Bart Vanhauwaert’s Kieswijzer, as plugged by LVB, is my favorite one so far—compared to Doe de stemtest and Kieskompas. It’s based on concrete issues, with balanced answers. I’m willing to let the fact that the guy misspelled “Lijst Dedecker” slide, since my profile turned out to be pretty much spot on.
I hope CBS buying out Last.fm will mean the end of their Web 1.9 design and an overhaul in the scrobbling API. Specifically, if I listen to a 30-minute track by the same artist, I expect it to influence my music profile more than a 2-minute interlude.
So I’ve got my first exam tomorrow. I think it’ll go well, because it’s Mathematics III, and we all know that math can be fun. I am however not looking forward to Algorithms & Data Structures I next Monday and Tuesday. Since I’m hoping to pass the other subjects, however, my best bet is that I’ll pass thanks to deliberation. Anyway, wish me luck.
So, Doe de stemtest wasn’t very surprising. I like how elaborate the whole thing once again is though, while keeping it fairly accessible. I’m all for bridges between politics and Joe Sixpack. Once again, my result would be accurate if it weren’t for cartels. But I’m at peace with that. And De Standaard got it right.
Right. I was getting sick of scrolling through PDF documents while studying, so I gave in and bought an entry-level HP LaserJet 1018. Its warranty period’s only a year and it’d better last well longer than that. After having 3 inkjets die on me—namely an HP 690C, an HP 710C and an Epson C86—I’m going with lasers now. Don’t ask me why I got an HP after not one but two mishaps. I guess I just like to live on the wild side. So far, it appears to be working. And the pages are toasty when they roll out, so that’s a nice bonus.
After exams, I’m switching to my bank’s newly introduced Lion Account. Even though I currently get most services for free because I’m under 26, oddly enough, the Lion Account is still more economical than my current Green Account. For instance, I currently pay extra for Maestro—it’s a small country and you never know when you’re going to end up making payments abroad—while the Lion Account already includes that.
Also, my other bank apparently hands out free debit cards, so I’m going to get me one of those. Why? Because it’s free, obviously. And also in case the other one fails or whatever. I’ve had that happen to me when I was still in banking hell. Believe you me, it wasn’t pretty.
It’s nice to see the whole online banking thing take off. Though my other other bank is taking it a bit far by not doing debit cards at all. Which is why it’s good that I’m a customer at a couple of other banks. Yeah, they all love me.
You’d think Thunderbird’s Bayesian filtering would catch on after marking at least 20 messages that recommend buying Tyche Energy stock as junk. I dare you to buy some and see how it performs. You might just beat my 12% annual profit.
Okay, so I’ve been using Comodo Firewall Pro for a while, so it’s time for another one of my infamous roundups.
First off, I’m still really pleased at how little resources it seems to be eating. Granted, I’ve got a new motherboard, a new CPU and some faster RAM since when I was using Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall, but regardless, it does come across as far less of a resource hog.
That being said, now for some dissin’.
First of all, I’ll never get used to the application rule editor. Kerio’s packet filter is far more straightforward. To keep Windows Live Messenger from making outgoing HTTP connections, I had to create two rules: one to block port 80, and one to allow traffic on all ports but port 80. That’s just moronic. I want exceptions to rules.
Next up, if I turn off everything but the “Application Monitor” component, I don’t want the other components to appear, let alone run. The DLL list in the “Component Monitor” just keeps growing and growing, even though I’ve disabled it. Why is that?
On a related note, if I allow all actions for lighttpd.exe in the application monitor, I don’t want it to block incoming connections to Lighty. I’m not the only one experiencing this issue. I’m guessing Comodo doesn’t like Cygwin or something.
Finally, I don’t like the way they’ve pushed back the version 3 beta twice now. Granted, it’s probably not an easy thing to code, and I appreciate that they admit that they’re behind on schedule rather than releasing an unfinished build, but they should have anticipated that. I’m not going to use firewall software that’s still in beta, but I’d sure like to know when we can expect the final version. And if it will have a decent packet filter.
That being said, it’s still a pretty nice product, and I’m going to keep using it.
All in all, I’d say De Standaard’s new Kieskompas is pretty accurate. In the process, I also found out I’m probably not as rightist as Luc Van Braekel. Tests are fun. Whee.
Now for an update on my switch to GreatNews.
First of all, I simply love it. GreatNews is by far the best feed reader I have tried. It’s responsive yet easy on resources, and minimalist yet versatile and elegant. Nonetheless, I have some remarks.
While I greatly appreciate that GreatNews uses SQLite, and that it stores favicons—which is non-standard, but it sure livens up the UI—, I can’t say I like the way it stores everything in the program directory. Come on, guys, Windows has been multi-user for quite some time now. Use the user’s application data folder.
Elegant as the UI may be, it could use a little more customizability. Sure, the toolbars can be dragged, but I’d like to be able to hide the Search toolbar, or maybe dock it on the far right. And once I’m done with that, I’d like to lock the toolbars altogether. Also, there’s no way to customize the toolbar buttons.
And, finally, some minor shortcomings: the inability to remap hotkeys; the way the author seems to like to pad brackets with spaces—easily fixed by editing Lang\gn_eng.ini though!—; the retro About dialog, which doesn’s quite have the added spiffiness of other UI elements.
Okay, so I tend to focus on the negative. It’s still a great product, and it’s free. Try it out already.
