they’re made out of meat! [update]

they’re made out of meat is a short-film adaptation of nebula award winner terry bissons story about two extraterrestrials having a funny and also a bit gross talk in restaurant at the end of the universe (or was that another story).

the dialogue is quite funny:

“They’re made out of meat.” “Meat?” “Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

go and watch it on youtube. after you watched that movie, you can still watch the bekennervideo of the pendlerblog, which was showed at the swissblogawards this friday.

and if you’ve watched that movie, you might also want to see another funny one, the bekennervideo of the pendlerblog which was shown last friday at the swiss blog awards.

[via boingboing and prettymucheveryone]

update: corrected wrong blockquote.

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SBAW, a retrospective and picture of the week 18

i really liked it on friday night in biel.

i’m not gonna tell you who won in the end, ’cause if you haven’t read it elsewhere, you’re not interested anyways [1]. there were some surprises, but hey, everyone is a winner (be it only in the morales departement)!

i really liked the event, mostly also because i met some faces behind the bytes i read on an almost daily basis. the whole networking aspect was quite a big motivation to got to biel. a pity that a lot of bloggers left the party in the pooc quite fast to disperse into all the regions of switzerland. thanks to bruni [2] that let me ride home with him.

and i hope the team is getting ready to discuss the beginning of the SBAW 07, ’cause you made it happen guys!

the picture below shows some random geeks in the volkshaus staring at their screens instead of listening to what’s happening on stage. and jan in characteristic pose :-)

Dsc03665

[1] or see it here

[2] one of the few visitors sans blog

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bloggrrr.com

die sbaw waren lustig und gut.

der leumund hat endlich sein neuestes spielzeug – bloggrrr.com – vorgestellt (die präsentation liess zu wünschen übrig, er weiss es, also fertig mit dem leumundbashing :-).

obs funktioniert, weiss ich nicht, ich hab mich registriert, und als englisch-sprachiges schweizer blog eingetragen, aber auf bloggrrr.com/CH/en [1] tauch ich noch nicht auf.

herr löi, müssen sie die eingetragenen blogs erst freischalten?

oder ist das ganze noch web-2.0-beta-ajax-mässig unterwegs?

Bloggrrrin der gesamtliste bin ich momentan rang 26, ist doch auch nicht so schlecht, oder? stimmt für mich im sidebar ab, dann rutsch ich höher und gewinn die nächsten SBAW!

aber eine lustige idee ists schon. und jetzt muss ich dringend ins bett.

note to self: solche posts will ich nicht mehr allzuhäufig machen.

gute nacht

[1] schöne URL’s: brav, brav!

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backrub from fscklog.com

today, fscklog posted something about menushade, which i’ve been using together with backdrop, when i have to read something carefully and cannot be distracted by anything.

to illustrate the way it works, leo used the image i submitted to the cs3-pool on flickr, a screenshot of my preparation for a job interview at the psi. [1]

i adapted this read-mode after a post on 43folders, a gtd-freaks heaven.

[1]: the job would be in bern, at the anatomical institute, but i’d heavily work together with the people at the psi.

i’ll let you know, when i know if they chose me…

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picture of the week 17

this weekend the 21st berner renntage have been carried out at the klösterlistutz.

because i saved two days from my civil service at the adventure playground i was part of the staff this weekend. after hauling around 300 bales of straw around 60 soap box cars raced down the rather steep hill. the car below was one of the nicest, even though it doesn’t really fit into the selfmade category. the kids got it from an old rollercoaster and rebuilt it as a race-car.

if you’d like to see some of the other participants of the race, you can do that in my set over at flickr. (or separated into the pictures from saturday and sunday).

Dsc03624

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renamed mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi scripts

yesterday evening chris, the admin of the gna-server informed me that my trackback-scripts stressed the server quite a bit.

and because i got a massive hit of spam in the morning (more than 100 spam comments that passed the junk-filter) i decided to do, what i’ve should have done a long time ago: rename my comment- and trackback-scripts so they cannot be easily guessed remotely

first, i used the direction posted here at the photoblogs-wiki and adapted them a bit:

first, i renamed

…the comment script. A good proportion of comment spam is generated automatically; i.e. a spam site will try to automatically contact your comment script which normally resides at:

http://yourURL/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi

If you rename the script you stop the automatic spam in its tracks. You can rename this file anything you like (e.g. death-to-spambots.cgi) but you a) need to retain the cgi extenstion (I think), and b) also need to make a change to your mt-config.cgi file (which resides in your cgi-bin directory. You need to look for the following block of code

# CommentScript mt-comments.pl

# TrackbackScript mt-tb.pl

# SearchScript mt-search.pl

# XMLRPCScript mt-xmlrpc.pl

# ViewScript mt-view.pl

… and make two changes. First, uncomment the first line by removing the hash symbol; i.e.

CommentScript mt-comments.pl

… and second, change the filename to match your renamed version; e.g.

CommentScript death-to-spambots.cgi

this means, that the scripts still work, but under another name [1], so noone should be able to just guess their location. but as a human person nothing changes, because you comment through the comment interface and get redirected to the correct script. the problem of this solution is now, that the spammers generate massive amounts of “404: File not found”-errors in the logs, because the original scripts are not there anymore.

to prevent this, i then implemented the Junk slow-down-solution posted over at the solid wall of code, which consists of throwing the junk-bots into a loop when they guess the original-file destination.

so if you now go to the original mt-comments.cgi on my server, you (or better your spam-script) has to wait 30 seconds before it gets to see an error-message. this should at least slow down the junk scripts and put a bigger burden on the junkers than it does on the server my blog resides on.

Mt-Commentsthe whole setup seems to work quite fine.

before renaming the scripts i got around 5 comment spams per minute (!) and now it already has slowed down quite a bit, the last comment spam (as i write it) has been more than 2 hours ago and the one before already four hours ago.

see yourself in the screenshot on the left.

[1]: i’m not gonna tell you, leave a comment to see for yourself. :-)

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oster-ausverkauf!

ich hab mal in meiner dvd/games/etc-kiste gewühlt (weil ich endlich mal alle meine dvds im dvdmanager eintragen wollte) und dabei einige “karteileichen” gefunden.

und weils im moment zu stark regnet, um zum 2nd-hand-gameverkäufer auf dem märit zu gehen, landen die sachen halt auf dem netz.

also, brauchst du ein retro-game für deine playstation (die originale) oder ein neues game für deine psp? dann schau mal hier bei ricardo.ch vorbei…

und jetzt hab ich endlich zeit, um weiter aufzuräumen! also ab an die arbeit!

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fixed-gear-gallery feed [update]

raph/dom/blaize, this one is for you [1]:

’cause i always forget to check back at the bike-p0rn-site fixedgeargallery and actually never want to miss a great bike there i created an rss-feed of the site with feedyes.com.

so if you’d like to be notified of an update on that fabulous site, then add this feed here (see comments below!) to your preferred news-reader and get your daily fix (it doesn’t get the individual sites of the bikes, but at least you get all the updates…)

[via kus]

[1]: tell me if it works, leave a comment or so…

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a funny magic trick

i got a chuckle out of this, ’cause it really works. makes a neat office-trick:

Allright here’s what I want you to do – while sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

Now, while doing this, draw the number “6” in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do about it!

[via “optical” illusions]

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