Wer hätte gedacht, dass es so witzig sein kann, "Wappen zu kommentieren":http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:AndreasPraefcke/Heraldische_Humoresken.

Podpress is a plugin for Wordpress that is supposed to make embedding audio and video content into blogs easy. It maybe does, but after looking at the feature-list that includes the item

View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting,

I do not feel like testing it anymore. It may be nitpicking, but this "you're / your" error is a red flag for me, just like "there / their / they're".

I just found this site with spelling poems. Very funny! An example:

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

Although hardware-recognition has made its way into Debian GNU/Linux, it still is not trivial sometimes to find the right driver for a certain piece of hardware, especially on machines that you are not familiar with. A smart and easy way that I used sometimes is to boot Knoppix or a similar LiveCD, look at what drivers (i.e. kernel modules) it loads and then copy that information.

Now, I sumbled upon this website where one simply can paste the output of lspci and get a list with the corresponding drivers. Very convenient.

RSS-feeds are becoming very common. However, there are still some sites that do not have one but send a newsletter via email from time to time. There is a new service called Mailfeed that allows you to subscribe to any newsletter with an email address like whateveryoulike@mailfeed.org and then access all mails that get to this address via the RSS-feed at http://mailfeed.org/rss2/whateveryoulike that you can subscribe to with your favourite newsreader. No need to register or even visit the website.

This also means that people can share the feed of a certain newsletter. However, I would guess that as soon as a feed becomes popular, spammers will discover it and make it unusable. One would have to switch the feed-address. But up to now, this is pure speculation.

Unfortunealty, people send HTML-emails and those are not yet handled by Mailfeed.

So far I have used Raggle to read my rss-feeds from news-sites and blogs. The choice of a text-based rss aggregator was due to the fact that I wanted to have it running constantly while still being able to access it from anywhere (it ran inside of screen).

I have thought about a web-based solution before which would have the advantage of running in a browser and thereby being able to show images and clickable links that come with the feed. There are providers that offer such a service for free, e.g. Feedreader or Bloglines. Apart from being rather unconfigurable, I cosider these as out of question due to privacy issues. I do not want any company knowing what news I read and how.

Therefore, I was looking for a stand-alone appplication that I could set up on the same rented server that runs this site and so again being able to read my news from everywhere. I found Tiny Tiny Rss a while ago which works in principle, but for some reason I did not like it and I stuck to Raggle. Yesterday I finally discovered Gregarius - and I love it!

It has everything I need:

• fast response due to AJAX controls
• grouping of feeds
• tags and searching through old items
• deletion of old and read items only on request
• bookmarklet for easy subscription to new feeds
• grouping of unread items with source or chronological display
• flexible configuration interface

Have a look at the screenshot to the left and if you have web-space with php and mysql available - try it out!

Gerade habe ich zusammen mit anderen einen neuen, deutschsprachigen Blog gegründet: www.blogressiv.de. Gemeinsam werden wir versuchen, die deutsche Blogosphäre mit Texten über "Wissenschaft, Kunst und Gesellschaft" zu bereichern. Ziemlich anspruchsvolles Motto, mal sehen ob wir es ausfüllen können... ;-)

I just created a new blog: www.blogressiv.de. It will be in German and together with some other people, I'll try to enrich the German blogosphere with texts about "Science, Art and Society". Quite an ambitious title isn't it? :-)

Welch bodenlose Frechheit! Da hat jemand wirklich sich die Marke "ogg" registriert, alleine um Leute, die den verbreiteten Begriff (ein open-source Audioformat) verwenden, abmahnen zu können. Der Gipfel: Derjenige versteigert bei Ebay Beteiligungen am schmutzigen Geschäft. Mehr Information im Artikel von Telepolis.

Wohoo, Radio Paradise plays "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd right now. I always get Gänsehaut (goose bumps?) when hearing this. *pumping up the volume* :-)

I just read that Google's Blogsearch has opened. I am not sure whether their expansion into many areas is a good or a bad thing, but I do not agree with people saying that there is a new monopoly copming up.

There's elections on Sunday in Germany. Although I've sent in my postal vote already, I enjoyed looking at the election posters all over Berlin. I'll post the pictures of some later this evening, when I'm home and have gotten to looking at my camera's content. I just wanted to point you to this campaign video that we saw in the cinema yesterday evening and that I really liked. For all non-Germans: it's made by the still ruling social-democrats and shows three rivalling (and probably successful) kingpins from the christian-democrats and liberals. The text at the end says: "Are 40 seconds already to long for you?"

Apart from the most known ones like Ryanair and EasyJet, there have come up many more cheap airlines in Europe during the last years. I focus a little on the ones that fly to Sweden and leave out the ones that do not have international flights. So let's make a list:

Ryanair, EasyJet, Germanwings, HLX, FlyNordic, Snowflake, Condor, Sterling, flyDBA, VirginExpress, AirBerlin, GermaniaExpress, SkyEurope, bmibaby, Blue1

There is another list of airlines, sorted by country/region, here (in German). In addition, there is a djungle of websites that offer searches over various airlines and of course everyone claims they give the cheapest prices. I think I have gotten the best results by looking at the individual airlines' websites so far. Therefore, if you have any addition to the list, please comment...

there are a few words that made it directly from german into english, like the prefix "eigen-" or "kindergarten". i just read one that really made me laugh: to abseil or abseiling (german: abseilen, das Abseilen). you can find more of 'em at http://germanenglishwords.com/

Rejoice! Having been absent at sluggy.com for a long time, he finally is back.