Luxembourg’s CLC (commerce association) has gone web 2.0 and launched a blog at goodidea.lu to promote Luxembourg as the “pôle” for shopping in the greater region. Interestingly, the blog is available in French and English only. German speaking visitors can still admire the pictures. Let’s see how this one evolves (remember blogdelux, another Vanksen Culturebuzz project?).
Apparently, some sort of Luxembourgish product and retail store search engine is in the works, too. The idea seems to be that you enter the product and it tells you where you can find what you want in Luxembourg and why you shouldn’t drive to Trier instead. Just kidding about the Trier part. 😉
BTW, the young woman chewing on her shopping bag on goodidea.lu is file number 3563163 from iStockphoto [affiliate link]. Happy shopping!
Note: This blog here has moved to a new server at Hosteurope [affiliate link] (and has been updated to the latest version of WordPress), please let me know if something’s broken.
It was a bizarre situation: Paypal had acquired a bank license and transferred its headquarters to Luxembourg and still, if you were a Paypal customer in Luxembourg, your only option was to withdraw funds to a U.S. bank account or to spend them. Withdrawal to a local bank account or to an account in another EU member state? No way.
At least, that used to be the situation until… well, I have no idea when they actually changed this, but anyhow: It’s finally possible to withdraw money to a bank account in Luxembourg!
As you can see, you can alternatively withdraw funds to a credit/debit card (this feature had been announced on the Paypal Blog in September).
I’m just glad I didn’t go through the trouble of establishing a bank account in the U.S. just to be able to withdraw funds.
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In other “news that I apparently missed”, Paypal competitor Moneybookers [affiliate link] is allowing merchants to accept payments with the French Carte Bleue. As far as I know, this is the first and only option to accept the Carte Bleue without the need to establish a merchant account (compte commerçant) with a French bank.
While most Carte Bleues (>90%?) are nowadays co-branded with the Visa logo, giving potential customers in France the additional option of using the Carte Bleue Nationale sounds like a good idea to me, especially if the implementation is as simple as it is with Moneybookers.
I’m about to change my company’s online shops’ payment pages and might post again in a few weeks about the acceptance of Moneybooker’s Carte Bleue payment option.
A while ago, a corrupted XD card gave me an opportunity to try a bunch of picture (and video) recovery programs. When reading the following reviews, please keep in mind that 1. files can “disappear” for different reasons, so what didn’t work for me might work for you and 2. the more programs I used on the same xD card, the higher the chance it got more corrupted (due to card or card reader defects or maybe software actions) 3. the whole thing is just my personal experience and no fair comparison under “lab conditions”.
Recover My Photos from GetData (the makers of the general-purpose Recover My Files software [affiliate link]): Using the “deep scan” option, this program was able to find all lost files within only 15 minutes. I liked the way it lets you select the file types it’s supposed to look for. I also liked the preview function, though it’s a bit sadistic, because you have to buy the program before it’ll actually restore any files. What I didn’t like was the 39,95 US$ price tag, especially since cnet / download.com listed it as “$29.95 to buy”. That’s why I went looking for other programs.
PC Inspector smart recovery 4.5: It’s freeware, sponsored by Convar. Unfortunately, the setup program refused to work until I disabled my virus scanner (Bitdefender). Furthermore, PC Inspector was much slower than “Recover My Photos” and could only recover one file type each time it worked its way through the xD card. I wasn’t patient enough and started looking for other options (below), though I eventually returned to PC Inspector and had it recover the pictures in about 2 hours plus another 2 hours for the videos. While it did a great job with the pictures, some AVI file were still damaged (but playable with VLC media player).
Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 2.3: Freeware, too (donations are appreciated). You select the drive with the corrupted pictures, a folder to save them in and then the software does its job. Unfortunately, it did way too much: after 3 hours, I had to stop it because it had recovered more than 2000 pictures, most of them tiny useless and unreadable 37kB files. While it had found some real photos, too, and I believe it would eventually have recovered all of them, it was unable to recover video files. Note: A new version (3.0) has been released in the meantime.
Following the 3rd incident (video link) in a few weeks with the landing gear of a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, SAS has decided to permanently remove all their remaining Q400 from service, despite Bombardier’s claims that this incident was different from the two previous ones.
“SAS’s flight operations have always enjoyed an excellent reputation and there is a risk that use of the Dash 8 Q400 could eventually damage the SAS brand,” said John Dueholm, Deputy CEO of SAS.
According to Wikipedia, “in all, seven Q400s have had landing gear failures while landing during 2007: four in Denmark, one in Germany, one in Japan, one in Lithuania and one in South Korea.”
This makes me wonder if Luxair is regretting their purchase of three Q400 (with an option for another three) and the publicity surrounding their recent start of operations. Although I think it is highly unlikely that Luxair’s brand new planes will suffer from similar problems anytime soon (SAS was an early operator), passengers’ doubts about the safety of this type of aircraft could quickly offset all cost advantages.
10€ hätte mein kürzlich zu Mac 0S.X konvertierter Bruder gespart, wenn er über Amazon bestellt hätte statt am Freitag zum nächsten Apple-Händler zu rennen, um sich OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) zu kaufen. Die Möglichkeit, bereits am Wochenende mit dem neuen Betriebssystem zu arbeiten, war ihm allerdings mehr wert und den Kommentaren im Heise-Forum zufolge war er nicht der Einzige.
Auf Platz 2 der Amazon-Topseller im Bereich Software [Affiliate-Link] hat es Leopard dennoch geschafft. Was dies im Vergleich zum Absatz im stationären Einzehandel bedeutet, ist leider nicht klar. Mit dem Erscheinungstermin an einem Freitag dürfte Apple den Versandhändlern allerdings keinen Gefallen getan haben.
