I made the mistake and let myself get carried away by recommendation of Veerle, a decent designer I would say, and subscribed to the Layers Magazine e-version for some 30$ a year. First of all, I did not receive any order confirmation, which is really unprofessional when you give someone your credit card number and allow them to charge it for 30$ – then I mailed them asking if they had received my subscription for the international e-version Layers Magazine. An employee replied that they were sorry but did not receive anything. Four days later I did receive a confirmation (a bit pathetic I find) – now today I got the first copy of Layers Magazine and I must say I am shocked.

First of all, the email said that the Magazine was being published six times over the year. That is one magazine every two months?
Most of the articles are contributions by well-accredited designers such as Veerle from Belgium, who has been in the business since 1992 – then they drop in some reviews and miscellaneous tips and tricks that you can get from any cheap tutorial site or tech-review page.

Where is the added value?!
Half of the magazine (it has some 110 pages) is advertisements, so you pay 30$ a year for a magazine that is published every two months that is filled with ads, ads, ads. (UPDATE: I counted: 51 full pages of ads!) I must say those ads are really targeted and interesting to the audience, but still that is way too much for my taste. I will not pro-long my subscription and find it stumbling that people like Veerle recommend the magazine so highly (e.g. under every post). Of course, her tutorials (which are great!) are published there, but still the Layers Magazine SUCKS as for the reasons given above.

I cannot recommend Layers Magazine

P.S. The Zinio delivery manager is very annoying and looks like spyware, I don’t trust it. However I can imagine that Layers Magazine does not want to send around PDF files directly (else people would upload them to their blogs and sites bluntly).

If you want to waste some money you might be interested in subscribing to one of the worst paid e-zines I have read and visit Layers Magazine here at www.layersmagazine.com

I can recommend the Before and After Magazine, which is short, concise and to the point. Nine to Fifteen pages, no advertisements, sources included and cheap (costs 24$ which is like 16Euro for 32 articles that really help you out)

BA Magazine offers even free samples of articles for PDF download: free of charge, high quality! Link 1 | Link 2 – and no I do not work for them or am related or anything, I am just stating my honest opinion and review here)

Sometime around May I decided to have my website transfered over to zone.net as I outgrew Dreamhost.

Dreamhost, which now offers quite some cool setups (such as pimping up your server by additional ram etc), has kind of “chucked me” off due to excessive CPU use that was triggered by my WordPress install (running WP-Cache of course).
I was told, I outgrew a shared environment and should opt to either switch to their (at this time) 360$/month plan or get another hosting provider. when asked what to get, I was told “a vps with plenty of ram”.

I had a particular setup in mind and was thinking of either joining jaguar pc hosting or zone.net.

What I did like at zone.net at this point was the working live-support. I clicked “live support” – chat now and within seconds I was talking to someone who had a clue and cared about getting me to move over.

I opted zone.net as they promised to set-up my domain(s) in before of moving for free and making the transition happen without any downtime.

It worked this way, I sent my sql databases to them and uploaded a four gig rar-file to third-party server (always handy to have another one at hand). They downloaded everything and setup my VPS with CentOs, plesk and virtuozzo.

From my GoDaddy-domains I know there were plenty of discount codes around- as I couldnt find any for zone.net I blunty asked them if they had a promotion campaign running and if there was a zone.net discount code.
Their honest reply, which I appreciate, was “yes” and I was given the code to discount my setup and monthly fee by 10%. Seeing as I did not find any codes on Google, this was a good catch.

The transfer went smooth and the first weeks passed. Without any trouble, my site(s) ran smoothly, quicker than ever and with no downtime. Thanks to the watchdog module, that one employee installed, services that killed itself were automatically loaded again.

Ever since I moved my site to zone.net it has been growing prosperously with 15,000 visitors daily and increasing. WordPress and WP-Cache are working smoothly, Permalinks with htaccess are operational, too.

When I had trouble setting up WP-Cache (at one point you have to run a shell command to create a sym-link file), their Live-support helped me out in seconds.
I really liked the free and high-quality support at zone.net and the polite, yet direct employees.

The advantage of “sticking” with a company with a dozen employees is that in due progress you get to know everyone and they get to know you. You dont have to explain your setup and problems all over again, as your setup is known and sending passwords over etc has become obsolete.

Amongst my domains are also two German denic (DE) domains, the setup of them is very annoying, as you have to observe all kinds of regulations (like specific TTL time), different class C ips etc. – zone.net has been so accommodating to setup those different C-class ips for free.
I am quite sure that I would have had to pay additional money at almost every other company.

At my VPS I had Plesk and CentOS running, what I did not know is that you SHOULD not (seriously!!!) try to update your VPS (plesk) manually.
I pressed “auto-update” under plesk, and the whole vps went into full-out lockup mode. zone.net´s experienced techies had the website up within minutes, but still plesk was unaccessible.
This was the case for a week roughly and I did not receive any email for one week. This really annoyed me, but who to blame? It was all my fault- if I had not played around with things it would not have locked up so bad (internal errors all over the place). I decided to wait one week for them to find a solution, as the website was up, I was earning good money with it (around 40$ a day) and I did not care about emails… since it was only a secondary email address.

yet I wanted to have my plesk back.- so one employee worked on my vps for two days in a row and tried all kinds of hacks. still I did not work. so without asking, and I appreciate that, they cloned my “running” site and setup another vps and routed all traffic over there. wow. I did not know this was technically possible!!!

anyway, I had my plesk back and every setting I had done, was input kindly by the zone.net tech-man. If I had to do this all myself I would have lost valuable time at university that (at this point) I did not have.

Just a few weeks ago I received an email saying that my vps (and basically) every VPS had to be moved, as zone.net had bought their own network or net of servers or datacenter, I cannot remember what it was, anyway… my vps had to be moved, meaning starting at “zero”. A new vps was setup again, but since the ips changed, too I had to undergo the whole IPs annoyance with the german denic domains again.

luckily zone.net helped me out quickly and assured me things would work.
Indeed it did, the transfer went very smooth, as the old vps was not shutdown until the new one had been successfully “talking” with my nameserver.

Bad thing though was, that I lost several posts and comments, as in the meantime I was accessing (randomly) two different sites on different servers.
At one time, the old site loaded, the next hour the new one loaded and vice versa.

If you plan to transfer sites, you should not post anything and close comments. just as a matter of fact, that was my learning…

What I did not like about zone.net is that after the server move and in the meantime, they have seem to taken off the live-support. I loved to quickly address my problems and have them sorted out.

Now I have to reside to their (working!) ticket system, where I usually receive a reply within hours, but sometimes also days (but that´s my fault then again to not “bump” my tickets every now and then).

In general, I am very satisfied with the performance at zone.net, the level of support and the possibility of having almost EVERYTHING customized to my needs. I appreciate being a customer there, seriously! as soon as I experience something else, I will post it here, promised!

Yours,
jez

(lol this is almost a whole book of a post)

I’m always interested in experimenting with new hosts for various shares. when i read your
interesting list, my purpose was solely to verify. these hosts come and go.
so if an exceptionally fast host sticks around and maintains what it’s
initially recognized for, it’s news to me.

in my example, i simply put several .lit files in a rar. these files are
meant to be read with Microsoft Reader.

personally, i like to revisit some of the winners. as you know, every so
often, the stars burn out and new ones come to play. apparently, this is
primarily decided by bandwidth cost. seems like only Rapidshare (be it .de
or .com) has maintained it’s longevity and speeds. for most people, RS
remains the golden chalice. I think mediafire and divshare are fast on it’s
tail. time will tell.

experimenting with your list from 12/06, I uploaded a 5.99 MB file – classics.rar

Results:

http://www.myfile.ch/de/file/152/classics-rar.html

(avg. UL/good DL)#

something wrong with fileho. first noticed significantly slower UL, then
link provided wasn’t even for my file. Are their days numbered?

http://www.mediafire.com/?9mnaayfcddj
(fast UL & DL. enough said.)

sharedzilla is no more.

http://mihd.net/ep95uc

(avg UL/good DL)**

http://www.bestsharing.com/files/79X5PQ250011/classics.rar.html
(fast UL/painfully slow DL)

http://tornadodrive.com/download.php/2230/classics.rar.html
(avg UL/good DL)

http://www.useboost.com/98c53b5885d1fa6a59fb2b026f9ed0e1/classicsrar.html

(slower UL/good DL)

http://www.divshare.com/download/293702-90f
(fast UL. good DL)

http://tinyload.com/1409
(fast UL. fast DL, but for the timer. a bit spammy)

# host added prefix to file, so when DL, filename is [myfile]classics.rar.
may be an issue if password-protecting files.

**I’ve had only success with mihd. files deleted depend on content and the
host’s share policy (see below)
I’d consider giving them another shot. of course, this is my opinion, I
could be wrong.

12-March-2007
Great news we decided to allow uploads up to 2GB (yes thats whooping 2
gigabytes per file)! Also we are extending the file expiry for smaller
files! files are deleted depending on their filesize:

* 0 to 10MB – 90 Days after last download
* 10 to 20MB – 70 Days after last download
* 20 to 50MB – 60 Days after last download
* 50 to 100MB – 45 Days after last download
* 100 to 200MB – 30 Days after last download
* 200 to 500MB – 14 Days after last download
* 500 to 1000MB – 3 Days after last download
* 1000MB+ – 1 Day after last download

This post is an update to my prior released article about different one-click filehosters. I have compared some of the best (and free) hosters and recently got an e-mail by someone called kanji. He told me that he used my list to conduct further studies. His results can be read above!

Sometimes it is necessary to filter out the competition, not only to make more money off the ads, but also to serve high quality and targeted ads to your visitors. It is them, after all, who click on the ads.

If you haven’t filter out some junk advertisers, I advice you to do so. My earnings went up 300% ++ after spending half an hour crawling my site with google’s adsense preview tool.

How much Chilly can you take?

I think it really depends on the kind of Chilly, there like different “blends”, the biologists on here will probably know what I wanted to say…
e.g. my personal favorites are:

Birdeye
Habanero
Tepin, Piquin, Pequin

They are all quite spicy, not to say hot on taste!
I do recommend washing your fingers carefully after cooking, grinding those or touching them in general, else you might end up like me, sitting in front of your PC in thoughts, scratching your back (ass?) and then swearing about the stupidity of not washing the hands. No joke, I spent an hour or so to get things of, so burning hot I thought I was going mad. I had to drink myself to bed with vodka!!

Here is a list of Chilly blends:

Source: http://www.pepperworld.com/basics/brenn-o-meter.htm

The parcel I received weighted 23kg (46 pounds) and was delivered by DHL. I paid 139 Euros for the set (Teufel Concept E Magnum),
and some 12,50 Euros for the shipping. After all a fair price I must admit. I was moaning about the high postage cost, but considering it weighted 23kg I think I have nothing to moan about…

So the Concept E Magnum 5.1-speakerset was created by Teufel , Germany. This set promises very good performance for a relatively low price. Since one of my friend has this at home and it totally convinced me, I decided to give it a shot (and sell it on ebay afterwards if I am not satisfied).

Teufel is mainly known for her mid- and high-class home cinema speakers, however for a while the German company has been making speakersets for PCs. The small satellites come with magnetic screens and a powerful subwoofer. There are all kinds of screws and connectors on the back of the subwoofer, here is what it looks like:

The Concept E Magnum is a 5.1-speakerset and therefore consists of five small satellite speakers and one large subwoofer which also contains the amplifiers for all channels. The satellites are connected to the subwoofer with clamp connectors and the volume can be adjusted seperately for each channel. The subwoofer also contains a switch that allows turning the phase 180 degrees, which should be ideal when the subwoofer can’t be positioned in line with the front speakers. Teufel supplies 30 meters speakercable with the set, offering users the possibility to lengthen the satellite cables themselves. Also added are three stereo cinch-cinch and 3,5 mm-jackplug adaptor cables, allowing the Concept E Magnum to be connected to other equipment.

The subwoofer contains a 25-cm bass speaker and a bass reflex port. The frequencies on which the satellites take over can be set manually, however Teufel claims 120 Hz to be the best value. The satellite speakers tend to feel quite massive and contain one 8-cm broadband unit and a small tweeter. The center speaker is taller and contains two broadband units.
(Source:Google/The net)

Another picture showing the five speakers and the remote:

And if you like to mount the speakers on special ‘feet’, you can get them at their site for 18,50 Euro a pair each.

Second Life

Second Life has been around since 2003, but just recently a wave of heavily polished articles written by Public Relations companies working for LindenLab has hit Germany. It seems like their Marketing department is now trying to reach out to new grounds. I find the concept of Second Life highly interesting, but it simply is not ‘ready’ yet. Read why below, checkout the In-Game images and the review. The closing paragraph offers some ideas of what to do instead of playing ‘Second Life’.

‘Second Life’ reviewed

This review is divided into three parts, feel free to ‘fast-forward’:
PC specs and account used for testing
‘Second Life’ In-Game images
Review of ‘Second Life’
Why play ‘Second Life’ when you can <enter action> in reality?!

PC specs and account used for testing

So I signed up at the Second Life website for a FREE account and entered my Paypal-Information to
a) verify I am over 18
b) receive $250 Linden bucks (handy if you want to ‘buy’ something in ‘Second Life’).

Next I had to download the Windows Installer for Second Life, it’s titled Windows 2000/XP: 1.13.1.6 (30MB). There are also version available for Mac OS-X (61MB) and Linux (39MB). I have only tested the Windows / PC version.

After the downloaded finished (quite fast – good servers), I run the Installer on my system:

Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2)
Intel Core Duo 2.667 GHz
1500 MB G.E.I.L DDR2 Ram
GeForce 6200 256 MB Ram

Connection:
3456 kBit/s Downstream (1&1 fastpathed)
448 KBit/S Upsteam (1&1 fastpathed)

Notes: Not the best system, but a stable mule that keeps running smoothly and silent (21 db measured), with a stable and speedy 3 Meg-line connection. This should be well above ‘Second Life’s’ min. requirements to run the game!

So after some minutes of installing, the game was launched. I had to re-enter the account information and was then connected to ‘the world of Second Life’.

‘Second Life’ In-Game images

Here are some images, let them do the talking before I begin to with my starfall of criticism. These are just some images I found on google images (I was too lazy to screenshot them myself, because it simply is not worth it..)

Review of ‘Second Life’

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 2,617,859 people from around the globe. Source: secondlife.com.

PR crafted articles speak highly positive of ‘Second Life’, for the reason of offering ‘a new and unique chance of commencing a new life’. A life in which you can even earn real money. The currency used in Second Life is called Linden Dollar, a self-creation by Linden Labs.

So after some time installing and setting up the game I found ‘myself (my character – 3rd person view)’ on an island, a so called ‘spawning point’ for new players. It seems like I am not alone as there are many characters ‘standing’ around and not having a clue what to do. A father like voice explains the phenomena of lag, followed by a female voice introducing the world and the game.
You can change your character’s outer appearance, the cloths he/she wears, the body attributes such as height, width, size etc, the color of the hair, the eyes, the length of the nose – well nearly everything. As seen on the images above, people highly customize their characters, put custom textures (skins) on them, so that you can even look like papa smurf or a zebra.

The aspect of customization is really interesting, as it allows people to become creative easily.
There is a variety of programming languages that can be applied/used in the Second Life, so for example it is possible to combine 3D designing skills with programming skills to create -let’s say- an arcade/amusement park. I have been to areas where you’d play blackjack: enter the amount of Linden $ you wanted to set, click pay, and voil?: either you win or either you loose.
The possibility of buying your own land and building on there, say a house/villa/pool whatsoever is great, but nearly every place is empty:
how does this match with Linden Labs’ statement that thousands of people around the world play Second Life simultaneously?
What is the high level of customization good for if others can only experience it in a limited way? (e.g. you create yourself nice multi-colored shinny hair, but other players only see a brown blob…)
Second Life offers the option of getting yourself a job within the new world and earn money. This earned money can be exchanged into real US $ using Linden Labs exchange ‘Lindex’. Linden Labs claims that the first Linden dollar millionaire was spotted a week ago. A millionaire, but still playing?

So far so good, but now here is where the criticism comes into play:

Lag

Even though my PC suits the minimum system requirements for Second Life, it lags insanely.
Other characters are ‘warping’ bye, the atmosphere (trees, buildings, sea, plants, textures) takes ages to load.
This is clearly a server-side issue as my connection is fine and system does usually not lag at all.
I remember the slow male voice telling about lag and check the ‘upper right boxes’. They are green or even black, which -according to Linden Labs and this speaker- means I am lagfree.

Low world detail

As to be seen on the images above, the world detail is very low. I have checked my settings and it didn’t change at all. I waited several minutes in a people-free spot and let everything load, but yet no increase of quality. So clearly all images shown in magazines, articles and even on the Second Life website are forged or at least some kind of manipulated, because ‘Second Life’ does look like crap in reality.

Logic

‘Second Life’ is praised as one of the ‘new chances to life your live’ like you want it to, but this seems unreal for the following reasons:
1. I don’t like a world with Smurfs
2. I don’t want to live in a world with goddamn zebras talking to me
3. Second Life is already commercialized, at two different spots a person was offering ‘free ipods’ if you’d click on his shinny backpack.
4. Second Life features a world which is empty, or at least not really populated.
5. Second Life features cheap adult material, sleazy hookers and strippers. If one wants porn, simply fire up google and look for it.
6. Second Life makes it rather impossible to earn money big style, exceptions are rare. Why would you earn more in an E-True cybergame then at McDonalds around the corner?
7. Why can these people fly?
8. Weapons welcome in Second Life, so at least, was my impression. They can either be bought in arms shops or created using the ‘no limitations create it yourself kit’.
9. What about dying? You can’t really die in Second Life.
10. Membership fees. 10 bucks a month just for a graphically shitty game which is crowded by nerds that need to escape their miserable or uncool life and boast with their e-cool character in Second Life?

Read more about ‘Second Life’ at wikipedia (unbiased reporting)

Why play ‘Second Life’ when you can <enter action> in reality?!

With 10 bucks a month that you are ought to pay for Second Life a month (premium account that is needed for buying land etc) you can:
- rent 10 porn DVDs a month
- subscribe to WWF and save some cute little Pandas
- get a hustler membership account
- buy at least 10 cheeseburgers
- get a rapidshare account for downloading
- subscribe to di.fm and enjoy loads of music!
- invest your money into decent stock and get rich
- run a website like this and entertain other people

but for christsake DON’T waste it on Second Life, because this reality is fancy enough. If you need to escape your reality, buy some weed, some liquor or some smokes. It’s better then watching your e-cool character dance in a virtual club whilst you could be out there wasting your money on something cool…

If you somehow can’t get enough of Second Life, you can get even more pictures at flickr

I have no idea why, but according to this article at the businessweek, Second Life is marching on strong. Is our western society so whacky? I mean this is totally f%�$cked up. Get a job, get a life, get some porn, but don’t waste your time online on Second Life

Using

• Bayesianato
• Comha Filter
• Domainator
• Earlgrey
• Razor Filter
• Ruleminator

They are all doing a great job filtering my E-Mails and thus giving SPAM NO-CHANCE.
Here are some details about my E-Mail traffic from last week (end 2006):

Overall
Total number of messages checked: 357
Detected spam messages: 235
Detected ham messages: 122
Unknown messages: 0
Reported messages: 33
Revoked messages: 1

If you want to achieve similar results, Spamato (sourceforge open source-free tool), available for a variety of email clients!

Update – February

Overall
Total number of messages checked: 2713
Detected spam messages: 2116
Detected ham messages: 597
Unknown messages: 0
Reported messages: 33
Revoked messages: 12

+ German Version / Deutsche Ausgabe

The Sony VAIO Support is one of the best services I have every expirienced.
At Sony every department knows what the other one is doing due to their genius “eSupport” and case-system.
I always wondered what advantage “registering” your product I was having. Until late April I couldn`t imagine registering my device on some “portal”, just for statistics sake and some lame driver updates,
but when Heathrow officials grossly chucked my laptop in one of these plastic boxes my display got damaged and had to be repaired. That’s when I remembered the “Register your VAIO product” -icon on my desktop. I instantly created an account and filled in all my data. Such as serial number, product information, warranty expiration date, home address and phone number. All these data came handy lateron when creating a support case.

At first I thought no one would care and I wouldn’t get a reply anyway, so why even bother creating a support case?!
But then I thought, when I had a support case I’d give someone on the phone, they’d have more information about my problem than without and me having to retell my problem to some “hotline clerk”.

Anyhow, I created a case, waited some days – no reply.
I phoned their hotline at 0180 577 67 76 and after selecting my way through a menu I spoke to some “dutch accent having” guy. I told him my problem -that I had a one pixel wide red vertical line spanning my screen and some pixel errors on the display. He asked me stuff like “is it in windows only, etc.”. I told him to please lookup my case number and that I explained it there in german and english (as he couldnt really speak german I thought he might understand english). After some time he told explained to me what to comply with when sending in my precious sony vaio device.
- no battery
- no cd drive
- no accessories
- do data backups
- create an admin account without password

Easiest way to do all that is, just unplug everything, use the “create restore tool by sony” which you defaultly got installed and then put it all in a paper box (not the original box, he said, as a sony vaio laptop might easily be heisted by sight).

Well anyhow, I paid the shipment fees and waited.
After two days, he called me (that’s why entering your real data is important) and told me the device had arrived at repairs, but that they needed to order a new display and that they didn’t know when it was arriving.

That’s when I thought I’ll not be seeing my laptop for weeks – which really’d be a pain in the ass, as I need it on a daily basis.
Alas I mailed them that I need it urgently. I got no reply, but my laptop sent back to me two days after my mail.
Wow, not bad I thought, quick repair, all well done.
But when I booted up my laptop, the red line and thus the error was still there.
Well it shifted to the very left side of the screen, but for “a new display” it just couldn’t be.
So re-logged onto the e-Support portal and told them my situation, that I am happy that I got my laptop back, but that it is totally inacceptable to have it not repaired and that I need it urgently.

I also abused them by email at support at (you are going to figure that out yourself [vaio link?.com!]) and got no reply.
No reply? Well when I was out, they called in and told the one answering the phone, that they were picking it up for premium repair the next two days or so and that I should undergo the same procedure as last time when sending it in.
Alas I had to delete all my data again and restore the laptop.

Two days after calling, a DHL EXPRESS guy turned up with his own packing material, some sort of special box (pictures below) and an anti-static bag. It was well boxed and then driven to DUS airport and then flown to ECX airport in france. It should then be repaired.
That was thursday last week.
THIS week, on monday on 8:54 in the morning I got woken up by the exactly same DHL EXPRESS guy and recieved my repaired and this time REALLY fixed Sony VAIO laptop back.
Today I was phones when I was out and asked whether my laptop was working correctly and if all was okay. Genius service, amazing!

What a success story, I can totally the recommend Sony VAIO support!
German Version / Deutsche Version: Der Sony Vaio Support ist beste Support ?berhaupt. Erst eingeschickt, wurde dann nicht ganz repariert, zurueckgeschickt bekommen, angerufen und beschwert, dann wurde der laptop mit express bote abgeholt, innerhalb von 5 tagen ?ber das wochenende repariert und montags um 8:50 zurueckgebracht. Reperatur in Frankreich und per Luftpost hin und her, mit DHL eigener Verpackung. 2 tage spaeter wurde ich angerufen und es wurde gefragt, ob alles in ordnung sei. Das ist heftig! So einen Service und Einsatz bekommt man mit Sicherheit nicht, wenn man sich einen anderen Laptop kauft. Zwar ist der Preis ein wenig h?her als bei anderen -und wahrscheinlich auch besseren Laptops- aber ich denke nicht, dass sonst irgendwo ein Laptop mit DHL EXPRESS (w?rde ich sonst nie machen, wenn ich es selbst bezahlen muesste [?ber 60 euro!]) abgeholt wird und international verschickt wird um ihn innerhalb von 5 Tagen wieder beim Kunden abzugeben. Mit Sicherheit auch ein Grund warum Firmen und spezielle Einzelpersonen auf Sony und Dell (die einen guten “ersatzlaptopservice” haben) vertrauen.