Cristiano on Tech/Life

Playing around with the statistics of the last year on the exchange rate between the £ and € I noticed something I already kind of knew but was surprised to see visualized: life became cheaper last year!

As our money is still on Dutch (and therefore in €) bank accounts, the drop in exchange rate above was simply ideal. In the last year the £ dropped from €1.55 to about €1.34, which is a drop of about 13%. To make this a more concrete example: it saves us €125 a month in rent. Obviously this still means we pay a lot of rent because London is expensive, but at least it now is a bit less painful.

Hopefully this drop will continue in 2008.

• Runner’s World – Beginnersschema 1
  My starters schedule for jogging the next 12 weeks. Hoping this will “work” for me.
  (tags: running, schedule, tips)

So I stumbled across this handy tip on MacOSXHints.com describing how you can use the Stocks Widget to give you the current exchange rates between for example the Euro and the Dollar. The cool thing is that this widget comes with Leopard, Tiger and best of all the iPhone, which means that this hack works even when you are on the road!

Just add codes like these below to your widget and they will be recognized:

GBPUSD=X (for £UK to $USD rate)
GBPEUR=X (for £UK to €EUR rate)
EURUSD=X (for €EURto $USD rate)

This works because the Stock Quote widget uses the Yahoo! Finance site in the backend. Go there for more currency codes.

[More hacks for the Stocks Widget]