Cool Wallpapers for free

Ok, today is advertising-day
If you wanted to have a nice decent, say, landscape as your desktop background  (like the one on the left) – in high quality without any tricks, just give
http://interfacelift.com/ a shot.

Those pictures are really awesome and they have various resolutions available. But you knew that one already anyway right?

Cool Icons for free

Lately I was encouraged to give a presentation in public and it was a long time ago I had to do such a thing. So I was looking around for cool eye-candy to keep my audience happy and guess what – I really found some at:

http://www.iconspedia.com/

I think those guys do a really brilliant job!
Hilarious Icons – clean and professional looking.
And the best: for FREE . No Pop-Ups ‘n crap, just the usual google adds.
Unfortunately I’ve seen the site quite unresponsive from time to time, but be patient – it’s really worth it.

Broken attachments in Apple Mail

Once in a while I seem to have broken attachments in my e-mails in Mail.app.
But when I check those e-mails with another client or webmail everything is all right.

I found out, that one can work around this issue by rebuilding the Mailbox’s Index:

Mailbox-Menu -> Rebuild (last entry)

After a couple of minutes (depending on the size of the corresponding mailbox) my attachments look alright again.

A really cool screensaver – electric sheep.

Haven’t  you heard of “electric sheep“, yet?  The fancy screen saver that turns your screen into a psychedelic
playground. The idea behind is so charming:

The very beautiful sequences of animated fractals are generated by thousands of computers in their “sleep”. Those CPU “dreams” are called (sheep) in reminiscence of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?”, which got filmed as “Blade Runner”. That rings a bell, doesn’t it?

And the best: it runs on Linux as well as on Windows and Mac!

How to check 64bit or 32bit CPU ?

Lately I stumbled upon this post on the web:

Hi All,

Any one knows the utility, which will provide info about the
CPU used in the machine is 32 bit or 64 bit ?

Thanks

I was wondering about this myself from time to time…
The good news is – in Linux you can figure that out in no
time by typing:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you can find the “lm” flag (lm for long mode) in the flag section, it’s a
64-bit machine. If not it’s most likely a 32-bit box you are dealing with.

Sophisticated Clothes Dryer

Alas, today I messed up my trousers with finest french salad dressing at lunch.
Lucky me – we have a washing machine at my work place.
But would I make it home with dry pants?

YES.
Thanks to ~100 cluster nodes blow-drying them in no time!

“What was he wearing while his trousers were blowing in the (cluster) wind?”
I hear you ask…

How to mount your ro system disk as rw again?

Sometimes your Linux boots with your system disk mounted readonly (because of some fs issues for instance).
So if you want to change stuff e.g. in /etc/fstab this becomes quite unhandy.

To get e.g. “/” writeable again, you just remount it with this one-liner:

mount -o remount,rw /

Good luck.
(This is also one of those tings, I can never remember…)

Uninstall Lotus Notes 8.5 from Mac OSX

At some point I wanted to completely erase and reinstall my Lotus Notes 8.5 installation.
Turns out, that dragging the app into the Trash is not enough – the user preferences are still kept.
But finally I found help in the IBM-Documentation-Jungle:

You can uninstall IBM^® Lotus^® Notes^® by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes using the uninstaller application supplied with the Notes install media. This preserves user data. As well, you can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Apple^® Mac OS X^® trash bin:

• Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
  • /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg
  • /Library/Receipts/xpdcoreinstaller.pkg

Note To reinstall after uninstalling, you may also need to delete the following items prior to reinstalling Notes:

Note If you installed the Notes basic configuration, rather than the standard configuration, you can uninstall the Notes basic configuration by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Mac OS X trash bin:

• /Applications/Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
• /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg

That did the trick for me.
Next time I started the installer, it had forgotten everything and started from scratch:

Dead Space

Today I learned, that there is a rather popular video game called “Dead Space”.
It seems to be one of those harsh sci-fi-horror-ego-shooters and got released in 2008.

Should I consider to buy it?
At least the main character seemed to get named after the infamous Sci-fi writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Hm.

Anyway, if this is what you are looking for you better get going this way:

http://www.wikipedia.org

Fun with Trash can in Mac OSX

I figured, that at some point – if you have BootCamp installed it might come to the case, that your trash can in the doc looks always  filled, although the trash seems to be emtpy.

If you open up a finder window, all you can see is this strange link:

I managed to work around this, by “ejecting” my BootCamp partition/drive.

Other folks have reported to get this fixed by booting from your Windows partition, right-click on the drive ->Properties ->Tools->Check Now->Automatically fix filesystem errors.

Did not test this on my own.