pictures of the week 45

today i’ve been in the rope-park with nine (a belated birthday surprise for her).
that was quite an amazing and adrenalie-inducing afternoon.
but the most amazing thing was that nina is able to smile really charming before abseiling herself 15 meters down a tree.

DSC03788
from above

DSC03790
while abseiling

DSC03791
from below

ps: i know the picture lacks in the sharpness-departement, but i like it anyway…
ps2: more pics are on flickr
ps3: can you believe it’s only 7 weeks to go until ’05?

address book apple-script

the powerbook blog linked to a nice hint on macosxhints.ch (features german translations of osxhints.com, but also original german hints).
you might have seen that you can click on any label in a contacts detail (e.g. work address, telephone, etc) to get a nice menu to do things with the data (get it in huge letters all over your screen, look for the map, print label, etc.).
since the release of panther coders can add to these menus with little apple-script-effort. the script mentioned in the hints adds an european map search, but i wanted to alter it to use the excellent map.search.ch. after downloading the nice applescript i changed it to this point:

using terms from application “Address Book”
on action property
return “address”
end action property

on action title for thePerson with theAddress
return “mit map.search.ch anzeigen”
end action title

on should enable action for thePerson with theAddress
return true
end should enable action

on perform action for thePerson with theAddress
tell application “Address Book”
set z to zip of theAddress
set c to city of theAddress
set s to street of theAddress
end tell
tell application “Safari”
set browser to make new document
tell browser
set URL to “http://map.search.ch/” & z & “-” & c & “/” & s
end tell
end tell
return true
end perform action
end using terms from

so, to use the script, just open script editor, paste the code above (or FAR better, just click here1), save as “script” in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/ restart your address book and have fun with the address label.
it should work with all swiss addresses, if it doesn’t send me a note and i’ll try to fix it…
oh, and i forgot to mention: the whole thing only works for os x.3!

1that link took me ages!

want a mini-dv cam? [update]

i cannot remember the last time i used my video-cam, so i’m selling it.
if you need one, go and grab it on ricardo.ch (or email me and i’ll delete the auction and sell it to you, bypassing the ricardo.ch-fees. i’ll even throw in all my home-videos for you :-) )

update: it’s sold already!

dubya bush doesn’t want you

dubyasiteso, let’s assume you’re part of the internationally interested population and want to read george dubya bushs weblog to see what he (or his blogger) wants to tell you. or do you just want inform yourself about his view on different things that are important to yourself? but since monday morning you cannot access his website (www.georgewbush.com) from europe (or just about any other part of the non-us-world)? since quite a long time the website just times out on you and since monday morning you get one of these funky error messages seen in the image on the left. hm, then you’re left out behind and must stick to kerry’s page :-)

but just in case you really want to read what the still to be us-president has to tell you, you might direct your browser to: http://65.172.163.222/ or httpS://georgewbush.com/.
not that i could care less what he says, because i’d vote for: </bush>, but hey, just in case…

[via boinboing, joi.ito, haslo or jimmiz journal (german, with a link to the the technology used to block the unwelcome users) ]

telly tonite [update]

my selfmade pizza is in the oven and will be ready exactly when the live-movie starts (sorry, the link is only available in german).
i can hardly remember the last time i spent an evening in front of the telly watching normal television, i’ve been watching a lot of dvds lately, but not a live program, so this is gonna be fun.
have a nice evening!

read more about the live-movie project on zdf.de

update: the movie was quite good – although i don’t really like murder mystery stories. while fun to watch the slight errors which occurred through the live-format (delayed appearances of actors, some shaky cameras and two or three times reflections of the camera-team in the well-lit windows) the achievements of the whole team were really impressive. if you want to see a bit more, then zdf has a little after-documentary on its website.

targot.net

as i mentioned in the post below, i played targot.net yesterday afternoon.
targot.net is a project of two guys of the fachhochschule aarau (i forgot the name of one, so both remain nameless…).

DSC03748the game revolves around modules (on the left) which you have to place on the playground. each module consist of three pieces: the fuse, charge and the shell.
first all participants make their modules, preferably on self-adhesive paper, so they can be placed on walls and alike. when you place a part of a targot, you send the exact place of that module via sms to the gameserver. (something like “put fuse, 1-943, mattentreppe unten, wand” or “put charge, 1-965, rathausgasse 1”). shortly after sending that message, the gameserver notifies all other players where you have put a fuse, charge or shell. then you have to get to that targot-module as fast as possible and add your module (add 1-943, 1987). if you’re the third person to add the correct module the targot detonates and you get a point. the first to reach three points wins. easy as a cake.

targotto make the whole thing a bit more interesting, every player also has some blocking modules (the white module on the right) where you can block a targot, so noone can add to it anymore, hence no more points. when you block a targot you earn those modules you block, so in the case on the left, bruni earned a new fuse to place somewhere. because yesterday the game was extremely fastpaced we had kind of a headquarter where 3 laptops were available to take a look at the targot-site, where the whole playground is updated in realtime, so you could see who has placed which module where. it was nearly impossible to keep the overview only on the messages you got on your mobile! so if you saw eight people running around in the old town staring on their mobiles and waving around with pieces of adhesive paper you now know why!
the goal is to get a sponsor for the whole site, so playgrounds can be opened constantly, instead of only on saturday afternoons. just imagine a targot-game distributed over whole switzerland. it would be run over weeks! how cool!
but until then the whole game runs in beta-test-mode, mostly because the whole thing is quite costly. yesterday we’ve been 8 users playing in the lower part of the old town and the server has been sending out more than 200 short messages to all users, adding up to 40 bucks only for sending those messages.
so, for the moment you can only play targot.net when you grab four friends and everyone pays 10 bucks to play, which covers the cost for the modules and smses.
anyone up for it? i’d love to play it once more and the two inventors need more beta-testers!

picture of the week 44

the threepieced thing in the picture below might look like something that could be documented by stickernation.net. but it shows the targot1 with which higisuper* won the targot-game we played yesterday afternoon in the old town of bern.

DSC03751

1explanation will follow later. the game was so amazing that it merits an own post. later.

new feature (in test mode)

1t the image on the left shows the total accesses of habi.gna.ch since the start in july last year (reminds me, i missed the anniversary :-). it impressed me that the total accesses to this little site are around 20000 a day which seems huge. but be reminded that every access to every file counts, so if you watch an index-page on the pics-section this counts as more than20 accesses (9 thumbnails, 2 navigation-buttons and 8 image files for the thumbnail frames plus the html-file itself plus the css-file).
since the usage-statistics provided by gna.ch are not easily readable (e.g. something like this) and i wanted to know a bit more about you i implemented a little counter in the sidebar (under the “test” category).
the counter provided by countnow.de adds a human touch to all the data that can be pulled from your visit. i will keep it in the test-category to see if i am pleased with it or until you, my dear readers get bored with it. if you click on the number you will get teleported to the counter-page which is free for everyone to abuse…

since i saw that baba had this counter on her travel-blog i felt like beamed back to my first web page when it was cool to have a counter on your page, which was populated mostly by your hits. and this made me do it, the whole stuff above is solely justification-babble…

the kleptones

piece lately mentioned a night at the hip-hopera from the kleptones. according to me this is THE mashup album of the year. although the album as a whole is illegal it is quite brilliant, mixing the best songs from the hiphop-spere into an album with great flow.
boingboing posted a link to waxy’s blog where he collaboratively tries to identify all samples used in the 23 great songs! i’ve been listening to those songs all morning long, they’re great, go and grab them while they’re hot!
on waxy’s page you can also download the files, he’s generously hosting them. or else you go to the kleptones’ page, they point you to some mirrors to download all the songs (either as one big file (109mb .zip), as 23 individual files or – if you like that – as a bittorent file).

[via piecoblog and boingboing]

funny typo

i think dell has a really bad lectorer.
or they want to scam me, because they sell a laptop with a 1gb hard disk for 2099 swiss franks.
or maybe it’s only a funny typo. whatever:

DSC03678

i thought it’s fun, in a nerdy way. excuse me if you don’t get a wee laugh out of this.

messengers caught on film [update]

the first few glimpes i’ve seen since the download started1 make it look like THE uber-messenger-movie, but i definitely need to go to bed now, i’ll download the whole movie tomorrow and let you know.
but be warned, the movie of a rider filming an alleycat through manhattan with his helmet-camera is a hefty 50 mb big!

update: after viewing the whole film today i got to mention that we’re all wussies here in bern.

[via memepool]

1: right-click on the .download-file, show package contents, and you’ll find a nice, but unfinished .mov inside the file