alleycat in lausanne
i just returned from a very cool alleycat in lausanne. normally an alleycat is about 30km “go as fast as you can”. Blaize from velocite made that one different: there were 6 pickup places around the place de l’europe in lausanne (which were in a diameter of maybe 400m). at the start you got a list that was maybe 1-4-5-2, so you had not only to drive fast, but also think hard on how to go and pick up the “parcels” (which consisted of rubber stamps), then when you finished that list, you got another one, then another one, and so on until you finished seven lists. and guess who finished first of all twelve messengers that were there and got that nice t-shirt that Blaize made himself? me.
Dasher.
I just read that on apple.slashdot (I should prepare my physics-lessons for next week, but the pressure is not high enough at the moment): Dasher is availiable in beta for OSX. Dasher looks like a really promising way to enter text on a device with limited abilities. This can intentionally be understood in both ways. Either the device has limited abilities (think about palm-sized devices or wearable computers) or the person entering text has limited abilities (think about a paralized person). I just downloaded the Beta-version of Dasher for OS X (which is also availiable for Windows, GNU/Linux and Pocket PC) and played around with it a bit (see below) . Dasher sports some pretty nifty interface. The user point to the letters he want’s to write an Dasher has some preemtive text input possibilites, so you are quite fast in writing (and also really fast in learning how to use it). The developers want to start to embed the possibility to add text to any application which should make dasher some decent fun to use!
gossip!
if you want to create a real-looking gossip magazine-title-page sporting your friends, then quickbrews dirt-generator has the tools for you :-)
yay for the us of ay!
guess who has a blog too? george nutter double-u bush. check it out here. i wonder if he makes the entries himself….
cyborgs, take over please
where the hell have we come, when cyborgs start to rule the world?
ten years ago.
today i had to get a new ID, because mine got out of date after ten years. quite funny to see me today and ten years ago :-)
what a nice 404!
the french ministry of culture has some really nice 404-error-pages! (through Boing Boing)
ah well then!
this is a fast reaction! today i got two mails in my inbox regarding the letter i wrote to the editor of the sonntagszeitung, first, one of the head of the ‘science’-part of the newspaper; besten Dank für Ihren Leserbrief. Selbstverständlich hat uns die Geschichte im Wired inspiriert, dem Thema nachzugehen. Wir haben damit den freien Autoren Hubertus Breuer, der in New York lebt und regelmässig für die SonntagsZeitung schreibt, beauftragt, der Sache nachzugehen. Dass dabei eine ähnliche Geschichte rauskommen wird, wie sie schon in Wired stand, war uns von vornherein klar. Denn: Gute Ideen übernehmen ist schliesslich nicht verboten (im Gegensatz zum Abschreiben).
note to self
tomorrow it’s my duty to cook for ten hungry messengers, i have central-shift, and my flatmates have gone to bed already, so i cannot print them, because we have a “three flatmates to two printers ratio” and i’m the one without printer :-) these are the recipes: recipe 1 recipe 2
Wired vs. Sonntagszeitung
Well, if you compare the following two articles, once in the latest WIRED and then in the swiss paper Sonntagszeitung of last sunday, then - if you speak English and German - then something must come to your mind. Plagiarism? Maybe not, but at least excessive Copy & Paste with a detour over Babelfish. :-) This is my reaction to their “letter to the editor”-departement (sorry, only in German). Wenn ich aber den Bericht über die Diamantene Revolution in derselben Ausgabe durchlese (ab S. 89) fällt mir - selbst beim Überfliegen des Artikels - auf, dass dieser Artikel praktisch Wort für Wort aus dem Heft WIRED übernommen wurde. (Ausgabe WIRED 11.09 ab Seite 096 oder http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html). Selbst die Illustrationen wurden praktisch eins zu eins übernommen, mit kleinen Änderungen in den Proportionen und Farben.