right in time for the Semifinals of the European Football Championship a new desktop wallpaper is ready: I just added the final Line-Up-Wallpaper to the already existing Worldcup Wallpaper-Set. With this new wallpaper you could for example try out different team line-ups, almost as seen on TV…

free downloads:
-> the Final Euro-Line-Up-Wallpaper (and four more)
-> the team shirt tricot icons (2x 16 Tricot-Icons +Ball etc)

…of course all desktop wallpaper images und icons are free to download and free to use and should be working on PCs and Macs. Please note that the Team-Shirt-Icons come in a ‘classic’ icon size of  32×32 pixels - it might be a good idea to adjust the display preferences according to this so that the appearance is as ‘nice’ as possible…:]

…enjoy the show, -t..-

at least: almost in time for the quarter-finals of the European Football Championship 2008 I finally made it to re-pixel all tricot shirts of all 16 teams - which means that here’s now some cute and small and colorful 2x 16 team shirt icons for you to download. For free. Of course…:]

‘European Football Championship - Team-Shirt-Icons - 2008′

I first feared that I wouldn’t make it this year to make an appropriate icon-set, just like back in the days of the football world cup 2006 - but then…

-> here’s the ‘Football-Team-Shirt-Icon-Set - 2008′

..to be continued..

…enjoy! greetz! -t..-

usually it’s not that easy, to be part of a world record - and even this time I almost missed the opportunity and took only part in it, because Mr. Firfox himself was a little bit late…:] Anyways - one hour later than originally planned the “Firefox 3 Download Day” took off - and I took part in it ‘already’ one hour before it was all over. Hurray!
Before I clicked the download link the download counter showed that already 7,832,299 downloads were downloaded before mine - so I guess download number 7,832,300 can be concidered as ‘my’ download…:]

At that time the download statistic showed over half a million requests from Germany alone, some 165.000 from China, more than 1500 from Jamaika - and with 1002 downloads Cuba was not really on the last position.

First I wasn’t even sure if I should really try to download this brand new version of my favourite browser a.s.a.p. or if I should rather wait, until the ‘first download wave’ was over… But when I read the first reviews and saw all the hype and nice blinking banners and invitations to download parties all over the world I was ‘on fire’ and started downloading. Not even two minutes later my hard drive was one 17,2 MB application fuller - and I was one 17,2 MB application happier…:]

Of course I haven’t yet checked out all those new features - but so far I am quite curious about all those little helpers and features an the ‘real zoom’ and so on - and I will probably sooner or later write something like a small review about my experiences with this best-browser-ever… - …or is it…? …we’ll see…:] For now I am just happy that I finally made it to be part of a world record..

-> www.spreadfirefox.com

greetz, t..

basically I don’t have anything against Black Sheep - the opposite is actually the case: not so long time ago Environmentalists, Globalisation-Sceptics, Human-Rights-, Anti-Nuclear- and other Activists and even members of the Green Party were sometimes treated like ‘Black Sheep’…

Nowadays hopefully nobody really wants to doupt that fossil fuels are limited, nuclear power is not such a good idea - and sooner or later we will have to move on and switch to alternative, renewable, regenerative - green sources of enery such as wind, water and solar power.

Actually these ‘natural/green’ power sources are currently so popular in Germany, that the demand can hardly be satisfied by the ‘natural/green’ power plants in operation today. This is obviously not the wind’s or the sun’s fault - these two colleagues deliver way more energy than we can consume. It’s a man made mistake - we are just not collecting or ‘harvesting’ enough of that energy.

What to do…? Some German newspapers ( Tagesspiegel and Spiegel-Online) recently reported, that one of the big players in German green power business recently found a pretty easy though not-so-green way out, bought some not-so-green kilowatt hours of coal and nuclear generated electric power and re-sold it under their green label. Well well.

And what do we learn from this…? First of all: there is also some Black Sheep among the Greens - but that we already knew at least since that ‘clever’ Swedish man not only collected money to preserve forests in South America, but then also cut down and sold some hundrets of thousands of trees - and finally was sentenced to pay a 177 Millionen Dollar fine (see also -> german newspaper Tagesspiegel)…

…well - I’ll anyways stick with the ‘clean~’ and/or ‘green power’ company called Naturstrom AG - they re-invest some of the money for new ‘clean~’ and/or ‘green’ power plants - so that also in the future we will hopefulle not need to use nuclear power - especially not secretly!

…powerful greetings, -t..-

actually for quite some days now I was planning to work on an icon-set for PC and Mac, featuring all European football championchip team shirts as desktop icons - just like those worldcup icons I managed to work on back in 2006. This is of course again more work than expected - especially since this time the team shirt icons should not only be compatible with Mac OS 9 (Classic) and Windows XP, but also look good on those ‘contemporary’ operating systems Mac OS X and Windows Vista. On the one hand this means that those icons will probably look ‘even nicer’ than those worldcup icons - on the other hand it clearly also means more pixels to work on.

Miniature-Cup
Trophy “EM 2008″
ca. 70mm tall
red wooden foot
buy new:
€ 17,95
at amazon.de

‘Work’ is also the right keyword for my excuse: besides all of this European football championchip and Public Private Viewing and Super Summer I am actually also still working on various projects - whis is good. But that also means that I can’t really afford working on team shirt icons full time - and all you Euro-Championship-Tricot-Pixel-Icon-Fans have to be patient for a little longer. As I already said I am still planning to work on those tricot-icons - but it will take a litle time until I can present them to you…

Until then I can only ‘feed you hopes’ and ‘promise you jam tomorrow’ and invite you to have a look at the freshly opened ‘fan shop’, have a closer look at all those ‘real’ fan items like Football Team Tricots, Fan-Shirts, Baseball Caps, Flags and so on - and maybe you would even want to order the one or the other item - everything presented her is presented in cooperation with amazon.de…

All product names, team details, descriptions and especially all prices are based on the information I found on the website amazon.de - no warranty or guarantee for correctness or thelike…
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The European Football Championship is almost right around corner - and I still did not manage to re-release the Desktop-Wallpaper and the team-shirt-icon-set I did in 2006 for the Football Worldcup. Just like in 2006 I wanted to create at least one team-shirt icon for each team, together with the football field wallpaper it would make a nice desktop decoration - not only (but also) for football fans…:]

I just didn’t find the time yet - but I can almost promise that I will still do ‘the job’ before the European Football Championship 2008 (”UEFA EURO 2008™”…?) will start off on June 7th. Until then you are warmly welcome to feel free to download what already is there to download: the Desktop Wallpaper and the Icon-Set from two years ago - all for free, of course…:]

->

football world cup team shirt icons

->

football world cup desktop wallpaper

..preview:

please feel free to download and use it for your private purposes: desktop decoration, szenario simulation, homepage illustration, ..whatever..

…to be continued - until then: enjoy! +greetz! t..

First of all: I usually don’t read Ebooks - on the on hand I hardly find the time to read ‘real’ books, on the other hand Ebooks usually cost at least some money - and until now I didn’t really care about them and thought that the information provided in Ebooks usually would also be easy to find and therefore easily accessible online somehow somewhere…
The second thing I have to say before I get to the point is, that I am usually quite skeptical about -free- things. The recent WIRED-magazine features an interesting story about FREE-things - how they can be free, and what they actually do ‘cost’… but also before I read that article my point of view was that I can’t really afford most of the -free- things…

Anyways - surprise surprise: I just downloaded my first free ebook from chitika.com - or actually two ebooks for the prize of none:

• the first one is named “Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging”. It’s basically a round-up of the 30-days “Blog Bash” that took place at chitika.com throughout april last year. It features 30 one-page articles about ’successful blogging’ written by 30 (of the most successful) bloggers of the world wide web…

Of course this ebook can not and will not make anybody a successful ‘good’ blogger over night - but at least it provides an interesting insight into some bloggers ideas, strategies, minds…

• once you’re there downloading the one ebook you can just download the other one as well: it is titled “Using Chitika With Google” and shows different strategies of mixing Google Adsense ads for example with Chitika MiniMalls. Again: don’t expect too much from this - but maybe some interesting and/or entertaining tips and tricks and how-tos and so on…

both ebooks can be downloaded completely free of charge from chitika’s blog:
-> www.chitika.com/blog

greetings, t..

PS: you do not need to register for an account at chitika.com to download the free ebooks - but if you want to start using the chitika-ads for your weblogs/websites you may of course register using ‘my’ referral-link:
-> chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=tille

for obvious reasons I recently designed/made this “Free Tibet!” blinkie-button:

Free-Tibet!

…please feel free to download the button, and/or to include it into your homepage, website or blog, decorate your FaceBook account or some MySpace page of your choice. On the related blinkie-button-page you will also find some ready made code snippet along with some related links, that will make it very easy to add this button to whatever website of your choice..

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for almost a week I managed to keep my mouth shut - but after my honest opinion the public “discussion” about Nokia’s decision to shut down its factory in Bochum recently got a bit out of hand. So I finally see myself forced to comment on some of other people’s comments..

..for example Nordrhein-Westfalens minister for economic affairs Christa Thoben (CDU), accusing the finnish mobile phone manufacturer of “subvention tricking” (”Subventions-Tricksereien”) and warned the company of a possible “massive image damage”.
The Prime Minister of Nordrhein-Westfalens Mr. Rüttgers insulted the former beloved investor, den ehemals ach-so-sehr geliebten Investor, employer and tax payer Nokia and called the company a “subvention cicada”!

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..what if everybody..? ..what if everybody not only used Firefox as a browser - but also combined it with Wladimir Palant’s free advertisement blocking plug-in ‘Adblock Plus’ (www.adblockplus.org)..? ..would there just be less ugly blinking ads on my screen and your monitor and on his and her and their internet browsing experience..? ..or would there be also less motivation for publishers to publish useful information online..? ..would there be less crap online..? ..fewer weblogs..? ..less growth..?
To sum it up: has ‘Adblock Plus’ the potential to bring the Empires of E-Marketing down to their financial knees..? ..might this the end of the free world wide web as we know it..?

At this point I’d like to freely quote from H.P.Baxter’s Scooter’s current hit single:
“The Question is: What is the Question?!”
..or in my words: “The problem is: What is the Problem?!”
Well.. Currently there seems to be a lot of discussion going on about moneteasing äh- monetization - or actually about the possible future problems of making money online by publishing ‘free’ content - which seems to be one of the sole reasons people publish things on the web anyways. Some people seem to be so bitter about this ‘problem’ that they started blocking Firefox - hoping to make Adsense-blocking visitors understand that advertisement is needed to cover the costs of free content.. Others seem to switch to in my opinion even worse/ more ‘evil’ advertisement techniques such as text-ads - text-links that are shown in the middle of a text - leaving the visitors of a website with no choice of ignoring or even blocking the ad since it ‘camouflages’ perfectly well..

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