Back in March I started look­ing for a new mail user agent, com­monly referred to as email client. Dur­ing the last few days I had a lit­tle time at my hands and I tried Claws Mail, eM Client, Post­box and Sylpheed. Regard­ing Post­box I went for the 30-​​days trial of the full ver­sion after I’ve com­pared the two edi­tions (Post­box and Post­box Express). I set up a few IMAP and POP3 accounts and then I just used each client for a short time.

Once again, I’ll stay true to Thun­der­bird. To be hon­est, I liked Post­box a lot but it’s not that much supe­rior to Thun­der­bird espe­cially if you con­sider the add-​​ons sit­u­a­tion. What I liked best about Post­box was the way they orga­nized the accounts. That’s where Post­box really shines. So, instead of wast­ing more time with other clients I just went ahead and did what I wanted to do for a few years – I finally cre­ated a nice User.js to store some help­ful pref­er­ences. I thought I’d share a few of the most impor­tant set­tings that I found with you:

// Thunderbird 3 adds a disk cache. Activate it to cache any remote content.
// Messages and attachments are now cached for IMAP accounts as well.
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", true);
// Grant 50 megabytes of storage
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 51200);

Now, let’s move on to the IMAP set­tings. Read more…

At GamesCom 2010 Bliz­zard revealed how crafters will be able to cre­ate their own gear. In Dia­blo II, you had the assis­tance of the mys­ti­cal Horadric Cube to cre­ate new items. In Dia­blo III, Bliz­zard intro­duced the Arti­san, a new char­ac­ter who does the work for you. You just need to enlist an arti­san and pro­vide some mate­ri­als and he sets out to cre­ate your new gear.

To add an Arti­san to your ret­inue you have to help him out – usu­ally by doing a quest for him. After you gained his trust he will fol­low you on your trav­els. They will set up show in the near­est town and you will be able to inter­act with him there. There are three types of Arti­sans that will be avail­able to your hero: black­smith, mys­tic, and jeweller.

• You can sell and repair items at the black­smith, as well as have him cre­ate weapons and armor for you. He can also add sock­ets to any weapon or armor.
• The mys­tic cre­ates mag­i­cal imple­ments like scrolls, potions, runes and charms, and enchants items.
• The jew­eller is an inter­est­ing fel­low: He cre­ates gems for you and allows you to com­bine gems to cre­ate one of higher qual­ity. This Arti­san can also remove gems from items.

Read more…

So, this week I bought the Sam­sung Galaxy S (I9000) so that I too could revel in the Android glory. I did a litte research before buy­ing the phone and in the end I had to make my choice between the HTC Desire and the Sam­sung Galaxy S (I9000). I went for the Galaxy S because of the Super AMOLED, the 8 GB stor­age, and the big­ger screen. Up until an hour ago I liked what I had.

When I tried to con­nect the phone to the PC to access the SD card though, it didn’t really work. I tried chang­ing a few set­tings and I even installed Sam­sung Kies which didn’t help either. Alright, a chal­lenge then. I set my mind to the task and here’s how I finally man­aged to access the phone’s inter­nal SD card on my PC run­ning Win­dows XP. On Win­dows 7 every­thing just works so there’s no need to install or change any­thing at all.

1. Install Sam­sungs New PC Stu­dio for the dri­vers (Alter­na­tively, you can try to locate only the dri­vers some­where else on the web).
2. Go to Set­tings – About phone – USB set­tings and choose Ask on connection.
3. Go to Set­tings – Appli­ca­tions – Devel­op­ment and turn on USB debugging.
4. Con­nect the phone via USB, choose Mass stor­age from the menu, slide the noti­fi­ca­tion drawer down and select “Select to copy files to/​from your computer”.
5. Con­firm the popup by press­ing “Mount”.

Now comes the impor­tant part because this didn’t work the first time.

1. Dis­con­nect the phone in the noti­fi­ca­tion drawer und dis­con­nect the USB cable.
2. Go to Set­tings – Appli­ca­tions – Devel­op­ment and turn off USB  debugging.
3. Con­nect the phone again as out­lined above and now every­thing should work normally.

That’s how I got my Galaxy S work­ing. Every­thing else I tried did noth­ing at all – and I lit­er­ally searched through lots of forums. As long as there’s a solu­tion I don’t mind. Sure, it sucks big time but at least I didn’t have to con­tact sup­port and wait days or weeks for a solution.

A few days ago I had to check out lots of PDFs and I never liked the Adobe Reader that much. I also have a dis­like for the Foxit Reader and while the Nitro PDF Reader has its uses it’s not exactly small, it’s still beta, and if you don’t like the rib­bon user infer­face you won’t be happy with it. I dis­carded Suma­tra PDF because of it’s very, very min­i­mal­is­tic user inter­face and Cool PDF Reader because I got a few error mes­sages with dif­fer­ent PDFs.

Per­fect PDF Reader 6 was too big as was the excel­lent PDF-​​XChange Viewer. By now I was ready to go with the PDF-​​XChange Viewer despite its size but then I stum­bled over a PDF reader called STDU Viewer. It’s small, it’s blaz­ingly fast, it opened every PDF I threw at it, and it fea­tures tabs. Absolutely fan­tas­tic! Exactly what I was look­ing for! I would rec­om­mend this viewer to ever­body look­ing for a small but effi­cient PDF reader.

The Green Hor­net trailer is sweep­ing the blo­gos­phere as it has been made avail­able for pub­lic con­sump­tion. Slated for release in Jan­u­ary 2011 the film stars Seth Rogen as the title char­ac­ter and Jay Chou as his manser­vant Kato. The Green Hor­net will also fea­ture Cameron Diaz and Chrisoph Waltz. While I like Rogen he wouldn’t have been my first choice for this movie so I guess this should make it interesting.

Unfor­tu­nately, the trailer doesn’t look very remark­able. I had to laugh a bit though, so let’s hope for the best. I’m con­fi­dent Rogen will get the part of Britt Reid right but I’m not so sure about the other part. Well, we’ll have to wait until the movie is released, but until then, enjoy the trailer:

PlaySta­tion Plus
© 2010, Sony

Dur­ing E3 Sony announced that it will launch a new pre­mium sub­scrip­tion ser­vice called PlaySta­tion Plus on June 29th. The PlaySta­tion Net­work as we know it will still be free to join and all the cur­rent fea­tures will remain free. PlaySta­tion Plus expands on the ser­vice already in place and offers loads of con­tent to sub­scribers. Start­ing on June 29th Sony will offer a one year or 90-​​day mem­ber­ship from PlaySta­tion Store.

As an incen­tive they throw in a full copy of Lit­tleBig­Planet if you sign up for a one year mem­ber­ship between June 29th and August 3rd. The one year sub­scrip­tion will be avail­able for €49.99 while three months will cost you €14.99. What do we get for our money?

Sony says that mem­bers will get their hands on at least four games a month at no extra charge. That sounds good but the four games will be com­prised of one PSN game, two minis and one PS one clas­sics. Sub­scribers also get pre­mium avatars and dynamic themes each month as well as dis­counts on loads of PlaySta­tion Store con­tent. The dis­counts will change each month as well.

The pre­mium fea­ture also allows for full game tri­als. Mem­bers can down­load a full copy of a game and play it for a cer­tain amount of time as if they owned it. The time­frame depends on the game but you should have approx­i­mately one hour to check out the game. If you decide to buy the game, your progress and tro­phies will all be unlocked so there’s no need to start again.

The most use­ful perk, how­ever, seems to be what Sony calls auto­matic down­load. Sub­scribers can set their PS3 to auto­mat­i­cally receive game and firmware updates, and down­load game demos. All you have to do is to set the time when you want to receive them and your PS3 will wake up and down­load every­thing. That sounds really use­ful to me.

Check out PlaySta­tion Plus and see for your­self. You need at least ver­sion 3.40 of the PS3 sys­tem soft­ware to make it work. I think that’s just what I need. Per­haps updates will get a bit faster then.