grand challenge 05

hopefully this year’s grand challenge will be more of a success than the last one.

at least there’s hope, because a contestant is driven by max os x (albeit there could be a kernel panic on track :-)

if you forgot how the last year’s edition ended, then this boingboing-post links to a video excerpt (31mb .wmv) of the satellite-feed from the 04-edition, so you can see for yourself how craptacularly bad most of the autonomous vehicles drove.

[via tuaw.com]

bloggerbraeteln

Folio Curr Img Eckengaaus aktuellem grund mal wieder deutsch;

diesen sonntag findet in konolfingen wieder mal ein bloggertreffen statt, diesmal brätelnderweise. christian hats angerissen und einige wollen kommen (siehe kommentare). wenn schönes wetter ist, werd ich mit dem velo nach konolfingen düsen und hab schon mal beim herr leu angefragt, ob er auch mitkommen will, der ziert sich aber noch :-)

der velobegeisterte aargauer ist ja bekannt für längere touren, und ein mail von mir wartet in seiner inbox, mal schauen, evtl. gibt das ne art sternfahrt :-)

ps: bild via nzz, wieder-gefunden im blog.ch-blog.

famous detective

A man suspected his wife was seeing another man, so he hired the famous Chinese detective, Chen Lee, to watch and report any activities while he was gone. A few days later, he received this report:

Most honorable Sir:

You leave house. I watch house.

He come to house. I watch.

He and She leave house. I follow. He and She go in hotel. I climb tree.

I look in window.

He kiss She. She kiss He. He strip she. She strip He. He play with She. She play with He.

I play with me. I fall off tree.

I not see.

So no fee.

Chen Lee

[via urs‘ mail]

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picture of the week 27 [update]

i spent the past weekend with renzo and eveline which competed in the gigathlon, a race across switzerland involving swimming, inline skating, road- and mountain-biking and running from locarno to basel via luzern. all the athletes and their supporters were housed in two camps, the picture below shows a panorama of the tents in the camp in airolo.

Gigathlon High

oh, and don’t blame me for the barrel distortion, i was standing on a heap of scrap wood, while i took that panorama and feared that i’m gonna fall down, so i could not align the pictures any nicer…

update: all the pictures from the gigathlon can be found here.

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apple doesn’t want to sell me stuff

Applestoreborkeddear apple.

i just spent an hour and a half to layout a book (for a gift) in iphoto. now, that i want to buy it, you inform me, that my credit-card cannot be accepted for this transaction. i double-checked with my credit-card-company, and yes, my card is fully valid and within its limit, so there’s nothing wrong with that. and i’d also love to buy sunny days, but that also doesn’t work.

and hey, it’s a gift which i need soon, so what can i do?

don’t wonder, i already called at the apple help line, but they’re closed so late in the evening…

picture of the week 26

i’ve been experimenting with panoramas quite a bit lately [1]. and with huginosx it’s really easy to align ramarkably good panoramas even with handheld pictures, like i’ve done it in the one below.

Velodemo High

this wednesday the ja! [2] made a bike demonstration in bern. they wanted to protest against the newest plans to slash the free bike-parking around the main station here in bern. because of the thunderstorm that just started minutes after the demonstration was about to begin there were not too many people. i tried to document that with that panorama, which makes the waisenhausplatz look quite empty with that little bunch of protesters on it…

[1] maybe you’ve watched my panorama tag over at flickr.

oh, and raph, i’m still waiting for the CMWC-tag (or maybe cmwc2005) to get filled!

[2] we never were 70 people. i counted when we were on the bundesplatz, and we were exactly 34… oh, and can you spot me on that picture?

[3] i really love tagging :-)

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my phonebill puzzles me [update]

today i just got my sunrise mobile phone-bill, and i was quite puzzled by one item on it. i’ve used gprs three times this month (not a hardcore user, am i…).

twice [1, 2] to send a moblog-post from switzerland resulting in a total data rate of 248 kB, and once [3] to send a moblog-post from spain which was 113 kB heavy.

the thing that now puzzles me, is that i actually paid less for my data in spain, although i was roaming with Telefonica there.

in switzerland i paid 0.02 CHF per kB, which results in a price of 20.50 CHF per MB (!!!).

in spain, i paid 0.0116 CHF per kB, resulting in a price of 11.90 per MB, which is nearly half the price i pay in switzerland. and remember, i was roaming with my swiss phone on a spanish network, so i surely didn’t pay the least expensive price there.

ain’t that unbelievable? guess it’s time to look into other options for sending that occasional moblog from my phone. sunrise do you hear me? data is much too expensive with you!!!

do you have any tips to lower my phone bill?

update: bitflux-chregu has some remedies. see his comment here.

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itunes 4.9

Itunes4.9apple just released the new itunes, now with included podcast-feature.

the ITMS now features a podcast-section, so apple released a directory, where anyone can add their podcast. for a start, you can go to the top 20 of apples podcasts, which will be more than enough to fill all your gadgets with stuff to listen to.

so, you podcaster-guys and -gals, get ready for some massive bandwidth-consumption! (cause apple is only linking to your files, i download them from you…)

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filewile on itunes

dejot and dustbowl released a new track today. you can grab their remix of sunnydays from melody & rider here. it’s another pay per listen release, ’cause those laptop jugglers need to make some cash, too… (and a dollar is not too much, innit?)

if you don’t want to pay through paypal or finetunes, then you have to wait a bit, until the other songs are released on itunes, for the moment you can only get the barbarella-ep and emitow from the CCCC IV-sampler in the ITMS. other songs will follow, for sure.

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a new gadget

Axok, i admit, i could also have bought a really long (but marginally less expensive) cable, but i has got me an airport express from ricardo [1].

now i can play all my tunes [2] over my bad-ass stereo with b&o loudspeakers, much better than the puny logitech speakers :-) and if i’d actually had a printer, i could print wireless, but that’s another story. now i just need another wireless enabled gadget to fully use this new one.

[1]: i prefer using it to ebay, it seems less scam-ridden…

[2]: currently 2624 songs, 11.21 GB

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