Looks like I was right holding off on the new MacBook Pros for a while: A huge part of the users apparently experiences problems with the "no button" trackpad not registering clicks:

A tip came in this weekend from someone with a fleet of new MacBooks. His complaint? Every 50 or so clicks and the trackpad freezes for 5 to 10 clicks and then wakes back up.

The users in the comments over at CrunchGear also note that the click of the new "button-less" trackpad is considerably louder than the previous versions' button, which is why some of them have switched on "finger-tap" clicking (incidentally a feature that I disabled on my laptop because it mistook my moving the mouse as a click too often). Maybe it's a case of nostalgia: Dear younger generation, this may be news to you, but keyboards always used to have an audible "click" sound whenever you pressed a button (and I can't believe that's how old I am already ;) ).

Let's see how long it takes for the first hardware and software fixes to be released. And for old times' sake, when will the first battery factory recall be?

[caption id="attachment_1765" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Schlock. CC-by-nc-sa licensed on flickr by nathan."][/caption] Picture: "Schlock." CC-by-nc-sa licensed on flickr by nathan.

Read more…

After I disabled the "subscribe to comments" plugin yesterday, I found out today that two people already extended the original plugin with a "double-opt-in" feature (Link 1, link 2, both [de]).

So I installed the latter and set it up so it sends you the following email the first time you subscribe to comments on this blog:

Note that this email will only be sent once, ever. If you accept it, you'll be able to subscribe to additional blog entries' comments without further hassle. If you ignore it, you won't be asked again.

"Le roi est mort, vive le roi." -- I hope this is a solution that everybody can live with. I'll go back to the original subscribe-to-comments if the author adds a double-opt-in solution himself, but until then we should be golden.

Sorry for the confusion :)

Read more…

For quite a while now, I've been using a popular Wordpress plugin called "subscribe to comments" on fredericiana. It allows people to request email notifications when further comments come in on an article they commented on themselves. As it turns out though, the plugin has an unclear legal status in Germany [de]. The fact of the matter is, since somebody can put an arbitrary email address into the email field when commenting, a person who didn't want that may get "spammed" by my blog against their will.

That would result in a situation where the seeming "victim" of my "spam" could sue me for unsolicited advertisement, provided my blog is considered commercial--and depending on the judge, even a link to Amazon can make a website "commercial".

It is sad that German laws are so Internet-unfriendly, but I have to live with them. So I switched off email notifications on my blog until further notice.

I may switch to a double-opt-in solution (i.e., before notifications are sent, people have to click a link in an email to confirm they actually requested this service). While this is also not completely safe in legal terms (that means, no significant court has ruled about it yet), it is currently considered state of the art when it comes to sending out any sort of regular email to a group of people.

Since a lot of people are facing this problem, maybe the plugin's author or somebody else will extend the plugin to have double-opt-in functionality soon. I may even do it myself when I am bored the next time.

Until then, sorry for the inconvenience. You can always subscribe to the Comments RSS feed if you want to stay up to date with what's happening here.

(via JP)

Read more…

Over at AppleInsider, they have a bunch of photos comparing the new 15-inch Macbook Pro with the now "old" design:

My thoughts: The new MacBook Pros are a really worth thinking about. From their overall look, they seem to be better designed, and a few annoyances have been taken care of, such as the old MBP's plastic rim, or the hard drive (failure part number one in computers, seriously) that was hidden way on the inside of the box.

Along with that, since I bought my first-generation one, the processor speed (mine still has an Intel Core Duo CPU), and now also graphics power have increased significantly. All the new "bling" in Mac OS X Leopard and many new and fancy applications demand a lot from a laptop, which mine--in spite of plenty of RAM--sometimes can't fulfill.

Bottom line: I am considering retiring my laptop "Chronos" some time next year as my primary, every-day tool, in favor of one of its younger siblings, with much more "bang" to tackle the work to come.

I also looked at the smaller MacBooks, and while I like that they moved closer to the MBP (being aluminum and all), the missing FireWire, ExpressCard, and the shared-memory graphics made me forget about that pretty fast.

Read more…

Carnegie Mellon's wireless network makes me sad: I get about 20 KB/s of constant noise (all day, every day) from, mostly, Windows computers announcing their presence to the outside world via broadcast packets.

In the "network" window, this looks like that:

If this is a secret ploy with the intention to empty everybody's laptop batteries as fast as possible, it's working! :) Then again, unlike University of Karlsruhe, CMU puts power outlets into every seat when they drop a bucket of money to renovate a lecture hall. At my home university--with the exception of the new library--laptops have to be mostly powered with their owners' love and respect: Places with appropriate power connections are rare.

Read more…

Today's xkcd comic boils down the Digital Restrictions Management dilemma to its core:

The latest Wal-Mart example--switching off their DRM servers (in spite of their later decision not to do it after all)--has shown that companies are not willing to stand by their self-imposed duties of providing a DRM framework for many decades to come. Instead, they are taking away the technical possibility to play your files at their sole discretion, leaving you as a customer with no choice other than throw away your media collection--or violate the law.

This is why DRM is so bad: While it is understandable that companies want to protect their income sources, by demanding payment for the media they produced, DRM is making promises the companies do not want to hold, or in some cases (read: bankrupcy) can't hold. This is why I prefer, at least at the moment, Amazon MP3 over the DRMed part of iTunes any day of the week.

And while Wal-Mart does not exactly have a great reputation as a whole, there's one thing they've thoroughly understood: The concept of capitalism. So it comes to no surprise that they (along with Amazon, for example) exert pressure on the music industry to be able to sell DRM-free music. The market demands DRM-free digital media that can be owned like a record or a CD and slowly, very slowly, content providers are forced to acknowledge that.

I can't help but wonder, though, is this development going to include digital video as well, any time?

Read more…

The new feature called "content-aware image resizing" in Photoshop is amazing. There is a promotional video up on the Adobe site that's really fun to watch. For example, they make a Volkswagen bus more "economical" (mind you, while keeping the wheels round):

The technology behind it is based on research from an Isreali research group. That group put a video up on youtube in 2007 already:

It's a little more technical, but no less impressive, so all of you geeks who wonder how it actually works should watch this as well.

I can tell you one thing: I want this in Firefox's page resizing code. Sadly, I assume it is strictly patented and Adobe will probably have made sure to have some sort of exclusive deal on it.

Update: A commenter points out, there is an open source plugin for the GIMP that does content-aware resizing--already since 2007. Thank you, Gandalf!

Read more…

An unfortunate typo in a configuration file left this blog completely without images for a little while. Apologies to the readers who may have been confused by that.

Now, fredericiana is back in all it's glory :)

On a side note, I am actually glad how nice my blog still looks with images "disabled". Still, I am glad everything is back to normal now.

Read more…

As only the most attentive readers may have noticed by now, I redesigned my blog. It's been a while since I have done that, and the former layout started to bore me a little.

So I went ahead, got myself a template from freecsstemplates and tweaked away. It wasn't a Wordpress template, so there was quite a lot of work to do, but I am quite pleased with the outcome.

Gone: The old design.

There are a few advantages of the old vs. the new layout. First, more room for more awesomeness: The articles used to be only 500 pixels wide (and that was already stretched from how the old layout came out of the box). This one has 575 pixels, plenty of space even for bigger pictures.

"New car" scent not included.

Second, due to the famfamfam icons I built in it should all look a little neater and be hopefully quite intuitive. Just for fun, I also added "magazine-style" quotes, just like the one you see on the right.

At last, my comments now differ visually from everybody else's:

I hope you like it. Oh, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, let me know!

Read more…

Google's Picasa Web Album supports downloading an entire album, however, it requires the Picasa software to do so. Bummer if you are on a Mac, or don't want to (or can't) install Picasa on your computer.

There's another tutorial online that suggests using a Greasemonkey script to surface the download links, then use the DownThemAll Firefox extension to grab the links.

Sadly, the Greasemonkey script in question stopped working after a recent code change on the picasa website. I was able to easily fix it, but due to the lack of an open license, I am unable to share the script with you :(

However, I found an alternative solution: The album's RSS feed! Along with the aforementioned DownThemAll extension, you can easily download a complete album off Picasa Web. Here is how:

Go to the desired Album, and click the "RSS" link on the right hand side:

Firefox will show you the RSS feed in a more or less appealing way. Note that each of the pictures shown has an "attached" JPEG file underneath:

The only thing we need to do is download all of these with DownThemAll. For that, right-click, and choose "DownThemAll". In the "links" tab, it'll automatically grab all pictures for you:

Just hit "start" and let it load!

Hope this helps!

Read more…