Nope, I’m not dead! I’m still alive and back with a brand new post!
Forgive me for not updating the site for a while now but these are very busy times for us..

During the last couple of weeks, which were very busy weeks for us obviously,  we have managed to do a lot of stuff for our wedding and enjoyed life..
See below a small round up of what I was up to when I wasn’t blogging!

• I turned 27 on Friday the 26th.
  Jannie surprised me with some lovely presents; such as a Sony digital video recorder with 60GB harddisk and it’s accessories (yet another toy which I can play with! ), some perfume, a nice card, a nice diner and in the end a small party.
  Ow, I forgot to mention that I also got a Guitar Hero Metallica as a present! I haven’t had that many time to try it, but I already played it for a couple of minutes and I have to say… IT’S GREAT!

• I managed to buy my wedding suit!
  While shopping with Jannie we saw this lovely black suit and when I tried it on, it just fited perfectly!
• We went to “Zwarte markt” (blackmarket) in Beverwijk (somewhere near Amsterdam) with some friends.
  Every week, tens of thousands of visitors come to check out the stalls, lively cafés and countless bargains. Live music, interesting finds and the many restaurants and cafés all help to make this cosy and convivial picture complete. The atmosphere here is full of good fun and good fortune!
  After visiting the “Zwarte Markt” we drove to Scheveningen, yep our favourite place beside Eindhoven, to enjoy the sun.
  We ended the day by having an Iranian meal at some Iranian Restaurant.

• Working in the garden…
  Yep, it’s summer again and therefor it’s necessary to have the garden nice & clean as we love to BBQ and sit outside!
• Some birthday parties of our friends / family and had a great time..
• We went to Roermond for a day trip, which was really fun to do! The weather was just great!
• Ow, I forgot to mention.. The pictures above are taken with my new digital camera, yeah the old one has “passed” away. My new camera is a Canon IXUS 95 IS which is a very nice camera with 10 megapixels and a lot of cool features.

So as you can see a lot happened during the last couple of weeks.. So you may understand why I haven’t updated the blog that much!

After having a HTC P4350 for two year, which is a very good & nice phone, it was time for some new gadget/toy to play with.
Obviously there are a lot of cool phones which you can get these days but after a recommendation of a good friend (and my man of honor) I decided to stick with HTC and go Pro with the new HTC Touch Pro2!

As you might know HTC is actually a very large player on the Pocket PC ground and therefore it runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 PRO. I like having Windows Mobile installed on mobile phones as you can quickly have it working with your Windows PC/synchronizing it  and like a Windows PC you can install third party software on it and off course.. You can tweak it!

Anyway, the specs of HTC Touch Pro 2 are actually awesome, check them here below!

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and HSDPA 7.2Mbps
• 3.6″ 65K-color touchscreen WVGA display (480×800 px)
• Five row full QWERTY side-sliding keyboard of brilliant ergonomics which is really handy!
• Revamped TouchFLO 3D Home screen and gesture controls
• Wi-Fi and built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS. Yep, navigation is possible with TomTom!
• Qualcomm MSM7200A 528 Mhz CPU and 288 MB DDR SDRAM (yeah, reminds me of one of my computers which I used to have in the 90’s!)
• Dedicated graphics chip (64MB RAM reserved for graphics)
• 3.15 MP auto focus camera
• Active stylus
• Touch-sensitive zoom bar (which works with pictures and even with Opera browser!)
• microSD memory expansion (I guess it could go up to 16GB, but I’ve used my old microSD card of 1 GB for time being)
• TV out
• Teeter game aboard (a very nice game which you can play by tilting the phone up, down, left and right!)
• Cool YouTube client
• Excellent video playback
• MS Office Mobile document editor
• Opera 9.5 web browser (Yes, it has Internet Explorer on it, but believe me I’m NOT going to use that!)

I just have the phone for a day and I’m having a lot of fun with it and I don’t think I’m done “playing” with it!

While surfing on the net I just came across a very funny commercial from a phone service company in Norway called 1881.
What this commercial is about ? Well..”Be sure you know the spelling before getting a tattoo or better yet, make sure your tattoo artist knows the spelling”

I just installed a very cool FireFox add-on which you might want to give it a try! This FireFox add-on is called “Locationbar²” and it basically allows you to formats and linkifies URL segments in your location bar.

At first I didn’t know what to expect but after spending 30 seconds on playing with the options, I have to say that this is a great add-on! It makes browsing even more easier, I mean take a look at the screenshot here below!

As you can see you can also add breadcrumbs to the URL segment and as I already mentioned; This is very handy to use and to navigate websites with! Give it a try, I know you’ll like it!
PS: See here below a screenshot of my preferences of Locationbar2..

Requires: FireFox
Publisher: Dao Gottwald
OS: Windows 95,98,98SE,NT,2000,XP,Vista, Mac OS X, Linux etc.
Current Version: 1.0.3
Language: English
License: Freeware
Download: Click…

It was last year when I saw Metallica live on PinkPop, yeah they did give a nice performance, and now it’s time for you to step on the stage as Metallica!
Yesterday I saw a Guitar Hero Metallica ad in “Bart Smit” paper.. Guitar Hero Metallica has been released in Europe just a couple of days ago and is now offered with the Game (duh! ), Wireless guitar and a Metallica t-shirt.

I obviously haven’t played the game (yet), but as a Metallica fan I think I would like to give it a try.. However.. me and “making” music?
Anyway, while surfing the net I saw this very funny Guitar Hero Metallica commercial which you have to see! As mentioned it’s hillarious: “means you gonna have to put on some pants, pops”! Watch it your self here below!

Are you looking for a good & free alternate software for Adobe Photoshop? If so you have to try The Gimp. The Gimp which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free graphics editor which can be used to edit, resize, crop, alternate the colors used in a photo, removing unwanted image components and much more. Off course you can use The Gimp too in order to design graphics, icons an logo’s!

The Gimp’s manipulation tools can be accessed via the toolbox, menu paths, and dialog boxes. Beside this “basic” stuff, you also have access to include filters, brushes, transformation selections, masking tools and my favorite: Layers! Having that mentioned you can see that The Gimp is pretty much like Adobe Photoshop, only this one it’s free!

If this isn’t enough for you and you would like to read more about The Gimp’s features, feel free to look here…

Publisher: Gimp
Version: 2.6.6
OS: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, GNU/Linux (i386, PPC), Mac OS X, Sun OpenSolaris, FreeBSD
Language: English
License: Freeware
Download size: 15.31 MB
Download The Gimp: Click here…

Last Sunday was a nice day; the sun was shinning, there was this beautiful blue sky without any clouds and to top it all.. It was really hot! Jannie and me didn’t want to stay at home and so we already had decided to do something cool if the weather was great… And believe me it was really a nice weather!

Anyway, for some times we wanted to explore the Southern part of The Netherlands, Valkenburg and Vaals to be exactly. The Southern part of The Netherlands is really beautiful because of it’s landscapes and off course because of the history! Luckily for us, both cities aren’t that far from our house.

When we arrived in Valkenburg we went to the Chairlift which will take take you to the 90 meters higher! While sitting in the chairlift, you’ll get this view:

As you can see the view is pretty awesome! When you’re at the top of the “hill”, you can eat and drink at a cosy restaurant.
Beside the chairlift there’s also a toboggan slide, which is always fun to do, right? With the toboggan slides with has a length of 325 and 375 meters you can slide down the hill.

After walking around in Valkenburg, we moved to our next point; Vaals. Like Valkenburg, Vaals is also a very unique place. It borders on both Belgium and Germany. The two borders meet on the Drielandenpunt, which is also a few hundred meters from the highest point of the Netherlands (300 somewhat meter higher), the Vaalserberg.

Going to  Drielandenpunten was very easy, but going to the city was a bit harder. Why? Because almost ALL the roads were closed because of  a bicycle race! Any that couldn’t spoil our day..
After exploring the town (after a long way of looking for a way to go to the center of Vaals) having a very delicious Italian ice cream, walking to Germany.. It was “time” to head back home.

Next weekend is going to be a “long” weekend as we’re closed at the office on Monday, so we’re looking for a nice town which we can explore again.. Any ideas?

For more pictures, click here!

The Windows Registry is a database which contains information about almost everything you do on your computer; From a visit to a website to information and settings of  the hardware in your computer. The registry also contains information about drivers, other programs, user settings, etc.

So you can see that the often you use your computer, the more fuller the registry gets. I mean think about all the junk and temporary files stored on your computer, all those broken registry, which Windows forget to delete, etc. So that’s why your computer is getting slower and you notice a loss on your computer performance. However this doesn’t have to mean that you have to accept this, right? Luckily the registry can be cleaned up using a registry cleaner. One of them is: Auslogics Registry Cleaner.

Auslogics Registry Cleaner is  a free software which will clean Windows registry for you. It will analyze it by searching for broken entries, non-existent file associations, uninstallation leftovers, and other elements that can turn the Registry into a real mess.

One of the good points of Auslogics Registry Cleaner is that it’s very easy to use for everyone, no matter your technical knowledge.  When you run the program you get to choose between a quick scan and an advance one, where you get to choose which registry categories you want Auslogics to scan.

The results are displayed in a basic or detailed format. It will also show you your computers performance before the clean up and the percentage gained after the clean up, which is always good to know! Auslogics Registry Cleaner offers you a backup function too, just in case!

As mentioned above, this is just a great and simple software which is good for everyone. Make sure to  use it once in a while in order to keep your registry nice & clean!

Publisher: Auslogics
Version: 1.3.9.145
OS: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and even Windows 7!
Language: English
License: Freeware
Download size: 1.81 MB
Download Auslogics Registry Cleaner: Click here…

For a couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about to re-arrange and clean my sidebar as I wasn’t very happy with it. After giving it some thoughts it’s time to re-organize my sidebar a bit.

Something which has been deleted from my sidebar is the Blogroll. Well, I haven’t deleted the blogrolls, I just have created a page only for the blogrolls! So from now on you’ll find the blogroll in their own page instead of my sidebar.

So what’s going to replace the blogroll!? Well,I’ve decided to display my 15 Popular posts, which are being sorted by total views. This is a good idea to make sure that new visitors will read those as well..

Another thing which has been changes is the re-placement of “A Year Ago”. From now on you can access this from my tabbed sidebar. I figured that this was a better place to display it, right next to recent posts, popular post and post from a year ago!

So with this chanegs I’m once again very happy when it comes to my sidebar! I hope you’ll like the changes too.

Last weekend there was a small Alborz reunion at our house; my cousin Kasra and his girlfriend Carmen, from Italy, came to visit us for a weekend. It was such a long time ago since we had seen them and so we were really looking forward to see them.

From left to right: Kasra, Carmen, Jannie and me

They arrived Friday at the airport and off course we picked them up. So after we got home from the airport, drinking something and making sure that Kasra and Carmen could “recover” for a while from their long trip , Jannie and me decided to give them a tour through our favorite city Eindhoven;  As this was their first visit to The Netherlands. The day went by pretty fast and we all had a great time together.

The next day we went to the market, showed them where we’re going to get married, the party place and more. We ended the day at our house with drinking something (Yeah, Kasra and me just love Smirnoff!) and catching up.

On Sunday they saw Amsterdam and later that day we went to this 3D movie called: “My Bloody Valentine”, which was an awesome movie! I really enjoyed watching it, unfortunately Carmen didn’t like the movie that much.. (Sorry Carmen! )

Unfortunately the weekend was too short and went by extremely fast, even faster as usual, and Kasra and Carmen had to go back to Italy on Monday. Yeah, time flies when you’re having fun, right?!
Anyway, it was really nice to see them again and we really enjoyed their stay! If only weekends were a bit longer!

You can find some more pictures in the Gallery: A Small Alborz Reunion Pictures.

If you’ve followed my on Twitter then you must have noticed that I was twitting about designing a new blog called BJ-Alborz.com. Well, the blog is finally ready and can be viewed online!

So make sure you visit my new blog and leave a massage!!

There are times when you want to edit, rename or delete system files and folders in Vista. For example; If you want to use a third party theme for your Windows Vista. In order to use a theme you need to edit and overwrite some system files and if  you have ever tried this, then you must have noticed that windows doesn’t let you do this, even if you’re logged in as an administrator.

In order for you to edit and overwrite the system files (or rename and delete any other system files/folder) you must “Take Ownership” of the files. When taking ownership of a files, you’ve full control of the files (and folders) and you replace the security permissions to have access.

There are a lot of ways to bypass this in order for you to do what ever you want with the system files and folders, but there is a much easier way: Taking Ownership of files and folder with just 2 simple mouse clicks!

All you have to do is download Take Ownership.zip file, which is a registry hack, extract it using 7Zip (or any similar software) and install it by double clicking on the “InstallTakeOwnership.reg” file. This registry hack will give you a menu item called “Take Ownership” that will handle all the steps for you. I don’t know who originally made this script, but who ever he/she is; A big thanks, cause this makes life much easier!

NOTE: If you ever want to uninstall this great registry hack (I wouldn’t know why you would do that.. But ok, It’s your computer! ), just double click the “RemoveTakeOwnership.reg” file which is also packed in the zip file.

Yeah, it’s been a while since my last blog post and believe me I’m not dead, I was just extremely busy! So please forgive me for not posting!

Anyway, there is this Heineken commercial, which I wanted to post for a while, but as I was very busy I forgot to post it! So here it goes, a very funny Heineken commercial!

PS: Ok, it’s a Dutch commercial, so in case you want to know what they’re saying (not that it matters ), here below you can find a translation:
- “Well, this is our living room.”
- “And… This is our bedroom.”
- (When the lady opens the door!) “And this is…..”

Almost a year ago I wrote a post called: “PDF to DOC Convertor“. The post was about  a small tool which allows you to convert any pdf file to a Microsoft word document, .doc file. This tool extracts text, images and shapes from the PDF file to doc file and lets you keep the layout. This tool did his job very good but some days ago Richard from  PDFtoWord.com left a comment saying:

You might like to check out our free PDF-to-Word service too — http://www.pdftoword.com. You do it all via our website rather than downloading and installing software.

Well, as it sounds good to me and it made me curious so I went to check it out. The first thing I noticed was that PDFtoWord.com is another free software from Nitro PDF Software. Yes, the creators of “PDF Download Add-on For Firefox“. So before I started writing this post I wanted to check and see how the service works and submitted a pdf file containing images and off course texts just to see how it works. Converting a pdf to a word document file using this free online converter is very easy and it’s done in 3 very easy steps:

1. Select your pdf you want to convert.
2. Now make a choice; convert the pdf file to .doc or .rtf (Rich Text Format). Personally I would suggest to go for .doc.
3. You’re almost done.. Now fill in your email address and the converted file will be e-mailed to you.
   Within a couple of minutes you’ll find the converted file in your inbox. Now you can open the .doc (or .rtf) file and start editing and/or using the file!

Pdftoword.com is another great service from Nitro PDF software and I have to admit that this works much easier and faster then having a software installed! Now go ahead and try it out yourself! 

Today it’s exactly one year ago when I launched BioTecK.net. Before that I used to blog on .nl domain, but as I wanted to blog international I had to look for a new TLD ( Top Level Domain) and after some time I choose for .net. After designing and tweaking the theme, which I’m still using , a new blog was born:  BioTecK.net! 

So yeah, today is the first anniversary of BioTecK.net and it’s time to celebrate! I actually wanted to hold a contest or a give way around this one, but due the lack of time I wasn’t able to do so. Remember my post about how fast time flies, Another Week Passes By…!? It sucks that I still can’t buy time anywhere! Anyway, maybe some other time!? 

Now 1 year later, BioTecK.net got a PR2, some post pages even have PR1, 708 posts, 2120 comments & counting, received a lot of Blogging Awards (Sorry if I didn’t pass on the awards!!), got some very nice reviews and much more!

So I guess it’s time to say THANK YOU  ALL, yes every 177.233 one who have visited BioTecK.net the past year and a ::hug:: for helping me get this off the ground! I hope this year will be even better then the last year!

Poker… I don’t know about you but I don’t know anything about poker and it seems that poker is really hot these days. Here in Holland you’ll find poker accessories in almost every shop. Some time ago a Dutch television channel, Veronica, had organized a poker tournament with Dutch celebrities and where they did explain the game. The same television channel is broadcasting a program called: “Poker After Dark” which is all about poker and about poker tournaments.
Back then I didn’t feel like watching those programs, but since a couple of months I wanted to to learn more about poker. So I’m a complete newbie when it comes to play poker!

In my search to learn more about poker, I came across a great website called Pokerlistings.com. As the title of this post says: Pokerlistings is your online poker guide and provide you a lot of information such as interview, updates from major tournaments and more.

PokerListings.com’s Design & Navigation:

As we all know the Design & Navigation of a website is really essential. If the user can’t find the information which he’s looking for or the navigation isn’t easy to use then the user will probably quickly close the tab and go elsewhere in search of information. Some other thing which is really important is the design of a website. PokerListings.com has a good layout and is very user friendly.
The website isn’t cluttered and you can easily find the information you were looking for, even if you enter via a subpage, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for immediately you can always use the search bar on the right.

Basic Poker Rules:

Have you ever heard of Texas Hold’em? Omaha? Or Seven-Card Stud? Well, I didn’t! Yes, I told you… I’m a newbie when it comes to poker! So if you’re a newbie, like me, and you would like to learn more about poker, then you really should check out the Pokerlistings.com Poker rules page on PokerListings. There you’ll find a step by step beginners guide (such as the game rules & gameplay) for almost every poker variations. You can find almost everything on the Pokerlistings.com Poker rules page, even the basic poker etiquette.

Online Poker Tournaments:

If you know how you can play poker and you want to win some cash, you might want to visit the PokerListing Online Poker Tournaments. Here you’ll find the Top 20 Online Poker rooms which are selected by Pokerlistings.com’s experts. Each of the poker rooms are ranked and the ranking is based on the number of tournament players during peak hours as well as the quality of sit-and-gos and fixed-schedule poker tournaments.
If Online isn’t good enough for you, then you can also check out Live Tournaments. There you’ll find a lot of information such as live updates, blogs, interviews, a TV section from all major live poker tournament events. On this page you’ll also find a very nice calendar called: “PokerListings Live Tournament Coverage” and as the names already reveals: It gives you a fast overview of upcoming tournaments.

So you see, this is a website with a lot of content which is suitable for everyone. It doesn’t mater if you’re looking for some information about poker, if you’re a poker player looking to win some cash or if you are completely new to the world of poker, cause you’ll always find what you’re looking for!

Not so long ago I wrote a post called: “Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer“. Well, make that almost a year ago. Anyway, I’ve used Foxmarks ever since and I really have to say: I can’t live without it! There are just too many times that I’m at work, searching for something which I already had bookmarked at home. In this kind of situation I just log in to my.foxmarks.com and can simply access my bookmarks. Briliant isn’t it?

Now just a couple of days ago I recieved an email from Foxmarks (like many other Foxmarks users) about a very important news about Foxmarks.

Foxmarks is becoming Xmarks. We’re not just changing our name, we’re also enhancing our browser add-on and web site with new capabilities.

With Xmark you’ll still enjoy bookmark sync and all other “previous” feature but there are some new cool features like;

1. Smarter Search
   From now on Xmarks will highlight the 3 sites in your Google results that have been bookmarked by the most people; this is a quick and easy way to tell which sites are most valued by real people like you.
2. Site Info
   Xmarks adds a small blue information icon in your browser location bar. Click it to learn more about the site you are on and see recommendations for the top 5 similar sites. This is a great way to uncover the best of the web.
3. Xmarks.com
   Visit Xmarks.com from any browser to write your own site reviews and to see even more similar site recommendations.

To learn more about Xmarks click here. So if you liked Foxmarks, you’ll love Xmarks too!

Ow I almost forgot: In order to manage/edit your bookmarks from any computer, you’ll have to log in via login.xmarks.com.
NOTE: Xmarks is currently Firefox only, but it syncs perfectly with your existing Foxmarks account and Foxmarks add-ons for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Requires: FireFox
OS: Windows 95,98,98SE,NT,2000,XP,Vista, Mac OS X, Linux +
Language: English, Dutch and many more!
License: Freeware
Download: Click…

If you don’t know who “Frank The Black Sheep” is, I suggest to read this post called: Frank The Black Sheep: Born To Be Cheap! which I have posted a while ago.
In the past couple of months “Frank”  is getting even more popular and that’s probably because of their good & funny commercials!

This days Tele2 has a new commercial and it’s called: Job Interview. Ow yeah, I almost forgot… You can’t fool Frank!

Let’s start with a little basic stuff, shall we? FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is a very common method to transfer (large) files from “computer A” to “Computer B” or vice versa. Transferring files from a client computer to a server computer is called uploading and transferring from a server to a client is downloading.

In order to transfer files using FTP, you need:

• The FTP Server address;  This could look like “ftp.domainname.com” or it could look like “11.231.231.234″.
• Username and password. Some FTP servers let you connect to them anonymously so you don’t need a username and password.
• An FTP Client.

Now, there are a lot of FTP Clients, some of  them you have to pay for and some of them are freeware. One of the free FTP clients is FileZilla.
FileZilla is powerful Open Source, so it’s free, FTP/SFTP client with many features. FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP client with a lot of useful features, such as:

• Resume support for downloads and uploads.
• Site manager to store all your connection details and logins.
• Available in many languages.
• Configurable transfer speed limits.
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and more.
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
• Firewall support and many more.

Installing FileZilla is very easy and using is even more easier! FileZilla is a great FTP Client with a clean design and I suggest tring it. I use FileZilla at work and at home and I’m really happy with this free FTP Client.
So if you’re looking for a FTP Client with a lot of great features which comes in for free, then you really have to try FileZilla!

Publisher: FileZilla Project
Version: 3.2.3
OS: Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Linux,  Mac OS X, BSD.
Language: English, Dutch, Chinese and much more!
License: Freeware
Download size: 3.89 MB
Download FileZila: Click here…

Now before we go on… In case you haven’t heard of the SSD before, SSD is a disk drive that uses memory chips instead of rotating platters for data storage. SSD’s are faster than regular disks. Now the question have been answered, let’s move on….

Now imagine this.. 24 250 GB SSD’s (total capacity: 6TB) chained together in one RAID device, making it a fast computer! A very fast system that actually reaches transfer speeds of 2GBps, which is capable of loading all Microsoft Office applications in half a second, ripping a full 700MB CD in 0.8 seconds, open 53 programs from the test computer’s start menu in 18 seconds and do a complete system defrag in 3 seconds.
Don’t believe me? Just watch the video here below!

Now that’s a system I’d love to have, don’t you?!