I finally made it!
I tried for more than 2 years to get this done: A new design and layout for this website. And now it’s finally done!
I hope you enjoy the new colors and elements like the nice tagcloud there. Feel free to tell me what you think!
Well some of you may be interested in how many other people are visiting schrankmonster. Well it’s more than a year since I last did an article about the official schrankmonster statistics. One year is about time to take another look on where we got in this year:
As you may see there’s a huge jump from January to February 2007 which can be explained by the introduction of the XBOX 360 Achievement Generator. But even without this new service you can see a huge increase in visits and hits. Now if there would be more comments 
Oh dear, that stinks! Someone must have left some things on the cooker… damn you!
Because the small aquarium was free we decided to buy a siamese fighting fish. So let me introduce “Boris”:
So far he seems to be okay and healthy after the transport… to get updated information in the future just take a look at blueturtles or if you want some info about the species right now, take a look here.
For me YAPS becomes more and more the vcr application I was always searching for. I’ve fixed a lot of bugs since the last article about YAPS and added a lot of features. It did not crash for about a month on my production system and the daily build access seems to work better than I thought it would (since it’s only a quick .cmd script).
Since the settings page is quite hard to implement I started with some other things that lead their way to get the settings page done – one of which is the dynamic template keyword feature where you can add options to .html pages which can be used in the page itself. (documentation to be written).
The settings page should be ready within this week hopefully as all the needed parts are coming together right now (like those options and stuff).
What I want from you:
Here’s the changelog since the last version I wrote about…oh..we do have a build version now…it’s 1.0.30 for the Processor and 1.0.2474.1263 for the application as I am writing this.
10.10.2006
09.10.2006
07.10.2006
03.10.2006
29.09.2006
28.09.2006
21.09.2006
Dailybuild (Microsoft.NET): http://www.slow-backward.de/yaps_daily_build.zip
Dailysource: http://www.slow-backward.de/yaps_daily_source.zip
While cleaning my keyboards the idea came up to actually use dvorak keyboard layout I wrote about more than a year ago.
After creating the “dovrak german type 2″ keyboard layout file with Ukelele I am now slowly learning the new layout… quite hard after more than 16 years on QWERTZ/QWERTY…
Well… both Apple Keyboards are now dvorak-layouted… looks a bit strange when you’re only known to QWERTZ/QWERTY
If you like you can download the OS X keyboard layout here.
Source 1: dvorak article(german)
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Key…
Source 3: Ukelele
Source 4: btk_Dvorak.zip (3,21 KB)
I just configured the build system to generate daily builds straight of the subversion repository. You can grab the daily build archive here.
Dailybuild (Microsoft.NET): http://www.slow-backward.de/yaps_daily_build.zip
Dailybuild (MONO): working on that
Dailysource: http://www.slow-backward.de/yaps_daily_source.zip
The changelog since I wrote the last YAPS news:
04.09.2006
03.09.2006
01.09.2006
You can find the changelog in the daily build archive “Documentation and Misc” folder. Also a build logfile and svn checkout logfile can be found in the “logs” folder.
In the next days I am going to implement the Settings System and GUI.
Tell us what you are YAPS using for, which features are great, which ones not, which ones do you you need in the future? What would make YAPS a great tool for you?
Since my girlfriend had a spare aquarium to offer we decided to put one into my residence (yeah!)… What fish species to take wasn’t a real question: they should taste great when eaten by a turtle… And since the species Poecilia reticulata aka Guppy is quite reproductive and is known to taste great (Wilma knows best) it is the species of choice.
First the basics: Testing the water.
Everything looks fine…so.. here’s the final tank:
Now, does this look good or not? I worked the whole day on the graphics…hopefully everyone will like it
Oh that one was fun 
… Despite the fact that it rained this whole day it was serious fun watching the knights fight…
Source: http://www.schloss-thurn.de/
Yes I am alive… I took some days off so here we are back in business. There will be some articles about the things I did the last days…and of course as usual: many pictures.
I start the series with the visit to the Zoo of Erfurt:
Of course I made some panoramic views:
this and the next one show the enclosure where the turtles and the cows live
the monkeys live here…(no island)
Here are the three movies I made:
and here we are back again, reorganising the desktop:
if you want to see how it looked a month ago…see part 3
I do like two car manufacturers (well, their cars to be precise) more than all the others. One of them is Mercedes-Benz and the other is…TVR. Yes, the brits.
They make great looking powerful sports cars and I hope one day one will be mine They are quite affordable compared to other supercars – for example you can get a brand new TVR Sagaris (4l V6) for 80k EURO…a pre owned 2004 Cerbera (4.5l V8) comes for about 48k EURO…did I mention they do not come below 380 bhp and weigh as much as two packs of chewing gum? (I’ll have to pay royalties to Jeremy Clarkson for that…damn!).
The fact is that the Cerbera has gone out of official production in 2004. But now TVR is auctioning the last made Cerbera on the Internet:
Yes, you can get that brand new, pepper white, 420 bhp supercar…just sign up and bid…well if you have the money (which I don’t)…
Beside the Cerbera I fell in love with the Sagaris…look how gorgeous it is:
I just found the sagaris video:
If you want to buy me one…contact me
Source 1: http://www.thelastcerbera.com/
Source 2: http://www.tvr.co.uk/overview_sagaris.php
After several really really hot days we’re finally getting some rain…temperatures dropping to 26 degree celsius…
A couple of days ago I wrote about a website that has some interesting pictures of the planets of our solar system compared to each other in size. The idea was great but the quality of the pictures was bad. So we decided to push our knowledge about 3D tools a bit and render our own high-quality version.
But first a before-after comparision:
Aaaaaand:
Tell us what you think of it!
We will add some more pictures in the next hours, beside that a short movie in 720p is in the rendering process at the moment.
Last time I worked with 3D tools they were called “3D Studio Max 3.0″…which is quite a while ago. 3D Studios current version number is 8… You can grab your own trial version here.
We actually experimented a lot with the tools…look what earth became after just seconds of play:
Source 1: original article and picture
Source 2: 3D Studio MAX trial
I don’t own a 600 Euro digital camera. Mine was cheap and does the job well so far. And now I’ve found something more to play with. I like to do panoramic views, as you might have mentioned before. But the technique I am now discovering is far more interesting. It’s called High Dynamic Range imaging.
Here’s an excerpt of the wikipedia article on that subject:
Since it’s night here at the moment I could only experiment in the dark, where my camera creates, beside dark pictures, very much picture noise.
So, what to do, you may ask. Well grab a camera where you can control at least the exposure time. Than take at least 2 (the more the better) pictures with different exposure times. I started with 3 pictures per HDR image. As you can see above:
When you have those pictures you need a software to combine them to an HDR image. There are many sites that can provide such tools, I recommend hdrsoft.com. They provide a tool called “Photomatix” which is specialized on HDR imaging. If you have a Photoshop CS2 available, well, that will do the job as well. Just go to the “File->Automate->Create HDR” dialog.
If you downloaded the tools, throw the pictures inside and let the magic happen. You get a 16 or 32 Bit per pixel image. You can control the exposure and saturation, the white and the black levels and so on. To save the picture as a standard-JPG like I did, you have to do some Tone-Mapping. Photomatix can do that as well.
Expect more on that subject here tomorrow. Then with some pictures of the sunny nature…well if there is sun tomorrow…Till than: Enjoy the HDR images I’ve got so far:
First the 3 source pictures:
And then the HDRI:
First the 3 source pictures:
And then the HDRI:
Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
Source 2: http://www.hdrsoft.com
The temperatures raise these days. And I have this great limes. So what else could I do than transforming limes+cane sugar+passion fruit juice+ginger ale+ice into this really refreshing drink called “Ipanema”. It’s just like a Caipirinha. But without the headache afterwards.
LIMES! A huge amount of them. Yummi.
Once again I reorganised my desktop. One display less now, but much more working space on the left-hand.
I got the new Community Server platform up-n-running now on slow-backward.de. But with the help of the dasBlog developers I am able to tweak dasBlog a little bit for speed. You should have noticed a dramatic improvement on front-page loading-times…
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