weird video

Belindaif you’d like to start your week wirh a really weird video, then you might want to step over to pieceoplastic.com. jan posted a link to a video of belinda bedekovic who plays a weird instrument really weird. you can either watch the video as a flash-file or download the 32mb divx-encoded .avi. quicktime refuse to play it, so you might want to grab vlc, which is always the best candidate for those weirdo videos (and all formats :-).

as jan said it: holy mackerel!!!!

ps: why are the comments closed, piece?

finally!

finally i found a freeware panorama solution that works!

i confess: up to now i’ve used different unlegal ways to stitch my occasional panorama (read: cracked software), mostly because i just couldn’t cough up the steep amounts of money needed to buy one of these programs.

but now it’s over: last week i stumbled over HuginOSX, a program in the very early steps of development (e.g. experimental builds), but still useable for my needs.

HuginOSX is a free port of hugin to os x (who would have guessed…). hugin is a frontend to the excellent panorama tools by helmut dersch. the panorama tools are a set of scripts and plugins for different programs (like photoshop or graphic converter (both not free, so no option for me)) which give excellent results with panoramic images, and are free like in beer.

as i said before i am quite geeky, but definitely not the cli-person, i prefer to use a GUI for most of the stuff i do. that’s where HuginOSX steps in. you load in all the images you want, define control points (in quite a nifty way i must say: after you’ve defined one or two per image, the program is getting really accurate at suggesting the next matching control points), click on some buttons to optimize the panorama and to run the needed scripts and then can export the image in the desired format.

everything is still a bit rough on the edges – the toolbar is far away from useable, only flashes up for split-seconds – but it looks like HuginOSX is going to become a very important program for me (and my conscience :-).

for good results you should also use enblend, another free piece of software, which nicely blends the seams between the images. the combination ofTateblend

leads to images like the one seen on the right (760kb .jpg, 3410*1186 pixels).

so i guess in the coming weeks i’ll have some panoramas for your delight and to help me master HuginOSX’ hurdles.

[1]: i couldn’t get enblend to work nicely with HuginOSX, so i stumbled over Xblend by Kevin Kratzke [2], another freeware program. Xblend is a front-end to emblend, which itself is also cli-heavy…

[2]: Kevin is the creator of PTMac, a shareware frontend to the PanoTools which i’ve used before, but as i said, i prefer freeware….

picture of the week 14

finally i got some time to sort through the pile of pictures i took on vacation in london. it’ amazing how many pictures you take, when you don’t have to care about any restrictions. the one below was taken in the tate modern, a very impressive old power-station converted by Herzog & de Meuron, two swiss architects. the main hall (see a panorama here) serves as the “main floor” for exhibitions and was only filled with some loudspeakers (by bruce naumann) (that exhibition was about as good as the link is…). nonetheless i was able to get quite a good shot of the eerie afternoon glow outside.

Dsc00433

a bunch of new feeds

i just returned from the matt blogg+birthday meet which was really nice and interesting. it was really nice connecting the faces to the bits and bites, talking about tagging vs. keywords, map orientations and stuff like that.

i actually suspected to stay around an hour or so, but in the end i turned out to be home around ten at night.

guys and gals, it was really interesting to meet all of you, and i’m surely gonna add some more feeds to my news-reader.

btw: if you want to see the appropriate images, then go to my blog.ch-meet-tag on flickr. (so please tag your images accordingly, so they show up as a whole bunch under the general tag blog.ch-meet.

k700i and isync (or k700i & isync :-)

yesterday i went to prolong my contract with my mobile phone provider, so i was able to cheaply get a new mobile phone. after looking at the different mobiles compatible with isync i decided (mostly for monetary reasons) to get the Sony Ericsson K700i.

after trying to sync it with my computer i nearly gave up, because isync always crashed on me in the middle of the syncing process. after countless tries, deleting preference files, rewriting some preinstalled bundles and stuff like that isync notified me of a “duplication warning” with one contact i have in my address-book: the godfather of my sister is in my address book as: Renner Prename & Prename Wife.

that puny little ampersand made my isync crash every time. after i’ve edited the contact to “Renner Prename1 Prename2” everything worked like a charm.

just in case anyone out there has the same problem and is trying to find a solution…

Btk700Inow i just need to get file transfers going, that’s also a thing that doesn’t work. the transfer starts just right, but then dies with the error seen on the left. i can send files from the phone to the mac, but not the other way. really weird!

anyone any suggestions on how to remedy that situation, ’cause i’d really like to use a cool .mp3 as a ringtone…

rfid implant

you might have seen that flickr photoset which was linked from boingboing last week. a guy implanted a rfid chip in his hand to do different stuff with it, like opening a door lock, or starting his car. sounds crazy? it is, but it’s that kind of stuff i like. just imagine how cool it would be to touch the handlebar of your bike and it’s unlocked in that very same moment. no fiddling with keys and anything.

privacy concerns? not really, because the implant cannot be read if more than some inches away, which is surely the distance one would notice

now shannon posted an interview with Amal over at the bmezine. go and read it, it’s enlightening (or think what you want of it).

movie of the week 12

i spent the weekend in london with nina (just like other people did…) and didn’t have time to sort through all the pictures i took. can you remember the times when you took something like ten pictures on a whole weekend? ah, the good old analog times. but nonetheless i got a kick out of that little movie i quickly hacked together in imovie. it’s the tower bridge (not the london bridge!) opening for a ship to go through, with a little squeaky door effect i added. and if you recognize the song from which i took the opening riff, i’ll pay you a beer, the next time we meet! (tip: the song title contains london…)

Bridge

(116kb .mov)

ps: i’ll surely share some pictures with you, but now i gotta run, nina has something to celebrate – she passed her exams!

new badge [update]

i’ve added a new badge to the collection on the lower left: GeoURL

if you click on the badge, your browser is taken to the geourl-page, where you can see all my neighbors in meatspace (i just love that expression!).

hello b., hello urs, hello guido not hello fsp!

update: i stumbled over the link on the bottom of arnis blog (which seems to be dead), that’s how i noticed that geourl relaunched, it’s more a coincidence than investigative bloggin…

picture of the week 11

i again spent a weekend on the slopes. this time i spent it with some folk from work.

the image below is a crop from an image from the bunch i shot this weekend, hence it’s quite grainy (keep in mind, it’s shot with a puny dsc-u20), but still i like it, mostly because the cable cuts nicely through the image. and it makes a nice desktop background.

Dsc04520

if you’d like to see the rest of the images, then head over to the /pics section.

googles dock [update]

if you cannot be without the dock magnification effect, then you abolutely must start to use google X from now on. quite nifty!

[via google blog]

update: the site is gone. it was a nifty dhtml-emulation of the dock magnification effect on google which made it “easy” to switch between the different parts of google (imgages.google.com, video.google.com, groups.google.com, etc.)

picture of the week 10

the past friday was absolutely amazing at work. as you might know (or not…) the swiss messengers have a collective product: swissconnect. hence, if a customer wants to send a parcel to any other town in switzerland, he just gives us a call, and we do the rest.

pick it up at his door, drive to the train station, put it on a train, and another partner grabs it from that train and delivers the parcel. anything goes. passports from lausanne, movie rolls from ostermundigen to zürich.

normally all those swissconnects are a little relief from all the other pickups and drops you do, you get a little break at the trainstation and stuff like that. but this friday was absolutely crazy!

Sc-1on a normal day we get at most around 18 so called velocities. but on friday we had 34 in total (24 exports going from bern to wherever and 10 coming to bern). if you click on the extremely tall image on the left you can see a screenshot from the internal swissconnect site (with masked details…).

every parcel has to be entered on that central site, so every partner (and big daddy cm in luzern) is informed with all the details and everything which can be quite a tedious process if the recipient is not entered as a customer in the database. so the whole friday was filled with entering all those details. so many details that it was hard to keep up with hurrying around six messengers in town. at least it was good fun and we made

the best day-revenue of the whole year up to now. way to go!Wochenrapport

the funniest parcel involved a passport, a russian diplomat, and some mühsam zuschlag from our side, but as i said to dom, it was only one of those 3 swissconnects per hour we had this friday.

ps; if you wonder how i took the funny screenshot of the internal swissconnect page: i used paparazzi [1], an extremely lightweight tool for taking complete screenshots of any webpage. i know you can just print the page to pdf, but then you break it up in separate pages and i thought it looks ways more impressive that way… (oh, and don’t worry, i didn’t install it on dispo1 or dispo2, i made the screenshot here at home…)

[1] the website seems to be down, i tried to use the coral cache-version, but it doesn’t work either. you can grab it on versiontracker if you like…

i want one of those new powerbooks [update]

the newest revision of apples powerbooks features an accelerometer, that detects if you drop the powerbook and parks the hard disc heads (a thing already found on older ibm-machines). now a guy figured out how to tap into the accelerometer and use it to display all kind of funky stuff (e.g. a window is fixed in space, while the powerbook rotates). this led another guy to program a python script whith which you can control itunes. just give your powerbook a mild slap on the head and it switches to the next song. i see some really funky stuff coming up for those powerbooks….

[via fscklog]

update: someone already did program a game for the tilt sensors. let the fun begin.

[via the unofficial apple weblog]

stöckchenwerfen

folgendes stöckchen wurde mir von rage zugeworfen:

1. wieviel gigantische bytes an musik sind auf meinem computer?

10.06 gb verteilt auf 2387 songs.

knapp die hälfte davon findet auf meinem ipod platz.

viel elektronik, viel handgemachtes, altes und neues und dazu noch ein grosser schuss schweizer musik.

viel musik ist noch auf den silberscheiben aufm gestell und nicht in einsen und nullen auf meiner festplatte. wenn ich mir in naher zukunft einen neuen ipod kaufe, muss ich mal eine rip-session einlegen. zum glück hat mein neuer powermac zwei optische laufwerke…

  1. die letzte cd, die du gekauft hast, ist?

vorgestern, beide zusammen: tank von den asian dub foundation gielen und 25.07.03 vom stress.

beide im chop.

beide erst kurz angehört.

3. welches lied hast du gerade gehört, als dich der ruf ereilte?

weiss ich nimmer, hab den referer der das stöckchenwerfen enthüllt hat letzte woche mal angeguckt.

bis dann hatt ich rage noch gar nicht im newsreader drin.

momentan läuft grad hey! von viel von den fantastischen vier.

4. fünf lieder, die dir viel bedeuten oder die du oft hörst:

ohni titel von yedi.

das schönste und funkigste dialekt-liebeslied.

club soda von thomas bangalter.

groovigster electro-track ever. und nicht nur weil ich ihn von der vanity9-dvd kenne (da wo die mädels in den knappen kleidchen tanzen…)

see breeze von talvin singh.

tablas. meditativ. und trotzdem schön schnell.

sitting on the dock of the bay von popa chubby.

tief im herzen bin ich der blueser par excellence.

weak become heroes von the streets.

geiler piano-hook. und mike skinner hat ziemlich was zu erzählen, dem hör ich gerne zu.

schlussendlich möcht ich mich aber nicht auf 20% sülze 60% elektronik und 20% blues festlegen. ich hör nämlich viel mehr…

5. wem wirfst du den stock zu?

piece, auch weil/obwohl er immer so viel über musik erzählt.

sis’ musikgeschmack nimmt mich auch wunder.

was hört der urs eigentlich?

qu’est qu’on ecoute a l’autre part dü röschtigraben?

hat monorom schon? (ps: bei ihr sind urs und piece auf einem bild..)

puh, das waren jetzt einige links zum zusammensuchen.