Helvensteijn.com

I wish everyone a happy new year. A few days early, but I won’t be at home for the occasion so it will have to do. Try not to harm yourselves or others with fireworks!

I’m not really in the habit of celebrating it myself (heck, this is the first time in years that I’m actually at home for the occasion ) but I do wish everyone who reads this a merry Christmas. I’m taking this opportunity to make a proposal. It seems tradition to kill each other all year … Read more

This is surreal. Recently, the Dutch IT company Compello was sued by T-Mobile, subsidiary of Deutche Telekom, for the use of the color magenta in their marketing. They also urge the Dutch radio stations Slam FM and 100% NL to stop using the color. Deutche Telekom claims to own the exclusive right to use magenta … Read more

Last Friday, I installed Leopard, the sixth major release of Apple’s Mac OS X. After 2 days of playing around with it, all I can say is: Incredible! Not only is it notably faster than Tiger (Leopard’s predecessor), its new features are simply fantastic. Of course, I’ve used things like backup software (Time Machine) and … Read more

Today, in San Francisco an event called “Lights Out San Francisco” takes place. Basically, everyone there is asked to turn off al their lights except for one compact fluorescent lamp between 20:00 and 21:00 hours tonight, to raise awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption. Google supports this initiative by serving a black home … Read more

Almost 2 weeks ago, the smiley celebrated its 25th anniversary. Today, the celebration is for Sputnik 1. Exactly 50 years ago, on October 4th, 1957, it became the first man-made object in outer space. Technically it did little more than sendig radio beeps back to Earth, but more importantly, it set off the Space Race … Read more

My Logitech MX1000 died this morning. They’re excellent in surviving free falls from half a meter. But accidentally stepping on them kills them, just like it would a real mouse. And that’s exactly what happened this morning. It served me well over the past few years. I did try Apple’s Mighty Mouse for awhile, but … Read more

Due to time constraints, this plugin is no longer supported and will not be updated, ever! Unless you know what you’re doing, I strongly discourage using this on a production blog because it hasn’t been tested since WordPress 2.5. Upgraded my WP Admin Links plugin to version 1.1. It is now also possible to remove … Read more

Looks like I found a bug in WordPress 2.3. It so happens that I have some pages in which I frequently use HTML entities. Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3, when I try to edit such a page, all those entities are gone and replaced by their plain text counterparts. So all that escaped HTML … Read more

Due to time constraints, this plugin is no longer supported and will not be updated, ever! Unless you know what you’re doing, I strongly discourage using this on a production blog because it hasn’t been tested since WordPress 2.5. My WP Last Posts plugin was pretty buggy. It interfered with tings like searching (getting weird … Read more