Weblog

This week I had to conduct a two day Photoshop training. While Photoshop is definitely the de facto standard for professional image editing it is nowhere near affordable for home users.

One of the attendees asked if there were any alternatives if they wanted to use a tool like Photoshop at home. Which is more than understandable since Photoshop is much too powerful and pricey to buy it for yourself at home. There are cheaper alternatives like Paintshop Pro or Pixel Image Editor but these solutions still cost money. Also since I was teaching Photoshop, the question really is, is there something that mimicks Photoshop. Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit I totally screwed up the RSS feed when I moved my blog to a subdirectory and I did not even notice. So the issue is hopefully fixed now and links in the feed should get directed to the working URL.

If it is still not working for you try to delete and resubscribe to the feed. You might still have a local cached version of the feed.

Thanks for your patience!

Would it not it be great if you could read a PDF manual like a book and make annotations? Would it not be great if such a software would not cost you a dime? Well Skim is exactly that. A helpful PDF annotation tool which lets you highlight important things and lets you add and edit notes.

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Thanks to the ease of use of Wordpress I had my basic design implemented after the day I had set up my new blog. I just tweaked some parts over the weekend to style some subpages.

Wordpress is really easy to use, in just 2 days from knowing nothing about Wordpress I went to a fully set up blog with my own theme. The documentation on wordpress.org is really excellent and helps a lot.
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I am back. Do I need to say more? Yes, after 6 months I have finally managed to get my blog back online and I have a game plan how to improve my site over the next days and weeks. Today I also coincidentally got a nice present from Stash.
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Ok, I’ve been busy for a long time and I had no time to update my blog. The current website isn’t complete. I’ve decided to completely redesign my website before I start posting again. My goal is to have a new website up in about 2 months. I hope to see you then!

The Motley Fool has an interesting article on how to retire sooner. If you can cut corners on things that you do not really need at the moment, you are able to save this money to retire earlier. The article shows some nice examples how to this saved money to work.

Sometimes the little things make the difference. This one is no exception. Since the introduction of HTML mails nothing has been so badly used. I for myself still prefer plain text mails, not only because of their lower size but also because there is no good about color coded emails with all kind of whacky fonts.

humanized.com has a nice article where they show how to make notations with a simple bracket system. This system is so plain simple and amazing. But take a look for yourself.

Humanized > Weblog: Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation

I am still looking around for lists of software people are using on a daily basis. Especially when they are coders. I was looking for some information on how to code in HTML with TextMate. This software is pretty cool for coding but it seems they don’t have the right guys for marketing their software. Garret Dimon gives some insight on how to use TextMate.

Other than that he also has a nice list of his favorite software he uses on his Mac.

Procrastination is a problem for many of us. Probably most of you know how it feels to be able to do something but still you do not get to the point where you will actually do it. This can be frustrating at least and can be so devastating that it ruins a business. This isn’t another article talking about the importance of getting things done. This blog entry will be the first in a series of how I personally approach these things and my progress.

Personally I would recognize myself as someone who has skills in many places but still does not get much done with it. This is most often because I am not able to start or finish something because I get distracted by other things, I lose focus of my goals or something feels so overwhelming that I do not know where to start. All these things kill my productivity because I procrastinate more than it is good for me.

On day 1 I will give you a retrospect of the things that happened the weeks and months before.

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