That’s great news for everyone interested in science and history. As it turns out Google and PopSci just made their entire 137-year archive available online… good times!

“We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”

Source: http://www.popsci.com/archives

Create a new folder, rename it to:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

After hitting <return> the folder will be a shortcut to the Windows 7 Administration GOD Mode. Enjoy. (Thanks Damir)

Source: http://tomicic.de/2010/01/03/Windows7GodMode.aspx

If you want to completely destroy your productivity for today, just go ahead and visit this great Mash-Up Charts website.

“A mashup, bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.

In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” They have also been described negatively as “the logical extension of the sampling fever of the ’80s taken to its dumbest extreme”. Due to the questionable legal status of mash ups and little chance of profits “there’s a real punk rock attitude attached to the movement”.” (Source)

Oh… by the way: This is not the first time I am writing about Mash-Ups… be sure to have a look here and here.

Source 1: http://www.mashup-charts.com/
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28music%29

One of our two DSL lines in the office is provided by QSC. So far the decision to go with QSC was one of the best since I deal with Internet providers. These guys at QSC are just brilliant. Great support, great service, great pricing!

They even sent me a notice that there will be a planned maintenance downtime in more than a week. They do the maintenance on a saturday morning. When it’s unlikely that anyone will miss the uplink. (Since we got two, we won’t actually miss it… it’s just slower)

Apparently DiRT 2 is coming with several funny features – one of which is that you can decorate your cars interior – like: you can hang your avatar on the rear-view-mirror… great idea!

Bonn, 2. April 2009

Der T-Online Venture Fund gab heute ein Investment in die sones GmbH bekannt. sones sicherte sich in einer zweiten Finanzierungsrunde eine Beteiligung im einstelligen Millionenbereich. Mit den zusätzlichen Mitteln soll das Produkt bis zur endgültigen Marktreife weiterentwickelt werden.

Das 2007 gegründete Software-Unternehmen aus Erfurt hat eine völlig neue, innovative Datenbanktechnologie entwickelt. Die objektorientierte Datenbank kann die relevanten Informationen aus komplexen, unstrukturierten Datenmengen direkt miteinander verbinden und setzt somit neue Maßstäbe hinsichtlich Skalierbarkeit und Performance. Mit dieser Technologie werden komplexitätsbedingt bisher unlösbare Probleme in der Datenspeicherung und -analyse beherrschbar.

“Bei sones hat uns vor allem die innovative Technologie überzeugt und der Ansatz, Bestehendes in Frage zu stellen. Somit können völlig neue Möglichkeiten des Datenmanagements geschaffen werden“, so Christoph Schmidt, Senior Vice President bei der Deutschen Telekom AG für den Bereich Personal Social Networks.

sones arbeitet derzeit am Ausbau seiner Datenbanktechnologie sowie am dazugehörigen Dateisystem. Gegen Ende dieses Jahres wird die erste Vollversion des objektorientierten Datenbankmanagementsystems (DBMS) zur Verfügung stehen. Softwareentwicklern und Partnern wird es via SDK (Software Development Kit) ermöglicht, weitreichenden Einfluss auf die Entwicklung zu nehmen und Veränderungen am System vorzunehmen. sones lädt interessierte Softwareentwickler und potentielle Partner ein, sich über die Webseite www.sones.de für das Preview- und Partner-Programm anzumelden, um die kostenlose Entwicklerversion zu erhalten und Feedback für die zukünftige Weiterentwicklung zu geben. Derzeit steht ein auf Webservices basierendes Tagging- und Recommendation-System zur Verfügung, das bereits kommerziell eingesetzt wird. „Das System kann an die jeweiligen Anforderungen in den Bereichen eCommerce, Social Networks und Portal/Content-Lösungen angepasst werden“ sagt Alexander Oelling, Leiter New Business Development bei sones. Auch hier setzt sones auf die Zusammenarbeit mit Software-Partnern, um das Produkt in die jeweiligen Webseiten zu integrieren.

Mauricio Matthesius, Geschäftsführer von sones: „Der T-Online Venture Fund hat erkannt, dass unsere revolutionäre Technologie die Zukunft der Datenbanken mitbestimmen kann, und uns in die Lage versetzt, diese Vision konsequent umzusetzen.“

Mit dem Einstieg des T-Online Venture Fund sucht das Unternehmen weitere Mitarbeiter vor allen in den Bereichen Softwareentwicklung und Vertrieb.”

Source 1: http://www.t-venture.de/de/topnews/090402_PM_TOVF_sones_dt
Source 2: http://www.sones.de

I am not a fan of Guns’n'Roses – but this deal is a steal: Dr Pepper betted that the band won’t get their new album released in 2008. If they would release it in 2008 every US citizen would get a free serve of Dr Pepper.

get yours!

Source: http://www.drpepper.com/freeDrPepper/

This is just hilarious! Like we all like to fool around with Chuck Norris it’s time to do the same with the security guru Bruce Schneier:

Source: http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts

Hätte ich einen Fernseher wäre “Schlag den Raab” eine der wenigen Sendungen die ich mir glaube ich ab und an anschauen würde. Nun lief diese Sendung zum 13. Mal und ich dachte mir: Schaust du einmal nach ob das nicht im Internet als Stream angeboten wird.

Wird es – und zwar von ProSieben selbst – als Flash On-Demand “auf-der-Webseite” Player. Und hauptsächlich als Notiz für spätere Sendungen an mich selbst hier mal kurz die Anleitung wie man sich die ganzen Einzelvideos von Schlag den Raab auf den heimischen Rechner zieht um sie ohne Werbeunterbrechung und ohne lästiges herumklicken durchaus auchmal auf dem ebenso heimischen Fernseher anschauen kann. Die Qualität reicht dabei so gerade bis kurz nach knapp aber durchaus schaubar.

Also – für mich und den geneigten Leser:

Wie schon bei vorherigen Folgen der Sendung ist der vordere Teil der URL immer der gleiche, also http://videoplayer.prosieben.de/show_comedy/schlag_den_raab/flv/ – geändert wird jeweils das Jahr der Sendung – in diesem Fall 2008, der Monat – in diesem Fall 11 – und die Nummer der Sendung – in diesem Fall die 13. Danach kommt -00-01.flv bis -00-15.flv – wieviele Einzelteile das sind kann man auf der Webseite abzählen oder einfach probieren bis ein Notfound kommt. Einfach oder?

Das ganze Zeug ist dann mit handelsüblichen Playern abspielbar und die Qualität ist wie schon gesagt nicht so schlecht für ein On-Demand Angebot der kostenlosen Sorte:

Der Platzverbrauch ist dann entsprechend auch bemerkenswert für ein On-Demand Angebot aber das ist ja nur von Vorteil:

… oh even more joy!

Photosynth is publicly available and it’s time to give it a try and play with the technology. Before starting you should be aware of some facts about the public photosynth technology-preview:

1. all synths are uploaded and only available online (broadband needed)
2. all synths are public, everyone can access them
3. the synther tool runs only on Windows
4. you’ll need a Live ID

When everything is checked you can go and upload up to 20 Gbytes of image data – my test synth takes up 200 Mbytes of the available space – so you have plenty of space to play with.

To start just install the photosynth application to view – and click “create” on the website. After the obligatory login you immediately can upload your pictures. Give it a name, ssome tags and a license and select your pictures.

Your pictures should show the same scene from different perspectives – photosynth is all about matching perspectives. After clicking on “Synth” the process starts.

And after a surprisingly short period of time your synth is done. Click on “View Synth” and you’re taken back to the website and you can browse your synth. That’s it – easy!

Source 1: my first photosynth
Source 2: Photosynth is open for the public
Source 3: create a synth

I finally found a way to get Mountain Dew frequently and cheap here in germany. Oh joy!

Now the soda wishlist is completed. Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper – soda heaven.

If you – just like me – played Duke Nukem 3D excessively in times when there was “CompuServe” instead of “Internet”, mailboxes instead of social websites and when there was 1on1 dial-up modem multiplayer instead of MMOs you may recognize those cool quotes you could hear while playing Duke Nukem 3D in single player or the ones you could say to your multiplayer opponent… there’s a list of many of them:

“Uh, Uh, Uh. Where is it?”

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0228246/quotes

You may have heard about Levelhead – an augmented reality game made by Julian Oliver – if you did not hear about it? No problem:

“Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data. At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial marker recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators.”

So – Augmented reality mixes the reality and the computer graphics and creates a new reality for you. That’s a lot of theoretical…so let’s talk about Levelhead:

It’s a game where you have to move plastic cubes with printed-on patterns in front of a camera – the computer now renders a new world inside of the plastic cubes – when you move the cube, the world inside the cube moves too… it looks like this:

“levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.
In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.
Someone once said levelHead may have something to do with a story from Borges.. For a description of the conceptual basis of this project, see below. “

If you are not amazed now? You should watch this:

The thing is – this cool game and technology will be available at the end of this month as full open-source. I suggest to check Julians site back at the end of the month at last.

Source 1: Augmented Reality @ Wikipedia
Source 2: Levelhead homepage

That’s the best news for months!! After TVR being out of business for some time they seem to be back in business now – they even presented the new Sagaris 2008 modell yesterday.

“Announced this morning by TVR Managing Director, David Oxley, at an exclusive preview event held at the new TVR development works in Lancashire, England – TVR Production has resumed!

Upon the momentous occasion, which included invited members of the TVR Car Club, TVR staff presented the TVR Sagaris model year 2008. Exterior design has remained the same except for new 5 spoke wheels, while the interior receives a new center console with satellite navigation.

As promised back in 2006 by TVR owner, Nikolai Smolenski said “My intention is to expand the sales and distribution of TVR cars throughout Europe, the rest of the world and USA markets is a key part of the business strategy of the company.” Built as a left hand drive model, the 2008 Sagaris confirms it will be exported internationally.

Preliminary pricing puts the 2008 TVR Sagaris just below 85.000 Euros.”

So now the only thing I need is the money to buy one of these beasts… I’ll have one in black or white

the re-designed interior included satnav…touchscreen…

…and re-designed exhausts… I actually liked the side-exausts better…

the new bonnet … and the gorgeous speed six…*raaawwr*

Source 1: http://www.worldcarfans.com/9080710.012/page1/tvr-production-restarts—2008-sagaris-presented
Source 2: http://www.tvr-car-club.co.uk/tvrpreviewevent.asp

Ähm… was hat das zu bedeuten? (Sorry, german article again…but it’s a german website…)

“nur in der ehemaligen DDR”, gesehen auf Spiegel-Online Fussball Liveticker.

Spooky. Hilarious!

I just noticed that Windows Server 2003 has a great way to tell me how incredibly mind-boggling huge my storage space is…:

OMG! Someone really did it. Either he was bored and didn’t know what to do with his time or he just is plain genius!

Read the article and get the Excel files and play with it for yourself…

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php

This morning I stumbled into the refurbished offices at Microsoft Research Cambridge heading for a week full of code work: Obviously it seems as our boss over here really takes care of us.

Yeah, and of course you get all the unhealthy things real coders do need to stay night after night awake. 

Happy coding!

(Crosspost from blog.aheil.de)

By speaking of unhealthy food in Great Britain: Freshly imported from the Netherlands…

But I have to practice some more before being ready for the Forest-Gump-17-in-a-row-in-one-evening-because-it’s-for-free-challenge.

Jens Heymann

What happens when something rare gets rarer – you’ve read it an article below. But it’s also interesting to watch what happens when the fate twists to the opposite – a “strictly” limited edition gets a second one.

Limited Edition of 300, first release

That took place in context with the Limited Edition of “300″. Every fanboy and collector got his copy and had been happy, proud and (I guess) felt also a little bit arrogant – what a great divinely thing he owns and others not.

Limited Edition of 300, second release

Now everything is different. The big exclusiveness has gone. More fanboys can have their limited edition and doesn’t need to feel inferior any longer. Additionally this new version is different from the first one.

The reactions?

The previously exclusive owners of the first limited edition moan, that it’s only a rip-off of customers. In reality they are annoyed about spending much money for something (perhaps via bidding or third-party usury) that simply was not worth it.

All the other ones are happy and satisfied.

Jens Heymann

(Printed commercial in various magazins)

Jens Heymann

What went wrong here?

(TV Spielfilm, 16.11.2007)

Jens Heymann

Beim Aufräumen kamen mal wieder einige interessante Sachen zum Vorschein:

26.11.1942, kurz nachdem die Sowjets die 6.Armee in Stalingrad einschlossen (hier natürlich nicht so dargestellt)

19.11.1976, Honecker auf Staatsbesuch in Guinea-Bissau

10.11.1989, die erste Wende-BILD

12.11.1989, die erste Wende-BILD am Sonntag

Ein Nachtrag zum Fernsehprogramm von 1989:

Damals liefen noch keine Talkshows, aber dafür die Lindenstraße um 18.40 Uhr, Transformers im Nachmittagsprogramm und Apocalypse Now am Abend. Aber ansonsten hat sich seitdem nicht viel geändert.

Jens Heymann

“Once upon a time — on June 6, 1995, to be precise — we were playing racquetball, not well but gamely. It wasn’t our intention to become “the pirate guys.” Truth to tell, it wasn’t really our intention to become anything, except perhaps a tad thinner and healthier, and if you could see our photos, you’d know how THAT turned out. As we flailed away, we called out friendly encouragement to each other -”Damn, you bastard!” and “Oh, jeez, my hamstring!” for instance – as shots caromed away, unimpeded by our wildly swung rackets.

On this day, for reasons we still don’t quite understand, we started giving our encouragement in pirate slang. Mark suspects one of us might have been reaching for a low shot that, by pure chance, might have come off the wall at an unusually high rate of speed, and strained something best left unstrained. “Arrr!,” he might have said.

Who knows? It might have happened exactly that way.

Anyway, whoever let out the first “Arrr!” started something. One thing led to another. “That be a fine cannonade,” one said, to be followed by “Now watch as I fire a broadside straight into your yardarm!” and other such helpful phrases.

By the time our hour on the court was over, we realized that lapsing into pirate lingo had made the game more fun and the time pass more quickly. We decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day. “

Source: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/about.html

Uhh it seems that someone got hold of a power cord … and did a bad bad thing:

Oh well. Just after the 43 thousand Euro pile-of-metal arrived some of our office-technicians just thought: It’s tea time, we got a new toy, would that blend?

So they got the tea set and the digital camera out:

We don’t just think of our new hardware as the core equipment of a enormous network. We think of it… well… in a different way.

Source: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

Since my girlfriend has a turtle website she often stumbles upon turtle related websites… just like this one:

Source 1: http://www.lostgarden.com/turtle_main.htm
Source 2: http://blueturtles.schrankmonster.de

I asked for it and they did it. Once again.

I’m just speechless.

I did not write about that one time when Sony made the mistake to use a Project Gotham Racing 3 Screenshot in their advertisements for Gran Tourismo:HD (the PGR3 thing is a racing game by Microsoft exclusively for the 360 and GT:HD is the Sony exclusive racing game). They pulled it just hours after it went up and we all had a good laugh.

Oh… it looked like that:

Just today the car maker KIA decided to start his PS3 related marketing campaign. And guess what? Someone did it again. They used a PGR3 screenshot in a Playstation 3 advertisement.

Have a look:

There we have it: Two advertisements for the Playstation 3 doing all the same: Advertising the fact that you’ll better buy a 360. Priceless.

Do it again Sony, Kia, or whoever would like to make my day…

Yeah you probably know that: You got the idea, you start the coding and you stop at that same point you stopped last time because you run out of talent. It’s that art thing you’re not into. I for myself have to admit that I cannot draw. Well to be precise I can draw technically but nobody every recognized what I was drawing so I suppose …

Well to make a point: Someone who can actually draw took a heart and created what a person like me wanted for years: A proper tile set for prototyping.

The author wants to tell us this:

“The PlanetCute set attempts to wiggle past many of those problems.

• Building blocks, not tilesets: Instead of having complex tilesets, each block stacks nicely with pretty much any other block. If you can understand Legos, you can understand how to put together these graphics. These tiles should be useful to children, not just uber-elite game gods.
• Standardized format: All the graphics are uniform sized PNGs. The graphics will also work in almost any graphics engine out there that can do 2D sprites. Once you get your offsets right once, you never have to change them again.
• Source files included: If you do need to make changes, I’ve included the source files. If you really need to change a color, go for it. If you need a big gem, just scale up the original. Everything is a vector so you’ll alway end up with clean results.”

And yet it does look very very good:

You can grab them and:

“The next time you make a prototype, use these graphics. If you can reduce the time you spend on futzing with graphics from 40% to 5%, you can put more time into those fun game mechanics you’ve been dreaming about. The magic is that your graphics will now look good enough to get you through the first 15 seconds of your demo. Your friend will perk up and stay engaged long enough to give you feedback all the wonderful work that you’ve put into your prototype.”

To complete this article: They are available as pixel graphics and Silverlight/Expression compatible .design files…hurray!

Source: http://lostgarden.com/2007/05/dancs-miraculously-flexible-game.html

Oh joy! Seems like ahzf took out an ad and guess for what? Yeah, for our unfriendly neighbourhood Herr S..

Oh you could search for this…or for “Tino Seeber”

Source: http://blog.ahzf.de

Hmm.. You don’t know “You don’t know jack”? Well learn:

Source: http://www.youdontknowjack.com

It just seems like make is going to get some interesting pictures tomorrow:

“We’re using weather balloons to go up to approximately 100k feet armed with 4 cameras… 20 megapixels of camera! We’ll be taking shots every 7 seconds for two hours and measuring the temperature with the Make: controller and thermistors!

It took 16 people working on this, countless cases of mountain dew, lots of take-out food, and a lot of sleepless nights, and we intend to fly Sunday!

Cloud cover, snow, and mechanical failure may postpone the launch, but we’re ready to give it our best shot this weekend.

In this Make: Video Podcast, you’ll learn all the details of how to put a weather balloon up into space! The weather balloon will make it up to about 100,000 feet. That’s almost 20 miles up and more than twice the height of being in an airplane. It’s high enough that the sky is black and you can see the curvature of the earth.”

You are a fan of SIM* games? You want something light to take on your travels and play from time to time? I got good news for you: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe is available in it’s final version 0.5.

It’s running on Windows, Linux and MacOS and you will need the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe files because OpenTTD just reuses the graphics of the old version.

But when you got all that you get a very very great game that doesn’t need much resources and is insane fun.

Source: http://www.openttd.org/index.php

“Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there’s “go to” a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.

When a byte of data (as opposed to code) is found in the cartridge, it is shown as an orange row: a solid block for a “1″ or a dot for a “0″. The row is eight elements long, representing a whole byte. This usually means that the images can be seen in their entirety when a series of bytes are shown as rows. The images were often stored upside-down as a programming method.”

And it looks like this:

Source: http://benfry.com/distellamap/

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollyjake/278562314/

Normalerweise halte ich nicht viel von Wetten, insbesodere nicht von denen mit Geld. Diese Meinung werden auch die meisten anderen Menschen haben. Nicht ohne Grund, denn meistens verliert man, und Städte wie Las Vegas wurden schließlich auch nicht von Spendengeldern erbaut.

Nun kommt es aber alle paar Jahre vor, dass ein Sportwettenanbieter in Hinblick auf kommende Ereignisse das kalte Grausen bekommt.

Heute beginnt die World Series. Das ist die Endspielserie in der größten us-amerikanischen Baseball-Profiliga, der MLB. Im Finale stehen sich die St. Louis Cardinals und die Detroit Tigers gegenüber, wobei letztere als Favorit gelten.

Und damit sind wir auch schon bei der Ursache für die Sorgenfalten bei einigen Wettanbietern: Die Detroit Tigers galten eigentlich als klarer Außenseiter im Meisterschaftsrennen. Wer vor Beginn der Saison etwas Geld übrig hatte und vielleicht einen Tausender auf das Team gesetzt hat, kann bei der damaligen Quote von 500:1 schon mal zittrig werden. So eine halbe Million ist nicht zu verachten…

Für die Wettanbieter bleibt nur zu hoffen, dass nicht allzu viele treue Fans auf ihr Team gesetzt haben – und dass St. Louis den Titel holt, denn die haben nur eine Quote von 7:1.

Artikel in Sport1.de

Artikel eines Sportwettenanbieters aus den USA