about eBay. This post explains a few simple and proven principles that will help buyers to win at lower prices, and help sellers get higher prices for their auctions.
Continue reading ‘How to win on eBay: buy low and sell high’
Enough is enough. This article in Wired is but one in a sea of cries against Facebook, and they’ve all got a very good point: Facebook is actively undermining the privacy of the users, but we users should be able to control what information gets published about us or not.
So I’m preparing to leave Facebook, and I’ll make sure to delete all my information in there in an attempt to protect my privacy. I’m going to focus on this blog instead, so that people who really want to follow me can still do so.
Incidentally, here’s an article on Lifehacker describing what you could do, if you agree on the above.
If you don’t know what “DNS” means, then never mind this article. But if you are familiar with DNS, then you’ll likely appreciate this tip. Google has recently provided a Public DNS service which is often significantly faster than your ISP’s DNS, especially if you’re outside the USA. My own tests verify that it’s a lot faster than using my ISP’s DNS servers. YMMV.
Skip right to the good stuff — use this:
Google Public DNS
Primary DNS Server: 8.8.8.8
Secondary DNS Server: 8.8.4.4
Read up on why this might be useful for you: