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.

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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…)

newsfire 0.2

newsfirei can hardly remember the last time i blogged about new software i installed on my trusty ibook. now newsfire 0.2 (!) gets the honor to be featured here.
since i discovered the beauty and simpleness of reading most of the web via rss i’ve been using netnewswire lite for all my rss-needs.
(btw: xeni jardin (of boingboing-fame) explains the whole rss-thing it nicely in her article for WIRED 12.04).

since two of my fafourite mac-blogs (fscklog and powerbook-blogger) seem to like it, i thought i’d give it a go and installed that impressive piece of software. i can hardly believe that the version number is 0.2!

the pure simplicity got me really hooked, all you need to read all your feeds is the spacebar and the enter key. all your feeds are organized in the left column and the post you’re reading is in the right frame. no third pane needed. (which only now strikes me as completely useless anyway :-) as you read a post you press enter to visit the post on the web or press the spacebar to read the next unread feed. simple and easy.
and there’s even some ichatesque eye-candy included, which means you should definitely give it a go!

ps: oh, and newsfire’s (nifty) icon doesn’t sport an “unread message” count as netnewswire’s onde does, which means some more productive time on my hands, because i won’t notice if there’s only one of all the feeds on my list which is updated and i have to go and check to see if it’s worth reading that post. give it a go! it’s well worth it.

(and sorry, only and purely availiable on os x)

how nice!

look what mail i just got:

Would you like to donate your picture of the dugong
https://habi.gna.ch/blog/images/Image009_8.jpg to a good cause?

Dugong photos are very hard to find, and yours is truly wonderful.

We all love to make it available to people for a desktop. Here are some desktops donated by other photographers.
http://www.earthjustice.org/supporter_center/gallery.html

This would help support our work to prevent the US govt from building an airbase on top of a dugong feeding ground in Japan.

Here is more about that lawsuit against the US Department of Defense.
http://www.earthjustice.org/urgent/display.html?ID=154

Look forward to hearing from you. If you are willing, we would need the largest pixel version you have. Send to me.

Tell us how to credit the photo.

Thanks,

Brian Smith
Western/International Press Secretary
Earthjustice
426 17th Street 6th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612-2820
PHONE: 510.550.6714
FAX: 510.550.6740
donotspambrianhemustbeaveryniceguy at earthjustice.org (edited by me :-)
www.earthjustice.org

that’s quite nice. i think i’ll hand them over the three pics i took of the dugong.
if brian is a really nice guy he can send me something from my amazon wishlist or just say thank you, and credit my work correctly. everything here is released under a creative commons license anyway (creative commons is by the way one of the winners of a golden nica at the ars eletronica in linz which just finished yesterday or so…).
if you want to read some more about the AEC and get a good insight of the things that happened there, then piece has some good coverage on on what he did there.

skype for osx

after i’ve been fooling around with an unofficial beta-version today the official beta version of skype was released for os x. (and could not call anybody, because only bruni had it installed and he has troubles with his microphone…)
skype is an internet-telephony software from the same people that brought you kazaa, the p2p filesharing software (and skype works in pretty much the same way, also through some p2p-trickery).

so if you want to give me a call and listen to my voice, you can add “david.haberthuer” to your skype and test it out.
i tried it out with b. and i must say that it works very much like intended and is absolutely hassle-free.

[via e.g. macminute]

[update] the fate of a geek

franziska informed me that i got the job, so i’ll be featured in a campaign of postfinance.
since this means some unscheduled hight tide in my wallet my technolust came up again and i thought, why not replace my trusty dsc-p9 with a new camera? and just as i surfed the web to compare the prices for the dsc-t1 (it’s not that expensive!) i found out that sony introduced some new cameras today, among other things the dsc-t3 and the dsc-l1. now i think i have to wait and see how expensive they’re gonna be when they show up here in switzerland…

or i might just replace my broken chair with the red beauty that sits in el trapero’s window, or i might get a new ipod, or i might just book another dive-holiday, or…

update: the shooting was quite fun, but the picture will be horrible. two girls from the ad-agency took part in the shooting and decided that it looks a lot “trashier” when the snowboarder (which i depicted) wears his snowboarding boots together with normal jeans and a jumper, which looked really silly, but they seemed to like it. i think i’ll be quite embarrassed when the ad comes out…

my weekend

the past weekend i spent in italy. a good friend of mine had his wedding in the hometown of his girlfriend, now wife. i met kim seven (!) years ago, when we both made a kind of student exchange in australia and we both managed to keep in touch through all these years, amazing!
the wedding was the most spectacular wedding i’ve ever attended (it was my third ever by the way :-) and was held in the beautiful town of villasanta, near monza (the town famous for their formula1-race-track).

the first row of pictures show kim and samantha kissing during the huge diner they held, the newly-wed just before the firework and the firework that was held for them. the second row shows a panorama i made. it features the church of villasanta, where the ceremony was held (512kb .mov file)

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villasanta

kim, if you ever read this, i wish you and samantha all the luck in the world and would like to thank you very much for inviting me to your wedding it was “marvellous, splendid and amazing!!!” (little inside-joke)