yesterday i read a review of “the art of rebellion”, today i surfed on their page and instantly bought that book.
looks like a really good book to read (1.5mb pdf-preview) or just simply to look at. i can hardly wait until the postman rings twice…

btw: go to page 7 in the pdf, there you can see invader from france. can you remember where in bern that he put up his invaders? (in the münstergasse and at least two in the matte…)

next weekend nina and i go to the polyball which is the biggest decorated and themed ball in europe, there are supposed to be around 10k people.
the theme is “kitsch as kitsch can” so i thought i buy these trashy funky dancing shoes which should go really well with a classic suit.

yes, they’re golden and i’m probably gonna wear them only once, but hey, they did only cost 19 swiss francs :-)

i even start to edit my ID3-tags, so that the links in the sidebar work (e.g. itunes finds the songs in the ITMS)

now you can also see the last five or the last 30 songs i listened.
through some code from b. (he said: “es ist etwas hackisch geschrieben, aber dafür sagt es auch “1 day and 1 hour and 1 minute ago” und nicht “1 days ago”” after fiddling for 3 minutes…) it displays the date/time in a nice format.
now you can spy on me my musical taste even better :-)
have fun:

i use spamcop daily to report my spam to the relevant people, it’s an excellent free service (although sometimes a bit clumsy in accepting spam…), but this doesn’t really look good…
i wonder how long it’s gonna take until they take down the free service.

following up my entry of yesterday evening here’s a link for all of you to enjoy: a website that takes the words you want as an input, converts them to a song. that song consisting of sampled words of some other songs.
i at have at least three of the words from my example in my own library.

rhytm – rhythm of the dancer from snap!
true – digital love from daft punk
fun – perfect day from lou reed (the other ones cannot be found on ITMS…)

hmm, that could become a contest, post your song to recognize in the comments! (you can send the song to your email to get the direct link to it.) or do you recognize more samples than i do in my song?

[original link via boingboing, but the text is mine :-)]

now the whole usb-powered stuff gets a bit far off the track :-)

[via gizmodo]

i was reading some more about trackback some days ago (which still is a bit too much for my puny little head to fully get the point).
well, the thing is that some guys proposed to the trackback abilty of movable type to post songs from winamp, then another guy followed up with pretty much exactly the same for itunes (btw, also quite good for window…).
the approaches used a special applescript which i could not get to work (even with the help of l33t b. :-)
after hours of debugging and timeless rebuilding of my blogs index files i googled for another solution, which comes in the form of kung-tunes (clearly a sibling of kung-log, which i rely on to maintain my blog).
the solution is actually not any different than with the applescript, but kung-tunes has a GUI which i found out to heavily rely on.
but there was even some more debugging needed and quite a long discussion over fire with berni, which led to the final result (with again some l33t coding snippets flying through the ether) to the new category on the sidebar.
you can now see what five songs my itunes played in the last few minutes. including links to the ITMS (where you can only buy the song if you are in the us of a-land, but a preview is availiable from everywhere) and cover-art from amazon (if available).
an interesting point of view if you want to know what rocks my socks.

if you want only to see the songs, and not read my babble all day long, then you can click here, there sits the file that gets included into the sidebar through some php-magic.

resources:

• this was the entry on quiet confusion that started it all.
• the final solution to my problem came from erichs blog
• where he links to the kung-tunes authors blog entry which was quite helpful, too

now there’s only one problem: as i have quite a buch of swiss music. amazon is not very good at finding these covers. maybe there’s a way to retrieve the covers from cede.ch, but that’s a task for some other day.
and with the ability to post all the played songs the creation of an online habi-hitparade or a “this song was played least”-page seems not too far off. ah, i look forward to all these cold winter evenings :-)

good night!

oh and by the way: i’m listening to Xtremes from the album Billy Bear by Stress while typing this entry, which is a cd you have to buy if you haven’t jet!

the three dead trolls have a (not so) little video with an in-deep sight on the pros and cons of every major os (windows, os x and linux).
if you’re still deciding what to install on the mighty little box under your desk, then you should watch that video :-)

we three in our flat have a so-called darling of the week – some piece of bizarre news, some really far out whackos or just something funny out of the newspaper.
if you’ve been in my kitchen, you know what i talk about.
this weeks darling even has a homepage and a really cool photo :-)
say hello to music man otto:

since quite a long time i get some daily comics via mail: calvin and hobbes and the daily perscheid.
i always think that nearly all perscheids are hilariously funny, but this one today just blew the top off everything. not actually the joke itself but the tiny little twist (pun intended) in the preserving jar in the bottom left of the rack.
(it says “hitlers pen…” which undoubtedly stands for the little mans dong….)
this made my day!

i have no idea if this is a copyright-issue if i post that picture here on my blog, but i think this goes under “fair use”, just to say that perscheid is really great!

yesterday evening i was surfing around some messenger-sites and found that site here: ostro, some shop in poland which sells nice steel track frames for an unbelievably low price.
i mailed those guys and they said that it costs only 20€ to send those frames via ground mail.
how cool is that?

they even send you the color you want. decisions, decisions :-)

ps: even if bikes are not your thing, go check out the other parts they have on sale, there are some really beautiful pieces of craftmanship…

i just returned from seeing bauchklang live at the bierhübeli.
if you’ve never heard of them, then you should go and check out their website.
bauchklang is the so called vocal groove project. they make dubby drum n bass acapella. it is really amazing, what those five guys achieve with only their voice and microphones.
go hear some samples (in the goodies section), it’s really not that kind of acapella-music you think!
if you got a fast connection, then click here for a direct link to a 11mb-quicktime-movie from their site to see how they perform on stage.

why haven’t i seen software like this really, really nice screensaver before my switcher days?

i think from now on i switch my screensaver from a blank screen to this:

hmm, i think if i participated in that picture-contest, i would have been the designated winner.
compare the winner with the original :-)

oh, and btw: a huge amount of people might wonder how i always find obscure links like these.

this time it’s a simple chain reaction.
we from bern won the right to host the suicmc04. while looking for sponsors i talked with lüsche from klink (webpartner of the velokurier), he’s got a contact with bluewin for potential sponsoring. to be able to talk with him i needed to get his phonenumber, so i surfed to klink.ch and saw that they programmed a image-database for swiss meat. not too hard, ‘aight?

you got an mms-enables mobile phone?
want to send a real postcard to someone who doesn’t have one of these gizmos?
then click here and follow the instructions :-)

this is a new service from the swiss post (press release). they will print a postcard for you and send it.
the funny thing is, that the first one is free, so give it a go, you only have to pay one mms and a marginal data-amount…
really retro. send a truly digital message and someone gets a truly offline postcard.
silly it costs 3 bucks when you use it more than once…

if you own a mac, then go and download these two:

• sidetrack
• collage

sidetrack is definitely a must! i never thought i’d miss these features until i installed this nifty piece of software. sidetrack is a replacement driver for your trackpad on the mac. it enables scrolling features i now heavily rely on (it almost makes my mouse obsolete…). you now get a defined zone on your trackpad in which you can scroll the screen (preferably the left part for vertical and the top part for horizontal scrolling…)

collage is a funny little plugin for itunes which displays freely available images from the internet as a visualisation. it’s quite hard to explain, just give it a go.
ah, and most important: both pieces are freeware.

if these guys are not amazing, then you have an extremely high level of unimpressiveability!

[via boingboing]