WP Tiger style dashboard

Pollastigerwpdash
While wait­ing to start on some real work, I get to play with Word­Press: WP Tiger Administration.

I’m not really sure whether I like the appli­ca­tion approach to what really are web­pages but it sure as hell is one tasty-looking dash­board. 5 sec­ond instal­la­tion. The power of CSS, yay.

Tags: , ,

Pollas.dk
Comments Off

Recording while moving

This guide on how to build a helmet-mounted cam­era for moun­tain bik­ing for $35 might add some cool­ness to another idea I have: Doing an on-the-go pod­cast record­ing while run­ning through the streets of Berlin on one of the Call-a-Bikes. I’m think­ing hat-mounted micro­phone… In Dan­ish that would be ‘mikro­fon­hat’ which just sounds too coll not to be tried… Does any­one hap­pen to know where I can get a wind screen for my Electro-Voice some­where in Berlin? I expect to go fast…

Tags: , ,

Audio
Comments Off

[DK] Medie-perspektiv

Og mens man i bar­nagtig vrede og med teenagepa­raderne oppe brokker sig over E.B. falder man over lidt per­spek­tiv i gÃ¥rsdagens Berliner Zeitung.

En 13-Ã¥rig dreng har fun­det en Edelweiss-plante midt i Berlin (i alt for lav højde forstÃ¥s) og biologerne undrer sig lidt. B.Z. hiver den pÃ¥ for­si­den, bruger led­eren bare pÃ¥ det. Den ind­kaldte ekspert? DJ Ötzi naturligvis…

Tags:

Misc.
Comments Off

Reizgasanlage at Kaisers

30875678 5Feeb84550 M
Found this dis­turb­ing pic­ture at the Metroblog Berlin. I’m think­ing of just tak­ing my shop­ping some­where else.

Dear Kaisers Super­mar­ket at Schönhauser Allee, now where do you guys think we are? Well, here´s the news: Pren­zlauer Berg ain´t Jo-burg!

Tags: ,

Misc.
Comments Off

[DK] Ekstra Bladet: Luskede paparazier

Ekstra Bladet: Hur­ley og Janet slikker sol­skin.

Det er næsten umuligt for kendisser som Janet Jack­son og Eliz­a­beth Hur­ley at smide bikinien og tage sol­bad, uden de luskede paparazz­i­fo­tografer stiller skarpt med telelin­sen og fore­viger øjeblikket.

Luskede? I betaler dem, ergo mÃ¥ I stÃ¥ inde for deres metoder…hvilket vi andre sÃ¥ ikke kan, men ok…resten af ‘artiklen’ er knap sÃ¥ kri­tisk, der bliver blot jublet over bar røv osv. Fuck­ing hyk­lere.

Tags:

Misc.
Comments Off

Book review: Drawing Trucks & Diggers

TrucksanddiggersToo lit­tle book review­ing going on here. Wait no more. Draw­ing Trucks & Dig­gers. Not very long, not hard to read, not expen­sive, not pos­si­ble to dog-ear. But boy, is it use­ful. It’s made by Cater­pil­lar and should really be con­sid­ered pure com­mer­cial. But then again. It’s biiig machines. Which you gotta love. Aimed for chil­dren aged 2–10 it’s per­fect for the aspir­ing street artist. And at the dis­count price of €3.95 (book­shop in Martin-Gropius-Bau) it’s a steal.

Aspir­ing artists can learn how to draw a “Track-Type Trac­tor” and a “Soil Com­pactor” in the spiral-bound vol­ume Draw­ing Trucks and Dig­gers, A Book of 10 Sten­cils. Each die-cut sten­cil page acts as a frame for a color pho­to­graph and a drawn illus­tra­tion of the machine (with the parts labeled, along with a descrip­tion of what each does) on either side of it, so that it frames both pho­to­graph and draw­ing perfectly.

Couldn’t care less what the dif­fer­ent part do. This is heavy machin­ery cut out of heavy card­board. Rip the pages out, buy a can of paint and get going. I know you want to, after­all you’re all Hack­ers & Spray­painters.

Tags: sten­cils, stree­tart, tag­ging

Misc.
Comments Off

Ostkreuz

A cou­ple of days ago I went to Ostkreuz to shoot a few picu­tures. I like the over­all bea­tup ath­mos­phere (and look) of the old train sta­tion and its mix of daily com­muters on the S-bahn and the regional trains roar­ing by.

Ostkreuz

As luck would have it, this weeks zitty has a fea­ture on the sta­tion. It turns out that it is actu­ally one of the busiest S-bahn sta­tions in Ger­many with over 150.000 daily trav­ellers. It is to undergo major ren­o­va­tion work, pos­si­bly begin­ning at the end of the year. Which in a way is kind of sad as very lit­tle of the old charm can be expected to sur­vive the heavy machin­ery. So the zitty story goes any­way. To the point: The fea­ture included a link to a pho­to­blog fol­low­ing the sta­tion; the Ostkreuz guide. Good stuff. There I found a link to another excel­lent site, Kopf­bahn­hof:

Die Galerie Kopf­bahn­hof zeigt Pho­togra­phien ver­schiedener Autoren zum Thema Bahn.

I’ll go back to Ostkreuz one of the fol­low­ing days. I didn’t have my tri­pod with me the last time and I need to do a few shots using that. And accord­ing to the trainspot­ters inter­viewed in the arti­cle, a Czech train with Pol­ish wag­gons come by every day at 17:15…

Tags: pho­tog­ra­phy, ostkreuz, berlin

Photography
1 Comment

Tagging

I’ve been want­ing to imple­ment Tech­no­rati tags for some time, but couldn’t find the time to get a decent overview of the var­i­ous Word­Press plu­g­ins available.

I’m using ecto as my pri­mary blog post­ing tool, and next to the cat­e­gories tab, there’s a nice lit­tle tags-tab. It appears that it doesn’t need to hook into any­thing, but that it can gen­er­ate the tags itself, based on a tem­plate you can tweak to meet your needs.

So prob­lem solved for now — I’ll give this approach a spin.

Tags: , ,

Uncategorized
Comments Off

[DK] Festtips

Husk: ¥r du er i økseland, skal du undgÃ¥ kontroverser.

Tags: ,

Misc.
Comments Off

Why All Headphones (might) Suck

Word of advice from Tod Maf­fin over at I Love Radio: Why All Head­phones Suck.

In sum­mary: Your lis­ten­ers might lis­ten to your show through reg­u­lar speak­ers — so that’s how you should mix your show. Which sort of makes this only true for the typ­i­cal radio show pro­ducer; the rest of are more or less specif­i­cally tar­get­ting the head­phones crowd.

Tech
Comments Off

Comments working again

I’m not mak­ing any promises, but it appears that com­ments are work­ing again. I’ll keep the rea­son for the fuckup to myself until I know for sure that they are indeed work­ing again. But lets just say I’ve down the wrong path try­ing to solve this one…

I would greatly apprea­ci­ate any read­ers tak­ing a few min­utes to post any com­ment any­where to test this a bit more thouroughly. Thanks.

Update: Thanks to mess from http://poker-chips.neasoc.org breath­in­ser­tours for prov­ing that com­ments are indeed work­ing again. Now, where did I put that WP-HashCash–link…

Tags: ,

Pollas.dk
3 Comments

Audiotour Berlin: Berlin Sounds

While brows­ing the shelves of pro qm, a most excel­lent media/architecure/design book­shop in Alte Schönhauser Str., I stum­bled upon Berlin Sounds — an audio­tour of Berlin focused on the beats of the city. Right up my audio alley.

The idea is great: Anja Schnei­der gives you a tour of Berlin’s Mitte while spin­ning records. Artists include Bar­bara Mor­gen­stern, Chris­t­ian Kleine, Jaz­zanova, Max­i­m­il­ian Hecker, Mia and Mod­e­se­lek­tor. The walk­ing pace is given by the beat; 75BPM.

But. The infor­ma­tion pro­vided is some­what triv­ial, and though she intro­duces audi­ol­o­gos, city sounds etc. it never really takes off. The thoughts on the peo­ple of Mitte are pretty naive and the over­all tone a bit too pädagogish

for my lik­ing. If you ever lis­tened to elec­tronic music or thought just a lit­tle about the sounds of the street, you won’t learn any­thing. Which prob­a­bly just means that I wasn’t in the tar­get audi­ence. Just as I found it impos­si­ble to walk that slow… How­ever, I can imag­ine it will be a great way to expe­ri­ence that part of Berlin for the first time if you’re not the typ­i­cal recordbag-carrier and to be fair, you can find a cou­ple of decent sto­ries on the var­i­ous build­ings you pass as well as some info on the club scene of the area.

Tak­ing the tar­get audi­ence into acount, I’m still sorry that the actual music doesn’t take up more space of the tour, though. Too much talk, way too lit­tle beats. Again, the idea rocks.

It’s avail­able as an MP3 down­load at reduced cost, just as Hear We Go has made other audio­tours.

On a related note, I picked up 100% Pure Ham­burg by Pure­Or­bit when I vis­ited Ham­burg in February.

Their approach is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent; it’s not an audio­tour but record­ings from dif­fer­ent places of the city. The sound itself is a lit­tle muse­um­like, as if it got post­processed a bit too much, but over­all it gives a good pic­ture of the “typ­is­che Geräusche aus der Hans­es­tadt”. The­ater of the mind!

One last note. Credit to Berlin Sounds for solv­ing a lit­tle mys­tery. The I hate CBS grafitti doesn’t relate to the net­work, but to a Ger­man grafitti group by the name of CBS (Cow­boys Crew) — and they prob­a­bly put the grafitti up there themselves.

Culture
2 Comments

[DK] Kapster er tilbage, yay

His­to­rier fra det pulserende nat­te­liv — gotta love it.

People
Comments Off

Sankt Oberholz

Free Berlin wifi tip: Sankt Ober­holz (already a plaze — pic­tures by your’s truly) at Rosen­thaler Platz. Laid back and spa­cious. Free wifi and the option to have today’s spe­cials mailed to you every morn­ing. Cof­fee and sand­wiches are fine — appa­rantly they are pub­lish­ers as well.

Misc.
Comments Off

Zur Semiotik des Widerstandes

Some­what of a messy post, but here goes:
Went to see THE ABC-SEMIOTICS OF RESISTANCE at Neu­roti­tan, a really nice gallery in Berlin’s Mitte yesterday.

Good exhi­bi­tion, “Ein mul­ti­me­di­ales Spek­takel über Dada, Cut-Ups, Inter­na­tionale Sit­u­a­tion­is­ten, Urban Art, Cul­ture Jam­ming u.v.w.” Seri­ous stuff includ­ing sev­eral calls for action; boxes with stick­ers for you to take and use. Will try and post pic­tures later. Will skip the proper review (take a look at the rebe­lart review), it’s all in the links…

More here: m e m e f e s t 2 0 0 5 | world­wide com­mu­ni­ca­tion cen­ter.

A dif­fer­ent take on reboot­ing here: G8 reboot.

Culture
Comments Off

Berlin Snap Shots — del.icio.us tags

Damn, del.icio.us/technorati etc. tags are nice.

New city, new tem­po­rary sub­scrip­tion pro­vid­ing valu­able hints and more, such as Berlin Snap Shots, a nice snap­shot blog from Berlin.

Had good fun sub­scrib­ing to the roskilde tag dur­ing the fes­ti­val (the next best thing if you can’t go) and to the reboot7 tag the days fol­low­ing the con­fer­ence (great, espe­cially if you went).

I won­der if you can setup your aggre­ga­tor with a ‘sub­scribe until’-date — or ‘sub­scribe for the next n days’…?

Nyholm has got some good thoughts on Liv­ing through tags. Quick com­ment: The mas­sive num­ber of entries added to del.icio.us (or the other ser­vices) cer­tainly is quite over­whelm­ing. But for the first few days, I’ve found that tak­ing the time to quickly sort through it all usu­ally pays off. Often stuff pops up that I hadn’t thought of. but yes, I have nar­rowed down my ser­ach now.

Syndication
Comments Off

Amoeba

As an update to the news about the clos­ing of Loud (which appear to have redesigned their site a bit?!), a name has now been put on the record store to be housed in the back room of Nad­sat: Amoeba Record Shop.

Look­ing for­ward to check­ing their stuff…

Culture
Comments Off

Police guidelines: aim for the head

Boing Boing: New police guide­lines: shoot sui­cide bomber sus­pects in head (reported heav­ily a lot of other places).

Fol­low­ing the recent killing of an inno­cent elec­tri­cian in Lon­don, the ‘sus­pected’ part makes you think.

Beside (as noted in the Boing Boing post) mak­ing me recon­sider my choice of cloth­ing — maybe I should just stay indoors, keep­ing my skin pale, and go for a more innocent-looking touristy non-gadget-carrying style — it seems as if this approach is incred­i­bly short-sighted.

For how long exactly will suicide-bombers con­tinue to look sus­pi­cious prior to set­ting off their bombs? I rode the Berlin unde­ground yes­ter­day and dur­ing a ticket-inspection, the inspec­tor failed to iden­tify the owner of a bike parked in the car (prob­a­bly bea­cuse the owner didn’t want to pay the extra money for it). It’s a pipe bomb on wheels, damnit. Shoot the (pos­si­ble) owner in the head? Great. Now he can’t push the dead man’s han­dle which is the only rea­son­able ter­ror­ist approach to trigger-happy police­men look­ing to kill them.

Sui­cide bomb­ing is gonna be so last year real soon. Remotes, proxy bombers or sur­bur­bian house­wives — you can’t expect being able to rec­og­nize these people.

What about a reli­giously and polit­i­cally indif­fer­ent poor house­wife from sub­ur­bia with a bad con­science, hav­ing never really done some­thing good for her kids. Could she be talked into car­ry­ing a pack­age for money? Prob­a­bly. Is shoot­ing jumble-sale mums wear­ing flow­ery dresses in the head the answer? I doubt it…

Misc.
Comments Off

[DK] Bergensbrag

Er desværre ikke i lan­det til denne her:

30 uafhængige litterære aktører fra hele Nor­den
sam­les 11.-14. august til et sem­i­nar i Lit­er­aturHaus. Aktive fra
tidsskrifter, smÃ¥forlag, net­sider og fes­ti­valer mødes
for at diskutere stÃ¥steder og strate­gier og udvek­sle erfaringer
med det konkrete arbe­jde med lit­ter­a­turen. Sem­i­naret inde­holder
også to oplæsningsarrangementer, som er åbne &
gratis for pub­likum, i Lit­er­aturHaus, ¸llegade 7, kld., 2200
¸benhavn N.

Fredag d. 12. august, kl. 20:00: Oplæsning ved delt­agerne samt
gæsteoplæsning ved Claus Beck-Nielsen 1963–2001) og Lone
¸rslev. Musik ved Bodega Boys (Andreas Ugorskij (Gui­tar),
Daniel Lind­berg (Harmonika/Sax), Mar­ius ¸rup-Nielsen (Vokal),
Wamsler & ¸rup (Tekst), Stine Tange (Instruktion).)

¸rdag d. 13. august, kl. 20:00: Oplæsning ved
delt­agerne samt gæsteoplæsning ved Niels Frank og Pablo
Hen­rik Llambias.

Bag­grund: Dette er en fortsættelse. Det første sem­i­nar
blev afholdt i Bergen i 2003 – deraf navnet bergens­brag.
Delt­agerne var fra en række tidsskrifter, smÃ¥forlag og
fes­ti­valer i Norge og Dan­mark, og mødtes for at diskutere og
lære af hinan­dens syn­spunk­ter og erfaringer. Det første
Bergens­brag stim­ulerede til en række gode samar­be­jd­spro­jek­ter
og udvek­sling imellem uafhængige litterære
aktører. Med bergensbrag/københavn fortsætter og
udbyg­ger vi denne kontakt.

bergensbrag/københavn arran­geres af Appa­ratur (Maja Elverk­ilde
& Mar­tin Glaz Serup, DK) og Gasspedal (Susanne Chris­tensen & Audun
Lind­holm, NO).
Spørgsmål kan rettes til: bergensbrag2@hotmail.com, Maja
Elverk­ilde (mob:
20 61 24 94) eller Mar­tin Glaz Serup (mob: 50 91 24 76).

Mere infor­ma­tion:

http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2546/bergensbrag/

http://www.bt.no/kultur/article164491

http://kunst.no/pipermail/110/2003-June/000297.html

http://www.apparatur.dk

http://www.gasspedal.org

Arrange­mentet er støttet af BG Banks litterære pulje.

Skulle nok være et besøg eller to værd.

Culture
1 Comment

Wanna be Flickr-famous?

You have two options:

1. Invest some cash in a nice D-SLR, brush up on your pho­tog­ra­phy skills, splash some more money on CF-cards, put time aside for pho­tog­ra­phy. Prac­tice, shoot, get your hands dirty with the dig­i­tal work­flow; RAW-conversion and what have we. Tweak and tweak, upload care­fully tagged stuff to your Flickr-account.

2. Shoot some­thing Mac-related with a cheap cam­phone and let the Mac-heads do their magic: TUAW and BYODKM.

Option #2 is hereby rec­om­mended. My lat­est shot didn’t make it to the top of my Most Polular-list, though. That spe­cial place is reserved for… A snap­shot of my Powerbook…

Well, that didn’t last long. The Mac mini shot is now the most popular…and will prob­a­bly con­tinue to be for the dura­tion of my time on Flickr…

Photography
Comments Off

Polizeiticker Berlin

Polize­i­ticker Berlin (rss) — giv­ing ¸benhavns Poli­tis ¸gnrapport a run for its money.

Not nearly as fun as the Dan­ish one; basi­cally just assaults, rob­beries and traf­fic incidents.

Misc.
Comments Off

Flickr: The X-Berg Pool

Fun is to be had over at Flickr: The X-Berg Pool.

Photography
Comments Off

Self-help; Business

All of us wannebe-hackers seem to find great joy in the fact, that every­thing in life is actu­ally hack­able; you can tweak your habits and your mind just as you can tweak your data­base or your OS of choice.

GTD, ‘hacker’-blogs and var­i­ous books on self-hacking is all the rage, and I cer­tainly have read my part from the almost oblig­a­tory list of must-reads.

Classy reports that Kom­mu­nika­tions­fo­rum now fea­tures RSS (which, just to prove his point that you can’t under­es­ti­mate the power of… trig­gered this very post as I was brows­ing by K-forum for the first time in ages), so I just dis­cov­ered their review of Blink.

All of this just to say, that while I enjoyed Blink (I read it on my way down here), enjoyed The Tip­ping Point (also by Glad­well) and have gained a good amount of pro­duc­tiv­ity by think­ing along the lines of GTD, I fell for the temp­ta­tion and bought The Now Habit — which I didn’t enjoy all that much.

It should be noted, that this might have some­thing to do with the fact, that it turned out I’m not a real pro­cras­ti­na­tor but just lazy, so the book wasn’t really for me. Nev­er­the­less, some­thing on the back of the book trig­gered some­thing I’ve been think­ing about for a while: Where do you draw the line between Self-help and good, ol-fashioned reality-hacking?

I enjoy mak­ing fun of the grow­ing self-help scene that has almost taken over the space of any Dan­ish book­store, rid­ing on the back of numer­ous tv-shows, turn­ing aver­age peo­ple into help­less babies, need­ing help for mov­ing in together, mov­ing out again, con­vert­ing an ugly gar­den into a just as ugly — but dif­fer­ent — gar­den, apply­ing wall­pa­per etc. etc. But maybe, just maybe, I some­times read books or weblogs that are just as bad?

What trig­gered my raec­tion was the rec­om­men­da­tion for plac­ing the book in the store, put on the back of the book by the pub­lisher: Self-help; Business.

This pretty much says it all. This blurry zone between psycho-babble and ‘busi­ness’ I don’t need. Explicit guide­lines for sort­ing infor­ma­tion, focus­ing on sys­tems rather than state-of-mind and what have you: Yes, please. Books on var­i­ous sub­jects that’s nice to know some­thing about and might improve your think­ing about cer­tain areas: Defi­nately. “Just say to yourself”-type books: No, thanks.

Misc.
Comments Off

[DK] AUX Audiograf #3 med Else Marie Pade

Glemte næsten:

AUX Audio­graf #3 finder sted den 4. august. Elek­tron­musik­pi­oner Else Marie Pade vil fortælle, hvor­dan hun udvælger lyde til sine kompositioner.

Kan ikke selv være til stede, men har haft fornøjelsen af at se Else Marie Pade et par gange. Don’t miss it!

Culture
Comments Off

RAW workflow with iPhoto

Since I got my D70s I’ve been try­ing to find a decent solu­tion for still using iPhoto as the pri­mary show­box but unleash­ing the power of RAW (no, not the power of Ra although that is

a good tune).

Prob­lem is, while iPhoto offi­cially under­stands RAW now, it doesn’t seem to like the Nikon ver­sion (stan­dards, pleeeease). And if you start edit­ing (you can hook up Pho­to­shop as your edi­tor of choice), it doesn’t edit the orig­i­nal RAW, but starts destroy­ing the JPG it made for dis­play. Com­pres­sion, compression.

So I’ve pretty much ended up doing what this guy sug­gest:

Shoot a RAW and JPG combo (unfor­tu­nately the D70s will only let you have a basic qual­ity JPG), put the JPG’s in iPhoto for easy view­ing and keep your RAW’s some­where else, keep­ing their orig­i­nal name. When­ever you need to edit a good shot (say, some of the ones you rated high when doing a quick browse of your JPG’s), find the cor­re­spond­ing RAW-file, do your magic, export as TIFF or PSD and import those into iPhoto in a spe­cial album. If you’re strapped for stor­age space (lap­top users unite), remem­ber to trash your orig­i­nal JPG’s after you’ve done your backup as iPhoto copies every­thing anyway.

For con­ver­sion to B/W, I find this method pretty good.

If you can’t remem­ber if you did edit­ing, see if there’s a match in your Con­verted RAW album, if not go to your RAW-collection.

For now I think it’s the best of both worlds. The con­trol you have over your pho­tos in RAW, even if your a full-blown ama­teur like me, is silly-impressive — on the other hand it’s a bitch hav­ing to con­vert all your pho­tos (mean­ing 17MB+ a shot as well), so the good old-fashioned way of “putting a lot of JPG’s into iPhoto really quickly for easy brows­ing” is attractive.

It takes up a lit­tle more space on your mem­ory card and it is rec­om­mended to get a nice big fast one (or more). iPhoto, how­ever will make a JPG-copy any­way, so once they’re at your com­puter, it should be the same.

Flickr export is easy with the Flickr export plu­gin — a JPG is auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated from your huge TIFF’s dur­ing export.

Now all I need is some stor­age sys­tem where I won’t lose track of where I put my RAW files. One thing’s for sure, I’m run­ning out of space real soon.

Note to self: Look into pho­tog­ra­phy in bright, bright day­light — my pho­tos are all burned out highlights.

Note to oth­ers: Being in a coun­try with its own Ama­zon rocks. Ordered some pho­tog­ra­phy books last fri­day, they just got in the door, deliv­ered free of charge.

Update: Andreas has a good post (in Dan­ish) touch­ing on the same subject.

Tech
Comments Off