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:
gmail invitations [update]
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…
data mining
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.
picture of the week 48
i’ve not taken a single picture this week. because of this i’m nuzzling in my archive and found the pic below.
it was taken on my vacation in vienna this march. it’s the wall and a chair in a restaurant.
my 0.5% chance to win a million
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…
oopsie!
moveable type upgrade
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…
comment spam/firefox
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!
picture of the week 47
the picture of this week is especially for raph and dom from velocité which seem to be avid readers of my blog :-)
it shows a bunch of messengers at the veloblitz on saturday evening. the veloblitz was one of the first messengers that started in switzerland (among the first ones was the velokurier bern) and they had the fifteenth anniversary this weekend. from left to right you can see raphael feiss from velocite, stefan p. fröhlich from flash, randall from flash ans some other messenger. i truly apologize for the bad picture, but the batteries in my camera were so empty that was literally the only picture i took that evening.
the whole evening was really nice, after some terrific food (by lilys) the gals from the blitz prepared a funny alleycat. we from bern fibbed a bit (the alleycat was designed to be made on your own, you had to throw dices to get your next pickup/dropoff, but we wanted to stay together), but we had to, ’cause splint was filming the whole with his fancy helmet-cam. if i get some time (and his camera, firewirecable and all the other important stuff) i might make a nice movie out of his material which sometimes you might get to see here.
you should have seen us (urs, stefan, splint and me) on the trainride back to bern. four sweaty messengers staring into a 2″-screen of a mini-dv-cam and shouting “oh yes, that turn was so good” and “that was soo close!” and “i almost hit that car” while all the other passengers tried to sleep or read or minding their own business.
picture of the week
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?
nice cv.
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]
cleaning mood
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!
i’m testing ecto
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…)
back on track
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….)
ibook disassembly
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…
holy shit!
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…
farenheit 9/11
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….
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.
from above
while abseiling
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 propertyon action title for thePerson with theAddress
return “mit map.search.ch anzeigen”
end action titleon should enable action for thePerson with theAddress
return true
end should enable actionon 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!
how geeky can it get?
the image on the left shows how my flatmate notified me of the ready diner tonight. and he even didn’t cook, cause rita made some delicious homemade noodles.