About this blog

Soon after I became a government minister in March 2007 I started a blog in Slovenian language. A very natural decision, because I have been a computer geek since early 1980s. I blog to share my thoughts about politics, science and technology, research and development, sustainable development, day to day life etc. And also to get feedback from the citizens, sometimes even from colleagues-politicians.

In the first half of 2008, Slovenia is taking over the presidency of the EU, more specifically, it will preside over the European Council. Ministers of our government are involved in the preparations and will be involved in the presidency. So there is much to blog about in English as well.

The European Union, as an abstract entity, is aware of the problem of communicating the policies to the citizens. But the EU are also very concrete people with ideas, thoughts and worries. As a minister in a member state government I am one of them. By taking an open, direct, two way approach to communicating I hope to contribute to a better understanding of EU policies.

I am writing this blog myself, in person, without consultation with the PR office, without clearance from offical spokespersons. This blog is not providing an official view of the EU, or of the government of Slovenia. It is personal, but about public issues:

Popular posts from this blog

Updated! Synchronizing Moon+ Books on Android

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I do a lot of reading on my Android devices, phones and tablets. After a long search I selected  Moon+ Reader , the  Pro  version. The killer feature was the way bookmarks and underlining is handled. I mostly read non-fiction and like to mark important passages. And I want to be sure my marks are available forever. After I am done with a book, I create an Evernote clip from my marks and comments. With Moon+ this is done with a single click. I did most of my reading on my Nexus 7 tablet, but when my phone was getting bigger I realized it would be nice to do some reading there as well. And it would be even nicer if I could synchronize the books, notes etc. Synchronizing book files Moon+ provides functionality to sync books (.epub, .pdf ...) to cloud, but they are just pushed to cloud and this is the end of the story. They will not end up on your other device. So you need to do it like this:  Create a backup of the Moon+ main folder. Just in case. Many android file manages let you
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The End of the Web as We Know It?

We know it as a platform where: website or other on-line source (any web site or media store like iTunes), media (e.g. MP3), local software or client (e.g. Media Player) and device (PC, Mac, Phone, Flash Drive, Netbook ...) are not coupled with each other. Many competing companies are providing products or services for each of the components. This open model resulted in huge innovation over the last two decades, and spawned a lot of competition in creating the websites, media formats, software and the devices, driving the price down and quality up. All this possibly at the expense of the content providers who have huge problems protecting their content, because, to be universally playable, all parts of the system need to be well documented and interoperable, with any kind of security and copy protection clumsily pasted on top of it all. Apple Closing the Web? Kindle, Nook and much of the Apple Store stuff signal a possible end of this model. But with music and videos is it a lot like p
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Wishlist for iPAD II

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Now that I got everything I wanted from Santa, let me write down what I want in iPad II. Software Shared file system for (some) apps. This has in fact nothing to do with iPAD. It is an iOS thing. As it stands, iOS is lobotomized . Each app only has access to its own files. I want for example Dropbox app and Pages app to have access to the same files. I will use one to read and write documents and the other to sync them with the could. Is this really too much to ask? I mean, really! Decent Safari. I want Safari to work with "destkop" versions of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. This has nothing to do with new hardware either. It is just a wish to make iPad a better client for the cloud services. More iPAD specific features in the iOS . iPad has a larger screen. It could be managed differently then the iPhone. Like switching among apps Expose style, for example. Keyboards with smaller keys, but more of them. It is really a pain to type anything that is not
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