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

“This software works on Excel 97 and 2000. I was absorbed in video game named *pacman* when I was a schoolchild. I would like to reproduce that on Excel. I’ve held the thought from two years before,
and finally…It’s realized.

All actions are expressed by rewriting of a cell background color. Each one of cells as a dot, and move it by make cell’s background color high-speed rewriting. Although I did not think it’s possiblele, but now it’s possiblele by the favor of the improvement in a performance of a personal computer. The window zoom is 10%, so the each cell can not be seen. But it is A CELL.”

Oh…of course Space Invaders is available too…

Source: http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

Did you know that you can build almost every Visual Studio 2003/2005 Solution/Project without even having Visual Studio installed? You only need to have the Microsoft.NET Framework v2 (or better) installed. The Framework brings a great tool named “MSBuild” which helps you to build, for example, YAPS on your own machine.

1. Download the YAPS sourcecode (or any other project…) and extract to a folder
2. open a commandline window (Start->Run->”cmd.exe”) and change to that folder
3. run MSBuild in that folder. Normally MSBuild is in \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\MSBuild.exe
4. When no errors are reported, you’re done. If there were errors, check the source and/or the folder. You need to run MSBuild where the sln/csproj files are…

This is what compiling the YAPS daily sourcecode looks like on my machine:

Source 1: MSBuild at MSDN
Source 2: MSBuild Team Blog

Hurray! Teliko was at the Nuerburgring this weekend to see the DTM (german touring car championship) races and he got me a right rear tire from the qualifying…great!

280 R18…raaaawr

I recently wrote about the progress I made with YAPS – the multicast to unicast proxy that suddenly became even a vcr. And today I found “TVBrowser“:

“TV-Browser is a free electronic program guide. It offers more than 140 mainly german stations.”

You get everything you might expect from an electronic program guide with TV-Browser and even more. It’s extensible and fast. The extensibility is exactly the reason why I am using it as the EPG frontend for YAPS/VCR.

I used the WebSearch Plugin of TV Browser to actually do a http-request on the YAPS/VCR webserver. This request adds the recording to the schedule list…easy as it could be…

It looks like this:

Infact the only thing I had to do is to add one line to the WebSearch Plugin config, which looks like this:

Simple, isn’t it… one webrequest and the recording is added.

Finally I’ve got a great EPG to program my recordings…yeeehaaa!

Source 1: udp multicast to tcp unicast proxy extended to be a vcr
Source 2: http://www.tvbrowser.org

“Mike Nelson – the comic genius behind MST3K – has launched a new site called RiffTrax, where he provides an audio commentary track to mainstream films that you can download and listen to while watching the movie.”

For just $1.99 (beta pricing!) you get a commentary track for a growing number of movies…really really great stuff.

Source: http://www.rifftrax.com/index.php

“A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.”

This technology is mainly used to filter all those spammers from the normal commenting users. Schrankmonster even uses this technology. Kiesow doesn’t like very long captchas and I don’t like dumb ones…like this one which was sent in by Tomasz Naumowicz:

Source 1: http://www.kiesows.de/blog/2006/07/19/captcha-2

Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captchas

Watch and learn!

Source: derdickemann

“2001 seconds is a complete re-edit of Stanley Kubrick’s original Space Odyssey from 141 minutes to 33 minutes 21 seconds.”

Source: http://swith.gazaxian.com/2001seconds.htm

So, you think MS Paint is just nothing worth mentioning? It’s quite remarkable what this artist did in more than 100 hours of work:

“This drawing was done entirely in MS Paint with a Logitech laser mouse. I did not use the copy and paste tool, or the text tool. There was no color sampling or pasting from other images, but I did view some seperate images as reference, as do most artists. ”

it’s 700px x 10.000px in the big version

Source: http://www.ubersite.com/m/84167

Hurray! It’s here!

Black and sleek. Soon to be powered on with Sonic Rush and the New Super Mario Bros..