motorola razr v3

gadget envy.
at miklos’ and cecilia’s wedding b. and me talked about the upcoming motorola razr, the phone that looks like THE gadget-ency-inducing phone of the year. up to now i’ve only seen one or to pics of it floating around on the net. but today i stumbled over this thread at howard forums1 which induced a cringe in my bowels, (a soft wispering voice: buybuybuybuy). under one of a gazillion pictures of the razr was the one in the post below, the guy holding the phone in his hands.
can you believe motorola crammed:

  • a vga-camera
  • bluetooth
  • a speakerphone
  • a color screen
  • and mp3-ringtones

into that aluminium encasing?
it’s a bummer that phone is expected to cost around 0.5kChf even with a contract…

[via gizmodo]

1 don’t click on the link if you’re on a dial-up line, it’s crammed with pictures.
don’t click on the link if you don’t want to see a girl in a strange bikini!
and what’s it with that knife?

picture of the week 40 [update]

my plan for yesterday was to go and see freestyle.ch with sigi, but since the snowramp collapsed, the whole event was blown off (see a tiny pic here).
bugger! mostly also because i hope to get a good picture of the week :-)

so sigi and me went to the museum to see der gespiegelte mensch (the mirrored human) which was mildly said, a disappointment (beside the microscopes with the drosophila and their mutations…).. so we just went to the so-called niederdörfli and drank some tea and coffee and had a good talk, which was probably ways better than watching reckless guys and gals on their boards and skies.

so i’m just grabbing a pic from my archive:
here’s one i shot at kims stag night in crans montana:
DSC01354

[update]
here’s a better pic
[via tobistar]

ae fond kiss

i went to see the last kiss, the new film by the scottish filmmaker ken loach. besides that i was blown away from the language everyone in that movie speaks1 i just loved it.
as always ken loach is able to draw a very intense portrait of simple people (simple in a good way). his way of directing a movie is so far away from the way movies are don in hollywood. the people are real, so real that you start to sniff if they cry or laugh with them when they tell jokes.
although the movie is quite bitter – it’s about the romance between a wee irish gal and a tall pakistani bloke, which seem not to be able to flee from the constraints they get put on by their environment – it’s one of the most moving love movies in a long time. and even if you can’t go and see it with your important other half go and see it with someone else, because the story told is both moving and interesting to watch.

1 i studied half a year at strathclyde university in glasgow, hence i’m quite fond of the glaswegian/scottish accent..

hohtuerli-panorama

finally i found some time to do some (minor) tweaks to the panorama i shot on the hohtürli last weekend.

it’s a full 360° panorama on the hohtürli. when you open it, you look into the direction of the bluemlisalp-lodge. on the left you can view down to spiez, on the right is the descent to the oeschinensee and to kandersteg.

hohtuerliif you click on the thumbnail on the right, you can download the 1.2mb .mov-file and see what i’ve seen. bear with me if the panorama far from perfect. i made it without a tripod and with my snapshot-cam:

here and here are some more details on the route we walked. both images are from the (german) kandersteg-info-site.

pongmechanik

i do own a pong for my telly (a really lucky finding at the local second hand store for 15 bucks) but this fully-analog pong from two german students is way more cool. it’s built with pulleys, strings and pieces of glass. go and visit their site and watch the video (in 10mb and 6mb-flavour) with amazement!

[via gizmodo]

picture of the week 39

yesterday i’ve been on a big hike with nina and her sister. we walked over the so-called hohtürli from the griesalp to kandersteg (here’s the explanation from another guy).

on the descent to kandersteg we witnessed the sun going down over the hills on the other side of the valley. since the air was a little hazy i was able to catch the sun rays quite nice.

DSC03564

ps: i’ve made a nice panorama on 2778m above sea level, i’ll post that soon, but it needs some more tweaking and i need a bed now.
ps2: here are some other pictures on flickr. (i start to like that!)

nice to meet you

today i met pieceoplastic while i was having a break and he was going for groceries.
as an avid moblogger that meeting just had to end up on his moblg.net.
we’ve “known” each other for quite a long time online, have been reading each others blog, live about 700m apart, but have never met IRL. weird.
now the weirdness is over and we’ve met and can both put another puzzle part to the person we think to know.
nice.

CocoaMySQL

since i’ve been doing a lot o database maintenance lately (you won’t believe how many errors can be produced when 84 persons register themself…) i was looking for an easy way to do it.
The whole registration process for the suicmc04 runs on a MySQL database on the gna-server (thanks b. and chris for hosting us!).
Äbu, who did all the backend programming for us installed phpMyAdmin on the server, which is quite a good way to tinker with the database, but i didn’t like it that much. so i was looking for another way to get to the data. dbSuite Admin Tool is a well renowned Software to connect to your database which i used up to now. But yesterday evening i found the best tool up to now!

cocoamysqlCocoaMySQL is the tool i’ll be using from now on. It’s available for free and under the GPL license which means the app and it’s source code are free (but you might want to donate a buck or two).
In addition to that it’s also a lot spiffier than dbSuite Admin and phpMyAdmin, you can browse the database very fast and managing the database and editing the values is a breeze. And because you can decide to show the console you learn all those MySQL-terms, so maybe once i’ll be able to do all this via the command line :-)

if you ever need to remotely manage a database (and need a GUI to do it, like i do) then you should give it a try with CocoaMySQL!

picture of the week 38

i spent the past weekend in italy with my family. we went to the region called barbaresco in the piemont in the northern part of italy. the region is well renowned for it’s viniculture so we spent quite some time at trying different wines (exept me, i don’t drink) and walking through different cities and villages in the region. it was really relaxing and really nice to spend a weekend with the extended family (nina, my girlfriend and björn, my sisters boyfriend came with us).

the picture below shows nina and nina (once my girlfriend and once my sister (from left to right)) in the church of alba. they are both examining the piece of art on display. it consists of 57 metal boxes filled with different pigments (some were spices and some mineral pigments). the smell was really tantalizing.
in the back you see my dad with the backpack. and if you look closely you can see god entering through the church door.

DSC03574

ps: since i will try to keep posting those pictures i’m gonna add the week number to the subject title. here’s a calendar you can subscribe with ical to see the week number in any ical-compatible calendar app.

tetris

in the past times when i used to play tetris on my gameboy i once had a dream where i was nearly squashed by those falling blocks. i managed to finish the game multiple times in the hardest setting (which was rewarded with a starting space-shuttle).
this bloke does an absolute fabulous job at playing tetris! (12.7mb .mpeg-file)

[via powerbook_blog]

oh, and there’s also a nice tetris-clone for os x: quinn. the funny thing is, that quinn has a network feature, you can play a game over the net. if anyone wants to give it a go with a network-match just send me a quick note, i’ll be happy to try out a match :-)

[also via powebook_blog]

photo-shooting again

today i was again at a photo-shooting. a customer of the velokurier was looking for a model which was willing to show his ass to two old ladies (really!)
the idea is that the ewb, the energy and water supplier of bern is providing everyone with energy here in bern (their slogan is “we pass on our energy”). the setup was like this: a messenger fills his water-bottle at one of the fountains in bern. two elderly ladies pass and watch his nice butt. since we all have nice butts they were looking for one of us who had time tonight.
since the ad-agency preferred me to urs and renzo (urs has the wrong length of hair and they didn’t see renzos butt or the would have chosen him :-) i will be on that ad which comes out sometimes in november/december this year. it was quite annoying to stand there in full autumn-gear while the sun is shining down pretty strong. and both ladies were only marginally funny while they tried to make jokes about my butt so they would loosen up a bit for the pictures. we’ll see how the poster will turn out.

but with the money i got from that shooting and the last one i’ll finally be able to replace my broken chair! (the perfect birthday gift from me to myself…)