About 4 months ago I started to use Project Wonderful in addition to Adsense. I promised to follow up with a second post on the performance of this alternative ad publisher.

Well, here are the numbers:

That's right, I earned $15 over 4 months and prices went down over recent months. Not very satisfying.

Also not satisfying were the relevancy of the ads. Ads for herbal teas, jewelry or formula 1 racing isn't much related to my content. And even though I explicitly disabled NSFW ads in the setup I had to block one or two ads for their explicit content.

So Project Wonderful did not perform very well on my site. A few possible reasons I see are:

• The ad wasn't very prominently placed at my site
• My traffic might still be too low
• Most advertisers on PW seem to be very small businesses or private persons with a low advertising budget
• Finding relevant pages worth advertising on is somewhat complicated at PW

I might retry Project Wonderful someday, but for now it just isn't worth it.

What now? I removed the adcode and withdrew my funds. I now have an empty space to fill with some new service . Suggestions welcome. Let me know about new alternative advertising services or just cool widgets.

I recently moved to a new apartment and this means I have to announce my new address to a bunch of people and organizations. For your and my future reference, here is the list I came up with.

• Banking
  • Checking account
  • Savings account
  • Credit cards
  • Loans
  • Stock depots
• Insurance
  • Health insurance
  • Pension fund
  • Household contents insurance
  • Liability insurance
  • Car insurance
• Utilities
  • Power
  • Gas
  • Telephone
    • Land line
    • Cell phone
  • Internet provider
  • Domain registrars
• Online services
  • ebay
  • Amazon
  • Paypal
  • Adsense
  • Website imprint¹⁾
• Other
  • Magazine subscriptions
  • Registration office

Did I miss something? Please let me know in the comments.

Michael Klier just posted a blog entry on how he visualized 4 years of DokuWiki development using Code Swarm. Check out the amazing video:

Each dot represents a file changed in a darcs commit. The more changes are made to a file the bigger the dot gets. The files float around the developer's name who submitted the patch. Different colors are different parts of DokuWiki:

• red = core code
• yellow = GeSHi
• magenta = parser code
• white = test cases
• green = template and plugins
• blue = language files

As you can see in my “currently reading” section on the right, I'm currently reading Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother". I haven't read a book for a long time that moved me as much as this one.

The name is obviously a play on the omnipresent “Big Brother” from George Orwell's 1984. Like Orwell's book, “Little Brother” is a dystopian novel describing a not too distant future.

What’s Little Brother about?

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

from the website

What makes this book so disturbing is how close this dystopian future already is. Unlike when Orwell wrote his book, the technology used in Doctorow's book is already here. There is no time left to discuss probabilities. Many of the things happening in the book are already happening here and now.

I really recommend to read this book. You can download it for free under a Creative Commons license or just buy it as a regular book. I intend to give away a few copies as birthday presents.

If you read the book, please let me know what you think of it in the comments. Personally I find much of it still a bit too optimistic, but I'd love to hear your opinions.

It's done. I moved from apartment A to apartment B. Most of my boxes are unpacked and I got rid of some more stuff.

Of course there are also some new things to buy. We will need a new sofa for our new, big living room. Preferable a convertible to have a place for guests to sleep on. Some more kitchen cupboards are needed, too.

One thing we already bought is a DVB-T receiver. Cable TV isn't included in the rent ¹⁾, so we hope to save the 10€ a month by using the free DVB-T broadcast available in Berlin. Marketing promises cable like quality and choice but of course reality is a bit different.

I bought a Siemens Gigaset 270 first, and a simple rod antenna. But this didn't work out. The signal strength was bad and we had frequent dropouts in video and audio. I suspected a problem with the receiver because it made tiny but audible noise.

We returned it today and exchanged it for a Skymaster DT 440 and a more powerful antenna. After some experiments how to align it, we got a maximum of 82% signal strength. So far it seems to be usable but all that antenna wiggling reminded me of analog TV from the last century.

I wonder if you have any experience with DVB-T reception, receivers and antennas. Any tips you have to share? Please do so in the comments.