May be you have heard about it: ARD and ZDF, the two public TV stations in Germany, Europe, have halted their coverage of the Tour de France after T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz had been tested positive for doping. Yeah! Everyone feels that all riders are doping. It’s just the dexterity of their doctors that keeps them from being tested positive. And if this practise doesn’t stop, well, then simply stop covering them in the news instead. This is where it hurts them hardest. With all thes doping scandals, the Tour de France was no real fun to watch anyway.

If you are suffering the heat as much as we do here in Europe at the moment, here’s my favourite summer drink that helps you survive the afternoon: Lassi or Ayran. All you need is yoghurt, water, sugar or salt, and some ice. Get the yoghurt from your Turkish dealer, Turkish yoghurt is a bit sour. But some lemon juice also does the job. Fill your glass between 30 and 50 percent with yoghurt, then fill up with water. Add sugar (Lassi) or salt (Ayran), and ice cubes to make it really cold. Enjoy!

A few weeks a go we were walking through the pedestrian zone of Besigheim, another small town now far away, to a nice German restaurant. By accident, I discovered that the 49th latitude runs straight through the ped zone. While I am not into geo-what-o-ever, I couldn’t resist to at least take a photo :-) … (more)

If you receive a file that you cannot open because you don’t have the right piece of software at hand, or if you want to convert a file in a proprietary format for importing into DEVONthink, have a look at Zamzar, a free Web-based file conversion service that converts diverse document, image, audio, and video formats.

Jon Stokes from Ars Technica talked to me about DEVONthink, about the built-in AI, and about where we’re heading. While I won’t say anything about unpublished products or release scheduled, you may find it worth noting that we are actually working on a new product ;-) Read the full interview here.

Even on vacation in the far south of France, the DEVONians don’t let me go. Look what I have found in the local shop that interestingly also sells British food products — anyone any idea why one should do this? Seems we have found a good name for our next product! Now it’s up to you to guess what it will be … … (more)

One of our users (thank you, Martin!) posted a few days ago that he notices that on the Author’s Note page (p. 414) in Michael Chabon’s new best seller novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon writes: “This novel was written on Macintosh computers using Devonthink Pro and Nisus Writer Express.” Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 for his novel “Kavalier & Clay.” As we’ve not sponsored Mr. Chabon for putting us in there, we’re more than honored for the mentioning. If you are interested, here’s a link to his novel at Amazon (no affiliate link, just for quick reference.)

Why-o-ever it may happen, databases can go corrupt. Be it a damaged file system, a system hang, or, Heaven forbid!, a DEVONthink crash. But, no reason to panic. First, run Tools > Verify & Repair. If DEVONthink cannot repair the database or if you are sure that you’ve lost some data, it’s time for the internal backups. By default, DEVONthink keeps two internal backups of the database index files that you can revert to at any time. (more)

Innowen from DIY Planner has published a nice review of DEVONthink Pro. She nicely describes how she uses DEVONthink but does also mention the downfalls for her. Here’s her conclusion:

That said, if you need an excellent all-in-one research assistant/personal information manager on your Macintosh system, then DEVONthink is the one for you. It’s fast, reliable, is able to index, cross-reference, search, handles almost all file formats natively and makes coffee for you in the morning (okay, it doesn’t… but DTPro could do that if it wanted to) … (more)

This blog is named “The Balcony” and so it’s time to publish a new picture from our lovely town, now that summer is here — in April! See yourself. Not taken from our balcony itself but a nice view on our town center, less than three minutes away from here. (more)