Miranda IM

Today, I have a tip for all users of the wonderfully simple and lightweight instant messenger “Miranda”. Sometimes the problem occurs that, when starting a conversation, the complete history of that contact will load and appear in the chat window. One may not even realize it at the beginning – I myself didn’t notice it for a long time –, until the history becomes so long that opening the chat window takes several seconds and makes the machine rattle.

Pretty - and pretty expensive?

When I wanted to sign up for my driver’s license at 17, I had to pass a quick eye test just like everyone else. After I had guessed the final, completely blurred characters correctly, with more luck than skill, my optician let me get away without the obligation to wear glasses when driving. Nevertheless, he urged me to have my eyes examined closer again in the near future and maybe get a pair of spectacles.
That was almost exactly ten years ago, and my vision has since become worse and worse. Yet I still don’t have glasses.

For a while I’ve been looking for a way to integrate the top-posts of my site, that have been established by the WordPress stats plugin, into my template. I wanted to have a list of the five most visited posts, preferably with the number of comments.
I remembered that I had once seen a plugin for that: WordPress Popular Posts. But when I installed it, I found that in the latest version, it works exclusively as a widget and does not provide a template tag. That way, of course, it was of absolutely no use to me, because my template is not and will never be intended for widgets. And simply installing an older version of the plugin is not a permanent solution either.

But as usual, I thought to myself: “Man, there must be some way to do this!” And there is one indeed! With just a few lines of code, you can integrate your top posts from the WordPress stats plugin at any place in your template, without any additional plugin!

This issue is certainly known to a few, and I too have had the problem for a while that I couldn’t leave any comments on my own blog when logged in as admin (I could comment only from the back end, but not from the website). Today I have finally taken the “time” to go to the root of the problem. I am writing this in quotes, because in the end it didn’t take me three minutes to find the error. If only I had started searching much earlier.

In these days you get more and more overwhelmed with commercials for online dating on German television, from “neu.de” to “parship.de” to “elitepartner.de”. And although I would never try and find a partner through such a service, three quarters of my own relationships developed – at least partially – via the Internet. But by what criteria do you choose a potential partner when all you get to see of him is only a name and maybe a few details and a photo? Can you make an informed decision at all as to whether a person is suitable for you or not?

Sometimes it can really drive you crazy, this Windows … It hadn’t been too long since I had managed to make my shared files accessible to everyone on the network without entering a password, but now it was again broken, although I hadn’t changed any settings since then. Again, I was prompted for username and password when attempting to access shared files, which was exactly what I did not want. After some hair-tearing and cursing, I found the solution, which seems (once more) completely insane and incoherent and would never come to a normal user’s mind. Maybe it helps one or another who is also despairing of this.

Deodorant - toiletry of doom.

You read that right: The use of deodorant can cause you an aluminium poisoning, and with your fluorine-containing toothpaste you brush yourself into your own grave! – These and similar scaremongerings are disseminated over the Internet again and again by stupid people, only to be taken seriously by even stupider ones. And if these “facts” at some point even make their way to the websites of some stupid Homeopaths, Naturopaths etc., the average idiot will of course take that as an additional confirmation from a credible authority.