I released a new iTunes plugin on http://www.earlybirdapplications.com today: NightTunes, a simple plugin for iTunes that can automatically shutdown, hibernate or send your PC to standby at the end of a playlist.

If you, like me, enjoy listening to a good audiobook while dozing off to dreamland, but don’t want to leave your computer running throughout the entire night…

NightTunes is for you!

No more harddisk clatter noise or blowing CPU fans disturbing your sleep …plus you’re reducing your your energy bill and your carbon footprint

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Today I got AIM-Fish-Bot-ed (not that that verb exists). As Nixie explains in her article, Fish-Bots do exactely what you may have done as a child: call two total strangers, then hold the two phones together and listen in on how they accuse each other of doing a prank call. Only Fish-Bots do it via AIM or ICQ. While the whole thing seems to upset a lot of people, I found the idea hilarious and would love to read more chat protocols of “victims” Here’s mine (the first message is from the bot (RolyPolyCoho), the following come from the person I got connected to):

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After watching “The Wrestler” (a totally awesome movie by the way) the other day I went online to research, whether the story was biographically or not. After some time I came across “Wrestling Obituaries” and was shocked to learn that most of the (former WWF) guys I watched doing their showy thingy on TV more than 20 years ago have already passed away, most of them due to heart attacks….in their mid-40s!!!. The following names rang some bells and brought back some childhood memories for me:

• Jerry “Crusher” Blackwell–January 22, 1995–Died of complications from injuries sustained in a road accident.

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For a while now I’ve been working on a platform to publish some of the software I’ve developed in the past (and that I will be developing in the future:-). Well, it was a long path, some people even doubted that, given my tendency to perfectionism, I would ever finish up on this…but after way too many several re-writes, platform switches and logo changes (big thanks to Tobi for the final one), today I proudly present to you (*drumroll*):

http://earlybirdapplications.com

Come in, take a cookie and browse through the, yet, sparse exclusive product list!

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Unter http://www.nichtlustig.de gibt es wunderschöne Comics über depressive Elefanten, ängstliche Zebras, kreative Lemminge, sowie viele andere skurrile Alltags- und Nicht-Alltagssituationen. Absolut sehenswert!!!

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In der letzten Zeit habe ich viel über virales Marketing gelesen und gehört, speziell von einem Freund, der in diesem Bereich seine Diplomarbeit schreibt. Heute morgen ist diese neuartige Vermarkungswoge bis in die Wrangelstraße, genauer gesagt in meinen Briefkasten geschlagen. Dort fand sich ein gefütterter Umschlag, der nach dem Öffnen ein schmales Holzkästchen zu Tage förderte. Selbiges enthielt neben einer Lochkarte, welche auf der Rückseite die Beschriftung “THE FINAL MILL INC.”/”SERIES AAB” trug, einen Zettel mit folgender Info: “To execute these commandments you’ll have to find the properly gifted fellows.” Der Poststempel besagt, dass der Umschlag in Frankfurt aufgegeben wurde.

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Up until last week I used Bloglines to organize and read my RSS feeds. Since I have two computers and regularly access my feeds from both, I found this to be the best solution. While Bloglines satisfied my needs at first, over time I got more and more upset with their interface. Clicking on a feed automatically marks ALL items in it as read, no matter whether you actually read them or not. So if you have a feed with an already fairly large amount of unread items in it, you better work through them at one go, otherwise you’ll loose some. Trying to bring back items that you couldn’t read (because you maybe clicked on another feed in-between) by setting the display option to display “All items” will do the thing, although then you will still have to determine on your own, which items you have or haven’t already read. This got me to the point where I postponed reading some of my feeds until I could spare the time of struggling through 300+ news items and over time this got worse and worse. In the end I always just clicked on the damn thing to get it over with (not having read a single line:-)

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Yesterday I wrote about Gmail’s introduction of IMAP. After fiddling around with it a little I must say that I’m not impressed by their IMAP implementation of the tagging system, or “labels” as they call it. On the client side the labels are represented by individual folders, one for each label. So if I want to tag one of my e-mails with “work”, “php” and “project”, I simply create 3 folders with the appropriate names and put a COPY of my mail into each one. Although Gmail lets you nest these folders, I wonder what my Outlook will look like in about a year….thousands of folders….

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Finally!!! GMail now supports IMAP, which ends the era of endless “forwarding chains” of connected GMail accounts. In the end I had 5 different accounts (each of which forwared a copy of the incoming mail to the next one), one for each computer/device I wanted to POP my mails onto. Fortunately, the people from GMail heard all the crying.

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