May 4th will be the day.

So if you think it’s unfair that the music you could buy online wont run on your MP3-Player, operating system or that you can only burn it to a CD a couple of times, participate! If you run a website, spread the word, if you use social networks, spread the word, if you actually talk to people in person, spread the word

Insgesamt 35.000 Menschen hatten gegen das “Gesetz zur Neuregelung der Telekommunikationsüberwachung und anderer verdeckter Ermittlungsmaßnahmen sowie zur Umsetzung der Richtlinie 2006/24/EG” geklagt, so viele wie nie zuvor beim Bundesverfassungsgericht.

Quellen:

• heise.de: Bundesverfassungsgericht legt Hürde für künftige Vorratsdatenspeicherung hoch
• zeit.de: Karlsruhe drückt den Reset-Knopf

Märchenstoffe in Träumen ist eine, mir etwas weit hergeholt scheinende, Deutung von Träumen. Einleuchtend ist zwar, dass Märchen von Kindern als Deckerinnerungen benutzt werden, oder im Unterbewusstsein als solche fungieren, aber Freuds Argumentation in diesem Fall ist sehr abstrakt.

Der Krankheitsfall Katharina ist eine Dokumentation einer Analyse, beziehungsweise eines Gesprächs mit einer eher zufälligen Patientin von Freud. Sie beschreibt auf interessante Weise ein Schicksal und die Entstehung eines Traumas vorangegangener Ereignisse durch ein später erfolgtes Schlüsselereignis.

Links:

• Freud bei vorleser.net
• Freud bei wikipedia
• Freud Museum in Wien

Ever since he can remember people
have died in his good name
Long before that September
Long before hijacking planes

[...]

Do you think his favourite type of human is caucasian

wieder mit einem schönen Seitenhieb auf Rassismus, wie der, den wir aus dem Radio-Hit Fuck You sicher schon herrausgehört haben:

So you say it’s not okay to be gay
Well, I think you’re just evil
You’re just some racist who can’t tie my laces
Your point of view is medieval

Mein aktuelles Lieblingslied ist Back to the Start. Thema ist eine Beziehung die zu lange schon im kalten Nass des Herbstes herumkriecht und eine Entschuldigung des einen Partners an den anderen ist, inklusive der Erläuterung des eigenen Neids, mit der Bitte einen Neuanfang zu wagen.

Musikalisch bleibt Rammstein den treibenden Rhythmen weitestgehend treu und wird Fans der Band wieder begeistern. Insgesamt ein gelungener Mix aus Provokation und Rock, der Abgründe der menschlichen Seele zu ergründen versucht.

Today I’ll present a portfolio of a french designer which I think is one of the most succesful approaches at grungy sketchbooks that I have seen so far. The portfolio is not really packed with pieces, but it’s giving a nice overview of the artists capabilities, without being too bloated. Technically it’s a flash based, easy to navigate and self-explaining interface awaits. The artists name is visible at the bottom of the site, where also links to two social networks find their place in shape of the networks logo. The works are devided in the usual subcategories, which makes it easier for customers to check the recent works in the category of work that they may be interested in. Cheers to Florian Nicolle. Please check him out at neo-innov.fr.

This shows how you can connect the different images with points where the same object or same pattern appears. (I know these images are horrible, I should have taken 2-3 more of that building. Btw, this is the town hall of Flensburg.

The hugin website offers a lot of tutorials which I definetly going to have a look at. Puzzling images together in GIMP can really consume a lot of time. *sigh*

Here my first results:

As you can see here, I’m gettin my hands dirty again. Yeah I know, painters and pencil artists may actually want to execute me for this expression but I mean doing creative work. This one (Solitude) is rendered for the 100 themes I try to complete (I got stuck somewhere some time, nevermind). Beyond that I also work on stuff for my new portfolio. It’s really so much fun to work with pixels, vectors and photos again. I’m also drawing a bit, but not as much as I should.

Much love to the developers and communities of:

• GIMP
• Inkscape
• Blender

Kreuzfeuer, the new album of Subway to Sally continious the path that was begun on Bastard. Not as loud as before, but still with lyrics that are worth being interrogated. The CD comes with some extras like wallpapers and screensavers (Windows only, damn you blasphemic Microsoft-loving band ) and one big disappointment. The music video for Besser du rennst. Of course, Subway to Sally has never been famous for their videos but this is really a laugh.

Really great is that you can have a foretaste of all songs on STS’s website. You really have an idea about what you will buy and nice audio comments from the bandmembers. The CD itself is not copy-protected which is a positive thing because you in Germany (if you obey the law *cough*) may not even rip it to your mp3 or ogg player if you want.

The contents of the songs are biblical or related to inter-human relationships. As mentioned, the music is not as loud as before, less metal elements but a familiar style of lyrics and song-concepts. The refrains again have a lot of importance but are not rampant compared to the rest of the text.

At last a quote from a song with a oriental disposition:

Ich bin der Krähenkönig,
zertreten ist das Korn,
gebrochen ist der Galgen,
und glühend ist mein Zorn.

Subway To Sally – Krähenkönig

Links:

• sinfest.net
• The Dark Jesus#

Thanks to Stefan for the link

9/10

Links:

• Martyrs at the imdb
• Martyrs trailer at youtube

Hello all you command line lovers out there and all you people who may find this post very very strange. CLI stands for command line interface (you type instead of clicking). My most recent discovery for Firefox is Vimperator, an addon which gives you ~1 ton of key bindings and commands to use your webbrowser. Of course it specifically aims at people who already are familiar with the famous command line text editor vi or vim which I’ve already written about here.

Very useful key bindings:

• gg go to top of page
• G go to bottom of page
• h, j, k, l for left, up, down, right
• ctrl+n, ctrl+p next tab, previous tab

I’ve started my carreer and am now a computer-consultant apprentice. Beside that I have time to practise coding, design experiments and just living my life with Julia. Finally I’ve also got a new mp3-player (Samsung YP-S2) which officially supports OGG. Until now I could only listen to OGG through Julias iPod which runs ROCKbox. This post is written with Wordpress2.7 which offers a nice new backend and surprisingly it didn’t even break my layout.

Mirrors was very thrilling to see. The story is not very different from most horror movies, but it’s a good one. It’s scary, brutal and the end is genius. Kiefer Sutherland as Ben Carson is my personal highlight of the movie, reminding me a little of Flatliners. A broken man that is doubting his senses and though trying to stand against his fears. The other world, the one behind the looking glass is described as dark and horrible in this movie. If you like horror movies, see this one. Beware, the 18+ classification for German cinemas is justified. 8 of 10.

• Mirrors trailer on Youtube

Peter Fox’ first solo album Stadtaffe is a nice mixture of interesting rythms and clever rhymes. I’ve heard Peter Fox voice many times before, listening to Seeed and I loved his new single Alles Neu right away. I saw it by accident on MTV (not happening often, but this time it was worth the cell phone ads). The egocentric album about pre-, post-, or only party, beginnings, life plans and a few things in between make a great mixture.

My favourite songs are Alles Neu, Lok auf 2 Beinen and Schwarz zu Blau. The topics new beginning or new chapter in your life in Alles Neu and the restlessness in Lok auf 2 Beinen are well known. Also being alone in an urban environment even though everywhere are people is familiar to me too. Schwarz zu Blau is brutally honest about Berlin and the song I’ve definitly listened to the most. I love my nativ place, the Ruhrgebiet and feel at home in most ugly and big cities.

The musical part is an unusual hybrid between orchestra, drums and electronical beats and the great voice of Pierre Baigorry aka Peter Fox.

So long:

Guten Morgen Berlin,
Du kannst so hässlich sein, so dreckig und grau,
du kannst so schön schrecklich sein,
deine Nächte fressen mich auf,
es wird für mich wohl das Beste sein,
ich geh nach Haus und schlaf mich aus
und während ich durch die Straßen lauf,
wird langsam schwarz zu blau.

Peter Fox – Schwarz zu Blau

Translation to German (bitteschön Shino )

I just found the magazine with which I got my first Linux CDs, so I thought I’d throw out a blog post about it.

I’ve started experimenting with Linux at the age of 14 in 2003 I think. I don’t remember exactly, had to check when SuSe Linux 8.1 came up, which I started to install on my first decent own machine. I’ve had been using computers since before my third birthday. My father allowed me to play some old DOS games on his computer back then. Later I started experimenting with a computer with Windows 3.11 and later Windows 95. I never really missed anything, because I mostly played games until I more and more read of Linux in various computer magazines.
I was a fan of share- and freeware and the concept of open source started to catch my interest. Since 2003 I’ve tried a lot of Linux distributions and various versions.
I had shorter installations of Knoppix, Mandrake or Suse and longer ones with Kanotix, Debian, Gentoo or Ubuntu. Right now I’m mainly using Sidux on my Laptop and mainstation because I’m basically a Debian fan who just loves apt but likes the scripts delivered by the Sidux team.
A saying I believe in, concerning distributions is: Ubuntu for users, Debian for servers, Gentoo for insanes. I don’t know if meadow is the creator of this saying, but if so: credits to him.

The german production of Krabat (with some very cool german actors) was a disappointment. I expected a movie that was close to the book and not miles away like this pseudo romantic rape of the book model. The only nice adoption is the masters voice and force over his journeymen. A lot of conflicts, events and depht is lost compared to the book.
After all, I had expected more, but it’s 4 of 10. If you have the time to read the book, do it and don’t waste the money on the cinema (or bandwidth for the download).
If you know the book, the songs done by ASP on this topic may interest you. The album “Zaubererbruder” is dedicated to Ottfried Preußlers wonderful book.

Links:

• ASPs website

arrival, saturday
Our flight left early from Lübeck and got us to London without unsuspected events. From Stansted Airport we took a bus to Liverpool street and from there we walked to our hotel. It was a pretty long way,but the weather was nice and the sun shining.

the mind of a genius, sunday
The Dalí exhibition was enormous. I didn’t count the works, but the ad
claimed there were over 500 and that shouldn’t be a lie. The audio guide
was nice too, only Dalí’s comments were totally random and could have
been cut out without being missed.

scare the shit out, monday
Monday we walked by St. Pauls Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, a wonderful piece of streetart and visited the London Dungeon. A mix between pepped up historyand horror show. When we just entered the dark gaol where it is set, I scared the shit out of Julia so she even was a little more scared than
she was anyways. The actors in the dungeon from time to time drag
visitors into their show. I happened to mention, that the girl next to
me might want to join in the lesson about torture in the torture
chamber. She was taken in front of our group of about 30 people and
various torture techniques were demonstrated on her (not painful, just
to make them understandable). The funniest part was when she was told to
bend over and she didn’t understand and blushed like the back light of a
car . She finally did and the torturer could demonstrate all the ways
you can hang prisoners on a hook .

still monday
After visiting the dungeon we visited the Tate gallery of modern art. The exhibition in the old turbine hall of the facility reminded me a lot of huge harvester from the matrix. It’s a model of giant spider over a lot of empty beds without blankets or pillows, just books in them.

animal feeding (tues)day
Tuesday we were running around a lot in the Hyde Park, Julia feeding or trying to lure the squirrels, me taking pictures of it. Afterwards we saw a bit of marching, guarding and the Buckingham Palace.

by night, still tuesday
I managed to get a few good shots of the london eye by night. It was a
bit windy so I had to take some shots to be satisfied with the results,
but after all I was pretty happy that I had my tripod with me.

museum overkill, wednesday
Wednesday we visited the British Museum. A lot of the exhibited objects were stunning a lot of ancient culture. I especially liked the installation Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia. It shows the pills people take in their lives with some examples.

Saatchi n’ walk n’ tube, thursday
Walking to the Saatchi gallery and taking the tube back was basically thursday without leaving out a dog show, taking a massive amount of pictures and looking through various shops.

Random stuff: There were NERD Cafés. Julia always insisted, they were “Nero” or some kind of thing, but how should she know!? Another thing is that Britains really must be barbarians. Who would kill orcs? Such peaceful and civilised creatures…

The best thing about this whole trip was: Walking around with the most lovely girl of Britain <3.

PS: german translation coming.

A few month ago I heard about LXDE. LXDE is exactly what I’ve been looking for, it even seems familiar for Windows users. It’s easy to install on every running installation, like any desktop environment.

Here we see the PcMan file manager, the Gpic image viewer and the standard text editor leafpad. The startmenu is very small and easy to overlook

Through a middle click we can view all applications opened on all desktops. The graphical theme chooser of openbox, lxde’s window manager and a classic shell (lxterminal).

So the most basic LXDE apps are:

• PcManFM, should look familiar to windows users
• Openbox, combined with the panel a very need window manager
• Gpicview
• LXDEPanel
• LXDETerminal, simple terminal without many effects, but with tabs support

With Gpicview I’ve found a new favourite image viewer, it’s really quick and functional.

Beginners might need a bit help with language and keyboard layout functions, I’ve not found build-in options for that yet. Maybe a small app for that would help. If you don’t know how to change your keyboard layout, have a look at the setxkbmap command.

So let’s start out with a standard xhtml document called index.php:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Navigation with PHP</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Before the doctype we now insert a list of our files. Let’s say we have files called “news.php” “home.php” and “about.php”.

<?php
$section = array();
$section['home'] = “home.php”;
$section['news'] = “news.php”;
$section['about'] = “about.php”;?>

Now this “list” actually puts all these as entries into an array in PHP. We’ll need that later. Now we head down to the <body> tag and insert some php code here. What we’ve done until now is only creating a list with the files we may want to show inside our website. So if we want to display our content, we should add the next part where you want the content to appear.

<div id=”content”><?php
if (isset($_GET['section'], $section[$_GET['section']])) {
include $section[$_GET['section']];
} else {
include $section['home'];
}?>
</div>

Now our website has the ability to include the listed files and make them appear as a part of the site. I’ve already created a <div> around it, you don’t have to do that. The last thing to do is to add the navigation with the links that tells the PHP script which file to load. If there are no or no valid options given, it does include $section['home'];. This first of all makes the script include home.php when only index.php is opened and makes the site safer, because no not listed files can be included like /etc/passwd.

<ul>
<li><a href=”index.php?section=home”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”index.php?section=news”>News</a></li>
<li><a href=”index.php?section=about”>About</a></li>
</ul>

I’ve already put the links in a list, you don’t have to do that, but it looks nicer. The part between the <a> and </a> is the essential one. Through opening index.php?section=news you tell the index.php to include the file saved with the array entry news.

That’s basically it. You’ve learned how to avoid frames and create a website with multiple pages!

• Check out example (Only added some css here)
  

First of all, we need a graphic as a basis how our css box is going to look. I’ve just chosen a box with a dropshadow. Now we use the help lines in GIMP or Photoshop to divide it into 3 pieces and save these parts into new files. 1: top.png, 2: middle.png, 3: bottom.png. Now we got our 3 different graphics, we can start the CSS work. First of all we need a basic html file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Our nice CSS box</title></head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

To this we start adding a div container for the box, right below the body tag. In the box, I added a heading <h1> and a placeholder div for the bottom graphic.

<div class=”box”><h1>heading</h1>
<p>Yourcontent
</p>
<div class=”bottom”></div>
</div>

Now we can start defining the css attributes of the different html objects. You can link an external css file, or just paste the css into the html file. For this simple project I will just insert the css directly into the head of the html file. Generally you should use external css files to keep everything tidy and clear.

So, here’s the code I use in the head tag:

<style type=”text/css”>
h1 {
background-image: url(top.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
height: 44px;
width: 266px;
font-family: Verdana;
font-size: 12px;
margin:0px;
padding: 0px;
}

.box p {
background-image: url(middle.png);
background-repeat: repeat-y;
min-height: 400px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 16px;
font-family: Verdana;
font-size: 10px;
max-width: 250px;
}

.box {
margin: 0px;
padding-top: 44px;
}

.bottom {
height: 39px;
width: 266px;
background-image: url(bottom.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: bottom;
}
</style>

If I skip some of the css code explanation here, just try it out yourself or look it up in a css reference. Noteable css code: We use padding:0; and margin:0; to force the elements to be without spacings inside and outside them. Another thing is, that we control the background image very explicit. We define exactly if and how it’s going to be repeated. In box p {} we add padding: 16px; because we need some spacing because of the graphic. As we can see below, we can’t use the full area of the graphic, because we don’t want text on the drop-shadow.

A thing you can do for optimization is, that you scale your middle.png to 1px height. It will probably look the same, but increase the loading speed of your website a little bit. By the way, Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support transparent pngs so you should maybe add a Firefox/Opera/whateverbrowser link to your website.

• check out example now

Edit: I have installed it, like announced and I’m very satisfied so far.

Screenshots:

This is the main menu of Linux Mint

Here XGL and some apps like Firefox 3, installation dialogue and packet search running

Links:

• LinuxMint.com
• Torrent for downloading Linux Mint 5

Links:

• The Happening trailer on youtube

Who hasn’t at least seen one of these sites or a single video there? In fact, pornography is far more tolerated than ever, especially in Denmarks youth culture. Feminists point often is, that women are discriminated by pornographic videos or pictures and treated as objects. I don’t take that too serious, because I think that most people are aware of that pornography isn’t real. It’s as real as Hollywood Sites like redtube or youporn offer a huge collection of porn, just like youtube, everyone can upload. Problem here is, that some of the material might not be 100% legal, but there too are amateurs providing there sex-life to others. A modern branch of exhibitionism. Most sites don’t offer downloads for the hosted movies, but you can add that feature through the Firefox addon Video Download Helper. It saves the flash videos or embedded flash files in general to your computer. For browsing these sites I really recommend Firefox because they have a potential to spread malware, caused by their high user stats. AdBlock Plus could also help you surf these sites less annoyed.

At last, two funny videos from redtube:

Cybersex mistake

Having a pornstar as girlfriend

Links: (Warning, you should be 18 to enter these sites because they contain violence and explicit pornographic/hardcore scenes)

• redtube.com
• youporn.com
• nudetube.com
• xxxstash.com
• pornotube.com

“Connect the cause and effect
One foot in front of the next
Im going on“

Going On is the great new single by Gnarls Barkley and I’m absolutely happy, that I accidentially saw it on MTV Germany yesterday. The song brings the same euphoric rythm as the lines

“Hey, hey, hey, there’s truth in the thunder
Love in the lightning, the feeling is frightening
Yeah, isn’t it exciting?”

from Storm Coming (album: St. Elsewhere). Going On can be found on the current album The Odd Couple.

Currently, this song is giving me courage and helps me going on tomorrow I’ll have my last exam.

Links:

• Going On on youtube
• Gnarls Barkley | last.fm
• Gnarls Barkley | Wikipedia

Links:

• bigbrotherstate.com

If this is the big dream of so many women, my big dream is to be conan the babarian swinging and axe through all their faces.

0/10

The most interesting part for me is: Who is spending money on this? Vatican? Scientology? Other sects? In future: you know the place to go drunk and have fun. Don’t bully the huge Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck actors in Disney World or Phantasia Land, just go to the bible park and dance satanistic patterns around biblical figures. Take the videos as comedy and the information tables as fantasy and you’ll be fine

Map and statement belong to genesis-land.ch.

links:

• bigbuckbunny.org/
• blender.org

big_buck_bunny_1080p_stereoogg.torrent

# A flexible dice that can help you making decisions
import random
print("Please insert your choices, press enter and make the dices roll with \"end\"")
Options = []
while "end" not in Options:
Options.append(raw_input(""))
Options.remove("end")
zufallssumme = len(Options)
zufallszahl = random.randrange(zufallssumme)
print "The dice tells you: ", Options[zufallszahl]

Finally, it’s done. I’ve played with the idea of a flexible dice for quite a time, but I’ve finally managed to code it (now that I’m finished I see that it really is no big deal). My goal with this program was a dice with sides the user could define and it should be able to have as many options as wanted. Documented version in German and English is attached to this post. If you want to run this within Linux you probably need the python or python2.5 package provided by the team of your distribution. If you want to use it with Windows, maybe my little guide to cygwin could help you.

Download:

0x_flexible_dice1 English version

0x_flexiblerwuerfel1 German version

Download Cygwin from cygwin.com

Start installing Cygwin and choose a server and after that, choose the packages you want to install:

After installing cygwin, you can use it like pretty much every shell, navigate to the place where your script is placed or download the script/program directly into your cygwin directory. You can run a python script with for example typing: “python scriptname.py”.

5/10 After all, it was entertaining, so it’s an average movie with nice effects.

my favourite quote from wikipedia about vi: Sure vi is user-friendly; it’s just peculiar about who it makes friends with.

I don’t think I’ll use vi or vim (improved version) for productivity reasons, because I like the KISS principe (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I don’t want to get used to all the key bindings, at least not for now. Maybe vi will seem more attractive when I’m handling code daily or at my job. Currently I’m only using it on smaller scripts I’m working on right now, so, welcome my new friend vi

so long… keep typing

Thanks to all the people I’ve had so much fun with online like Gollor, Makran, Klorr, Sintha, Shino & Palo, Miarara, Maleen, Kassy, Pigo, Osta and mostly Morgainee Sorry for the people not mentioned, you are great too.

I have some ideas floating around my head and I will soon start some projects. There will be something to stare at when I’m done, at least I hope that.

The title of this entry is chosen because I’m getting a little Python on my fingers again and it’s a nice sound to wake my watchers, they must have fallen asleep long ago. I chose Python because it’s much more used than ruby for example. PHP also is something I like to experience with. Maybe someday Verpeilerchen and me will continue our collaborative PHP-Lessons.

School is okay and I’m only missing 4 exams until my (let’s hope so) graduation.

So long, see you all soon

<Sonium> someone speak python here?
<lucky> HHHHHSSSSSHSSS
<lucky> SSSSS
<Sonium> the programming language

from bash.org

As a student at a German school in Denmark, we have to obey the Danish schools system and rules, which is no major problem I think. Though a problem is, that the sources for an essential assignment are available for Windows users only. It’s not a direct problem for our school, because our laptops are delivered with Windows XP, but it’s discriminating against all other who prefer to work on alternative operating systems. To point it out again, this assignment has to be done, to finish our three years of education at our school. This CD was made by the Danish Ministry (Undervisningsministeriet) of Education and is delivered to every third year class in Denmark. The important sources, are saved on a CD, which is protected against being run by a non-windows OS with the following script in the index.html file.

<script language=”JavaScript”>
var sdfz = new Date()
if (self.location.hash!=’#C’ + (32*sdfz.getMonth()+sdfz.getDate())) self.location.replace(“error.html”)
</script>
The Startup.exe on the CD has to be started to access the Data through the framework. Of course you can pick out the data manually, but without descriptions and unsorted. In my eyes, it’s a crime to limit the access to Windows users.
How to avoid Windows, using the resources:
If you are effected by this and want to use it with Linux, just copy all the data from the CD and remove the script above from the index.html. (You just open the index.html with a simple text editor like Notepad, Kate, Gedit.)
Afterwards your can use the CD without restrictions.

Another school shooting shakes the world. This time, a finish school was the location for an amok run of a student who announced it on youtube 2 weeks ago. His motif seems to be the belief that not all humans are important and some are unworthy.

Links:

• Source: article on BBC
• Some closer facts and chatlogs by Riana Møller

Blogged with Flock

Flock is a very friendly piece of software, based on Firefox, that aims at the blogging and 24/7 connected generation. It comes with a lot of so called social-computing gadgets. My favourites are the Web-Clipboard, the Blog-Poster and the Photo-Uploader. You can add nearly any account (Blogger, Livejournal, Wordpress) and blog from within your browser. The Photo-Uploader is a very good tool for sharing photos on the fly. You select a couple of pictures, give them a comment or just batch comment them all, select size and rotation and upload them into an album on Photobucket or Piczo with a click. I think even my mom could overlook the simple features.

The editor for blog entries can still be improved in my opinion with features for image upload and a function to save something as a draft on your blog and not only on your computer, but maybe that will be integrated later.

So, I’ve been flogging this.. Don’t confuse that with a flogger whip

Screenshots:

<-The blog-posting addon with web-clipboard sidebar

<- and the photo uploader

    <-you can watch flickr or photobucket accounts with the media bar

Links:

• Flock website

Links:

• Subway to Sally website
• Coppelius website

For years I’ve used variations of this picture:

When I made this, with an old webcam and a lamp, I was about 13 or 14 years old I guess. Back than, I could barely use The Gimp to invert the base pic and copy it, so it appeared there twice.

The new one:

It’s done with Inkscape, with I am kind of familiar with now. I got kind of lazy on the hair, will maybe correct that later.

So we go from: which I used most and for the longest period, to .

(new splash screen by Paul Davey)

With great exitement I can announce, that version 2.4 of the famous Gnu Image Manipulation Program is worth a download. I’ve been using it since version 1.2.3 and it has improved a lot. In the current version the interface got more intuitive and it finally supports colour profiles, which are pretty essential for printing.

Links:

• gimp.org the official website
• gug.sunsite.dk the gimp user group

The Team around the Linux Distribution Sidux, has released a new preview of the Eros release. This release, however, seems to support my mainboard fully, so my Linux-Box here at home is online again! It was a big pain in the ss to be unconnected for so long and be forced to use Windows on this precious hardware. The team who maintains Sidux is mainly the old Kanotix team. Sidux is a stable Operating System based on Debian Sid. They have a lot of scripts, that make it very valueable for beginners. If you want to try Linux, this could be your Live-cd or first installation. Give it a try

Subway to Sally finally released their new album, Bastard, on October 19th. Going to be at a concert of the new tour on November 4th in Kiel. Looking forward to it. The album is very satisfying. The lyrics are awesome and the music is too. Compared to Nord Nord Ost there is less metal and more rock, which I like a lot. My favourite songs from the album so far: Vodoo, Puppenspieler.

6/6

more info

Girl, Intterupted is based on a true story, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. We follow Susanna Kayson into a psychiatric institution and experience her ups, downs, new friends and enemies. I can only recommend this movie for everyone who ever had anything to do with psychial diseases. Reminded me of Gothica, because it too describes how powerless you are, once you’re in. 5/6

Watch on CNN

German “Spiegel” on this

More info: os2world.com

Mei-ing Nieuwland prefers the pseudonym Ming on the net. She is known as ming85@deviantART or ming at the cheesecake studio. With her current age of 21 she, besides being a medical student, involved in the cheesecake studio and working as a freelance illustrator too. At the moment she is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Two of her mangas have been presented here already, Santa Croce 588 and Cafe 1914. She has developed amazing skills in drawing and illustration. I accidentially found her on deviantART and I am pretty happy about that because I enjoy her work so much, especially the mangas/comics. I recommend that you check her website!

Solar, the name of a short-movie, that was created by Ian Wharton & Edward Shires, two students, that just graduated from the Cumbria Institute of Arts. They won the “best-of-show” with their project Solar. The project itself took, according to Ian and Edward seven month to realize. The short-film itself is a great dip into another world that once more shows us the power of digital rendering. For the play time of 4.17 minutes, the Quicktime codec is needed. The making of is available too.

Links:

• Solar website

Simpsons – the movie. A lot of people were counting the days until the 27th of July this year, so they could enjoy the Simpsons movie. I saw it and I was entertained, no doubt. As the tv-series the movie is packed with side blows on social and political issues, but always in a funny and entertaining manner. The movie is very diversified and is everything else but boring. I met a lot of known characters and even the simpsonified version of Green Day is involved. Even if we know the characters pretty well now, the never caring Homer, the Lisa, trying to improve the world and the constantly joking Bart, this movie is unpredictable! So.. go and see it! I will not download this movie! (Or if you do, see it in the cinema too) now go and write that on a chalkboard like Bart does, in the intro

In numbers: 6/6

This neat little graphic above is a feed icon. Usually it’s orange, but I like mine in purple. Now, that we got that right, I’ll explain what a feed is, why it is useful and how you can take advantage of it. News-feeds are generated by a lot of websites. It makes reading news or keeping track of blog-posts very easy. You install a feed-reader or use an online feed collection service and lift off. Whenever you see this icon: (here again, my favourite one is: ), you know: Oh! There must be a news-feed here that I can subscribe to, so I wont have to keep in mind, to enter this website again to check if there are new information! The most common feed formats are atom and RSS. If you feel like you want to know more about them, I linked the wikipedia articles on them. I for example am a reader of several news sites, the German greenpeace website and some blogs. So if you find this blog interesting and maybe like to read news (If you don’t you should start in my opinion) you should get a feed-reader and start feeding it

Recommended feed-readers are:

• Mozilla Thunderbird can handle feeds too
• Newsfox, a Mozilla Firefox Extension
• Sage, a Mozilla Firefox Extension
• LiFeRea (Linux, GTK based)
• Akregator (Linux, QT based)
• Netvibes.com (web based)

This reminds me a lot of the mob torturing the defenseless victim, a lot like it is these days. Think of it when you outnumber someone, think of how it would be if that would be you. Of course these insects are just “doing their job”. It’s not fun for them, it’s work. Their duty to keep their people alife.

I was out taking a walk with my aunt the other day and we passed a big anthill. I decided to make some shots of these little fellas. Suddenly my aunt said:”Look, they’re carrying something over there.” It was a grub, being carried away for feeding purposes.

Links:

• gobby website
• download gobby

Santa Croce 588 is another comic done by Mei-ing Nieuwland aka ming85 on deviantART. Once more a world, not reachable for humans, but located in our reality, is the background of the story. It takes place in the beautiful city Venice. Ming even added some pages that explain by what she got inspired and other background information. But now let the fight between good and evil begin

Links:

• read Santa Croce 588 on deviantART
• Santa Croce 588 for sale here
• mingming.nl

Inkscape is a standard conform vector graphic editor. It has basic functions and is a very good tool for illustration. It’s not as advanced as Illustrator or Freehand, but you can create some very good pictures with it. Examples from my gallery: devotion, powerstation, both created with Inkscape.

Links:

• inkscape.org

The short movie Elephants Dream was exclusively created with open source software. It’s available for free on the internet. The movie is done by the orange movie project. The old guy reminds of Agent Smith from the Matrix, especially the scene where Agent Smith describes the Matrix and its perfection. The old guy too describes how perfect the machine is. Big parts of the movie were created in blender.

Links:

• Download Elephants Dream

Blender 3D is a growing open source project and a very high quality piece of software. Blender is hard to learn in the beginning, you’ll find people saying that all over. But it’s worth it! Thats why you should use the numerous wikis, ebooks and tutorials found on the net. The active community sure will help you too. You can use Blender for all kinds of 3D purposes like animation, single frame rendering, simple illustration, vector based logos and much more. The possibility of python scripting is pretty popular too. The current version is 2.44 and licensed under the GPL.

Links

• blender.org
• Download Blender for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, FreeBSD and Irix.
• Blender art gallery
• Blender Wiki

So you may ask yourself: What’s wrong with Vista? The site http://badvista.fsf.org will inform you about, why they think Vista and Microsoft are bad. I link this site because I think they give an easy to understand overview on problems of DRM and advantages of open source.

Cafe 1914 is a, 15 page long, comic done by Mei-ing Nieuwland aka ming85 on deviantART. Cafe 1914 is taking place in the same year and integrating historical facts. The two pretty cold-blooded main characters are developed very well. Significant for the story is the brilliant use of gestures and facial expressions. Enough of all the words, read it yourself, it’s a pleasure.

Links:

• Cafe 1914 on deviantART
• mingming.nl
• Cafe 1914 for sale

The cover if the DVD caught my attention, because of the nice vector in the front. A Scanner Darkly is a masterpiece of animation. The main characters actor is Keanu Reeves which makes the movie more interesting than it is in the first place. The visual effects reminded me of the comic shooter XIII. The main character, Bob, lives his life in a world that is poisoned by total observation and a mysterious drug named substance D. The open ending of the story is partly directed to the audience. What are we believing and what do we want to believe?

In numbers: 6/6

Marilyn Mansons latest album EAT ME, DRINK ME, again is worth buying and listening to. The nice mixture of vocals and music, whispers and shouts in some passages even reminded me of Pink Floyd. For me the main themes of this album are death, dark sides of fame, sex and sometimes maybe love. It seems to be more quite than others, but not less interesting. I was surprised to find the track Heart-Shaped Glasses (When The Heart Guides The Hand) Inhuman Remix By Jade E Puget on the disc, because I would never have associated the beats used for it with Marilyn Manson.

Links:

Heart-Shaped Glasses on Youtube

The album on amazon.com

The Metal Gear Solid comic series now is completed and on my bookshelf. The books from 1 to 4 always are a pleasure to read. The legend of Solid Snake is unforgotten and one more battle ahead. It’s Snake against the world, as in the video games. The very nice atmosphere and the wonderful and rough speed-paintings of Ashley Wood take you close to the battleground of Snake and his powerful enemies. If you too loved to play the games, these are some kinds of must have. Shadows for hiding, bullets for killing, secrets to be revealed. Got the comics in a shop in Flensburg, Germany, called Gandalph. Visit their shops if you have the chance.

In numbers: 3/6

Links:

• Schäuble und Hitler?
• Schäuble wegtreten! (Dies soll natürlich nicht dazu anhalten dem Herrn W. Schäuble Gewalt anzutun, sondern eher Sinnbildlich als Befehl an Ihn verstanden werden.)

Copying music I buy to my computer or my mp3 player is illegal if it is secured by any copy protection. The prices for CDs are high and the money the music industry gains is used for hunting music pirates. The punishments are the same as for sexual abuse of children. How much longer will we watch?

“The industry kills music, let’s kill the industry.”

Links:

Chaos Computer Clubs music industry boykott

banner and more

Nach einer längeren Mangapause bekam ich, in einer recht ordentlich sortierten Buchhandlung, endlich mal wieder einen Oneshot (Einzelband, keine Serie) in die Hände. Der Klapptext ließ mich sofort an Ghost In The Shell und Cowboy Bebop denken. Die Hauptfigur getötet, eingefroren, erweckt und mit übermenschlichen Kräften ausgestattet. Gedächtnislos teilt sie so das Schicksal von Wolverine aus Xmen. Die Namen teils wenig originell, die Charaktere teils etwas zu flach, verleihen dem Band einen unregelmäßigen Tiefgang. Insgesamt ist der Manga einen Kauf bedingt wert. Die Zeichnungen sind sauber, die Texte leicht verständlich. Sie enthalten für meinen Geschmack etwas zu viel Umgangssprache und sind zu kurz. Ein paar schlecht eingestreute Fetzen Englisch tauchen auch auf. Unterm Strich das Geld wert, wenn man auf leicht verständliche, etwas düstere Zukunftsvisionen und Psi-Kräfte steht. Ich bin von Mangas wie “Gothic” besseres gewohnt.

Diesen Post werde ich entgegen meiner Gewohnheiten auf Deutsch verfassen um auf die Missstände und Probleme einer Überwachungsgesellschaft hinzuweisen. Unserer Gesellschaft.

Schaut es euch an, verschickt es weiter und achja werft einen Blick aufs Thermometer.

LINK zu panopti.com – Die schöne neue Welt der Überwachung

Here the LINK to my graphic.

So I installed it and tried to create a track right away. From 1:13 till 5:13 I was working on it and I really like it. It’s a mix between drum&bass and hardstyle or something. I used lmms samples only, so this is kind of an example what you can do with open source software in 4 hours. Feel free to check the track at last.fm. Hope some of you like it.. and if not, I DO!

links

high quality ogg vorbis version

the track on last.fm

The band futuristic sex robotz have submitted their album HOTel CORAL esSEX online and free for everyone to download. It’s a mix of electronic and rap with lyrics that mostly are focussed on netculture, sex and anti-MPAA/anti-DRM stuff. The lyrics are funny, nostalgic and pretty right in some way. That differs from song to song. Various samples are used. I’d say it’s pretty high quality music and you should all have a look at it if you believe in the freedom of music, are attached to the internet as a nerd, geek, freak or hacker or just like listening to good music.
The music is available in a .zip file about 66 mb.

Attention The lyrics that often are about netculture also conatin mature content.

Links:
http://www.futuristicsexrobotz.com

shortforms:
A proxy “hides” your IP-address and encryptions make it harder to sniff your private data.

Links:
Wikipedia Proxy
Wikipedia Encryption
The Gnu Privacy Guard

I’m looking forward to party with Henning and some other friends from school next weekend. Hope to. Thanks To Thomas, Ann-Kristin and Catarina here for kicking me a bit in the ass in the case of schoolwork, because I’m a too lazy there.

Learning ruby is fun. I try to drag other people in it and some of them seem to be interested. I think I’m making progress in small steps and I’m looking forward to the integration of Ruby in The Gimp, so I some day maybe will be able to write Gimp extensions in Ruby.

related links:

Google soc The Gimp

Google soc Ruby central

Ding dictionary

Let’s have a short look at methods in ruby:

geronimo@Zero-1:~$ irb1.8
irb(main):001:0> def greetings(name)
irb(main):002:1> puts "Rise and shine #{name}..."
irb(main):003:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> greetings("sleepyhead")
Rise and shine sleepyhead...
=> nil


I want to thank Nadine for coming up here and spending time with me and I want to thank her mother for paying her ticket. Maybe I can see her in my autumn holidays, that woud be great. If she enjoyed the time half as much as I did, she loved it, but I think the trip (8-9 hours by train was getting on her nerves ) She will soon log on again and I will know if she got home without complications.

Well, no real reason to worry, we’ll too be going to canada for four weeks, I’m a bit exited about that. It is a huge chance to improve my english and french abilities.

The “Puttefest” last thursday at our school was really great. I was DJ most of the time and I heard some people say that it was quite okay. I got a bit drunk later that evening and I got some wounds I can’t explain (I blame violent girls and jackass in some hedges what probably is right as far as I know)

I will have to concentrate more on school, sleep more and finish reading the book about concentrationtechniques and apply some of them to my work.

As you all can see, I have got a lot of work to do. I have to add a custom design, blog some more and add links. The design is the largest issue because I’ll be really busy at school this year.

I’m looking forward to “puttefest” on thursday (it’s where we welcome the new pupils) and till friday because Nadine is going to visit me over the weekend <3³