Xmarks bookmarks/favorites

Are you are reinstalling your computer or has it crashed and you can’t retrieve your old bookmarks. Then you can save your bookmarks (favorites) for once and for all? The Firefox add-on “Xmarks” is your tool to do this.

You can even make different bookmark-lists for different workspaces (home, office, etc). This tool even syncs your newly added bookmarks.

You can find this add-on on http://www.xmarks.com/ or on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410

LinkedIn button on your website

I found out that it’s difficult to find the LinkedIn-profile-button that LinkedIn uses for members who want to promote their LinkedIn profile. So here is the link to the page where you can generate this button-code for your website or profile. https://www.linkedin.com/profile?promoteProfile=

If you are a member of the Dutch networking site Hyves.nl you can add the button to your profile information like the following code:

[gadget]View Derk Braakman's profile on LinkedIn[/gadget]

That results in the following button:

View the profile of Derk Braakman on LinkedIn

How to Rip a DVD to harddisk and make a ‘.avi’ from it

What do you have to do to extract a dvd to your harddrive.

  1. If you have a protected DVD you can download dvddecrypter and install it.
  2. Decypt your DVD to your local harddisk.
  3. Download the program called Staxrip and install, it’s a opensource tool.
  4. Take the .vob files from the dvd directory and convert them to .avi files(Xvid codec).
  5. if you start the conversion the program will ask to install some extra conversion tools when you select to convert, these are all for the good purpose. I usually convert my movies to Xvid-codec-avi. This is widely used, so no problem for everyone to play on there pc.

Good luck and no converting of any illigal stuff…

Fridge Magnets

While i was surfing the internet i found a cool online application Flash. It’s based on an oldschool family toy: FRIGDE MAGNETS, see this link for creating your own words with other people who are online (real temporary art). Check this link for making your fridge magnet message in an e-mail message. It’s like a cool way to communicate.
Just like a link i have found a few years ago, “letter james“.

OpenSource alternatives for Photoshop and Illustrator

I’m a big fan and regular user of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Still on some occasions/places you don’t have this software and you don’t want to buy it right then. There is an solution for this problem: it’s “OpenSource software”, you can use it freely and you can install it on your machine very easy.The only problem is that you will have to find out how the program works and look for the regular tasks like cropping or resizing. Still nowadays you can use a PC or Mac without any puchase of any software. And this is something that will grow even more in the following years.

The program that I found for doing the same tasks as in Photoshop is Gimp. The program that I found for Illustrator is Inkscape.

The only disadvantage that I found in Gimp was that in Gimp the Windows are not grouped in one taskbar button but have a button for every window that you open. Maybe this is something they will adjust in the future.

Apple iPhone deviceid

For the people who have and Apple Iphone and need their deviceID of their phone and iTunes won’t provide this directly, I found out that you can find this id by going to the following folder on their PC: C:/Users/XX_username_XX/AppData/Roaming/Apple Computer/Lockdown. I don’t know what the path is on a mac. Buth i’m sure you can find it in the same way.

IE6 and IE7 on Windows Vista

I’m running Vista on my laptop for work. For testing older versions of browsers I would use MultipleIEs (http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE). But the problem was that this program would not run properly on Vista. So I began searching for another option to test an older version of IE. Well for this I found a solution in software from Microsoft (for free). They have a virtual machine called virtualPC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/default.mspx) and with that they have a available image which is valid till January first at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70868. After this period I don’t know what Microsoft will do. We will see.