Snippets of Hendrik Christian Daily Life

Here’s a fun little flickr gallery of “transparent desktop screens”. Users take a picture of whatever lies directly behind their displays, crop them accordingly, set the picture as their new wallpaper, and take a picture of the whole set up. Ultimately a lot of time spent on something that only works if you don’t move the computer at all, it’s a novel little visual trick nonetheless (and not Photoshopped, either.) If nothing else, it might give you some inspiration for fun desktop wallpapers of your own. Or you could use someone else’s and pretend to be on another desk altogether.

See them all at Transparent Desktop Screens Gallery. [via Gizmodo]

Posted at 02:16 pm by hendrikch
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First thing first, Google has recently announced plans to double the amount of storage space in Gmail to 2GB. The increase appears to have already begun. Mine now is 1103 MB and increasing by the minute. Only 5 minutes ago it was 1100 MB.

Second thing, since today's April Fool, so, I don't know if everything will be back to 1000 MB tomorrow morning. We'll see.

And oh, now it's 1105 MB.

Update: If you go to Gmail's homepage (you need to sign out first if you are signed in), you'll see their top secret Infinity+1 storage plan with a counter of the storage space they are giving now. Also, they now support Rich Text formatting for email, no more plain text, hahaha.... at last... *excited* To see what has just been launched by Google, check Gmail's What's New page. For my space, now it's 1112 MB.

Update 2: It seems Gmail space is increasing at a rate of 10.24 KB per second. That's exactly 0.01 MB per second. Going at that rate, we will hit roughly 1413 MB by midnight Singapore time. Now it's at 1138 MB.

Update 3: Now we have passed the 2048 MB (2 GB) mark, Google continues to give us more email space, albeit in much slower rate now. If I don't count wrongly, it's roughly 0.1 KB per 3 seconds, equals to 2.88 KB per minute. Interestingly, this calculates to 1 GB in one year. How about that? By 1 April 2006, I reckon, our Gmail space would have been 3072 MB.

Incidentally, this is my 200th post in my blog, since almost one year ago, 18 April 2004. Averaging one post every two days, not bad.

Posted at 03:21 pm by hendrikch
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Continuing yesterday's installing spree, here are few more software I installed last night.

WinRAR - Open .RAR files
TweakXP Pro - tweak many settings in Windows to my heart's content.
FlashGet - so many downloads, so little time, this download manager can split your download up to 10 parts and download them simultaneously.
Logitech MouseWare - utility for my Logitech mouse.
Nero 6 Reloaded - CD/DVD burning utility. Been using Nero for couple of years now.

In addition, I also disabled unnecessary system services in order to make my system run faster. Taking a cue from BlackViper's Windows XP Service Pack 2 Service Configuration page, I disabled quite a number of services, and save close to 100 MB of memory during Windows load. Worth your 15 minutes, but please be aware of the risk. Do not disable services which you don't understand.

Posted at 09:59 am by hendrikch
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As I am installing new software to my PC, I will post here and let you know, just in case you find something interesting. Without further ado, here they are:

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2005 - Antivirus, which according to CNET, is better than Norton and McAfee
ZoneAlarm 5.5 - the best firewall software out there. You need it to protect your machine from intruders.
Opera 8.0 - my favorite browser above all, though Firefox is also a good contender.
Copernic Desktop Search 1.2 - The Search Engine for your PC. How about being able to search any file on your machine faster than you can blink?
Microsoft Money 2005 - finance management software.
MSN Messenger 7.0 Beta - needless to say, complete with Messenger Plus! 3.5
ACDSee 7.0 - fast photo viewer and manager. Some may consider Picasa or Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Acronis TrueImage 8 - disk imaging software. backup my system, just in case.
Adobe Reader 7.0 - everyone need this.
Microsoft Office 2003 - everyone should need this as well. I installed Word, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote.
Winzip 9.0 - de facto compression software. Some may consider WinRAR or some other software, doesn't really matter, it's just that I have been using Winzip for ages.
pdfFactoryPro - print any document to PDF format. No need for full-fledged Adobe Acrobat.
PowerToys for Windows XP - I installed TweakUI and PowerToy Calculator.
Microsoft ActiveSync - to connect my Pocket PC to my desktop.
Daemon Tools and arniWORX extension - mount an ISO image as a virtual CD drive.
UltraEdit - call it advanced Notepad

That's all for now. I think I'm going to install few more apps on my PC tonight, will let you posted when I do so.

Posted at 09:03 pm by hendrikch
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It was 12.15 AM shortly past midnight, I was on my chair, in front of my computer in my room. Suddenly, I felt I was moving and "spinning". I thought, am I drunk? headache? or it's just my chair which moved? Seconds later, my roommate asked me, "Did you feel something?". At the moment I said "yeah", we know something happened. Apparently, it was a massive earthquake 8.7 Richter Scale west of Sumatra. This morning, I read up to 2000 people died from this latest mother-nature-phenomenon. Let's pray and hope for all those people.

Posted at 09:25 am by hendrikch
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Question: how harmful can reinstalling Windows Media Player 10 be?
Answer: Irrecoverable system

Sunday morning, I plugged in my CF card using a card reader, intending to copy new songs from Media Player to it, so I could listen to songs on my way to church yesterday. But, when I selected my CF card in "Sync" section of WMP10, it said: "A null reference was passed from the stub". What???!!! Okay, try again, same error message, plugged out card reader, plugged back in, nothing changed. I quickly browsed through Media Player newsgroup at Microsoft, to find that there are few people who encounter this problem, with no apparent solution, except reinstalling WMP10. Okay, sounds good I think, since a lot of software problems can be solved simply by reinstalling it. So, I went to Microsoft website, downloaded a new copy of WMP10, and let the installation ran in the background, while I was chatting to a friend. Seconds later, my screen blanked, three LED indicators on my keyboard blinked, and I heard a beep from casing's speaker, indicating that the system has just rebooted itself. Totally clueless on what's going on, I simply waited for my Windows to load back. To my horror, it refused to. It only went as far as the logon screen, and rebooted after that. Confused, I tried few more times. Same thing, Windows rebooted before I could logon to Windows.

Troubleshooting time. I rebooted my Windows, hit F8 when it loaded to get Advanced Options Menu, selected "Load last known good configuration". This should save me I think, wrong. It didn't help. Last known good configuration hit the same problem. Next, I tried "Disabled automatic restart" in order to see the blue screen which I hoped to give me more clues on what happened. It gave me STOP 0x8E. That's all. Not helping at all. Next, I tried "Safe mode with Networking". This usually works. It didn't. Oh no, what has WMP10 done to my system? Started to panic a bit, I tried "Safe mode". Nope, not even a glimpse of anything than black background with white text so far on my screen. This started to look ugly; I put in Windows XP with SP2 CD, loaded it, set up Windows XP, agree to its license, and hit "R" to repair existing Windows installation. Waited 15 mins, it rebooted to load Windows. To my surprise, it hit the same concrete block, refused to load my Windows beyond its boot up screen. Furious, I thought I would just roll back my machine to WinXP SP1 era by restoring my image created using Acronis True Image. I took out my DVD wallet, nooooo... the backup DVD was not there? DVD backups for all other machines I have was there, but not for that desktop's backup image. Okay, don't panic, I think it should be in my portable hard drive. I connected it to my friend's PC, and to my amazement, "Backup Images" in my portable hard drive was empty. Things are getting from bad to worse.

Well, with half an hour left before I must leave for church, I didn't have much choice. So, I deleted my Windows, yes deleted, and install a clean Windows. Can't believe my luck, especially after knew it was caused "simply" by installing Windows Media Player 10. To be fair, I don't think it's WMP10's fault, but it so happened that other problems decided to gather to cripple my Windows at the time when I reinstalled WMP10.

Now, since I have a clean Windows, it's time to install sooooooo many things (again). I think I will post on what software I will install on my machine, what customization, and what tweaks to get my machine faster and better. Hope this experience will serve as a lesson to me, to store my backup properly. The lesson for me here is not to do backup, coz I do backup my machine, it's just that it so happened I didn't keep the backup for this machine properly that I couldn't get back online in 15 mins time. Will post over the next few days what I am doing to my system to suit myself.

Posted at 05:12 pm by hendrikch
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It has been sometime since I last posted a song's lyric here. So, getting a new song from Irving's blog, here is a lyric of my favorite song at the moment.

Along life's road
There will be sunshine and rain
Roses and thorns, laughter and pain
And 'cross the miles
You will face mountains so steep
Deserts so long and valleys so deep
Sometimes the Journey's gentle
Sometimes the cold winds blow
But I want you to remember
I want you to know

(Chorus)
You will never walk alone
As long as you have faith
Jesus will be right beside you all the way
You may feel you're far from home
But home is where He is
And He'll be there down every road
You will never walk alone

The path will wind
And you will find wonders and fears
Labors of love and a few falling tears
Across the years
There will be some twists and turns
Mistakes to make and lessons to learn
Sometimes the journey's gentle
Sometimes the cold winds blow
But I want you to remember where ever you may go

(Repeat Chorus)

Jesus knows your joy, Jesus knows your need
He will go the distance with you faithfully

(Repeat Chorus)

Posted at 11:31 am by hendrikch
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How long have we all been waiting for Microsoft to increase the limit of contacts MSN Messenger can hold per address? Many months at least, years for some of us.

Well, finally our wish is their command - they have increased the limit to double what it was previously. You will not need to install any newer versions of MSN Messenger for this change to take place - you should be able to add more people immediately.

From Mess.be

Posted at 02:47 am by hendrikch
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HAPPY Good Friday and EASTER everyone. Hope you all have a great and blessed weekend.

Posted at 12:00 pm by hendrikch
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Just if you are curious how many people visits my blog everyday, here it is.

Posted at 11:24 am by hendrikch
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