Ich habe mir vor einiger Zeit aus den USA bei Threadless T-Shirts bestellt (ein paar Dollar auf meinem Paypal Konto musste ich sowieso noch verbraten und Defunker hatte keine Shirts, die mir gefielen oder die ich noch nicht hatte). Also bestellt und natürlich mit der Zollabgabe gerechnet - noch dazu den Postboten gestern morgen überhört und somit erst heute zu meinem Paket gekommen.

Was mich gleich ein bisschen stutzig gemacht hat war der Zollbetrag von 14 Euro. Nicht die Summe an sich, sondern die Differenz zu den bei der Post bezahlten 20 Euro und noch was. Hm, während der Heimfahrt auf die Rechnung gesehen und da scheinen €6.50 als Abgabe Paket Standard auf. Also bei der Post angerufen. “Die Zahlstelle ist leider nur bis 13.30 besetzt.” War ja klar, Beamte. Nun gut, die Website der Österreichischen Post besucht und mal gesucht, was ja bei öffentlichen Betrieben nicht immer lustig ist. Schließlich in einem pdf Dokument nach Eingabe der Geldsumme (!) doch noch fündig geworden: Zollstellung also.

Sprich ich zahle der Österreichischen Post €6.50 damit sie mir meine Zollgebühren vorschießt? Ganz schön heftig, meine Herren.

Apartment Therapy - I love other people’s homes

February 12, 2007 in Design | 4 comments

I told you previously that one of my favourite search tags on Flickr is ‘loft’. That’s because I like to see how other people live, what their homes look like, what ideas they have to make their rooms nicer, more beautiful.

Lately I’ve found some new design blogs (you may have noticed this when you’re checking my del.icio.us bookmarks) and one of them, Apartment Theraphy has a nice feature called ‘House Tours’ - now you can guess what that means. I especially liked this one, home of Silvia and Axel (a German), the wall sculpture you can see in the picture.

How to get the number of unread posts from your Bloglines account in five lines of Ruby code

February 10, 2007 in Coding, Technology | No comments

[code lang="ruby"] require ‘uri’ require ‘net/http’ uri = URI::HTTP.build(:host => “rpc.bloglines.com”, :path => “/update”, :query => “ver=1&user=user@domain.com”) number = Net::HTTP.get(uri).strip!.delete!(”|”) p “You have #{number} unread messages in your Inbox.” [/code]

btw, yes, I still use Bloglines. John Hicks’ OS X skin makes it look beautiful.

Addicted Live Search - Wordpress 2.1

February 10, 2007 in Technology, Wordpress | 2 comments

I am currently working on my Wordpress Theme and wanted to get rid of my livesearch and use a plugin instead. Unfortunately the only one I could find, Addicted Live Search, doesn’t work with Wordpress 2.1.

So I updated the source and tweaked some settings (2 seconds polling intervall for the search box instead of 1; a miniumum search query length of 2 letters). You can get the updated zip here: http://www.stopbeingcarbon.com/addictedlivesearch.zip

Intype 0.2.1 - Now with Undo/Redo

February 7, 2007 in Outside | No comments

Intype, maybe the upcoming texteditor for Windows, has been released this morning. It now includes support for Undo and Redo which was the main reason why I didn’t use Intype on a regular basis by now. Other new features are basic drag&drop support an a tab/space switch (which comes in handy if you’re sticking to the Rails coding standards - two spaces, no tabs).

iTunes ain’t cheap

February 5, 2007 in Music, Outside | No comments

Don’t get me wrong, I really love iTunes and the iTunes Store but thinking about prices… I’ve just paid 12 Euros for an album, if I would buy it via Amazon it would cost me 11 Euros and some waiting for the parcel to arrive. But I would get a real CD and a booklet, so more value for my money.

According to this article on CNET Apple has the same price scheme for every country, 0.99 Euros/US-Dollars/Canadian Dollars. I pay $ 1.31 for a song, a Canadian pays 83 Cents - that isn’t really fair, is it? I would really like to know how Apple justifies these differences. Maybe they need to save some money for their lawyers’ costs.

coComment is really useful

February 5, 2007 in Outside, Technology | 1 comment

I tried coComment when they released their first public version sometime at the beginning of 2006 but dropped it because it didn’t work out for me. However I sort-of rediscovered the service earlier this week and have to say that I really love it. The Firefox plugin works like a charm and detects every single comment form which makes it damn easy to follow your comments over different websites (Flickr is one of them).

February 2007

What’s the number after F in hexadecimal?

Some random links

Sites who use GeoMint (or used it)

Die Österreichische Post AG

Apartment Therapy - I love other people’s homes

How to get the number of unread posts from your Bloglines account in five lines of Ruby code

Addicted Live Search - Wordpress 2.1

Intype 0.2.1 - Now with Undo/Redo

iTunes ain’t cheap

coComment is really useful

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