Blog has been moved to martinstutenglish.wordpress.com

In order to consolidate my 3 separate blogs, I have moved all my English language blogs to http://martinstutenglish.wordpress.com. The content of this blog has been imported there, so you can replace your bookmarks and subscriptions

Blog has been moved to martinstutenglish.wordpress.com

In order to consolidate my 3 separate blogs, I have moved all my English language blogs to http://martinstutenglish.wordpress.com. The content of this blog has been imported there, so you can replace your bookmarks and subscriptions.

Comparing Functionality of Blogging Platforms

With accounts at posterous.com, blogger.com and wordpress.com, I need to decide on a platform. One factor in deciding is the feature set of each platform, including the android client available.

Feature	Posterous	Blogger	Wordpress
automatic posting to Twitter, other blogs, social networks	yes, many services	not possible	a few services (Twitter, Faceboox, Yahoo Updates, Messenger Connect)
search engine positioning of your posts	poor	good	best
Creating a Draft on the Mobile	click the tiny "i" to mark the post as private. Later, when on the web, edit the post options (top right in a light gray, next to media) to make the post public.	click "Save as Draft"	set status as "Draft" before saving
Editing a Draft on the Mobile	not possible	straightforward	straightforward
Drafts when Editing on the Web	Save (don't publish yet) and then click Cancel. When warned about unsaved content, accept to leave the page.	Click "Save", not "Publish Post".	While composing, set the status to "Draft".
H1, H2 headings	Not offered in the online editor. You are able to enter these codes in raw HTML view. H1 becomes right adjusted - not looking nice.	Not offered in the online editor. You are able to enter these codes in raw HTML view. Looks good.	Offered in the online rich text editor. Looks good.
Tables	Not offered in the online editor. You are able to enter these codes in raw HTML view. Looks good.	Not offered in the online editor. You are able to enter these codes in raw HTML view. Looks good.	Not offered in the online editor. You are able to enter these codes in raw HTML view. Looks bad, because THs are silently removed.

Browsing the web for information, I stumbled across a blog post by novel writer Emlyn Chand:  Which is better, WordPress or BlogSpot? See how they stack up here . The bottom line is: both have different strengths, it depends on your goal.

My Dive into the Social Web

After reading about posterous, I decided to give it a try. My first impression is, well, impressed. For a first try, I set up a site, designed to be a single source for all my blogs - admittedly, some of them started as tests. In particular, the autopost function is nice to keep all the social channels updated.

Let's see whether I manage to write more now than I did before.

Connecting a Canon Pixma ip4600 Printer to Debian Squeeze Linux

I bought that particular printer for its ability to directly print on CDs. The printer documentation says, that this needs the special driver (provided only for Windows), but still it should be able to print on standard paper from Linux.

Try 1: Plug & Play Connectivity

The Debian based Linux distributions nowadays do plug and play surprisingly well. So I gave it a try: connect the printer to a USB port, turn it on and see what happens:
A message box appeared "the ip4600 printer has been added with a text only driver". It offered "find driver", I accepted that offer, got asked for my password and voila, the printer configuration contained the ip4600_series.

Try 2: Manually Adding a Driver to CUPS

I connected my web browser to the local CUPS (https://localhost:631). The printer was there, but still with "generic text-only". Unfortunately, no search option turned out any results. So I looked into the aptitude package manager to install additional drivers.
I installed the package cups-driver-gutenprint, which pulled in ghostscript-cups.
The I chose the "add printer" dialog. Maker Canon, the model pixma ip4600 (gutenprint) was an offered choice which I chose. This created a new queue Canon_iP4600_series. I deleted the first automatic queue iP4600_series.

The first test print was a 6 page HTML file from Iceweasel (Firefox) which worked immediately.

Backup for Windows using a batch file

This batch file does a reliable backup of Windows Vista Users to an external hard drive. There will be a new directory for each day the script is run. For Windows language settings other than German, you will need to adapt the SET FULLDATE line. FULLDATE should be something like 2009_10_31.

SET TARGETPATH=F:\Sicherung
SET FULLDATE=%date:~6,4%_%date:~3,2%_%date:~0,2%
echo FULLDATE=%FULLDATE%
SET TARGET=%TARGETPATH%\%FULLDATE%
mkdir %TARGET%
rem robocopy C:\Users %TARGET% /S /V /R:0 /W:0 /PURGE
xcopy C:\Users %TARGET% /S /C /I /R /Y

ToDo Lists GTD Style with TiddlyWiki, MonkeyGTD Style

In one of my previous posts, I wrote about TiddlyWiki MPTW-Style. Back then in February I started using another TiddlyWiki variant, called MonkeyGTD, as a todo list structuring tool. I use Thinking Rock in the office and would like to have something different at home, to avoid being reminded too often of the huge backlog of work in the office.

MonkeyGTD uses the taggly tagging technique of MPTW to link tasks with projects, areas, realms etc. This way it is really easy to put your todo list into a structure. I really needed to read the documentation before starting, but I got rewarded by knowing how to arrange lots of tasks into imaginable chunks.

For my style of use, the major drawback of MonkeyGTD is the lack of sorting orders. With a dozen projects, each having several possible next actions, I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of possible next actions. I want a system that makes an educated suggestion of what to do next. MonkeyGTD has the option of starring projects and actions, but that is only a little help to me.