Task Till Dawn 1.5 is more or less just a bugfix release. Especially the serious bug, which caused the tasklist to be lost sometimes on Windows, should be fixed now.

Lock-UnMatic 1.2 brings a lot of enhancements and bugfixed. Amongst other things is the admin-mode, which allows to see and quit processes by other users.

PADEdit is an application which lets you view and modify PAD-files (PrivatAbrechnung Digital) used for the voucherless data carrier exchange between medical scientists and the PVS (Privatärztliche VerrechnungsStellen). Exchange-files exported by other applications do sometimes not correspond to the format specifications by the PVS, making manual postprocessing necessary. With PADEdit this is no big deal.

PADEdit is freeware and provided under the LGPL. The latest binary versions for Mac and Windows can be downloaded in the downloads-section. The application is only available in german language.

Thanks to Roger Weston I found a critical bug in Task Till Dawn 1.4. If Windows is shut down or rebootet while Task Till Dawn is still running, it can happen that the list of tasks is lost. I will provide a bugfixed version as soon as possible.

Since shortly, a great time-lapse-video starring Stuttgart can be seen on stuttgart24h.de. In almost nine minutes, 20 locations in Stuttgart - which were filmed over 24 hours - are shown. Actually this is not a new idea, but I haven't seen any other movies like this with the capital city of Baden-Württemberg in it yet.

Version 1.1 of Lock-UnMatic brings a lot of small changes and enhancements compared to the first release. Especially the handling of files with special characters in their filenames has been improved.

... and with it comes the possibility to conveniently determine what processes are locking your files on the Mac. The utility uses the terminal-commands lsof (list of open files) as well as kill (to quit the processes).

What startet out as a little utility - which should have been not much of work - now turned into one week of work which used up all my spare time. I just hope this tool will make somebody's live easier. And that Apple will one day incorporate an equal functionality into the Finder.

I won't do a version of Lock-UnMatic for Windows, as there are already enough other tools for this type of problem - like WhoLockMe, for example.

If any questions arise - or if you find any faults - don't hesitate to contact me via email or using the built-in feedback-form!

I wish you all a happy New Year 2010! Admittedly with some delay, but I had to recover from the new years party and the related stresses and strains.

This year, we (my girlfriend and me) went to Berlin - to visit a good friend who lives there. And who provided us with a place to stay at.

The journey to Berlin by car on the 30th was relatively nasty because it was raining all along and we had poor visibility. About 80 km outside of Berlin it began to snow …