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I finally have a digital camera again, and it's a great toy! Used iMovie 5 for this, but don't really like how effects and text overlays work (you can't apply them to individual frames). Still, it's quite simple to use and everything works flawlessly, not least of all iPhoto integration. (Note: Youtube indicated that this video was still in the upload queue about one hour after I posted it, don't remember that happening before.) Update: uploaded the file again, this time without audio -- and it was instantly available. Youtube might not support AAC, and iMovie didn't offer any …

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Still pretty busy right now, so still no new posts for now... be patient. Download freq08.mp3 (2.8 MB, 02:27 mins) …

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I finally found a decent way to produce music on my PowerBook. That was the last thing missing after I switched. I haven't been producing tracks for ages -- it's been a frequent pastime for years, but I just couldn't persuade myself to work on Windows just for the music. Anyway. This track is pretty representative of the stuff I did in the last 2-3 years, if a bit more focused. I still haven't learned how to properly use an equalizer (and probably never will -- I'm just not interested enough). Any professional audio engineer will blush when he sees …

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I decided on a whim to mirror "Network Forensics Evasion: How to Exit the Matrix" on my server, at least temporarily. This fairly elaborate text describes a number of technical (and some non-technical) means of hiding and obfuscating your "data trails". While this traditionally has mainly been a concern of crackers and dissidents, it's of increasing interest to the average consumer. I just started reading, so I can't say much about the quality of the document. The text comes with a disclaimer: I try to be as operating system agnostic as possible, providing information for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. …

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Last April, nearly exactly a year ago, I bought my first Mac (a 12" Powerbook), and after a while that became the only machine I use. There are at least two working PCs in this appartment that by now are only used as storage medium or by visitors. This last Wednesday I had to send the Powerbook in for repair (with a broken battery and CD drive), so I had to dig out the old Thinkpad as temporary replacement. And now I'm surprised at how fast habits change -- up until last year my main machines were always running Microsoft …

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I make a lot of little notes in text files that never develop into a full article and eventually get deleted. So to change that, and to maybe even increase the post frequency a bit, I'll start publishing smaller comments. Have no idea yet which way suits me best though; first approach: assemble several semi-connected commentaries to get to article length. TextMate 2.0, which I guess won't be released within the next six months, will be a free update for registered users of TextMate 1.x -- a bold financial decision for the developer Allan Odgaard, but great for his users. …

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A couple of days ago Jon Udell complained about the alledged "customer lock-in" in Apple's iTunes: ...although the podcast's feed URL is discoverable by way of the Show Description contextual menu option, the ensuing dialog box does not permit the displayed URL to be copied. That's why I had to manually transcribe the URLs... Via 0xDECAFBAD's daily del.icio.us links we're notified of an article on BlogicBlog, "The techie way of liberating the podcast URL from iTunes", where the unnamed author suggests to use a network sniffer like Ethereal to watch outgoing traffic while you refresh the respective feed in …

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This must be the most entertaining short I've seen in months. A couple of very geeky Brits, introduced by a Swede, show you how they are using Erlang as part of their PABX (or PBX, as the youngsters are calling it these days), and demonstrate the usefulness of realtime, declarative, symbolic programming. Is it industrial advertising? Or educational? Or is it just an awesome piece of academic retro futurism? Is it subversive comedy, dripping with pop cultural references and contemporary irony, or quite to the contrary simply an antiquated piece of another time? You decide. It's much more efficient! "Declarative …

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I just got a copy of Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information', and while I only skimmed over a few passages I found its historical examples of data visualization intriguing. A little searching then brought up "Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization", which is an interesting gallery and timeline of the development of the modern info-graph. While many examples shown there do indeed focus on mapping applications, the cornerstones of data visualization are all there, and the site shares many of the examples Tufte also uses in his book. This week I …

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Just found out how to work around a major nuisance of GMail: the inability to select the low-tech HTML view as default interface. It's probably going to be old news for a lot of people, but it was new news to me, so I'll post it here for others to see. Background I've been using GMail as a secondary email provider for a while now, and while I like that its Javascript-based interface affords you speed improvements and other nice enhancements I can't get used to a major drawback: you lose the browser's history function, at least in Safari. Others …

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I just updated to 10.4.3, and after the first reboot Little Snitch reported a network request by Dock.app to apple.com -- something which had never happened before. The first time I let it slip, but the second request came when I opened Dashboard for the first time, and this time I started tcpdump before granting access. Among the expected traffic (updating the weather forecast) was a rather unusual request: 22:19:57.059318 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 27097, offset 0, flags [DF], length: 147) 192.168.0.4.50428 > www.apple.com.http: P [tcp sum ok] 1:108(107) ack 1 win 65535 0x0000: ..[.q>..$..^..E. 0x0010: ..i.@.@......... …

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I've written a Ruby script that extracts keywords from a MovableType-exported plaintext database, and while doing so wanted to include the Rails Inflector so that the script could merge singular and plural versions of the same word. It wasn't that obvious to me how to include the Inflector in Ruby scripts outside of Rails, and I searched for a while until I found the proper usage; so I'll document it here to save other Ruby newbies some time. In the end it boiled down to finding the proper require statements -- I'm not sure if this is the best way …

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On friday I received a message via my contact form that looked a lot like the comment spam that blogs normally get: with a generic reference to my site content ("Well done very nice page" etc.), and a link to what obviously looks like a spammer's site. Signed with a name and email address. Unfortunately my web hoster's logfiles weren't accessible (again), so I couldn't check whether this was a manual "attack" or from a bot. Well the logfiles just started working again, so I had a quick look and now I'm a bit worried. Look at the (abbreviated) excerpt …

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Take a look at this very strange del.icio.us account: http://del.icio.us/cuthu -- I stumbled upon this user while datamining my own del.icio.us account with simple Ruby scripts and an SQLite database. His account shares three bookmarks with mine (covering three very distinct and arbitrary topics), and it only caught my eye because of the very strange appearance of its bookmarks. So I took a look at the user's del.icio.us page. Excerpt from the page (sans formatting): http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html [nitrogen:#geeks] http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html to nitrogen #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy this item http://qdb.us/48067 [prj:#geeks] n2: http://qdb.us/48067 to prj #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy …

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Surprisingly language constructs emitted by the same entity seem mostly repetitive, even if covering different subjects. "Interesting". Popkomm Panel: Management, the new Majors? - dekstop weblog "Surprisingly the most interesting aspects of the panel were the insights into DJ Bobo's business life; take a closer look at his numbers quoted below." to dekstop.de popkomm conferences music pop_culture distribution ... on 2005-09-29 ... Popkomm Panel: A&R in a Digital Environment - dekstop weblog "Surprisingly the panel was mostly about ringtones -- it turned out interesting nevertheless, even if the participants enthusiastically painted a picture of a brave new world that to …

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Strange, the DVD format is only ten years old and already on the verge of being obsoleted. In two years time everybody will buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. But those will be out of date in five years as well, because by then everything will be stored on hard drives, and rented off the Internet. From then on new data formats will appear every couple of months, but nobody will care because thanks to DRM all content will only be consumable for a couple of days anyway. You will stop updating your home entertainment center to accommodate new physical content mediums, …

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Yet another patent that describes a technical "invention" both blatantly obvious, and with apparently well-know prior art: "System and method for obtaining information relating to an item of commerce using a portable imaging device". A method, system, and apparatus are provided for allowing users to readily obtain information associated with a selected item from a remote location. More specifically, a user at the location of the first entity operates a portable imaging device to capture an image of identifying data, such as a barcode, that identifies a selected item. The captured image is then communicated to a server operated by …

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While playing around with the cool new <canvas>-tag, I found that Safari seems to have a bug in its canvas implementation -- it stops working as soon as you link an external style sheet to the HTML, even if the style sheet is empty. I'm not sure yet if this is an actual bug or if I'm overlooking something; but then, nobody is actually using <canvas> on styled production sites, and all the demos I saw online are using unstyled HTML, so it's not that unreasonable that it's not a well-known bug. Update: I posted this to the webkit-dev mailing …

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I own a simple MP3 player by a German company called dnt, the player model is called "Fun 256". It doesn't have any fancy features, doesn't play OGG, and occasionally chokes when presented with high bit rates, but it's adequate for my needs. When I started using iTunes this spring I made up for its lack of generic player support by using a combination of a dynamic playlist, the "Copy files to folder" AppleScript from Doug's Scripts for iTunes, and an AppleScript that marks selected tracks as played. This way I could fill up the player with songs that I …

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While writing another bug report for Apple's OS X feedback page I used the dictionary popup to look up the word "noticeable" (I always forget if it is written with or without an "e"), and found not only that I had gotten it right this time, but also that Apple has added a very nice description of when to use this term and when others are more appropriate. I use the dictionary popup all the time, but I've never seen this type of content: an introduction to better English language usage. Very nice! Here's the text: noticeable adjective easily seen …

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Normally I don't even glance at site ads, but while browsing Roger Ebert's site I saw a Google ad that made me stop and read. And reload. As if our democratized content mediation process wasn't confusing enough we now have Google ads that spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads, and Google ads that look like they spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads but in reality lead to fraudulent products. How bizarre: advertisers devalue the messenger (the Google ads medium) in an attempt to relativize a (probably …

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Via Dave Winer: Apple seems to be caching podcast feeds and MP3 files as part of their iTunes podcast integration. The Dailysonic blog gives several reasons why this is bad for the content producers, and could even cost them money. In a nutshell: Podcast producers need their subscriber numbers for the advertisers. And, worst of all from a listener perspective: The caching mechanism seems yet to be unreliable, which means that some podcasts never reach the listener. Hm, I see... I was wondering how Apple were keeping track of their subscriber count. Routing it over their servers makes sense for …

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Just stumbled over Alex Payne's blog and was so delighted about his witty prose that I decided on a whim to do something for his Google ranking. Even if you're not interested in web development, or in his commentary on Apple consumer products, you still might want to take a look at the site for the entertainment value alone. For example: The iPod Story, and his Google "world domination" commentary Not So Evil. …

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"The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades More art from Jason Salavon …

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Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. …

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