Month: May 2006

I was told this trick by one of the Starbucks employees. Place caramel waffle on the top of the cup with hot coffee. In a few moments, the heat from the coffee will melt the caramel, making the waffle even more delicious.

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-05-06_POTD/

After paying close attention to the my Flickr badge, I noticed that the selected pictures weren’t as random as I’d like. A quick search on Flickr support forums revealed that I am not alone. Something is wrong with their random number generator.

Gladly, there is a workaround. It’s somewhat painful, but gives far better results. I have changed the badge code to select random images from all my public pictures tagged with “badge“. There are only a few at the moment, but I’ll be adding more soon.

Today I attended the second lesson of Greek language (I wrote about the first one here. And don’t worry, I’m not going to cover every lesson here). We’ve polished our alphabet and reading skills. We were also given a bunch of new words and phrases to learn.

Overall, it goes easier than I thought it would. We’re going at exactly the right pace so far – fast enough not to be boring, but slow enough for me to understand and note everything.

The course consists of three parts. We are now in for the first one. If we are to have two 1.5 hours lessons per week, then it’ll take us two and a half years to complete all three parts. We’ll be speaking perfect Greek by then. Somehow I don’t feel that we’ll last that long though.

George, our techer, is an experienced fellow. He says he’s been teaching Greek for 32 years. A lot of those years were spent with foreigners. But he also deals with kids. He now works for some government school too.

For me, the most difficult part of the course is writiing. And it’s not the alphabet. For the last few years, I’ve been using computer almost exclusively. The only thing I know how to write is my signature. For everything else I used to type. I am re-learning to write now.

Also, I realised that my memory is not as sharp as it used to be. The “I can look it up” approach to most of the problems that I face daily doesn’t help. Even though we’ve been given only a few words and phrases, I can’t memorize them off the list. I’ll be making cards one of these days. I remember back at the days when I was learning English, cards were the most helpful technique for loading words and phrases into my brain.

The technique is really simple. Make a bunch of small cards – cut the A4 paper into pieces. Write a word or phrase on one side of the card and the appropriate translation on another side. Shuffle the cards and put them in your left pocket. Whenever you don’t have to concentrate on something else, draw a card out of the pocket and read what it says. If you can guess what’s on the other side, do so, check that you are correct, and then place the card into your right pocket. If you made a mistake or couldn’t remember, then put the card back into your left pocket. Once you don’t have any cards in your left pocket, start again from your right pocket. This time it will go faster. When you’re done, make a new bunch of cards with new words and phrases.

This technique helps to learn things in separation. If you have a few words on a piece of paper, than you brain associates them with one another, like “this word was near that word”. If you use cards, you get things at random. Also with cards you’re learning back and forward translations. One card you can get with one language up, another – with another language. Writing words and their translations on the cards also helps to memorize things.

Once you get used to making cards and moving them around, you can really learn a whole lot of new stuff. It’s really quick learning.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am trying out a different approach to feed reading. I am using offline aggregator from KDE – akregator.

It works pretty good for me. I can even say that it works better than I expected. All my feed reading is now done only on my notebook (which is my primary computer now anyway). I can better rearrage feeds in folders, subfolders, subfolders, subfolders, etc. I can better control the archiving of items – per feed, with time based history or quantity based history. I can refresh all feeds manually, or one by one, or do it automatically, with custom settings per feed.

It all looks great, but I need more.

Most importantly I miss tagging. It looks like it will be implemented in the next version of akregator, but I need it now. Urgent. C’mon!

I found out today, that I can delete items, leaving for archives only those that I might need – useful feature, but a dialogue asking me if I am really sure that I want to delete keeps coming up. I don’t see any way of disabling it. Boring.

Marking is too simplistic. I mark feeds either as read/unread and important. I hope that tagging will sort this out, because I really need more options.

Notes are missing. I would really appreciate if I could leave a small note explaining why I saved the item. Even better if I could have a yellow marker functionality to draw attention straight to the important place in the item.

Maintenance tools are non-existing. There are no statistics at all (how many feeds do I have, how many archives items, how many read/unread items, etc). I can’t find dead feeds. I can’t search for broken feeds.

Handy tools are missing. I can’t email an item or bookmark it from akregator. I have to open the webpage and to it all from there. I can’t save images – only print them.

What is even worse is that there is no plugin infrastructure. The only two ways for me to expand the functionality is to either patch the source code of akregator or do some dcop trickery. Neither one of these excites me.

Hopefully with all RSS and KDE hype, akregator will get some activity. I’m really waiting…