Lifehack: Audiobooks

When the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson was announced I instantly pre-ordered it for my Kindle. I’ve read numerous books on Apple and Steve Jobs before, but none of them were authorized by Jobs. So I was excited to finally get the complete story. But when the book got released in November ’11 I tried to read it, but just couldn’t get into it. The book starts a bit slow, I already knew most of the early stories and maybe most important I just didn’t have the time to read for a while.

That’s when I tried audiobooks. I’ve seen those Harry Potter 20-cd packs at bookstores selling for over €50,- so I never looked further into this medium before. But after a quick web search I found Audible, an online audiobook mp3 store, owned by Amazon. Audible has this neat promo which gives you 2 free audiobooks upon registering without charging your creditcard!

So I downloaded the Steve Jobs book to listen in my car to try this concept. As I drive for over 2 hours each day I already listen a lot to BNR FM Radio (10% news, 10% traffic updates, 40% commercials, 40% boring bs blah), a selection of weekly podcasts and of course Spotify. Now, a few weeks later, the FM radio time has been minimized and mostly been replaced by a range of cool audiobooks.

Listening to somebody telling you a story is easy, takes almost no effort and is very relaxing. While listening you can think about the story instead of being annoyed by radio DJ’s and commercials. This made my daily car rides way more efficient. I recommend you to check this out too. Go to Audible, get the free books and give it a try.

By the way, the Steve Jobs biography was superb! What a great story and I even got some great new insights out of it!

SAP GUI sessions 101 (updated)

The SAP GUI is the first application I start in the morning and the last one I close at the end of the day. Most of the time I use multiple sessions on multiple systems. Last week @pverstraeten saw me closing all these sessions one-by-one and showed me how to do this the right/fast way: Just type /nex in the transaction field. Thanks!

Update (11-2010): I added two fast shortcuts. TFTT @ron_nooren and @jurjen_heeck!

I listed the ‘session commands’ below:

/o Display list of all sessions

/o + transaction Open transaction in new session (/orsa1)

/n End transaction and go back to SAP Easy Access user menu

/n + transaction Open transaction in same session (/nrsa1)

/i Close current session

/i + number of transaction Close specific sessions (/i3)

/nend Close all sessions with prompt

/nex Close all sessions without a prompt

CTRL + (plus key) Open new session

CTRL / (forward slash) Put cursor in command field

Make your Playstation 3 region free HTG

For the past weeks my girlfriend and I have been on holiday in the USA and Canada which was – of course –  awesome. With the cheap dollar/euro conversion and enough luggage space left we decided to do some serious media shopping: DVD’s, Blu-rays (Lost 6 is superb!) and some PS3 games (Playstation Move is fun!). Back home we started using these with our Playstation 3 console. Blu-rays and games worked fine, but the DVD’s refused to play due to a wrong region code. Damn, I totally forgot about this and I just threw away my old region free DVD player a few days earlier. Nice. Blu-rays and PS3-games are by the way always region free.

A quick Google search learned me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Sadly, the region code for the PS3 can not be changed. Bummer. The only workaround given was to make a copy of every DVD to a blank DVD and use the copy. Since I didn’t feel much for that (too much work) I found a better way to view your wrong-region DVD’s.

Go to this site and download the PS3 Media Server. This nice piece of software enables you to stream all kinds of media from your Mac/Windows/Linux computer to your PS3. Not only the usual AVI, MPEG or MP4 files, but it also works with DVD’s! Just insert the DVD into your Mac or PC and browse to the files in the VIDEO_TS folder with your PS3. Easy and it works! Okay, you don’t get a DVD menu but who cares, you can finally watch the content.

If your PS3 is connected to your network by Wifi you should lower the video quality settings because PS3′s Wifi is too slow (max 54 MBit/s) to receive all data in real-time, which will make the video playback stuttering. In the ‘Transcoding Settings’-tab I set the maximum bandwidth to 14 and chose keyint=25:vqmax=7:vqmin=2 /* Medium quality for HD Wifi Transcoding as the video quality setting. This setup seems to work fine.

5 reasons I like Spotify

iPad is here! Finally…

Yesterday the iPad officially arrived in Holland, finally. With the iPhone 1 introduction a few years ago I bought one (overpriced) at eBay, got into some issues with the seller and had to pay a lot of additional tax at the Dutch border. So I decided to wait for the European release this time.

While waiting in line with over 50 others I thought about how things have changed. 15 years ago I was the only Mac-user at my school and Apple made some pretty boring products. Now in 2010 almost everyone I know owns at least one Apple product. Great!

Below are some pictures of the launch and some screenshots of the iPad in action while reading a SAP Press book and using the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad.

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