Allgemein

A Most Handy Little Tool.

Gentle readers, I would like to tell you about a most handy little information management tool that I found by chance – it’s called iMarkup. Completely integrated into IE, it allows to highlight and annotate any webpage – on that very page. And it remembers the highlighted parts and annotations when you return to the page later on. If it is really as usable as I think it will be, the days of printing web pages simply for the added benefits of active reading will be gone.

But there’s always room for improvement. So in case someone at iMarkup reads this – here’s some client input! What I’d really like is a highlighting and annotation tool integrated in a content organiser like Onfolio – and I want it to be able to handle large amounts of information (like my two million bookmarks) without any perceptible delay… OK?

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almost a diary, self-referential

Argh!

My (main) computer is still experiencing an extreme amount of unwarranted file-system induced “strokes”. Keeping it running and online long enough to write this is as good as it gets today. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fix this tomorrow. If anyone has any idea why my system (Win98SE) suddenly crashes all the time – and certainly when copying files larger than, say, 5 Mbytes from one partition or physical drive to another – please let me know. Ah, it’s not a virus, according to AntiVir.

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quicklink

It’s A Big Deal

although it’s actually only 30m. The city of Munich’s decision to use Linux not just on its servers but on all the 14,000 city computers, despite a personal marketing (and allegedly price-cut) intervention by MS CEO Steve Ballmer earlier this year, is almost unanimously interpreted as a huge blow to Microsoft’s grip on the market. Cynthia L. Webb of the Washington Post even calls her press survey “The Munich Revolution”.

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Allgemein

A Few Bits Too Much.

Just in case you haven’t yet heard about it, humanity’s decade-old suspicion has apparently finally been verified. It looks like Microsoft is indeed collecting more data about its customers than necessary via recent versions of its “Windows Update System”, according to a German computer website, tecchannel.de [link in German], which has deciphered the encrypted stream of bits sent to Redmond during any update of Windows.

Luckily, there’s help. In fact, heise.de[link in German] points to a Microsoft White Paper cryptically called Using Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 in a Managed Environment: Controlling Communication with the Internet describing how to deactivate the system.

But don’t ask me – I did not read it. It’s only 172 pages of small print…

If it weren’t so serious, it might actually be funny. Last year, Apple’s German pricing policy kept me from buying the new Imac, but now Bill seems to update his efforts to drive me to Apple’s gates…

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