In the past four days I have found a one-Euro coin on the outer window sill of the shop that is on the first floor of my place three times. I live by the rule “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”, so naturally I have taken the coins and put them to good use by buying something.
However I’m wondering who semi-regularly puts coins on the window sill (always at the exact same position, by the way)? There is a bus stop on the other side of the street, so it is likely that someone waiting for the bus put it there while sorting change and forgot it. But three times in four days? Rather unlikely. Terrorists passing venomed coins to erase my neighborhood? A anonymous do-gooder giving his money to the poor (i.e. me)? Some retard? Really, I have no idea. In any case: Thanks stranger!
(By linking to Google Maps above, I am of course inviting you to come and look for coins yourself. If you find one, ring my door bell. If I happen to be there, you can invest the buck in a fine coffee brewed by yours truly. :-))
Thursday, January 24, 2008, 21:20
There is an interesting news item on BBC NEWS talking about a recent report by the European Commission on the increasing proliferation of biofuel in Europe and especially Great Britain.
Essentially the report states three problems with biofuels:
- Planting for the production of biofuel has a huge impact on the environment. Think of all the machines that are required to farm the cropland.
- In order to have enough space for more cropland, soil needs to be disturbed, i.e. forests may vanish in favor of cropland and land formerly used for food production may be reallocated to producing biofuel. Which leads to the most important and severe issue with biofuel:
- With rising demand for biofuel, food prices will inevitably rise as well. The food producing industry is going to have to compete with the petroleum industry because both need cropland to plant palms, soybeans, and whatever else can be used to produce food or biofuel. This development will especially hurt the population of developing countries.
Essentially this means that while biofuel sounds like an awesome idea at first, it does not turn out to be overly cool in the end.
On a more general level, I have recently been thinking about fuel-based transportation quite a bit and have to come to the conclusion that cars and similar vehicles are an incredibly stupid idea:
- Road traffic is dangerous. In the WHO European region 127.000 people died in road traffic crashes in 2004. I doubt this number has dropped significantly since then.
- Road traffic is bad for the climate. Cars and trucks are an important factor for the increase in global warming. (Not as bad as the industry, but also not neglectible.)
- Road traffic is bad for people’s health. Traffic contributes significantly to air pollution.
- Roads dominate urban architecture. Ever wondered how beautiful your city would look like without streets?
It will be interesting to see how transportation looks like in a few decades. Maybe it will happen in the underground, based on some fancy, climate-neutral technology? Perhaps we’ll have flying taxis like in The Fifth Element? Or will someone eventually get around and figure out how to make Teleportation an industrial-strength technology? Who knows. In the meantime I’ll go out and breath some fresh, aerosol-enriched air.
[Disclaimer: I own a car.]
Thursday, January 24, 2008, 11:33
I’m considering to buy an Apple Time Capsule when it hits the streets next month because I need a backup appliance for my MacBook Pro. What I was wondering today was if getting one is a good deal or not. So I did a bit of investigation and some math. (Following I’ll be looking at prices in US-$, but my fellow citizens in Europe will likely get similar results.)
The 500 GB Time Capsule is going to ship for $299 and includes a 500 GB NAS, a 802.11n Access Point, a DSL router, a 3-port switch, and a print server to hook up USB printers to a network. This feature set can be replicated by the following devices:
This totals in $319.97 (already including insane Amazon discounts), which is 20 bucks more than the Apple device. It lacks Time Machine support which is very unfortunate. Also with this configuration you will have three devices taking up space, consuming energy and requiring maintenance instead of just one Time Capsule.
Of course I’m assuming that one actually needs a router, an access point and a print server in addition to the NAS. I certainly do, so Time Capsule will most likely be a good deal for me.
Sunday, January 20, 2008, 22:46
“Being a programmer must be great — little bits of satisfaction from problem solving on a daily basis.”
— Ricky Van Veen being right
Sunday, January 20, 2008, 22:21
At yesterday’s Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs announced a new version of the Apple TV appliance which includes movie rentals in HD quality. This last fact, ladies and gentlemen, is huge news.
Instead of forcing consumers to enter the compatibility hell that is HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, Apple extends the proven iTunes infrastructure to support high-definition movies and at the same time gives people a good-looking, easy-to-use, and comparably cheap platform to put in their living room right next to their TV.
Forget DVD, forget HD-DVD, forget Blu-ray. Acquiring movies online in awesome quality and playing them on your TV, your laptop, your desktop computer, your iPod, or your phone for that matter is the future. It must not necessary be Apple who wins this game. They have to some extent fucked up selling music in iTunes and it looks like Amazon is passing them currently. But what is important is that someone is seriously starting the competition.
I for one welcome our new HD overlords.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008, 12:08
Sir Edmund Hillary, July 20, 1919 - January 11, 2008.
He and Tenzing Norgay were the first to climb Mt Everest in 1953 and he was an outstanding philanthropist for the Nepalese population. (Photo by Mariusz Kubik.)
Friday, January 11, 2008, 5:00
Flickr Places has this cool feature where you can surf to http://flickr.com/places/random/ and get redirected to a (surprise, surprise) random location in the world. I’m not sure if the redirects are exactly totally randomized because very often Flickr has taken me to places in North America so far, but this might as well be coincidence. Still this is one of those “a lot of bang for the buck”-features: quick to implement and easy to maintain, but highly entertaining.
Thursday, January 10, 2008, 8:10
I’m majorly annoyed that there is no way to automagically keep my contacts in Thunderbird (my mail client of choice) and the Mac OS (my operating system of choice) Address Book in sync. Theoretically I can hook up both of them to an LDAP server but neither Thunderbird nor Address Book are capable of actually editing contacts in LDAP.
But there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Read-only, but better than nothing. (Yup, I’m aware of that.)
Friday, January 4, 2008, 21:50
