With a little help from the internet I figured out how to automatically send a Bcc (blindcopy) of each outgoing e-mail from Apple’s Mail.app (the standard OS X Mail Program) to an e-mail address of my choice (there is a standard setting for sending a copy to the sender address, which is not what I wanted — I like having a copy of everything in my gmail account). As usually, you can do anything you like using the Terminal to change the default properties of the program.

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A fascinating article which I found through the Valuscience Blog of my friends at Magic in Stanford is titled „Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?“. The authors, Timothy Mousseau, a US-based evolutionary biologist, and Anders Møller, a Danish biologist, basically debunk the myth that already after a relatively (for standards of nuclear waste and pollution) short period of time, the „Chernobyl Exclusion Zone“ has become almost a national park’s worth of happy wildlife. The article is very long and narrative in tone, though, so here are some remarkable findings of my skimming.

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It must be old news for some, because the comic is actually from 2008, but I laughed very hard and at the same time felt it says a lot about our world in many ways. Oh well, here it is, thanks to XKCD:

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I sometimes have free time at my hands right now to read things that have been slumbering in the depths of my computer for a long time. And I rediscovered „The Devil’s Dictionary“, composed around 1900 by Ambrose Bierce and available for free in a horrible text format on Project Gutenberg. As one of my early ventures into search and replace with regular expressions and into LaTeX, I created a nicely typeset version of that, hereby to be put into the public domain. And some of my favorite definitions from it right here:

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Via ZEITonline twitter: Sehen, was in Wikipedia gerade verbessert wird (ziemlich exotisches Zeug mittlerweile, trotzdem ein erhebendes Gefühl, dem Wissen eine Weile beim Wachsen zuzuschauen):

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As somebody who is often annoyed with the role cell phones have taken on in our lives, I have been surprised a couple times recently when reading about the role of cell phones in developing countries. A recent NYTimes article about Nokias involvement with „emerging markets“ makes me feel especially ambivalent about it.

Without much profit so far, Nokia seems to be pursuing especially farmers and small entrepreneurs, offering them low-cost subscription services about market prices, weather forecasts and other information apparently very valuable to them:

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Wie die ZEIT berichtet ging gerade ein großer Feldtest mit Elektroautos von BMW (in Gestalt des Mini-E) zu Ende. Die Erprobung sei fast schon überraschend positiv verlaufen, so haben sich die Testfahrer selbst ohne die für die Zukunft vorgesehene Elektro-Infrastruktur kaum eingeschränkt gefühlt. Allerdings war das Elektroauto oft Zweitwagen, und die Erprobung lief in großen Städten. Zu kaufen soll das erste Serienauto mit Elektroantrieb schon 2013 sein.

Um von unterwegs mit den Liebsten daheim in Kontakt zu bleiben bietet sich natürlich Skype an. Aber nicht jeden erreicht man ohne weiteres am Computer. Schon vor längerer Zeit hatte ich entdeckt, dass mein Telefonanschluss zu Hause (wie vermutlich die meisten heutzutage) alle Anrufe übers Internet schickt. Und überlegt, dass es dann ja eigentlich egal sein sollte, von wo aus die Anrufe starten. Ist es auch, aber als ich mich das letzte Mal damit beschäftigt hatte war es unglaublich kompliziert, das alles einzurichten. Nicht mehr! Mit der neuesten Version von X-Lite (Mac und Windows) war nach einer Minute der erste Anruf nach Hause gestartet. Über meine Flatrate natürlich…

Mit Hilfe der einer Anleitung von bennyn.de hier die Schritte, um mit X-Lite 4 über 1&1 zu telefonieren:

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… I hope This is me trying to get facebook comments back into my blog to have some consistency there. Hope it works. I’m using WordBooker now, after having the hardest time deciding between this and WPBook, I wasn’t even really able to tell the differences, and both settings are a pain. In the end, setting up a new application for WPBook was what made me go with WordBooker for now…

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Upon happy arrival in Glasgow I had to discover that my favorite news satirist Stephen Colbert cannot be accessed from the UK — wow! Hadn’t expected that he would take making fun of old Great Britain to that level! (actually, of course, this has to do with licensing stuff). I had been tempted to try and use one of the infamous „youtube proxies“, but they never worked for me. Today, through a forum of Colbert fans, I discovered the service „Hotspot Shield“ that actually does.

I’d usually be skeptical of free services like that, but my trust is increased after seeing that the program is also featured by German software site „Chip“. And by that fact that I can see how they make money: by adding ads to videos you watch using them, which I suppose is the de-facto main use for the thing.

By getting rid of the stupid „this content is not available in your country“ notes in youtube and elsewhere, I think this is one important step back to the free web, and to leaving country borders behind you when you log on. At least as long as all content is available in the US…