Matthijs.net

I've been forced to use MS Outlook as a mail client for some years now. For my work, I tend to communicate with Open Source software developers and mailinglists quite often. Needless to say, the Outlook reply style and HTML formatting of messages is not really compatible with that.

To overcome this, I've been using a VBA macro to create a special ReplyToAll button. Today, I've perfected this macro and I'm publishing it for others to use.

The macro has the following features:

1. Reply in Plain Text automatically
2. Set Reply Style to use '>' indenting, a.k.a. in-line reply style
3. Get rid of automatic signature that Outlook may insert into the reply
4. Remove the Outlook Reply header and replace with "On <DATE>, <NAME> wrote:"

Yesterday afternoon we signed the contract to buy a really nice house in Hoogveld, Sittard:

We were looking for a house in Sittard for some time now and this one is just perfect. Hoogveld is a new part of Sittard that was built from 2002 onwards and is located close to the A2 highway from Eindhoven to Maastricht, as well as 10 minutes from the Sittard railway station. With Mieke working in the AZM and me at the High Tech Campus, this location will equalize our commute times.

Update Dec 2008: Finally, I've uploaded some pictures to my photo album so you can see how everything turned out now that we're living there.

... to do anything with my website. Things that have been (are) keeping me busy:

• Our latest software release
• Well-deserved holidays, meanwhile testing my EOS400D
• Jobinterviews: looking for SW developers
• The future of electronic paper

So: if you'd like to take part in developing the state of the art in Electronic Paper technologies: contact us!

I've just returned from three days of Open Source Software and a lot of networking. My collegue Edwin and me have visited the The 2006 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention in Brussels.

During the three days of sessions, we've learned a lot and have met some very interesting people. In this article, I'll try to summarize the highlights...

I've updated my Personal Photo Album to Gallery 2. As you might notice, I've removed a lot of small albums with uninteresting photo's and only kept my holiday pics. I'm still working on the customisation, so it is not yet integrated with my blog, but I really like the new look and feel. I'll be looking into installing more modules to get more functionality.

The album of my latest travel - to Marocco - still needs a lot of captions, but I've been pretty busy with other things lately.

Update: several people are indicating that with very little changes the instructions below work on the 8.5 version of MSN Messenger Live as well.

A few days back, I received an email from someone calling himself 'bug beatle', with instructions on how to remove the ads from MSN Messenger Live 8.0. I've since updated them with some more tweaks of my own, so here you go:

Hello and welcome to my new website! Apart from the fact that my site now looks a bit more 2006, it now also has blog-capabilities. The system I use is called Serendipity.

But knowing myself, I'm probably not going to write a lot of articles. Anyway: it's a lot better than the old phpBB-style design and long overdue.

I've been able to convert (I'm afraid I still had to edit a lot by hand, the conversion tool that comes with s9y is not very good) the important forum posts with reactions to my tutorial to remove MSN Messenger 7.5 Ads and have waved my good old phpBB forum goodbye.

You can stay tuned for an update of my photo album to Gallery 2.0 in the near future. For now, this will have to do.

My name is Matthijs van de Water and I'm an Embedded Software Engineer, living in Eindhoven - the Netherlands. I work for iRex Technologies B.V., creator of the iLiad electronic ink e-Reader. In one of my future blog entries, I will tell you more about this magnificent device.

A little bit of background: I've studied Electrical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology and have graduated my Masters in September 2005. During my studies I've worked as a part-time PHP webdeveloper for HWI Group B.V., working on the Hardware.Info website.

When I'm not too busy working (not much chance lately), I like to play squash and go sailing.

If you'd like to contact me, you can use one of the addresses below:

• Personal email: email@matthijs.net
• MSN Messenger: msn@matthijs.net
• Skype User: mvdwater

Instructions for MSN Live Messenger 8.0 are also available.

If you downloaded MSN Messenger 7.5, you might want to remove the advertising that is placed at the bottom of the main messenger window.

I will give you some details to do it manually. To edit the msnmsgr.exe file, you'll need a program called Resource Hacker, a freeware program to edit the resources that a Windows program uses. You can download Resource Hacker here. There is no installation, just download the ZIP file, create a folder on your hard drive, unzip the ResHack.zip file there, and run the ResHacker.exe file.