Recently I wrote about tips to increase your productivity by applying some “Getting Things Done” strategies and I suggested To Do for managing your tasks from inside OS X’s Dashboard.
Today I found another tools that might do the trick even better.

Organized from islayer combines a note taking application, a calendar, and a To Do list manager within a single Dashboard widget.

It uses iCal’s database for storage, thus a task entered from Organized is available in iCal an vice versa. It also supports multiple calendars, so you can choose to list only your private or your professional appointments, or appointments from all calendars aggregated together.

It is labeled as version 1.0 — so it’s not a beta — but still lacks some essential features:
For example the calendar can only be viewed but not edited from within the widget (although you can easily do this via an iCal-link to that event).
It’s clearly a benefit over To Do, that you not only see your tasks, but also appointments, or notes. However, I still prefer To Do’s clean and uncluttered interface that can even handle huge task lists. Organized fails at this point, as long entries aren’t wrapped into multiple lines and the window can’t be resized horizontally.

I hope they fix that in an upcoming release. Leopard is required, by the way.

PS: The guys over at islayer also crafted the iStat series for monitoring your system’s load, memory usage, temperature, and other nonformation about your computer. Beautiful tools, but I find them unnecessary, as my MacBook has a unmistakable acoustic system load indicator… :-/

Via ma.gnolia.com social bookmarking.

Premiere auf lipflip.org: Ein Gastposting von Marco, der auf einer Webseite eines RWTH Instituts eine kreative Zugangskontrolle entdeckt hat, die nicht nur unbrauchbar ist, sondern gleichzeitig den Datenschutz mit Füßen tritt. Viel Spass.

Bei dem Versuch mir ein paar alte Klausuren auf der Webseite eines RWTH Institutes anzusehen, öffnete sich unerwartet eine JavaScript-Eingabeaufforderung mit der Bitte, Nachname und Matrikelnummer zur Authentifizierung anzugeben.

Da ich jedoch keinen Login für die Seite besaß, musste ich mir was einfallen lassen um dennoch die Downloads ansehen zu können. Ich beschloss daher mir das JavaScript zur Kennwortabfrage mal anzusehen, dessen Speicherort mit der HTML-Quelltext der Seite verriet.

ROT 13+1

In dem Skript standen neben etwas JavaScript-Code ziemlich viele Kennwörter in verschlüsselter Form. Dankenswerter Weise hatte der Autor des Skriptes den Algorithmus mitgeliefert, mit dem das eingegebene Passwort verschlüsselt und anschließend überprüft wird:

I’m not that much of a television junkie and I prefer a good movie or an interesting TED talk over the ad-bloated junk you find on television most of the time. I don’t even have a televion and I usually don’t miss it. But sometimes — on very rare occasions — there is something one might watch. May it be some world-changing news event or that unbelievable documentary with Betty Botterblom. That’s when Internet-based television via Zattoo.com comes into play.

Zattoo.com is a free internet television service that streams many normal television channels right to your Windows, OS X, or Linux machine. It’s is absolutely legal, as zattoo has contracts with the stations it streams. On the other hand not that many channels are available yet. In Germany, for example, the complete public service broadcasting is available, but none of the big commercial stations.

The service is available in many west european countries (i.e. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and the channels you can watch depend on your location (e.g. Pro7 is available for people from Switzerland, but not for people with an german IP address).

The Zattoo-Player has moderate hardware requirements, is really easy to use, but lacks some (unnecessary?) features like recording, time shifting, etc., and you need a broadband connection with at least 500kbit/s to use it.

The quality was… okay… but I noticed a few dropouts from time to time. That’s not surprising as Zattoo is based on Peer2Peer technology: Your machine will re-stream parts of the content back into the net.

Go ahead and give Zattoo.com a try. But always keep in mind:

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

I’m using Google’s Webmaster Tools from time to time to make sure that google crawls and lists my site as expected.
The current list of search terms and associated google positions really made me laugh…

“Penis” is hidden in an image description of this article. But why is my site listed exactly at position 666 for this term?