These short tips I’m giving every now and then are pretty well received among you. Therefore here is another one.

Google Chrome is the best browser for me currently. However its similar to a partnership. There are always things which bother you about the other one. The main flaw I see is Chrome’s internal music-player which launches upon clicking on a mp3 instead of just download it. On the internal player’s page you can download the mp3 via pressing CTRL+S (respectively the option-key on the Mac).

I’ve been looking for a really long time for a proper solution and found one which works ok.

To download a file directly, hold the ALT-key during clicking on the link. You can get used to it after a while even if its not the most beautiful solution.

I will update this entry in the future if someone pops up with a better way to handle it. I’ve got an idea for a Greasemonkey-script which might do the trick. Those can be installed directly as a Chrome-extension.

Now that the work is done, it’s time to produce some dance-music.

However it is still possible to invite your friends (if they have a googlemail-adress). You just need to share a message to the E-Mail-adress of your friend. He will get an E-Mail and the opportunity to join Google+ then.
Just look at the picture below which illustrates how its done.

If you need an invite just leave a comment here and I will add you. E-mail-adresses in comments aren’t shown so don’t fear pesky spambots!

No one knows whether Goog’ can affront the 700-million pound golliath but from my point of view it’s looking damn good. I can finally open my online DJ school with the hangout-feature

It all began in 2003 as djs4life.de. As a 14 year old boy I covered topics such as “nocturnal child molesters”. It was pure mile-long continuous text without pictures or even punctuation marks.  At this time I thought a website which looks like Fruity Loops is a great idea, today I’m smarter.

I redesigned the website in 2004. It wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, more like 1997, but at least eye disease causing anymore.

Nothing happened for almost two year. My buddy Freddy and me came up with the name Tom Thong out of boredom in our English lessons. We registered the domain, built a site around it. Our only mistake was we didn’t know which content to put on the website with the great name. So everyone had his blog on there and we ran a forum together which even had some posts. I still like Freddy’s colourful design:

I started using WordPress. Customizing only small parts of the default-template was a smart decision as the following pictures will show.

A few months later the writing-desk-era started with mind-bending results:

At some point I noticed that I’ve got the power to write content which makes sense to a few people, so I needed a design which doesn’t cause crying fits for mature beholders. Thus ‘Ali Wall’ was born which I enriched gradually with stolen elements from other websites.

A while ago I asked the designer Denise Chandler to revise the header. I didn’t wanted it to look like Boogie Nights anymore. I will continue refining it, but am satisfied for now. More important is to slim the page’s size and load-time and of course, creating amazing content.

Here’s a picture of the current design, so people checking this post in 2014 will know why I was happy with the design at a certain time when there were no bog rolls or broo forms.

Dropbox has become one of the favourite solutions to sync files between multiple devices due to its elegance and strong API. The free account offers 2GB of free space, but you can extend it up to 10.25GB. Basically you’re getting 8GB by creating referrals by yourself. I’ll explain an easy way to do this by yourself.

A word of warning: Using this method to enlarge your Dropbox might get you banned. In my opinion for a good reason. Dropbox needs to pay the bills for the S3-service they use too. I’m only posting this information because I think that the pro-accounts should become a lot cheaper. Don’t talk in the comments whether using this method is justified or not – it’s certainly NOT!

1. Login to your Dropbox-Account

2. Go to https://www.dropbox.com/referrals and write your Share Link or post it somewhere online where you can easily access it

3. Download VirtualBox and an Ubuntu Live-CD iso-image

4. Install VirtualBox and create an Virtual Machine for Ubuntu

5. Start the Virtual Machine and choose the Ubuntu.iso in the dialog-window

6. It will now boot the from the CD, once asked for it choose “Try Ubuntu….” as in the picture below

7. Once Ubuntu is up and running, start Firefox,go to the location where you stored the referral link or write it in the adress-bar

8. Create a new Dropbox-Account. The email-adress doesn’t have to exist

9. You get to a page where you’ll have to choose the Ubuntu-version of Dropbox you want to install, Click on ‘Ubuntu (x86 .deb)’

10. Open the file after the download and click on ‘Install Package’ in the new window

11. During the installation another window will open, click on ‘Start Dropbox’

12. Dropbox will finally open, check ‘I already have an account’ and insert the email-adress and password you registered with

13. If it was correct you just got another 250MB space on your Dropbox-account (I saw a notification on my host-pc which was also logged on in Dropbox)

14. Close the Virtual-Machine

15. Right-Click on the virtual-machine, click on change, go to the network, click on Advanced and click on the green button next to the Mac-adress field. This will generate a random mac-adress. Thats also the reason why using a virtual-machine is probably the fastest way to do this

16. To repeat the procedure go to Step 5

What about the last 250MB?

So, you really did this 32 times? You can get the last 250MB by going to https://www.dropbox.com/gs and completing 5 of the 6 six steps.

If you got an idea how to to make the procedure even easier, feel free to share it in the comments!

I regard most of the new shiny web 2.0 stuff as a real pain. Sometimes it yields nice fruits though which even grabs my attention.

Money, money, money

Creating a blog-entry can take a lot of time. At least if you care about the quality of it. For an example writing the NS7-review from taking pictures to translating it took 12 hours.

Increasing the motivation

Most bloggers have fun doing it, but no one minds a well-meant back-slap. This can be a comment or a small donation. Donations showed to be not very effective in the past. People have to overcome their inhibitions of directly pay for something which is free.

Flattr tackles that problem by making its user pay a monthly amount you can adjust yourself starting at 2€ (in USA 2$ ?).

In the course of one week you click on all Flattr-buttons worth a contribution (besides your own one, which of course deserves the most clicks. At the end of the month your budget is spread across all clicked articles. That means if you only click on one button, one person gets the whole monthly budget. If you click two or more of them, it is spread among them. That takes away the aforementioned inhibitions because you have to for it either way.

You could ask yourself the question why you should become a member if you have to pay for it in the first place. Everyone who knows how hard blogging, programming, cutting videos etc. can be appreciates the hard work of the others and maybe wants to motivate them to continue.

That’s why a lot of people like me give that model a chance. All of my posts now contain a Flattr-Button. If you like a post and want to know more about that topic use the button.

Conclusion

You wont become rich using Flattr, but its definitely boost your motivation and that of others at a pretty low cost. Additionally it helps identifying whichof your content is regarded to be of high quality. The page impressions alone aren’t the best indicator because target groups have quite different sizes. If Flattr can assert itself is questionable but their on a good way with an own wordpress-plugin and an idiot-proof API.

I’ll toss out all AdSense out of my blog if it runs good.

Invite-Codes

Flattr has still beta-status. You can instantly register using one of these codes below:
Update: The codes have already been used. At least the three lucky guys could show their appreciation by clicking my Flattr-Button.

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