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!
I did some research and some tweaking on the servers that are hosting schrankmonster yesterday. I hope your experience is faster now.
Well I always wanted to have something like that: An archive for old versions of software. Comes in very handy. Did you know that an old version of Winamp only takes 0.5mbytes of your memory to do the job?
“Sometimes upgrading to a newer version can be a good thing. Other times, your computer may not be compatible with the new version, the new version is bloated, or all the options you liked are no longer available. OldVersion.com has been supplying the online community with old versions of various programs since 2001. The service is utilized by thousands of users every day and has been featured in newspapers and magazines as well as on radio and television.”
Source: http://www.oldversion.com
There’s a free fan made Battlestar Galactica game available…
“Beyond the Red Line is a stand-alone total conversion for the award-winning Freespace 2 released by Volition and Interplay for the PC. It is based on the popular new tv-show Battlestar Galactica. No, not the one from the 70s.”
It’s free and available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Source: http://www.game-warden.com/bsg/
If you need one, take a look at this one:
“A free, full-featured, graphically laid out, high-precision, scientific calculator for Mac OS X 10.4 and greater. Full source-code is included with the distribution.
Ideal if you need to enter large expressions or have accurate precision. “Data” drawers allow an easy way to generate statistical data, linear regression and gaussian elimination. The extensive support of complex numbers and hexadecimal numbers is also a significant benefit for anyone who has to work with this type of data.”
Was man nicht alles so entdeckt, wenn man nur ein wenig genauer hinsieht:
Aus der 6. Staffel, Folge “Buds 18. Geburtstag”
Go to amazon now and place your order! 
Hmm… Once upon a time there was a guy with an idea. The idea simply breaks down to this:
“Sell full price games to people and get an extra revenue out of in-game advertising.”
So here we are: I just found pacific city in crackdown literally plastered with Dodge advertising. Once day it was Dell… if you’re playing in the UK you’ll probably get army ads… how sick is that.
The first game that got this kind of in-game advertising was Testdrive Unlimited. The advertising was only available in the US of A and when you bought the game there it wasn’t full-price but $20 less than a full price title – because of that in-game ads. As an european player you didn’t see any ads and you had to pay the full price.
To be clear: I don’t think in-game advertising sucks. I just think that if you’re gaining revenue from in-game advertising you should share it with the players who actually bought the game. (e.g. lower the game price).
In the case of crackdown there’s no lower price. And that sucks.
Also was auch immer auf der CeBIT sonst vorgestellt wurde: Für mich war die Sensation (obwohl nicht neu) der biegsame Bleistift. Ich wusste gar nicht, dass es sowas gibt. Und viele andere Leute wohl auch nicht, sonst wäre das Gedränge an dem Stand sicher nicht so groß gewesen.
Okay now it’s getting strange.
“Where do GloFish® fluorescent zebra fish come from?
GloFish® fluorescent zebra fish were originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants. By adding a natural fluorescence gene to the fish, scientists hope to one day quickly and easily determine when our waterways are contaminated. The first step in developing these pollution detecting fish was to create fish that would be fluorescent all the time. It was only recently that scientists realized the public’s interest in sharing the benefits of this research. We call this the GloFish® fluorescent fish.”
It looks like this:
Thankfully they don’t actually glow in the dark. But how sad is this: Just because we can do something does that mean we should? Ethical discussions aside – where do you think that comes from? You’re right. The same country that proudly writes “artificially flavoured” onto the soda cans…
Source: http://www.glofish.com/
So here we are back again with an progress update on the YAPS project. First of all take a look at the gorgeous new looks (thanks to Dominik):
Currently Dominik is working on the layout. He did the switch to the YAML framework and is working on the integration of new features like the advanced recording options:
Since one of the most anticipated feature was the configurability of YAPS we moved the binary configuration files to a XML based configuration structure. That’s right: you can now configure your YAPS using XML files.
In the course of XML integration several other things came up. For example a better settop box integration. For that matter we are trying to make YAPS tuxbox compatible. That means you can use any Tuxbox/Enigma/Neutrino streaming client to access a YAPS server. That means: Onscreen Display on Xbox Media Center, EPG is possible now on every compatible client (and there are some).
This, when ready, will look something like this (without the debugging information at the top):
And since EPG will be possible we started to integrate XMLtv into YAPS. XMLtv is a free tool that brings several data grabbers with it. It simply creates an XML file in which the EPG information is stored… great tool and a how-to will be available soon.
So the data structures are already in YAPS and now we’re starting to integrate it into the GUI and internal methods. Here’s what the scheme looks like in eye-candy mode:
As usual you can grab the daily build here: http://www.slow-backward.de/YAPS_daily_build.zip or just build one yourself using the great MSBuild tools and a daily sourcecode snapshot. I wrote about that here and you can get the subversion access here.
We appreciate every single user feedback we get. If you got an idea, if you want to have a feature in YAPS or anything else. Don’t hesitate and contact us.
Oh. One last note: the current source might not compile with mono. We did not abandon the mono support so I’ll keep everyone updated on that issue.
Here’s the detailed changelog:
20.03.2007
19.03.2007
18.03.2007
17.03.2007
15.03.2007
14.03.2007
12.03.2007
11.03.2007
11.02.2007
Source 1: http://www.schrankmonster.de/SearchView.aspx?q=yaps
Source 2: http://www.yaml.de/
Source 3: http://wiki.godofgta.de/Ehttp_api_doku
Source 4: http://www.dbox2.info/
Source 5: http://www.tuxbox.org/
Source 6: http://xmltv.org/wiki/
Source 7: http://www.slow-backward.de/YAPS_daily_build.zip
Source 8: http://www.slow-backward.de/YAPS_daily_source.zip
Oh yes. Now since shooters are bad, the driving games come next:
“The researchers first questioned 198 men and women. Those who played the games most often were more likely to report engaging in aggressive and risky driving and getting in auto accidents. Those who played these games less often reported driving more cautiously, the researchers said.”
What’s the problem with you guys? I did play almost every racing simulation that came out the last 10 years and I did not get any speeding tickets or traffic ticket at all…. What’s the link? It’s just like it is with shooters: Just the fact that I play them doesn’t make me a real-life killer.
Source: Reuters
Someone put the $80 down and got himself a replacement laser unit of a Playstation 3. And he disassembled it:
Many more interesting pictures and facts after the jump.
Source: http://www.fineartradiography.com/hobbies/lasers/blu-ray/index.html
When you’re using Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit Edition with SP2/IE7 you will most likely not be able to access the advanced settings of an Intel Network Interface card (Teaming, VLAN settings). Instead you get the simple dialog:
Damn it. I don’t have a solution for this right now and it does corrupt my plan using one of the servers for VLAN games….
Anyone reading this got a solution how to get the VLAN settings tabs back?
Great that is – one of my 360 favourites just got updated and now you can have force feedback through the wireless wheel and a hardcore mode that injects realistic driving physics…
“We’re delighted to offer you this place where you can learn and share experiences with the XNA family of products. Whether you’re using XNA Game Studio Express or the native DirectX tools and APIs, this is the place to come to!…”
I really do love the pivot function of my display…
Source: http://www.xna.com
It looks to me just like something that might explode….
thanks do #blogs.de irc channel for the link.
Source: Google Maps
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.”
It’s almost a year now since I bought a tool named Salling Clicker. Since Salling Clicker is available for OS X and Windows and the fact that I am maintaining my Music Library on my Mac I went with the OS X version of the tool. Sad but true: You have to pay twice if you want it for Windows and OS X.
I now stumbled across a tool for Windows called “Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Mobile” which seem to does the trick – not as cute and extensible as Salling Clicker but useable.
“With this software, you will be able to control remotely applications like Winamp, the Windows Mixer, the Windows Media Player, PowerPoint, Media Player Classic, PowerDVD, with more coming… such as the Vista’s Media Center.”
The downside is that the author says it’s not working with the WIDCOMM Bluetooth stack at the moment – but maybe in the future he’ll/they’ll update the support.
Source: http://jaylee.org/RemoteControl/
SMKSoftware has something free to play with:
“The Pocket UFO is a remake of the popular game of the last century X-COM Enemy Unknown (UFO Defense) for the Pocket PC devices. The game is a turn-based strategy with the RPG elements. The excellent graphics and exciting gameplay are attracting the gamers all over the world till present. This game is absolutely FREEWARE!”
Source: SMKSoftware
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
I had this very same idea just a week ago and now someone has done it: A Raytracer written entirely in C# and running upon XNA.
“Ok, I’ve got most of what I want done on the Ray Tracing project — enough at least to publish some code and do some blogging. This first article describes the overall coding structure, and how to use the project. I’ll get into some of the more difficult aspects of ray tracing in future posts.”
It obviously doesn’t run on the 360 yet – so keep on watching this project. (due to some limitations on the 360 XNA Implementation I would also recommend waiting for the next run)
I’ve got two joost invitations left. So if you want one just comment on this one and leave your eMail. The first two ones will get it.
What? You don’t know what joost is? Take this:
“Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!”
Source: http://www.joost.com/
For those of us who want to write software for phones/pdas there’s also something new available for download. The Windows Mobile 6 SDK!
“Using the Windows Mobile 6 SDK you can test your application using the emulators in the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs. The SDKs together with Visual Studio 2005 mean you have everything you need to build and test applications for both Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6. Read the “What’s New” guide to learn why your Windows Mobile 5.0 application should work on Windows Mobile 6, what to expect from new screen resolutions and why Windows Mobile 6 makes it easier to build and deploy Line of Business applications.
Don’t forget that around May 1st we’ll release the Windows Mobile 6 SDK Refresh featuring new documentation, the latest emulators, support for basic AJAX applications and links to Line of Business frameworks, samples and documentation.”
Source: Download
“As everyone knows, it is possible to get quite a speed boost out of Mail.app by stripping all the bloat out of its Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on.”
It can lead to a speedup of Mail.App. Despite the fact it decreased the Envelope Index for me it wasn’t really noticable… but your mileage may vary.
Source: hawkwings
In this demo you will see:
Go and grab the bits of the brand new March CTP of Orcas (which is the codename for the next iteration of Visual Studio).
“Visual Studio code name “Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This new version enables any size organization to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. By building these new types of applications, organizations will find it easier than ever before to capture and analyze information so that they can make effective business decisions.
This download is the March 2007 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Code-Named “Orcas”. This CTP is available in English only.”
It’s available in 2 formats and 2 flavours:
Visual Studio Team System
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
I personally prefer the Virtual PC Image until the product gets do something like beta stage…but it’s your choice.
Oh well it’s no big deal really . The theory behind it was discoverd in 1851 and it proofs that the earth rotates under the pendulum. Uh, of course you can grab some more sophisticated theory insights here. So what’s up with that thing? It was voted to one of the ten best webcams on earth. Go and have a look.
Source: EarthCam.com Top Ten
Source: Webcam
I am in the middle of a jolly exiting jazz-swing-neo-whatever phase when it comes to the music I am listening these days. There’s “Big Bad Voodoo Daddy” – a band which I will talk more about in the next days and there’s one (for me) very very new
“Silje Nergaard (born June 19, 1966 in Steinkjer, Norway), is a very successful Norwegian pop and jazz musician. While some very old titles of her (e. g. Si det, si det from 1985) rather have a distinct pop feel, she has now almost completely given up making pop music, which is the reason why virtually the entirety of her later releases consists of jazzy tunes.”
Want to get an impression of one of my favourite songs of her (it’s “You Send Me Flowers”) ? Go ahead:
(thanks to last.fm)
Source: http://www.siljenergaard.com/
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 
Postcards with your domain on it you will receive sooner or later if you have any domain registerated by yourself.
Well, merging photos with individual text isn´t a mystic thing since Photoshop or other bitmap processors. But direct marketers are looking for our attention in our days where consumers are overloaded with ads.
The solution offered by DirecType is a software that connects databases with i.e. your data, some fitting photos [1] and the printing machine that produces all the tons of direct mails you’ll find in your mailbox day by day.
Other company told me a price of round about 6.000 EUR per license. May be, because this solution is for really high printing volumes. Interested industries can be traveling, insurances, furniture, automakers.
So, why doesn´t Vatican publishes a direct mailing for all christians with their name on it?
Source: http://www.directype.org
[1] “fitting” means a relation between costumers interests and the chosen photo. I.e. a domain owner of a website for fishing would receive a mailing with a fishing related photo. The owner of schrankmonster.de would receive some explicit pics. *vfg*
medienfloh
Even I can now control the world outside my computer. With the USB interface board K8055 from Velleman, Belgium, you can access to the board via DLL. It´s easy to use i.g. in VisualBasic Express. (I did so last night – faszinating!) That reminds me on old Commodore Plus/4 times!
I tested it on a Windows XP system, but it also should work on Linux. Now let´s see, what cases I´m going to resolve.
Manufacturer: http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/product/view/?id=500349
medienfloh
Oh dear, someone came up with this website and the first thing I was getting angry about is the header of the site:
What were those guys thinking? Anyone remembers the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” on the entrance of concentration camps? It’s just too bad to start thinking about possible excuses. Very very lame.
Source 1: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei
“In 1999, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North (then known as DMA Design) furthered the groundbreaking gameplay concepts established just two years prior in the original Grand Theft Auto – with the release of GTA2. GTA2 expanded on the top-down, open-ended crime world gameplay formula with a host of new features including the advent of multiple rival gangs – seven, to be exact, including the Yakuza, Scientists, Looneys, Rednecks, Zaibatsu, the Russian Mob and Hare Krishnas. Earn your respect with each gang. Reap the benefits with all manner of shady work-for-hire gigs contracted your way. And climb your way to the top of the criminal pile.
Now, longtime Grand Theft Auto fans can revisit this classic entry in the series – and new jacks who missed out on this early franchise title can further discover Grand Theft Auto’s roots – absolutely free. GTA2 has been completely optimized for play on modern PCs and is available gratis for all registrants to the Rockstar Games mailing list (rest assured your information will not be shared with any third parties, you will only receive information from Rockstar). Simply fill out the form below and check your email for a direct link to the file (353 MB .zip file, includes install .exe, readme .txt file, and a .pdf of the original PC game manual).”
SuperJer just had some time to spare and before getting bored he started to write a raytracer from scratch and write about it on the intertubes:
“Ray-tracing works sort of like a camera in real life, but in reverse. With a camera (or your eyes, for that matter), rays of light from the environment enter the lens and hit the film/digital chip/meaty eye cells. Something magical happens where the light hits and we get an image!
With ray tracing, we start at each point on our “film” or image, and blast a ray out of our camera lens and see what it hits. What it hits determines the color and brightness at that spot on the film. Of course by “film” I mean digital image, and by “spot” I mean pixel.
I decided my entire program would be centered around one function, called raytrace(). The idea is this: You give raytrace() a starting point and a direction, and it follows that ray until it collides with something in my virtual environment. It returns the color of the object it collided with.
When generating a 3D image, raytrace() will find the color for just ONE pixel in the result image. By running raytrace once for each pixel, we can get the whole scene! Ray-tracing is kind of slow because, for example, in a 1 megapixel image you’d have to run it 1 million times.”
He even has put up some pictures and videos:
You can even get the whole sourcecode (C++ with no dependencies whatsoever) from his site. Continue at source…
Lutz Roeder just released version 5 of the fabulous .NET Reflector tool. Go and get it!
Source: Reflector
“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/
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