I’m in the process of rethinking the design of this website. I like the current theme very much, but it has a few stubborn nuisances. But: another theme means: another banner, and another banner means: doing some personalizing with graphics. The point is: I’m not very good with graphics, so I usually try to find something on the web. I didn’t found what I was looking for yet, but I found some very amusing pictures, that I want to show here:

Inspired by Escher’s “Realtivity” litho with lego. I found it here, but the original (without the text, but with a description) is here.

This picture has been recycled on the web a lot of times, and that demonstrates how you should always protect a good idea before others use it for their own purposes.

The next picture by Hugh MacLeod is licensed by a Creative Commons License. I like it because the transhuman twist in it.

The Geek Shades, in the next picture, combine a very non-geek outdoors-activity (enjoying sheer sunlight) with tools for geeking. Very useful if you are dating a non-geek girlfriend who wants to go to the beach, while you actually want to do some tinkering.

Talking about tinkering: how often have I struggled with my, or someone else’s, computer to open the cover of it. While replacing the harddisk or plugging in a new card or memory cost me only a few minutes, removing the cover, especially with a Compaq computer, can take you an hour or more. This picture compares the desperate tussle of the computer geek with the Kama Sutra:

The last picture is pathetic. I have included it in this post because I collect owls, and I have some cuddly owls in my home. My collections is here, on my personal website, with a description in Dutch, and some others on my Flickr stream. But this one, pretending to
to keep your spirit up, while rushing for the piled-up work.

is just silly.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Via: Geek.com

Verizon Wireless unveiled a Droid successor dubbed the Droid X at a New York event last Thursday, the day before the iPhone 4 launch.
The press conference was pretty much smooth sailing except for the Verizon PR staffers rudely preventing a Silicon Valley Insider journalist from filming a size comparison between the Droid X and iPhone 4. The journalists attending the conference were also shown the below promo video highlighting key features of the Droid X, including its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen in 16:9 format, a 1GHz Texas Instruments processor, a dual-flash eight-megapixel camera with HD capture, 720p playback via HDMI, home electronics syncing with DLNA, the ability to turn the phone into a wireless hotspot for up to five WiFi devices, and more.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Yoono is free software that allows you to connect and share with all your social networks and instant messaging services in one place. I’ve tried a lot of other applications that brought together my social web activities, like Pidgin (only Instant messaging), Digsby (very nice and more than only IM, but not portable) and Tweetdeck – beautiful UI, but, again, not portable and designed almost exclusively for Twitter.

When I discovered Yoono, life became worth living, or at least: I grokked finally how useful Twitter could be as a social dashboard, while still giving me the opportunity to IM and to share films and pictures. It is available as a Firefox add-on, that works fine with my desktop-version of Firefox, but for some arcane reasons didn’t talk with my portable Firefox. No problem, there is also a Portable desktop-version.

The desktop version has the “Discovery” feature for related websites and more, like the good old “Juice“- add-on (that isn’t compatible with Firefox > 3.5), so this feature is not available when I’m at my work.
well, you can’t always get what you want.

Via CrunchBase:

Yoono develops products designed to simplify social life on the web by centralizing all social networks and instant messaging in a single browser sidebar or desktop app. Yoono’s sidebar enables users to get friend updates automatically wherever they are on the web and update their status instantly across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networks. Yoono also shows users personalized recommendations for related websites, products, videos, and more based on the page they are viewing. Users can share these discoveries with their friends via their social networks or IM clients.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Create your personal database of lists: autobiographical lists, to-do lists, catalogues, wishlists, top tens, and more. Try the list topic generator.

http://listography.com

There once was also a "OnMyList"website, that I have tried one or two times. I made some listst there, but then I forgot about it. However, this is a new website with lists and the sample page looks more like the pageflakes of lists. LifeLogging in Lists!

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Great video by Andrew Orton, aka solidbronze.

I don’t know how he did it. Also very nice is the “trailer of the third and lost Dalek film, made in 1967″.
Everyone knows that there were two Dalek films in the 1960s starring Peter Cushing. It’s not generally knwon that there was a third film made in 1967, based on the Doctor Who TV serial ‘The Chase’. The master print of the film was lost in a fire in the Aaru / Amicus archives before the film was officially released. In 2009, in a box of dusty, charred old film canisters in the basement of a church in northern England, I located the last surviving footage from this film.
All that survived was the trailer…

Sure

Some info about the Daleks is here, of course. Here is a screenshot of the Dalek, taken from Andrew Orton’s film:

More on Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, Phrases from THHGTTG.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Computers make us more productive, at least when we use the computer simply as a tool for realizing your ideas. When I have the  1% inspiration, my computer will do the 99% perspiration, which allows me to have some more inspiration or enjoying some free time.
And there I hit the problem: will I use the computer as a workhorse, where it actually has been invented for, or as a collection of games (I admit, sometimes I do play Chess or Go at my computer), like a communication centre (Skype, IM, SocialWeb), or simply as a multimedia collection of mp3′s, funny pics and movies (don’t ask)?
The only way to know is to track the time you spend behind your screen to evaluate your behaviour. There are several applications avaialable on the web, all with their own pros and cons. However, you can’t have all the goodies in the store, so I use Manic Time, especially while it stores a lot of data, all locally.

That is also the downside of it, because who on earth only works at only one computer? So time you spend behind your computer is only partially measured.
Recently – I didn’t visit their website for a longtime – I noticed they also build a portable version and that, as you, dear reader, may know, is entirely my thing! So now I have Manic Time on my 350G Portable Disc and I can log all my activity wherever I am.
Okay, ManicTime is a private thing, and there is nothing wrong with that, but this is not the purpose of the Web 2.0! You should share everything you do – and this is also a great incentive to be as productive as you can. So, is you go all the way and want to confess to the public about your counterproductive behaviour you should use Wakoopa, that has everything including widgets for your Blog and full Facebook integration.
Another tool is the Toggl-timer. This is a great tool if you have your own business and want to determine what to charge your clients (supposed this is time-based).

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve posted on Pi before, here about pi-day in Second Life, and here, a year later, and both with pi-day (March 14th, written as 3/14) as the immediate cause. I don’t like to repeat myself, so the last years I’ve celebrated pi-day on my own, watching some pi-video’s at youtube. However, this post about pi is without reason: pi-day is already over and pi-approximation day (22/7) is still far away, but I found some interesting video’s I would like to share.
It is difficult to memorize the digits (my personal record now is 30), but a song will help you, here is a video:

Lyrics:

3.
1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 07

This one is also interesting, based on “Don McLean’s “American Pie”:

And here: the Pi(ano) – song: 3.1415 92653 58979 32384 62643 38327 transformed into a piano tune, following the algorhythm: 1 = c, 2 = d etc.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Aviary is a free suite of powerful online creation tools. You can edit photos, logos, web templates and more, but I’m not very good with graphics – until now I only use Aviary for screen capturing.
Now they have released their online Music Creating tool. Of course it cannot compete with FLStudio or Ableton Live yet, but OTOH it is still in beta and offers already 50 instruments, mostly beats. But there is more to come, so I’m curious what will be the future of music making with Aviary.
So here is my first effort; just a simple beat. But that was before I sent out my five invitations to unlock more advanced features, that I haven’t explored yet.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

I wrote a short post about my own Life-Logging activities on my Dutch weblog. This triggered some mixed responses from people who don’t understand the whole concept and others who became interested. It sprouted a new project – more about that soon.

Ich weiss schon was dahinter steckt. Und was denn weiter? – Ein Projekt! (Goethe – Faust)

This week I found this interesting post on collecting data about yourself – since governments are tracking your behavior anyway, why shouldn’t you want to gather some fascinating information about yourself?
Google Latitude, Foursquare, 4Mapper and Spiggler are the services mentioned.
Other interesting links:

• Total Recall Book
• The Quantified Self
• LifeLogging: 22 Tools for Storing Your Life Online
• Justin.tv: create live video and show anyone in the world what’s happening right now.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being.

Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

Here is a beautiful presentation of Zimbardo’s ideas with some very interesting observations.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Live Matrix is a new project by Sanjay Reddy and Nova Spivack. Spivack was the man behind Twine, a semantic bookmarking service, that was sold recently to Evri. Live Matrix will organize anything taking place on the web. Audiocasts, auctions, chats, MMO games, etc. According to TechCrunch they’re up to 80,000 scheduled events every week, and growing quickly.
Invitations for events are called “RSVP’s” (The term RSVP comes from the French expression “répondez s’il vous plaît”, meaning “please respond”. If RSVP is written on an invitation it means the invited guest must tell the host whether or not they plan to attend the party. Via about.com)

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

I found this accidently; it is a Prezi presentation about a theory of learning.
.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

The theory is interesting (although not entirely new), but the presentation itself is a good sample of the possibilities of Prezi.

Academy: Prezi Workflow in 15 minutes on Prezi

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

In the preparation of Geek Pride Day next week (May 25th) I was surfing the Web for new pages on Geekism and stumbled on, again, another geektest. Actually it is called a Nerdtest, but who cares – since Geek Pride Day is the same as Nerd Pride Day. So – couldn’t resist – filled in the survey and guess what? 94% – Supreme Nerd!

Rather high, but, no kidding, the test was too easy. So I took the follow-up test, nerd test 2.0 and: High Nerd!

That boosted my self confidence! Earlier I complained about my results at g33kt3st.com, where I was ranked “Average Geek – still far away from the geek ideal” in this post.
A different kind of geektest is Wired’s 100 skills list that I consider as a study program, a To-Do list, like monkeylinux. There are also shorter lists, like this one at Geekend.
Of course, these tests cannot touch the original Geektest, that btw was recently updated to version 3.14 – hmm, interesting. My score was 42,01183 % in version 3.1, but today, a little overconfident, I took the test without cheating and that gave me a setback: 41.32841%.  Disappointed!! But: still Major Geek.

Major Geek, Average Geek with Nerd tendencies, or Supreme/High Nerd? Still not sure which category I will fit in. The Venn diagram says I’m Geek, but here is a comparison chart that almost excludes me from the species.
Does it really matter which I am? Be honest, it is just a tag. that allows your family. your friends and, supposed you’re proud enough to wear it, you to feel comfortable about the fact that you prefer solving computer problems or reading a book over watching a sitcom on television or doing the smalltalk-thing.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

A while ago I posted on Creately, an online flowchart service. Now the Dutch LifeHacker blog (that is currently doing much better than the original, where quantity rules over quality – IMHO), published a mash-up about online flowchart services. For the review you should read the original article by Micha Coster, but here they are:

1. Gliffy
2. Creately
3. LovelyCharts
4. LucidChart
5. Google Docs – Drawings

Now the problem with these tools is that there are not as free as they pretend to be, so I still prefer desktop applications for my diagrams, because the advantage of online services – collaboration – doesn’t apply to me when working with flowcharts. My diagram creation program of choice is “Dia“, that also exists in a portableapps version.
A new star is the program Diagram Designer, that I haven’t tried yet, but LifeHacker reviewed it briefly.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

With my drawing skills, comparable to those of a child of seven, I’ll never be a great artist, but computers will help me to boost my creativity. After learning programs like Gimp and Inkscape, I’m now trying to work in 3D, which is quite difficult to learn!
My ambitions are nothing less than making my own animation movie, like the famous “”Elephants Dream”

This movie is produced with the great and free Blender-program. This runs from my USB, but it is not easy to learn. For the script I will work in Celtx, but that is not the issue here. Besides: it will take years and years to make my final masterpiece

There is also Daz3D, that has a simple tutorial built within. The basic program is free, but they let you pay for almost every feature that you could ever need to expand your possibilities. A really smart way to keep your customers hungry.

Okay, I followed some of the tutorials and just did some first exercises with Victoria, Daz3D’s only built-in figure with some clothes, poses and props (a volleyball) and came to this position, that I rendered to jpg as quickly as I could.
Nothing great, I know, but just a start.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Via LifeHacker and Techcrunch.

TechCrunch is reporting that “Froyo,” the next version of the Android smartphone operating system expected to be released next week at Google’s I/O conference, will pack in more than just big compiling speed improvements and fragmentation fixes. It could also include built-in USB tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot sharing, allowing everyone around you to share your mobile data connection.

Still looking for a portable computer that can also let me make some phonecalls, I was earlier thinking about the Nokia N900, but I’ve changed my mind and decided that I wanted a HTC Legend, because that has the Android OS – and is slightly more affordable.

Then – chosing a smartphone is a completely irrational enterprise, at least for me – I found the Nexus One and decided that this cutie was the One I Want.

Just waiting until the Nexus One (with the Android 2.2. os) will be released in The Netherlands. Right now it’s availability is limited to webshops and – or course if you read the ads closely – rather expensive.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Wouldn’t it be great to link any object that direct to a ‘video memory’ or an article of text describing its history or background? Tales of Things allows just that with a quick and easy way to link any media to any object via small printable tags known as QR codes.

“Tales of Evertyting” is a site about memories and attaching media to objects via qrcodes and rfid.

A Quickmark of QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

Once tagged each object basically gets its own webpage allowing comments to be placed, new media added such as YouTube clips, Audioboo, Vimeo etc and new tales tagged to the codes.

As such any object you tag with the site can ‘Tweet’ each time it is scanned. If you tag a landmark for example, each time that tag is read you can get a tweet that says ‘Hey, I’ve just been scanned’. Once scanned new tales or comments can be added to that tag, creating a social network of ‘things’ and ‘locations’.

If every new object is within reach of a reader, everything is searchable and findable, subsequently the shopping experience may never be the same, and the concept of throwing away objects may become a thing of the past as other people find new uses for old things.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

I’m a fan of the Digital Urban blog. I wrote earlier about it, and I tried  – inspired by their tutorials – to make an Urban Movie myself, that is, let’s admit it, not worth being mentioned.

Now they have made available their booklet “Digital Geography – Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments“, written by Andrew Hudson-Smith, available on the web for free.

The booklet is aimed as the start of a ‘recipe’ book for Geographic Virtual Urban Environments (GeoVUE) which we will update frequently through both Blurb and other rapid printing methods.

It’s a collection of workshops to visualise the city yourself.

‘Neogeography’ (…) is a geography for the everyday person using Web 2.0 techniques to create and overlay their own locational and related information on and into systems that mirror the real world. The term derives from Eisnor (2006), one of the founders of www.platial.com, where she defines Neogeography as: “…a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in the manner of, the practices of  professional geographers”. Rather than making claims about scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd and/or artistic, but may be idiosyncratic applications of ‘real’ geographic techniques. Turner (2006) expands the definition considerably in his pamphlet on the various techniques which non-professional users now have at their disposal. He says: “…a Neogeographer uses a mapping API like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML and geotags his photos to make a map of his summer vacation”.

Essentially, Neogeography is about people using their own
maps, on their own terms and combining elements of an existing toolset. As part of GeoVUE we have built and distributed our own ‘toolset’ for geographic visualisation.

Welcome to a new world of rich geographic information available anywhere, anyplace, anytime.

And, some pages later:

Without question, the most important innovation in the development of the digital city, Neogeography, and the mashups that accompany it, is the concept of the Digital Earth. Google Earth and to an increasing extent Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and NASA’s World Wind have produced 3D cities at a speed and resolution that was unimaginable only a few years  ago.

These cities act as layers for information, a rich canvas onto and into which information can be inserted and extracted at will over the network. In essence they act as ‘space inside the machine’, a space that can be iconic, photorealistic or multifaceted depending on a user’s preference. It is into this space that spatial analysis, digital geography and geographic information systems (GIS) operate as software for analysing space.

Indeed Hillier actually defines ‘space as the machine’. In a Web 2.0 world of increasing software and infinite capacity for information, we can import the city into the machine, digitally, in a recursive fashion whereby the machine actually becomes the ‘space’.

It is in these virtual and network spaces that people are building, creating and indeed occupying digital cities.

We will explore the concept of the Digital Earth and virtual environments such as Second Life later, but for now it is worth looking at the graphic ‘Where will the people go?’ adapted from the garden city movement, an approach to urban planning that was presented in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard.

The three magnets pull people between the Town and the Country. In today’s Web 2.0 world we have digital cities which are becoming increasingly populated and perhaps it is time for a new magnet – that of the Virtual Town-Country?

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Again some navel staring scribbles about the Art of being Geek. The Dutch Wiskundemeisjes wrote a blogpost about the Venn Diagram, that was also printed in De Volkskrant. As a specimen they printed the The Geek/Nerd/Dork/Dweeb Venn Diagram, that has been around on the internet for a while and helps you determine which type of nerd you are. Of course I am Proud to be Geek, since I consider myself intelligent, others consider me obsessed, and – although some people try to blame me for being socially inept – I’m definitely not!.

Searching the internet archives for an English version of the diagram (De Volkskrant translated it in Dutch) I found the website “Geekologie“. There I found this diagram of Geek Culture.

Rather small, if you click on the picture the full-size pic will load.

It seems to me everybody is more a less a geek

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

IK-Multimedia has a group-buy for their Xpansion Tank 2, including some titles, depending on how many participants will join. It’s a really good offer – even if they stole the concept from Image-Line (the company behind FLStudio), so I joined and have 5 sample libraries extra, waiting for the sixth.

Since Sample Tank works as stand alone ánd as a VST, I supposed it would work with my DAWs. FLStudio has no problems finding Sample Tank, neither Energy XT, but Ableton Live unfortunately didn’t work with ST: it simply couldn’t find the dll in the plugin folder. A deep shame for such a rather expensive program. Especially when you can read that they are aware of the problem.
On the user’s forum “necho” wrote:

Yeah – there is a lot to be said for sticking with Live (especially if you have the Suite). I think Live makes most sense when you don’t use any plugins – its all about workflow, and the more native Live stuff you use, the more it flows.

I think this is unacceptable: The reason why I’ve abandoned Reason is because it is a closed application, no third party synths allowed. FLStudio and EnergyXT (which is a lot cheaper than Live) don’t have any problems with plugins. Of course it is possible to use EnergyXT or FLStudio as a slave so I can rewire SampleTank and then use it in Live, but why should this be necessary?

All these troubles couldn’t prevent me buying Max for Live, Live’s new product that

puts the power and potential of Max/MSP inside Live. Create all the instruments, effects and extensions you’ve ever wanted. Go beyond the common and predictable, and transcend the limits that conventional tools impose. Build completely unique synths and effects, create algorithmic composition tools, or fuse Live and controller hardware into radical, new music machines. Join a society of makers and share ingenuity. Max for Live was co-developed by Ableton and Cycling ‘74.

©2010 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.