How to use Google Apps and App Engine to get free email, calendar, homepage and more

This article will explain how to setup email, calendar, online docs and more from Google Apps, as well as deploy your homepage using Google App Engine – all integrated and all under your own domain! Why? Because GMail is the best online mail client, because Google Calendar is awesome, because Google App Engine works blazing fast, and finally – because it’s all free!

Automatically tweet about new posts in Expression Engine using AutoTweet plugin

There are stuff machines should do for you, and one of them is tweeting about your latest blog post – because it’s important to spread the word. Today I will show you my Expression Engine (EE) plugin called AutoTweet that does just that. It’s simple and elegant and doesn’t require anything above typing in your Twitter credentials. So next time you see an auto-tweet about my post, please retweet it :)

44 Zen Widescreen Wallpapers for your MacBook

It’s time to cool off the tech talk and chill out with this amazing set of 44 widescreen wallpapers I picked up over the years, especially for your MacBook desktop (all of them are 1280x800 or bigger). With these images you will feel bliss and peace. Your desktop will be zen, you will be zen, and your life will get better – in other words, these pictures will make you live longer ;) Enjoy!

Simple Template System in Perl

By now you should know I am a fan of everything simple. I casted an opinion that frameworks, while useful, are overcomplicated and create an unnecessary load on your project, unless it reaches a certain amount of complexity. And one of the most used frameworks, are the template frameworks. Thus, it would be great to have a dead simple template system, that just works. And that’s what I am going to show you today.

Setting up Mac for ease of use

It’s always a though call to install all the necessary (and preferably free) apps on your mac to have a pleasant experience at all times. Fortunately, due to crappy Apple HDD drives, I’ve been going though this quite a lot. Thus, I’ll show you what nice apps you should install right after you start up your mac (if you haven’t done it yet) – they are so worth it…

Setting up Mac for the Web Developer

Leopard comes with tons of stuff for developers, but out-of-the-box it ain’t quite configured to get them running in an instant. This article goes through the configuration process of Leopard and some of its bundled applications, to get the most out of it and create a nice web development environment. I will focus on setting up Apache with MySQL and Perl (and PHP, which I rarely use) plus some recommended apps. If you are a python developer, please share your configuration routine in the comments.

Don’t use IDs in CSS

In CSS, you can assign styles to elements in 3 ways: either by a direct reference to an HTML tag, or by a class attribute, or finally, by the id attribute. Each of these approaches has it’s pros and cons, but in this article, I’ll highlight why you should avoid using styling by #id. In fact, you shouldn’t base your style design on id attributes at all.

Apple hard disk failures or how I stopped worrying and love the SSD

Ever since Apple tried to pursue mainstream, things went bad for them. It’s not like their computers didn’t crash before — that’s normal. But recently, they started to crash a lot. I had a late 2007 white MacBook with a 160GB hard drive. Well, exactly after 12 months, this drive failed me, a few days before the warranty expiration. It started clicking and died. They changed it for free to an even crappier one — it failed too, a few days ago, exactly after 6 months, and out of nowhere. Similarly, started clicking and just died.

Wolfram|Alpha launching today and what it means for Google and search

Wolfram|Alpha knowledge search engine is set to launch online today, May 15, with a live webcast beginning at 7pm CST. A lot of hype has been made around this new project by the iconic Stephen Wolfram and his team most widely known for their brilliant Mathematica package and online math encyclopedia. We have seen a lot of attempts to create a Google killer, the last being the unfortunate Cuil. But Wolfram|Alpha is anything but a search engine — it’s not a Google killer, it’s the future.

Windows 7 on MacBook first look

Installing Windows 7 RC1 32-bit on my late 2007 MacBook was a piece of cake. Boot Camp manager created a 32 GB partition, installation from the DVD was quick and smooth, and the system was running nicely even without the drivers from Apple. The decision by Microsoft to release an almost complete product for free, with a one-year license, is a great opportunity to get used to the next iteration of Windows systems. Let’s have a look at it.