i want that car
today the newest wired arrived. as always, when scanning it for worthwhile stuff to read, my eyes get caught on the “fetish” page. nope, it’s not your normal fetish like latex and leather and stuff like that, but shining and gleaming gadgets and gizmos. this time, the wired staff portrayed the toyota volta, a hybrid concept car. the volta is the bigger and much much spiffier brother of the toyota prius, which is a really big hit in the us. i presume that hybrid cars are the only way electric cars are ever gonna be popular. (heck, even gearbits loves it :-) a hybrid car is - for all those that do not know - a car that has both a conventional engine and an electrical engine. both share the work, the electrical engine all the work where a conventional one is not good, e.g. accelerating and small burst of power, and the conventional engine comes to help when maximal power is needed, like on auto-routes. thus, such cars manage to be really fuel-efficient and environmentally safe (at least many of times safer than a normal car) while leaving the man or woman behind the steering wheel with the experience of a real car, so no charging of the battery or searching for that hydrogen filling stations.
amazing!
yesterday evening my ibook crashed. it locked up when i started realplayer to listen to some late-nite tunes while having setiathome running (so the processor was on full duty). normally such lock-ups are not a big deal, it will recover from itself, i thought, just give it some time. i thought, maybe if i unplug it, it will go to sleep soon and be a happy puppy again. so i lay on my bed and started to read in my book. sometimes later i must have fallen asleep without actually looking how my ibook is doing. this morning the ibook was sitting happily on my desk, turned off. it did not go to sleep, which is what it normally does when the battery power is too low, but was turned off. so the battery must have been completely drained. no big deal, it only lasted 5-6 minutes anyway, because my ibook is about three years old, and was used a lot on it’s own juice. the amazing part is that when i rebooted, i saw that the battery icon mentioned that the battery needs about two and a half hours to fully charge again. hmm. that’s much much more than it ever said before. then after these two and a half hours i unplugged the ibook from the juice and the icon says: (after some “calculating…”) that i got an hour and 16 minutes left on battery power. amazing. i guess the battery was not so bad then. lucky i’m not the winning bidder here :-)
picture of the week
as cranes seem to be popular at the moment, my picture of the week also features a crane. as you might know, i was in winterthur last weekend, on the sulzerareal. the picture below shows a crane on the area, the right one has a carrying capacity of 25 tons, impressive, isn’t it?
kraftwerk
in case anyone of you didn’t go to the kraftwerk-concert 1 last wednesday or thursday in the reithalle or didn’t see the pictures of it in the blog-o-hood, then here are the ones i made: as i told reto the day after, it was not really a concert, more a performance, because the visuals actually blasted me away, the music was pretty the same as on their records. as piece notes, a video of the show would be amazing (he links to two smallish videos in his post) ↩︎
handy dandy!
after submitting a comment spam to the MT-Blacklist, i stopped by at jayallens blog, and found an interesting link. bopuc proposes a way to view all the comments on your blog as a rss feed, spruced up with all the relevant links to despam and edit the comment and info of the commenter. here are the directions: go to your MT-HQ and make a new template. call it something you remember and insert a filename for it (e.g. something.xml) paste the code below into the text field.
funny link of today
this slideshow here is especially for my sister. you know why :-) anyone other than my sister might not think it’s funny. sorry. [via boingboing]
SubEthaEdit 2.0
SubEthaEdit made the jump to version 2.0. As fsck-log notes, even if you don’t need it, it has to be on every mac, one of the most amazing pieces of software, and extremely fast and helpful for writing down stuff (even simultaneously together and alike). oh, and after looking at the screenshots, i’ll even use SubEthaEdit to code that occasional latex-file i write… [via mactechnews.de]
my new precious
it’s here. it’s amazing. it’s mine. nuff said!
picture of the week
yesterday, urs, simu and me went to winterthur, because the guys from staffel x made an alleycat. this is what it looks like if you cram three guys with their bikes and baggage in a twingo: oh, and by the way, i’ve won that alleycat. pity for me that i didn’t go to the last alleycat in basel, because there i could have won a bikeframe, this time the winner got a cap (not even from the staffel x, but from veloexpress) and a beer (and i don’t like beer, so i could change that to a bottle of coke) :-(
folding your t-shirt [update]
this is amazing! i had to watch that movie (1.4mb .wmv) at least five times to get it. but from now on i’ll fold all my t-shirts that way, my mom will be jealous, if i show that to her. i’m gonna be the faster t-shirt-folder than her :-) [via boingboing] update: for those of you, who rely on more standard-respecting video files, urs points out to a mpeg-file of the same video