Friday, July 30, 2010

Surprise

Today I finally managed to get my eCard to work as a citizen card ("Bürgerkarte") with more than just the federal tax online aplication ("Finanz Online").
I could - for the first time ever - access the federal pension plan application (PVA) as well.

It was not easy, and I really don't know what I did differently with the (I guess) 3rd approach, but it finally worked.
And now it seems to work stable, i.e. I could access the site and authenticate with my eCard a second time...

After only more than half a year of struggling.
Amazing.

Now that this is done, and now that I know my future pension ... it's time to retire :-)

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Tab Candy for Firefox

There is a new Firefox add-on in the works called Tab Candy, that will help you to organize your tabs into quite powerful and dynamic tab groups:
  • Lightweight Grouping... simply drag & drop
  • Only the Tabs You Want... once you open a tab group, you only see the tabs from this particular group, all others will be hidden
See the demo/concept video here.

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

(I'm not sure I follow Aza on all the future steps and developments in the second half of the video.)

To me, the need to organize your tabs, group them, prioritize them, hide "inactive" tabs is just another way of saying how important and dominant web-applications  and the browser has become... It is no longer a tiny window into the world of the internet, that does a little HTML rendering... it's become the universal client.

One more quote, though, from Aza's post:
Tab Candy is made entirely with HTML, Javascript, and CSS. There is no native code—just the open Web. That is how powerful the web has become.
Looking forward to it.

Monday, July 19, 2010

iPad Available in 9 More Countries This Friday

Can't hardly wait... I guess I'm gonna get one...
iPad Available in 9 More Countries This Friday: "Apple’s iPad will go on sale in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore on July 23."

Friday, July 16, 2010

Digg4 alpha is out

I just got invited to the new alpha of Digg4 ... which finally introduces a friend-based news feed, i.e. I can see the storied that were digged by my social network.

So I know have two dimensions of filtering my digg/news feed.
a) by category (as before) like "Business", "Sports", ...
b) by my social network...

Probably the most usefuly type of curation in this century.



Sunday, July 11, 2010

Who needs sorting anyway...

Well apparently mobilkom austria[1] does not... at least not in their online shop:

8 - 3 - 5 - 2 - 1.3 - 12

maybe this is a code to a secret message ...
--
[1] sorry, A1 Telekom Austria as of today

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Microsoft's Kin is dead

The Kin will be discontinued and never make it to Europe.

So what?
Is anyone really surprised by this?

First of all, Microsoft never had a good track record with or mobile phones (and their operating systems) nor generally with hardware...

Secondly, a pure social network phone that's cluttered with status updates, tweets and stuff does not make any sense. A phone is still a phone, and not a social network beeper or pager.

If I consider my social graph - any of them, be it Facebook or on Flickr or on Xing or on Twitter - I'd panic if I'd get all their updates directly on my phone.

So lets grieve for the Kin...
Then again.... No, let's continue to ignore it.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

Odd limits on the E71

In the last couple of months the limitations on my Nokia E71 started to really annoy me.
Today's incident:

When I added my new corporate email account[1] (and did not delete the old one) I wanted to enable Automatic email retrieval[2] - of course.
To my great surprise, I could not...
Turns out, you can only have 2 email accounts with automatic retrieval enabled.
A limitation I don't understand at all.


Totally time for a new handset... preferably one with proper reception... :-)
--
[1] new because Oracle bought Sun and as of today I am 100% Oracle
[2] you know, the one that cannot be set to 1 hour...