During my highschool career I had five years of Economics class. One of the very first things we were taught was the following, very simply graph. It demonstrates very clearly the general way economy is going: we are getting more wealthy over time, but every now and then the economy has a (small) setback. However, during this time we are still more wealthy than we were, say, 10 years ago -- yet everyone complains. The economy eventually restores itself, until the next setback comes along.

 

 

Right now I am not (personally) worried about the financial crisis -- I think a lot of people were indeed too greedy, too stupid, and simply had a wrong vision of what was affordable. Especially the United States has become a culture of "if we can't afford it, we'll buy it on a credit card/loan". This is, in the long run as we're seeing now, stupid. Most people are no longer able to afford their basic cost of living. Too big of a car, too big of a house, the latest crazy tech stuff, and so forth, while they couldn't afford it. Simply speaking, if you can't afford it, do not buy it. This point should be hit home harder by any government out there who isn't already. Encouraging people to spend, spend, spend while they have barely any cash in their accounts is wrong.

 

Besides, my money is safe. The Dutch government (I am unsure whether this is a European thing or not) guarentees up to 20,000 euro -- That is, if a bank were to tumble over, you get up to 20,000 of your checkings/savings money back. Of the next 20,000 euro, 90% is guarenteed to get back into your hands. Above that, all bets are off. But seriously, which average citizen has over 20,000 euro (or 40,000 euro) in their savings account? Most people I know have maybe 10,000 or so euro in their savings accounts, and that's being generous.

 

Plus, moving your money to a different bank account will only cause more trouble due to the wonderful nature of human psychology.

A long time ago I wrote about installing drivers for the Compact Scan USB 19200 scanner from Trust. Since then I've had several comments about it not working anymore, even when running it in compatibility mode for XP SP2. I have no updated the blog entry in question, with an additional step to still make the drivers work. It sucks that there are no official Vista drivers (and probably never will be), but it will do for now.

 

And yes, I still use that scanner myself. It comes in handy every now and then.

I was recently researching import tariffs when I found a somewhat funny entry in the manifesto of tariffs: nuclear reactors. Imagine ..

 

 

DG: Ah, hello, sir, I've got a package here for you .. Says is a nuclear reactor!

You: Oh good! I've been waiting for it for a while now!

DG: Where do you want it?

You: Oh, em, just put it in the backyard, ill unbox it later

DG: Very well, please sign here, here and here

Fonts come in all sizes, themes, and what not. My personal preference is Tahoma for all things IM-related... I have used for years now. Before Office 2007 came around, I also used Tahoma for e-mails and documents, but I've gradually moved to the Office 2007 standard fonts, Calibri for text and Cambria for headers. Unfortunately a lot of people do not have those particular fonts, so I'm not going to use it for IM just yet.

 

What's your favorite font?

Logitech Setpoint, which manages some settings for their mice and keyboards, has a rather annoying battery level indicator for wireless devices. While most of these devices already have a LED on them somewhere to indicate when the battery level is low (it starts flashing red), the SetPoint software also decides to show alerts in the bottom-right corner of the screen, similar to MSN Messenger toasts. This is extremely annoying (it pops up like everybodies 5 or 10 minutes), and completely pointless. It also causes "Z-fighting" between top-level windows (especially when in a full-screen app), and so forth.

 

To get rid of these alerts you will have to manually edit a simple XML file. So far I haven't been able to find a snipet of UI that exposes this setting, which is even worse/stranger. Either way, go to the SetPoint installation directory, usually C:\Program Files\Logitech\SetPoint\. Find the file default.xml and open it in your favorite text editor (notepad will work just fine). Somewhere at the top of the file you will find the following line:

 

 

Edit this line to read:

 

 

Instead. Now you have two options: if SetPoint wasn't already running, start it (there should be Start Menu item). If SetPoint was already running you will have to restart it: Open up the TaskManager (CTRL+ALT+DELETE or CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE) and go the Processes tab. Find the SetPoint.exe item, and kill it. Then restart SetPoint by running it from the Start Menu.

 

Done!

There is a minor bug in the Windows Live Messenger Library regarding the TypingIMAddressCollection (which can be found on a Conversation object). The bug doesn't allow developers to access the collection by index. When it is accessed by index, an error is thrown. As a work-around, you can still use iterators ("foreach") to walk over the collection, such as:

 

 

I have heard that a fix will be available sometime next week.