gizmodo (one of my favourite gadget site) talked about a mysterious USB-powered noodle thingy (here and here) sometimes last week. now look at this really strange USB gadget i found on brando’s shop while looking for some other USB–stuff.
damn i live in switzerland
i need this shirt for that event, but there’s no time to get it until then :-)
mobile phone art
i need a bigger ipod
i just ripped an old cd i had lying around here: Overproof from Rockers Hi-Fi.
And after i synced it to my ipod, i found out, that i need a bigger one, it’s nearly full!!!
btw: the vast majority of all the songs on my ipod (i guess more than 95%) are legally owned/bougth by either me, my flat-mates or another friend i borrowed the CD. i admit that i have some songs that i got through poisoned or aquisition (three songs from Seeed, which i saw on the Gurtenfestival last year and Tour de France (the 1983 version, not the new one from 2003) from Kraftwerk, are some i remember out of my head…).
i believe in music artists, and i am quite happy to buy cd’s, so it’s simple: don’t steal music…
i have one little story about filesharing: do you remember that old commercial from apple when they introduced the ipod? (click on “commercial” to watch it. it’s hilarious!!!)
i’ve seen it in the openair cinema a year ago and had ages to find the song (take california” – propellerheads). i was searching hours on kazaa (i had a windows-machine at the university, and wasn’t aware of a good file-sharing application on my mac.) to get it and was really happy when i finally could listen to the song.
then, some weeks later i found out that i actually got the song on a CD i own, on the OST of The Dancer, a movie which i never heard of, but the songs are very good!!!
an early start?
susi sent me some pictures which she made in millau
it shows me on the start to 200m crawl:
if you watch closely on the second image, then you can see that i’m quite a bit ahead of the other starters in my heat (i’m the one on the second lane from left).
but the referee still thought it’s a valid start, so i had an advantage :-) nonetheless i came in pretty much as last :-)
the ipod as a consumer thang…
yesterday i was in rodersdorf, playing ddc with jochen.
jochen stayed over at a friend, so i was on my own in the train to basel and in the tram to bättwil/flüeh.
in the train i was listening to some music on my ipod, when a guy in the opposite compartment scrolls away on the wheel of his ipod trying to find a good tune. then when i walk out towards the tramway i see a girl with the revealing white headphones on the escalator. and to end that silly little story, the girl enters the tramway Nr 10, which i also needed to take and sits in front of me, so i was constantly surrounded by ipods on my journey :-)
the ipod is actually so hip, that it starts to show up in music videos, watch 50 cent’s p.i.m.p-video over at mtv to see 30s seconds of ipod, 50 cent and ladies with white clothes (not very much clothes…).
one point i’d like to make is that altough this little piece of engineering and design has a quite high geek-factor i see more and more girls walking around sporting their personal digital player. so albeit the high geekness it has, it’s also a very good music player for the masses (which is very easy to use, as opposed to other mp3-players i’ve seen bevore. the ipod’s UI is so clever even my mother could use it :-)
ps: if you want to see some action-shots of how ddc looks like, then you find some photos on my pic-page or on damons excellent ddc-page.
ps2: after jochen and me came second at that tournament, i’ll probably have a better ranking on the world ddc rankings than 245th soon :-)
g5
uglyfootballers.com
i found the fun link of the week (while looking at the website of iguana tatau; for no apparent reason (yes, i’m thinking about a new one…) :-)
natalie has it in her link section: uglyfootballers.com.
and yes, the ugliest of all is there: Trifon Ivanov.
Some of my blog–readers might remember it, i had Trifons Pannini-pic from some worldcup on my pen-case during a long time in the high-school!
Pictures of the EMC
the pictures i made in Millau at the Swimming Championsship are online here.
PS1: my results in the pool can be found here (i’m david haberthuer by the way :-). The open-water results here (i’m not really happy with the time i swam in the lake (5.2 km in 1:43, but i had a major cramp in both legs which made me make a break for about five minutes, so it’s not too bad…)
PS2: this site here has a lot of infos on the bridge you can see in my pics..
PS3: because i visited one of the caves where they produce the roquefort-cheese i’m gonna cook that tomorrow.
a warm welcome back :-)
when i came home from the european masters championship i started up my trusty ibook to read the mails which came in through the week.
and was quite puzzled :-) 135 mails in one week…
after skimming some of them i found out that the vast majority of them were virus-mails (the virus is sobig-f).
after follwing one of the hints on osxhints.com (btw. one of the best sites for hints regarding a truly beautiful os) i only had something like 25 real emails in my inbox, which was much more what i thought it would be :-)
i didn’t use the mail rule proposed in the hint, which seemed a bit harsh, but followed the last comment to that hint)
some pictures and other stuff from the championship are coming soon, now i need to go to bed, because i only slept for four hours the last night and have to teach some kids physics in about eight hours… looking forward to my bed!
European Masters Championship
Next week i will probably not update my blog at all, because i’ll be at the European Masters Championship in Millau, France.
I’m quite a keen swimmer and am going to swim some disciplines there (200m Crawl, 100m Crawl, 50m Butterfly and a 5km open water swimming in the Lake Pareloup)
So don’t be mad at me if i do not update at all next week, i have no idea if i’ll have internet access at the place we’re staying (maybe this is also a good thing for me so i’ll be able to read and sleep a lot :-)
cheerio!
this is the weirdest thing i’ve seen in a long time :-)
are flash mobs still cool?
yesterday there was a flash mob here in bern (and i missed it, i thought it’s today, i confused the date…)
and today there was a little article in two newspapers (in the BZ and in 20min).
b. and me were thinking about “organising” a flash mob some weeks ago. he pointed out a link to me about the first flashmob in manhattan. (actually we talked about it on the 18th of june, because i was just looking up the conversation we had over ICQ…) and it seemed like a really funny thing to do. as berni points out, the flash mob in bern was not a full success, but i think this leaves room for more ideas…
look ma’ :-)
how do you like my new dock?
a funny little app named skin a dock makes this possible. and it’s even donationware, so double the fun :-)
SaD needs the application enhancer from unsanity (go check them out, they have a bunch of cool OS X apps) to run, but it takes care of downloading it, so you only need to download skinadock, the rest is a walkthrough…
a new toy
well this is amazing.
i thought – now that i’m a teacher – i need something practical to carry my files from home to school instead of burning them on a cd, emailing them to myself or carrying my ibook to school.
so i bought one of these USB-memorysticks with 128mb capacity.
today it was in the mail and i have to say i was truly surprised how small this thingy is (good there was a little hand-leash included :-)
it’s about the size of my pinkie .
PS: and don’t be surprised that it says USB 2.0 on it. it was the cheapest one on ricardo.ch and it works like a charm on my oldfashioned vanilla-flavoured USB-port :-)
pictures, rankings, and manifest from the alleycat
the pictures from the alleycat last friday night are online:
the results were:
1 Michel – 41::2320
2 Ismu – 43:50
3 Urs – 48:36
4 Mischu – 48:38
5 Mättu – 49:24
5 Elia – 49:24
7 Päscu – 52:49
8 Rachel (1st woman) 56
8 Reto – 56:23
10 Michu – 1.08:58
11 Dewi – 1.11:15
11 Renzo 1.11:15
DNF Hämme & Simu
the manifest can be found here (38kb .pdf) and the list of all the posts can be found here (40kb .pdf)
fun link
i’m not shure if these guys make fun of themself, but their page is quite useful, if you’re looking for some little experiments for school (which is what i’m doing extensively at the moment :)
they also have a little part which is a bit more esoteric…
alleycat in bern
if you see some freaks on bikes driving around bern like mad on friday night, then you know it’s an alleycat1 organised by bene and me :-)
so, if you see one of the messengers (sometimes after 10pm) then cheer and shout and watch your back for more reckless drivers!
1 Alleycat: not on a closed course held race in a city, organized by bikemessengers. Usually with several checkpoints and not caring about traffic rules. As far as known, the first alleycats known as such took place in toronto, Canada.
this entry can be omitted…
…if you haven’t been at the lerbermatt-gymer :-) (probably all my blog-readers exept B., Miklos and Arni)
as you might have heard, i’m the substitution teacher of hans kammer (MC of Physics!) at that high school we all were.
and this morning was the teacher conference to the start of the semester. when i walk towards the building, guess who’s watching out of the window: Ändee Jöhl and Dieter Gilgen. They both look a bit puzzled and then. start. to. wave. their. hands. oh joy :-)
this is gonna be a fun semester.
i only say:
stuwi chäschüechli w
schul-hans-werker
seehung
nikkelti
sirup …
willi ä
hc-senn
aaaaah, those were the days…
for those of you which have no idea what i’m talking abuut: i’m a substitute teacher at the high-school where i went to school 7 years ago, and most of the teachers that i had lessos with are still there, which amounts to a serious funkyness…
8 years ago
8 years ago this week, Microsoft launched the war between the browsers (was there any other than netscape back then) with the release of the first version of the Internet Explorer.
guess who won the war?
but there are still some fighters left (at least on windows-platforms)
on os x microsoft stopped the development of IE, because they had to admit, that apple has a more advanced product: safari (mostly because they knew how to tie it into the OS :-)