Classic FTW!
A look at SAP GUI themes
Did you know you can change the way SAP GUI looks? You know, that basic SAP tool most of us use for hours each day? I really don’t like the looks of the standard theme, but you can easily change it into something else. I’m not sure if people know about this. All I see around me are those awful colors and/or 3D buttons (sometimes even with animations) like we are back in 2001 again.
In this post we will look at how to change your SAP GUI theme (which is very easy) and have a look at the different themes that are available.
To change the theme you have to go to the Options menu in SAP GUI. This is the most outer right button. You can also use the shortcut ALT+F12. Select Options here.
Here you can choose the theme from the dropdown box. You need to restart SAP GUI before the changes take effect.
Some themes, unfortunately only the older ones, have the option to use a different color set for each SAP system. This is very handy if you have to work with multiple systems at once. You can use for example a grey set for development, red for test and blue for production. Or you different colors for BW and ECC systems. All themes except for Corbu and Crystal Blue have this option.
So now let’s have a look at the various themes that are available for us with their “description”. I’ll start with the oldest theme first.
Classic: This is the well-known Windows design that was standard for Windows applications up to and including Windows 2000.
Pretty plain and basic, but ooooold.
2014: The return of the podcast
2014 must have been the year of the return of the podcast. I’m listening to way more podcasts now than a year ago, and I haven’t seen such an online buzz on podcasting for ages. Maybe it has something to do with the production quality that has risen over the years to an extremely high level. Even the most basic podcast, just a few guys talking to each other over Skype, is a good listen nowadays.
Also a number of shows have come up in the past months that demonstrate a very high production value. Not just some plain talking, but heavily mixed and edited stories to make it a perfect listen. Some of them even got wide spread attention in the MSM. Serial, StartUp, This American Life and Reply-all are examples of these.
I created a lot more time to listen to podcasts lately. While driving I rarely listen to the radio anymore and I now put on a podcast or an audiobook when running long distances, playing PS4 games (Destiny FTW!) and cooking.
So let’s have a look at my favorite podcasts of the past year, which I listen to on a very regular base (almost every show):
Appels en Peren – My favorite tech show. These guys discuss everything and nothing. Sci-fi books and movies, gadgets, Apple, Android, singularity, and so on. [Dutch]
Solomonster Sounds Off – The podcast I have been listening to during every Monday morning commute for a few years now. The Solomonster reviews the past week in pro-wrestling in this monologue podcast and previews upcoming events. I like his very consistent and logical way of making an argument combined with his historic knowledge on this great ‘sport’.
Kees de Kort BNR – Daily economics update by the most pessimistic (or realistic?) analyst of Holland. With a duration of 5 minutes this is also my shortest podcast. [Dutch]
OMT Café – Monthly or so Apple fanboy podcast by the OneMoreThing.nl guys. [Dutch]
Boars, Gore, and Swords – This is a Game of Thrones recap show, created by a group of comedians. The day after a new episode of GoT they go through it scene by scene, explain, speculate and joke. Can’t wait for the next season to start!
StartUp Podcast – Podcast about a guy who starts his own podcasting company. He shares everything. Very high production quality!
SAP BI TechEd 2014 recap video
Why waste your precious time and thousands of euros on going to the SAP TechEd event if you can get just watch a video covering all the key subjects for SAP BI?
Sven and Ronald did a quick 45 minutes SAP BI TechEd 2014 recap in Google Hangout last week. No marketing slides and no old or basic stuff we normally have to sit through each SAP presentation. Fast and very to the point. Good stuff guys!
So this is must see TV if you care about what’s happening in the the world of SAP BI and if you didn’t visit TechEd or SitNL yourself this year. Check it out in the video below or use the podcast stream for on the road listening/watching. Slides are here.
Edit: Sorry forgot to mention: The video is all Dutch… (maybe somebody can write the subtitles?)
Time tracking with Toggl
At the end of each week I have to fill in my timesheet with a breakdown of all the projects I have been working on that week. This used to be a though exercise. I checked my calendar for meetings, scrolled through the mails I received and sent and tried to retrieve things from my own memory to make some kind of estimation for the division of the hours between all my projects and activities. broken.
Another problem was that it was pretty hard to remember how many hours I had actually worked each day. Estimating and remembering extra hours in the weekend or in the evening made this even more difficult. This method was clearly broken.
So I started to add entries in my Outlook calendar for each activity, but this only lead to a cluttered agenda overview. Also this was not fast and easily forgotten.
And that’s where Toggl came along. Toggl is an online time tracking tool that I’ve been using since the start of this year. The concept is really simple: Add the activity you are working on and press the Start button. When you start another activity, just add it and press Start again.
After entering an activity once, you can quickly reuse it by clicking it in the tracker log. You can arrange activities to projects, and projects to clients. As I only want to register the time I spend on different projects, and not on the specific activities (creating an impact analysis, meeting etc.), I choose to only use the projects and leave the activities empty.
Search like a pro with DuckDuckGo
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few months now, and I’m still not thinking about going back to Google. Yes, there are other options for search, just as in the nineties! Apple recently even added DuckDuckGo as a standard search option in Safari on Yosemite and iOS 8, behind Google, Bing and Yahoo!.
My problem with Google Search is that I don’t always want search results that are tailored to me. When I want to learn more about a certain political event, I don’t want to see only the FoxNews reports as search results; I want the best results, including other opinions. This phenomenon is called the Filter Bubble and is explained in this ‘guide’. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track its users and thus doesn’t collect personal data, so the results are not user specific.
But, over time I got an even bigger fan of another DuckDuckGo feature: The !bangs. With these !bang commands you can directly search on thousands of websites, without having to visit those sites first. When I enter !a Xcelsius in my Safari search bar, I’m directed to the Amazon.com search results for Xcelsius. !yt takes me to YouTube, !imdb to IMDB.com, !bol to BOL.com and !w to Wikipedia.
