Alpha Core

This article is the third in a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

In this article I’ll list some system tools that I would like to give some attention. These are the ones that come in handy when things go wrong, or that keep things in order in the first place. Either that, or they perform a general-purpose task that I could be without. Here’s my selection: Read more

This article is part of a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

This time I’d like to list some image, audio and video viewing/manipulation applications that I would like to recommend. I want fast and light-weight viewers that open my files immediately but powerful full-featured editing tools for the more complex tasks: Read more

Already for a while I’m thinking about presenting a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment.

I know that there’s often a lot of alternative solutions, not necessarily worse than the ones I suggest here, but I’ll try to limit myself to one main title for every need. I have these applications installed and use most of them very often.

In this article I want to list my favorite productivity and office-related applications: Read more

If you’re not a software developer, this article will bore you immensely and it is therefore ill-advised to continue reading. If you are a software developer, it will most likely bore you as well, but at least you’re used to it then. Read more

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) program that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. You can talk to your friends using your Live Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, IRC and other accounts without the need to have lots of individual clients installed.

Today I also uninstalled mIRC (an IRC client) because I have no need for it anymore. Thanks to Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), I can now hang around on my favorite chat channels and get popup notifications when my nickname gets mentioned without needing an extra program to clutter up my system.

Pidgin is free software (GPL). For more information, visit the official website.

After a break of about one and a half years, I decided to continue learning Japanese again. For some inexplicable reason I’m immensely drawn towards this language. Maybe because of its complexity, maybe because it’s so completely different than any other language I know.

In Belgium, I did 2 years at the Centrum voor Levende Talen (CLT) in Leuven, thereby completing level A1 (Breakthrough). During my third year, I moved to Germany and put my language study on hold until now. Yesterday, I enrolled for an A2 (Waystage) course at the Volkshochschule (VHS) here in Hamburg. I’m studying hard to get back up to my level again until next week and I’m keeping my fingers crossed, because it’s not entirely sure that the course will actually take place, because that depends on the amount of people enrolling for it.

I also wanted to share some links and name some software for people learning the language as well. First of all, you have to learn Kana (hiragana and katakana). For Microsoft Windows users, you should also install the Japanese IME, so you can type Japanese on your PC. Its IME Pad (with handwriting recognition) is a really good thing to have as well! In my humble opinion, the greatest learning and dictionary tool of them all, both for Japanese as well as for Chinese, is WaKan. Among some of its great features are dictionary searches as you type, kanji lookup, stroke order and card printing. If you’re browsing the internet with Firefox or you’re using Thunderbird as your e-mail client, Rikaichan is a great add-on that adds tooltip help and dictionary word and kanji lookup when hovering over some Japanese text. Kanji-A-Day offers you a kanji, guess what.. yes, every day, so that’s another one of those things to start your day with. Furthermore, any article about Japanese is incomplete without a link to Jim Breen’s Japanese Page and finally also take a look at the Japanese Learning Suite.

I would also like to recommend the following books: as a course book I would suggest Japanese for Busy People I and II. An amazingly good book to learn your kanji is Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System. Although opinions about Heisig’s method are divided, I also suggest Remembering the Kanji 1 (here are some free sample pages). However, I don’t think you should wait with studying readings until you finish the book though! Finally, if you’re looking for a good dictionary, take a look at Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary.

As some of you might already know, I’m constantly on the move between Germany and Belgium. In order to make communications as easy and cheap as possible, I wanted people in Belgium to be able to reach me in Germany at national rates by calling a fixed-line number in Belgium. The call should get transparently redirected over the internet to Germany as follows:

I also wanted to call people in Belgium from Germany at very low costs. For them, my call seems to originate from within Belgium. Since some people already showed interest in how I set this up, I decided to write an article about this. Read more

Since almost a year ago, we’ve seen an enormous increase in popularity of the game poker, the Texas hold’ em variant to be more specific. I think it was around the time that the latest Bond movie (Casino Royale) was shown in theaters that I started to take some interest in the game. Sure, in high school we played some draw poker, but no game was ever as much fun as a regular hold ‘em one, simply for the reason that there’s a lot more interaction in this variant. The main reason for this are the ‘community cards’, a set of (eventually) five cards lying in the middle of the table that are shared by all players. Just two cards, called the ‘pocket cards’, are being dealt to every player at the beginning of every hand. These two cards are the only ones that can give you an edge over your fellow player. The community cards add a lot to the game and they offer a feeling of interaction. The game isn’t just about your hand and your luck drawing some cards anymore.

Update (October, 7th): NBC airs a great daily show called Poker After Dark and puts all episodes online for free. Watching the series is a good way to learn more about poker and to get to know some of the successful players out there. It’s really exciting and fun to watch! There are also some nice shows on Joost that are highly entertaining, e.g. the WPT (World Poker Tour) finals. Read more