When you are using a (digital) camera and need to place it on an uneven surface to keep it still long enough for your long shutter speeds, or you want to make a shot on the release timer (or both), you'll need a tripod, or a beanbag. A beanbag is an ideal option, you can tuck it into your backpack, take it everywhere …

To every photo-editing, image-manipulating, red-eye-reducing software developer on the planet: Sharpening photographs by default is NOT a good idea! If images aren't sharp directly from the camera, there was something wrong with them to begin with. Most camera's nowadays make fine pictures which don't need sharpening. …

I noticed the start of a "Monitor Chain" on the "Google Blogoscoped" blog. I liked the idea, so here it goes: Please photograph this blog post (including your monitor and its immediate surroundings), and post the resulting pic on your blog. Then the next person photographs your blog post and posts …

According to about.com, my name in chinese is spelled as: Funny to see that in Chinese, my name is only 1 character shorter.

All listed in one nice page on "Guide to OSX software for switchers". Have fun!

Yup, you've guessed it. User error. There I was in my last post complaining that gmail was down, while actually my ADSL modem needed a good reset. At work, I could access gmail, and when I got home, I had the same problem as yesterday. I cleared the browser cache, still no result. Then I resetted my ADSL modem, and …

I really like iTunes. When you have 1 computer (an apple, that is ;-), and 1 place to store your music, it's all you'll ever need. It is easy to manage your music with, it puts your files in reasonably understandably locations (artist/album/track), has nice smart playlists and there are a lot of plugins available. I …

Great, gmail is down for days now. I really hope it will return soon, so I can back up that mail to my server. By going down, Google showed me how much I came to rely on them, while they're actually unreachable when something happens, and I don't even have backups of my own mails! I really like gmail and the way it …

According to Sophos security, the whole world should switch to macs to get rid of the security problems. This would be great for business! Currently I do not order with companies who put up Word or Excel formatted price lists, simply because I can't (and to some extent refuse) open them. In the long run however, this …

So here I am using iTunes on my Apple. So far so good. The downside is that I have an iBead as an mp3 player, so there are a few problems with that. First of all, iTunes only plays nice with the iPods (and a few other oddballs ;-). For me to put mp3's on my iBead, I can drag them over from iTunes onto the USB drive, …