This afternoon I’ve finished the first/latest Mass Effect DLC, Bring Down the Sky. It adds a new mission to the game which promises ~90 minutes of gameplay, a new location, a new race and a new XBL achievement (worth 50 gamerpoints). It costs 400 MS Points (€4.80). The mission was nice, nothing out of the ordinary, tho. Drive around in your Mako, clean out some places, gather “leads” (if you want to call them that) and then face a boss guy.
Dana and I went to the garden store earlier today, since she’s is working on cutting back our apple tree and realised that she needs better tools for that. Trying to be a good and interested husband, I tagged along. Now, I don’t like garden stores. Yes, pretty flowers and all that, but I don’t like stores in general, so it’s a drag. But I wanted to help her in finding the right tools, so there.
Thank the Gods, the huge pile I’ve found on the sidewalk next to our door was just the remains of a friendly neighbour’s dog! Phew. I mean, you might expect me to be upset since said friendly neighbour was too fucking lazy to pick up the steaming heap of crap his goddamn (and obviously horse-sized) mongrel left behind, but nooooo… not me. Because for a moment I was seriously afraid some sort of monstrous mutant mole had broken through the asphalt and was now terrorising my ‘hood, but – phew!
So Friendfeed opened yesterday. Naturally, I had to sign in to take a look. When I got to the point where it wanted me to configure the feeds and services to grab data from, it first asked for my Google Reader shared items. Okay, can do. Then it asked for my Tumblr name, and this is where my eyebrows went down. So Tumblr allows me to bundle many of my “activities” in one place.
It’s amazing what 30 minutes of frantic walking can do for your sanity. Tonight, when getting out of the subway and noticing my bus had just left, I’ve popped in a 131bpm Podrunner mix and started walking. A good 30 minutes later I found myself on my doorstep with a clear head. Check out Podrunner, a free weekly podcast of one hour gapless music mixes for workouts and the likes. The only trick is to find a bpm range that suits you.
I’m done with the redesign. Both my tumblelog and this blog now share the same layout and (the most important parts of the) sidebar, adding some much needed consistency. Also I’ve got rid of the Google Coop search and put the Technorati search to use instead, it’s good enough in my eyes. The biggest change in functionality is the switch from the built-in Wordpress comments system to Disqus, on both my blog and tumblelog.
Seit mehreren Wochen sitzt in meinem Bus nahezu jeden Morgen eine Frau, die sich mit Hingabe während der kompletten Fahrt zum Bahnhof (~15min) schminkt. Und ich spreche nicht vom schnellen Nachziehen des Lippenstifts, sondern von der großen Packung—Haare zurückstecken und ab gehts. Ich wollte eigentlich die letzten paar Wochen schon etwas darüber schreiben, bin aber immer davon abgekommen. Vielleicht war das gar nicht so schlecht; da ich mittlerweile ihre handwerklichen Fähigkeiten aus der Ferne bewundern gelernt habe, möchte ich ihr heute etwas hausgemachte Lyrik widmen.
Over the last week I’ve been using RescueTime. It’s a neat little service that’s keeping track of what you are doing all day long on your machine (Mac or PC) by logging which applications are having the focus. On the site you can then tag the different applications with different keywords (for example, my Mail.app times are tagged with “work”, “communications” and “email”). And, to make it actually useful, you can analyse your time spent, graphs and all!
Hi all, so far, escaloop has a couple of services it’s supporting explicitly, which means there are rules to mark these services with their own service icon and maybe an adjusted wording when they are displayed. At the time of this post, these services are: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Flickr Google (search results etc.) Google Reader (shared items) Last.fm Livejournal Magnolia Newsvine Pownce StumbleUpon Tumblr Twitter Vimeo Vox.com Everything else is supported implicitly, which means it’s processed and displayed, but has no special icon or anything, it’s “just” another source.
I’ve spent the last few hours bug testing, then deploying, then yelling at, then hotfixing, then re-deploying a new version of both escaloop site and badge. I didn’t include everything I was planning on initially, and instead decided to go for “release early, release often”. A few highlights: Added some juice and stability—hopefully everything runs a bit faster more solid now. New feature: Source list, add a pretty list of all feeds in a badge to the end of the badge.
Okay, yes, I’m late to the review party. In my defense, it has something to do with this and the fact that I wanted to finish Mass Effect twice before rendering my judgement. So, my first playthrough on normal difficulty was very thorough. I’ve picked a male (Infiltrator class), took the “good guy” approach (“We have to save the galaxy! – Wait, what’s that, old lady? Your kitten is trapped in this death maze?
Ich war gestern beim Saturn, Plasma-TVs anschauen. Nach einigem Rumrennen finde ich zwei Panasonic-Geräte, die direkt nebeneinander stehen. Beide sind 37”, sind aber in der Form voneinander abweichend, haben recht unterschiedliche Modellnummern und differieren im Preis um die 400€. Ein männliches Fachverkäufer-Standin kommt auf mich zu. “Kann ich Ihnen behilflich sein?” “Ja, die beiden TVs… Was sind da die Unterschiede?” “Puh… Ja… Der eine ist silbern, der andere hat dieses schwarzes Glanzlack- Finish.
A few months ago I was talking to Hendrik about lifestreams, and in my ongoing struggle for his undying love (as a friend), I’ve whipped up a little somethingsomething using the wonderful Yahoo! Pipes. “Lifestream?”, you ask. “What the deuce is a lifestream?!” A good question. A lifestream is basically a big bucket where all the updates and update notifications from your blog, your ADD-induced Twitter posts, your Flickr uploads etc come together in one concise way so it’s easier for others to ignore them.
Calm down. Christmas isn’t about freaking out and panicking, it’s about not giving a damn about anything other than having a good time. If you’re stressing yourself out, you’re doing it wrong.
kaputtage, kaputt-age (kä-pŏŏ’tĭj) – noun Derived from “outage”, describing the state of something being really, you know, really kaputt. (Yeah, I’ve made that up.)
So, (almost) everyone is totally crazy for lifestreams these days. In case you managed to get around the whole issue so far: a lifestream is basically a big bucket (i.e. web page) where all the updates and update notifications from your blog, your ADD-induced Twitter posts, your Flickr uploads etc come together in one concise way so it’s easier for others to ignore them. Also, you only have one URL to hand out to hot women in pubs because the stream inadvertedly works as a hub page, too!
“Wir machen auf der Wiesn Mittag, kommst’ mit?” Warum lass ich mich immer nur wieder breitschlagen? Was für eine Scheisse. Zuerst Ochsenbraterei, weil es am letzten Donnerstag da so leer war. Oh, alles voll, Überraschung. Okay, dann Paulaner! Dort haben wir sofort einen Platz bekommen, mussten uns aber von der Bedienung “massregeln” lassen, weil ich nix trinken wollte, Min nach einer Limo fragte (Antwort: “Nur in der Mass!”) und Julian um einen Spezi bat (“Hört mal, was seid Ihr denn für welche?
(Disclaimer: The following paragraphs might be pointless and you might end up feeling I have once again stated the obvious. So… you’ve been warned.) TechCrunch reports on Google apparently working with some unnamed industry bigshots on opening up their social networks services. Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.
Over the weekend I finally had some time to continue playing around with Yahoo! Pipes. (Turns out that quitting World of Warcraft makes your days longer. Huh. Who’d have thought…) It really is a neat toy/tool. Alas, it is not without hitches. If you’ve worked with Pipes before, you know that it has a module named ‘Fetch Data’, but unfortunately this module is only able to deal with XML and JSON data.
I like my life. It’s not perfect, but I don’t care. It’s pretty cool. I could do so much worse, seriously. w00t!
Looks like there is a new Flickr API output format: LOL. Not my work, no idea who built this, but I really like it. Here’s an example of returned data (?tags=cats&format=lol): HAI IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS GIMME PHOTOS FROM EVERYONE TAGGED CATS WITH GEODATA I CAN HAS PHOTO IMG_2326 ITZ AT [http://www.flickr.com/photos/blush_response/1377293729/][2] INVISIBLE METADATA LOL KTHX.
Yeah, it’s actually a granite Yoda. Awesome.
I found a few versions of this in my inbox a few minutes ago: Dear “friends” at Rapleaf.com, I know you’re probably just “alerting” me that “someone” might have found possibly incriminating links to my various social network profiles, and that is so nice of you. You know what else it is? Spamming. That’s true! Ask your friends. Sure, there is this “If you do not want to receive emails from Rapleaf, click here” link at the bottom of each unsolicited mail you’ve sent me.
…in Europe. According to the Internet Traffic Report, Europe’s intertubes currently feature around 20-30% packet loss. Average, I might add. It seems like two of three major German routers have fallen of the net. I can indeed confirm this: My connection graph looks like a comb. When calling my ISP I don’t even get to the “on hold” loop, the automaton on the other end is telling me “Everyone’s busy, please leave a name and number, we’ll call you back ASAP”.
Some fun-name generator told me the other day that my porn name is Reed Funkenstein. What can I say, I do not plan on breaking into the adult entertainment market, but I like the name. It basically oozes willpower and ingenuity. It fits like a glove! I will probably use it for my next open source project. Reed Funkenstein is feeling frisky geeky.