Happy Birthday Kiwi!

If there is a special day, it’s today. Happy Birthday Kiwi!

Some German for dummies

For being prepared to my December's adventure and the rest of my life, I bought a pocket-size useful German phrases book. But it is not enough to learn. It's that kind of books only for asking and don't understand the answers, good for tourists. Finally I bought a book for learning German called “German easy essential”. 

Very nice structured, with this I feel I can learn.

PortableApps – Mines-Perfect

I’m an addicted of Mines sweeper since I started to use Windows. I don’t consider myself a pro, just someone who likes challenges and keep my record was an obsession in all the machines at home. I also programmed one version in Pascal and C++ using the recursive algorithm and a lot of creativity to paint the board without using GUI.

PortableApps suite brings this version, Mines-Perfect. The most fascinating thing is that you can change the shape of the cells. This one is my current record in hexagonal shape:

Maybe someday I could be included in the world ranking (http://www.minesweeper.info/worldranking.html), but I have to prepare a strategy for that.

Vocabulary - Days, Months, Seasons

The story of stuff with Annie Leonard

My best friend sent me this link. Recycling is more than only classify garbage or turn of lights, it’s a big change in our lifestyle.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Here is the first part of it:

PortableApps - Toucan

Some posts ago, I was looking for a backup solution, and while testing PortableApps I found Toucan. Toucan is an open source program to backup your information. Some of the features include synchronization, backup and encryption.

Sincerely, I didn’t test it too much, because at first sight doesn’t look too much efficient. My first test failed, I configured a backup profile and performed it, but as the USB drives change their letters when connected to Windows, I could not make it work between my laptop and PC, and that discouraged me to continuing trying.

My second try was successful but not amazing, only copied and zipped my contents. About synchronization and remembering my experiences, I prefer don’t try it until I test deeply the backup option.

Copy-and-paste is still my backup strategy.

Vocabulary - Colours

Colours are very important to describe things. In this chart are the basic ones, I hope add some other ones in the future. The bad news is I couldn’t find “turquoise” in Japanese, so if somebody know it, please share.

Color (Español)

Colours (English)

Farbe (Deutsch)

Iro (Nihongo)

FOSS

I like FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) as every IT guy, but after several discussions about how good or bad could be using them in an enterprise environment, I listed these conclusions:

• People need software. It’s in some way unfair that we have to spent money in hardware and then in expensive software. Fortunately, nowadays we can find good free software.
• Can companies use FOSS? Yes, but they should answer this question first: Are they ready for that? IT areas provide services to end-user areas and those services are provided according SLAs, for that reason the IT infrastructure should have SLAs with their providers and need specialized support. Once I heard that community of free software is better than a company giving 24x7 technical support, because you always can find some community member connected and he/she can help you. But, you know, “can” and “must” are different words. Also your SLAs could push you, and you don’t want to feel unprotected and alone in that moment. 
• The most know software is the most hackeable one. All the systems have holes in security, but if the software has massive distribution (like Windows), it becomes in a candidate of hacking.

Please, don’t misunderstand this list. As I said at the beginning I like FOSS because really help people to express and contribute with the development and progress If open source didn’t exists, programmers should be reinventing the wheel everytime.

Every change impact our lifes, the only difference is the degree of preparation we have.

I want to give my contribution to the free software, I still looking for a good idea that are not already implemented.

Vocabulary - Numbers

I bought a pocket book with useful phrases in German, because I have interest in learn it. The thing I like most from that book is that it organizes vocabulary in topics. Following that, I choose a basic topic for my next vocabulary chart: numbers. Also I added a language, Japanese (ja). Enjoy it!

Driving – First lesson

Not so bad. It was only one hour and I remembered almost everything. Of course I need more practice but I think I’m in a good way. I hope don’t be too much confident about this. Now the question is, when am I going to take the test?

Free photos for websites - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tamagoyaki

My mom had a rectangular frying pan for frying… rectangular eggs? Nope. She used to prepared tamagoyaki.

And today was one of those “no food at night” days, but I didn’t give up. I was watching TV while thinking what I could do with only eggs, and during my zapping something catched my eye. That was a Japanese TV show where teach how to make tamagoyaki and my cooking spirit woke up.

Sadly, the frying pan is totally ruined (thanks oxide), so I had to improvise with a standard circular frying pan.

I hope next time try with spinach and take some pictures.

Driving

Finally, after a lot of procrastination, I signed to a driving course. After 10 years without practice, I resume my learning process of “how to drive a car and do not fail trying” in order of get my driving license and left my pedestrian life... Don’t wish me luck; better reserve this to the pedestrians. LOL

At the moment I’m reading the traffic laws using my N95. I installed Mobipocket eBook Reader and downloaded the rules in PDF format and transformed it with Mobipocked eBook Creator. It’s a nice way to use idle time for reading everywhere.

PortableApps

Some days ago I tested “WD Sync” by DMailer, which offers synchronization of your personal data and transport your environment (wallpaper, e-mail client, Internet browser data, etc.) with your portable disc, letting you travel with only your USB portable drive, connecting it to any PC and then come back to home with your modified data. Sounds wonderful, but I still do not trust on the sync mechanism (in facts I lost data) and prefer check my e-mail using web pages.

But, today I saw the light! I found PortableApps, an interesting and open source alternative to the eternal problem about transport your information.

In my experience, this is closest thing to transport your computer. I’ll continue testing in and discovering new features. With some luck, it’ll be the solution to my adventure in December without transporting my dear laptop.