the ghostrider
in this months issue of wired there was a story about the great challenge. although the whole thing is a military-sponsored thing it chatched me as a truly geeky adventure. it’s a race from los angeles to las vegas. but the race is not a vanilla-flavoured race, instead it’s for driverless robotic cars which have to find their way completely autonomous. the official course will not be known until two hours prior to race time and will only released as gps way-points. then the teams have these two hours to fiddle with their equipment, and then are forced to watch how their creation competes without the slightest possibility of interaction, the machine has to do it on their own. it has to decide where to drive through, it has to decide how fast it can drive and all the other bits and pieces which a machine needs to consider to get from A to B as fast as possible. of all the portrayed teams (scroll down a bit to see them), the berkeley-team has by far the most impressive setup: their ghost rider is a motorcycle, while all the other contestants rely on at least four-wheeled chariots of fire. go and download the movies on the ghost rider-page (although they’re HUGE) and if you’re interested in that kind of stuff go and read the article in wired (although it’s far better on big pages and glossy paper :-)
engadget
after some guy left gizmodo he founded engadget to abandon himself to his gadget fetish. the first entries on engadget (which is a really cool domain name, why do i never get those ideas :-) look really promising to fulfill my gadge-lust. looks like i need to watch an rss-feed more!
mike van audenhove
last sunday my parents, my sister and me had a brunch in the marzilibruggli (where nina works). during the brunch the nose of my father started running (not that this is an event that needs to be blogged :-) and then a comicstrip from mike van audenhove came to my mind. zurich by mike is one of my favorite swiss comics, and luckily enough the zuri-tipp - which publishes one strip per week - archives all the strips on its homepage. so i skimmed through ALL of the strips there and finally found the strip that we talked about: the nosedrop.
apple rss-feeds
for those appleheads which heavily rely on rss-feeds apples new rss-feeds-page is something long awaited come true. [via apples newsletter]
exposé is just soo cool
as i installed everything from scratch, clutter now lacks quite a lot of my albums pictures. with expose it’s a breeze to update these. a quick google of the album tittle, click and hold, f9, drop onto clutter. et voila! couldn’t be easier than this. before i had to save the image to the desktop, minimize safari, locate the image on my cluttered desktop, get clutter to the foreground and drag the image to clutters window (direct drag and drop did not work, because through some mysterious bug all the images dragged to clutter arrived upside down.)
another great set of pictures
loretta lux photographs kids, scans their subjects and places them on a separate background which results in quite eerie pictures. most of the kids seem to be generated through cgi, but it’s all the real thing. [via boingboing and the NY Times]
probably the nicest pictures ever made!
[by karin]
i bought a powerbook :-)
but it is only made from cardboard :-) filewile’s new single comes in a beautiful hand-crafted limited-edition card-board-special-media-8"-powerbook. (and it’s yours for only 35 bucks). and have you read the article about their journey to the uk? (96kb .pdf) oh, and the chumpnrun-video (which is also on the single) is absolutely hilarious. i hope to see it on telly sometimes, it’s really good! go andy and dejot! update: it turns out that i’m quite lucky. the limited edition single won’t officially be available until the 17th of march! so i already know the song with the incredible sassy hook-line and i own a limited piece of art, there are only 300 filewile-power-books available for sale, then they’re gone for good.
installing panther
i will install panther now. i won’t do an update of my 10.2 system to panther but try to do a squeaky-clean and fresh install. i know that this is much more work, but in the past one-and-a-half year i own my ibook i’ve installed (and deleted) so many programs that left junk on my HD i don’t want to take with me any further. i cloned my whole ibook to my nifty external 80gb-firewiredisk, tried to boot from it (it worked) so i can go back anytime, so i expect no real troubles, just a time-consuming process while i install all the stuff i so heavily rely on (a small part of every junk-program i install and try out…) so wish me luck that everything goes well (and that i don’t need to call support :-)
deep blue
yesterday we went to see deep blue (german site). an amazing film. go and see it! fullstop.