the client i use to post pretty much all the post here is now an official member of the pieces of software that i actually bought.

i’m more than happy with it and forked over those 18$ to adriaan to help him to go on with the development of this magnificent piece of software. i’ve been using kung-log for a long time, but ecto is just ways better. hence my blog also features a new button on the far bottom:

pretty much everybody is giving them away, but in case you still need an invitation to sign up with gmail (google’s 1gb-email service) i’ve got six five three no invitations to give away. they’re all gone, maybe i’ve got some more to give away soon, i’ll post it here…

next weekend there are elections here in switzerland. i’m not overly politically interested, but i think voting is a must. so i heavily rely on tools to help me make the decision. i’ve already mentioned both of them here (smartvote and votez.ch).

smartvote enables you to generate your political profile, the so called smartspider. and then it matches your spider to all the candidates and proposes you a list of people to choose. votez is another tool, where all the different initiatives are explained with the pros and cons, so that any normal person is able to understand it and vote accordingly.

so, if my political spectrum interest you, you can click on the picture on the left and start to discuss this in the comments. now if i only could have printed out the generated list and dropped it in the box instead of having to write down all the 80 names the whole process would even be more easy.

maybe you’ve seen the ubiquitous ads for the american express bluecard, promoting the link win-a-million.ch.

since my credit card provider offered me to switch to blue for free that’s what i did and i also checked out the bluegame they made to promote their new credit card

the game consisted of 5 levels, most of them were – mildly said – trivial.

i know a guy from nothing.ch, the crew behind the programming of the bluegame (we play ultimate frisbee together). in the training on thursday we talked about the bluegame, because he saw me in the high-score list. i told him, that i thought the stuff was really easy and i only stuck to it, because i thought the later levels would be a bit more demanding. he told me funny stories about people who called, because they could not sign up for the game, or weren’t able to log in to it, and other peekaboo…

to make things short: today i got a letter from the head of marketing and sales of swisscard aecs ag in which he told me that i am under the first 200 contestants in the win-a-million competition. he also told me, that i’m invited to zürich next saturday, where the finals will take place. the whole thing will also be televised, so you can see how i compare to the other 199 people there. and you also might want to wish me luck, that i take that 0.5% chance to win a million!

in the evening i’ll be at the polyball with nina and i’ll guarantee that i will get drunk like hell if i win that money (i suppose it takes around two beers to make me drunk, ’cause i never drink :-).

i’ll keep you updated…

this is by far the funniest set of pictures i’ve seen in a loong time!

[via joi.ito and urs]

as you can see in the screenshot on the left, my moveable type installation is now upgraded. i think this should help with the flooding comment spam. the whole upgrade process seemed to go really well and painless, but things might be flaky in the next few days while i configure stuff and tweak the settings, so be aware…

the comment spam on the blog is slowly getting out of control (but will be stopped as soon as i can install the new version of moveable type, which will happen soon).

although mtblacklist is an indispensable piece of software, which is blocking a huge amount of comment spam i have to delete some spam from time to time.

one comment spam i’m not gonna delete is the last comment here, because i thought it’s well funny: a team of microsoft engineers – the IE Team – tries to sue me, because i installed firefox. ha!

guys, get it: i’m happily using safari on os x. but i also installed firefox, mostly to see how well it does. and as long as you work on a windows-machine i higly suggest you go and download it now, it’s supposed to be far better than IE and don’t be afraid of some cheeky guys threatening to sue you, try it!

Originally uploaded by habi.

just a quick note, ’cause i’m late.
this was the best picture i took last week. it’s the view from the kitchen window of my parents home.
nice, innit?

if mr. gueniot doesn’t get a job with that cv i don’t know what he must do to get one!

brilliant!

[via powerbook_blog]

altough it was my free day, i had to get up early today, because we got a new fridge, so i thought it’s about time to do some cleaning. after i’ve cleaned out my closets and thrown away a bag full of junk i started to catalog my dvd’s (call me obsessive) with the excellent dvdpedia (which i bought rightaway for 18 bucks).

so you are now able to marvel at my collection of 106 dvds. actually at least two of them are missing, ghost in the shell and the crow, but i forgot to whom i borrowed them. but this is never gonna happen again, because dvdpedia has a neat “borrowed to…”-feature which integrates nicely with address book.app on os x. if you click on the image on the left, you can download a three-paged pdf (300kb) of all the dvd-covers which i exported with dvdpedia.

do you want to borrow one?

send me an email!

this is the first post with the new version of ecto (one of the good points of doing a fresh install is that you update all your programs…)

thanks to the aforementioned disassembly guide me ibook now sports a nifty 60gb harddisk. to make things really pretty i decided to do a fresh install of panther. so things might be slow on the blog for some days, because i need to get back all the programs and little tools i so heavily rely on (just to make sure everything works, i’m writing this from the cloned backup….)

after i partially unscrewed my ibook last night i gave up at two o’clock in the morning (mostly because i was too tired to go on and couldn’t see the screws anymore :-)
then this morning i found this detailed pdf (1mb) in which cybergreg nicely explains how to replace the internal hdd of an ibook.
so i just need to grab one of these really small screwdrivers and give it another go…

my internal harddisk is acting extremely funky, and making weird clicking noises all the time.
at first i presumed it’s extreme overheating, cause i was doing some very processor-intensive work yesterday eveing. (rendering a huge mosaic with MacOSaiX). but this afternoon it’s not back to normal the weird clicking sound is still there.
thank god i have got a bootable backup so i can try to do some debugging.
after i booted from my external harddisk i started the disk utility from the backup and tried to verify the startup disk (the internal harddisk on my ibook). after a short while disk utility tells me that “the nesting of folders has exeeded the limit” which is beyond my explanation (see image on the left). i hope disk utility can fix this…

update: doesn’t seem so. i guess then it’s time for some major debugging. maybe i can find the hundreds of nested folders…

i wanted to watch farenheit 9/11 tonight in the television (i missed it in the cinemas). but since i will go to see another movie tonight with wolf, peter and bruni i can’t…
so, while i sit in the cinema, i’m (legally) downloading it via bittorrent, because the internet veterans for truth share their bandwith in the wake of the presidential elections in the us of a. (“…to help you make the right choice on Tuesday.”)
so you can download farenheit 9/11 as a 214 mb .mov file or as a bittorrent of the same size and watch it later on, wherever you wish.

ah, the internet….