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]

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.

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!)

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.

Originally uploaded by habi.

this is my mom and my sister.
as you can see i’ve been fiddling around with flickr.
it is quite cool.
more on that later, now i must go to bed!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

i think i need a watch to fit with my belt buckle!

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!

CocoaMySQL 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!

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]

i always wanted a bluetooth headset (only to be nerdy, not that i actually had a use for it). maybe i should make me my own, like this bloke did.

[via engadget]

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…)

i 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)

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.

one of the sponsors of the grand raid christalp is the fotolabo club which had lots a bunch of photographers along the track.
so now you’re able to see pictures of all the riders on the online-album-page. here are the ones they took of me and renzo:

if you haven’t seen it jet, heres a very funny flash animation (warning: 3.7mb) from the jibjab-brothers that features dubja bush and purple heart kerry telling you some more about their land.

[via someones email]

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]