Andreas Wacker

In a recent computer shuffle I must have missed to deactivate a laptop of mine. I got in touch with Adobe, hoping that they could provide me with the serial numbers of the computers that have the license. They were able to give me numbers. I didn’t get around to try to locate / translate them into a mac serial number: They were so kind to reset the activation count of my license.

This is awesome service. A benefit of using an illegal copy was that one would not have to worry when switching machines. With Adobe having this excellent license policy and support they make it much easier to do the right thing and to buy the software. I will remember this the next time I need to consider software purchases.

Just switched back from the 27″ Apple Cinema display (latest with Thunderbolt etc) to the 30″ one after a couple of weeks.

The 27″ has a nice picture. But it is useless. I am ready to write it off and put into a corner. It looks nice. When it is turned off. Or when one glances over pretty pictures.
But for any work that requires reading it is not usable. A glossy screen is in the end a mirror. My brain sees the content on the screen and the reflection of the room behind
me. For me that causes un needed strain after a couple of hours. Maybe that’s related to the fact that I also get to see myself

I find it amazing that the 7 year old 30″ design is still the best screen that Apple ever made. There were hardware bumps etc. No wonder they go for a high price on eBay.

The whole glossy saga let me degrade my 13″ MacBook Pro’s into Backup and Wife usage. Back on the 17″ non glossy display I must say that it was really worth the switch.
A shame since the 13″ is a neat little machine. With 8GB Ram and a recent CPU it is quiet a bit of punch. Back on the Aircraft Carrier I realized that I missed all those pixels though.

So glad I found this great introduction and overview of medical imaging.

I liked the article since it gives a great overview of different techniques together with their genesis. Stuff like a PET scanner does not rain down on humanity. Lots of people needed to work hard to realize it. Ideas, Patents and -as it turns out- the Beatles were needed and involved.

I personally found it fascinating how much ample computation power has enabled. Nothing that mattered in the last 40 years would have been conceivable without massive numerical processing. Even 99.999% of computing power is wasted on Facebook and games it is just awesome that we people deviced instruments to compute so cheaply.

It is probably impossible to estimate the impact that technologies like DfMRI will have on our knowledge and picture of ourselves. The microscope changed the world and each of our lives in the most radical ways. Which might only have dawned on people in the 17th century.

Of course the link was found in Wikipedia. After having set up a monthly donation to them and knowing how good it feels now and will do in the future I wonder why I did not do so earlier. Specially learning new things most Wikipedia pages allow a quick overview about the topic. What I personally really love is how detailed yet concise even very specialized topics are being documented. Quiet brilliant.

When adding the feed

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044

to google reader the resulting page showed the wrong content, while the title is correct:

This seems to be a caching issues. The workaround was to simply alter the URL in a way that would not have any effect on the feed:

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044?x

shows the expected content.

It is very telling to watch the first 2 minutes of this video

Libya is a country that had significant changes in 2011. Nato flew countless missions. It is shocking to see somebody who aspires to become president
respond to a question about this in this manner: This is a person trying to recall phrases he has memorized.

It would be so much fun to swap one of the cards that the candidates learn from. Have them utter total rubbish for a minute.
But one never knows if that would not get them elected …

Last century we bought 3 full size Samsonite Oyster suitcases. Back then you had to put some stickers on them to distinguish them from all the others that people had.
That changed. Now there are all those black soft textile bags on the belt. I never understood why.

Those suitcases are simply amazing. They have traveled ridiculous miles by now. Life is tough if you are luggage. I can not imagine what kind of treatment they have gone through. They always worked.

I was very saddened when he lock broke on one of them. I don’t think I want any other suitcase. Rimowa seems to be en vogue. But I feel that they would not work better and probably look pretty beat up within a couple of months. I also don’t like if my luggage tells the world “Hey - check this out - I have money - stealing here is worth the risk”.

But as it turns out Samsonite did not only make awesome products, their service rocks as well:

I emailed them, asking if I could order a spare lock. They asked for my address and will send me a replacement lock for free.

I love it if things work right. I think this kind of service is truly inspiring.

Me loves my Samsonites!

At7T now

vs

Nextel 5 years ago

For some people is bendable. Sadly they will pay the price for their ignorance.

Seeding confusion is one tool deliberately being used to keep peoples away from certain facts.

Another one is ‘astroturf trolling’ - as in the comments for this article.

For me the forces and practices of Fox News & Co are just 1 level up from spammers & scammers.

So far society and people just endure those issues. Hope that changes.

It changed for other ailments like slavery or witch hunts before.

Yeah for OptOutPrescreen. Takes less than a minute to have five years of no credit card offers in your mail box.
Unless they are not who they say they are and half of Ukraine is gonna have a big party now with my social and other info. Well - luckily https is still pretty safe,
and so is google showing the site as the first hit, as long one is careful.

I was expecting the Opt Out process to be tedius. Turns out it wasn’t at all. Nice. Now let’s see when the letters top coming in …

Walter Murch is easily my second most favorite editor.

I really like how his talks focus on new aspects, and yet they are coherent. Since he is a coherent. It is always nice to listen to somebody who thinks for himself.
Not just repeats what others might have said. Even when he talks about ‘The Tell Tale Brain” - a book that I read and loved myself - he is able to give it an interesting
new perspective for me.

I sometimes wonder what the ratio of people that think as astute and independent as he does would need to be so that it would change the world.
My guess is that it actually very small. My fear is that the ratio in reality is even smaller than that.

Dear Google, I understand that one might feel sometimes the urge to rock the boat. That’s OK. google+ did not hurt. The black top bar is fine. Google Reader is a bit of a different story. But I’ll manage. But, please, please, pretty please: DO NOT let those people anywhere near gmail.

Just keep it working. As it is. It is great. No need for social features. No need for Buzz/Wave/whatever-you-fancy.

I’d be happy to give you even more money for it. Just don’t mess with it.

Please.
Pretty Please.

looks like Munch got it right (there are clips inside of the slideshow)

This one will be tricky to explain to the wife

Upside is that it’ll last around 400 years or so. No joke. Some of the machines in my dads work shop are older than 120 years. I could not destroy them when I was young. That makes them very indestructible.

During childhood we build an idea of our surroundings. Kids figure stuff out quiet naturally. It’s what we are wired to do. When are young. Or when we like to learn.

I don’t think that this is a big deal - since people always did adopt to new ways of communicating. Reading and Writing are similar techniques that are ‘no natural’.

I think that it is a big deal - since more and more of our world is made up by glowing rectangles. We are what we watch. And what we watch could be controlled by some few corporations. No need to put people in pods like in ‘the matrix’ and maintaining them. They can do that themselves AND be under tight super vision.

I guess we will find out which one it will be.

A recent lecture by David Simon

Very much worth seeing. He has his own perceptive that is coherent and thoughtful and based on his first hand experience. For me was able to shed some light on why the USA is the country with the biggest jail population. According to him 7% of inmates are there for violent crimes. Prisons are a profitable and growing business in the US. I don’t agree on his views in terms of labor. Would maybe be nice if the world would still be like he sees it. Small countries like Germany can still work under those premises. But only since they supply the rest of the world with their products. You don’t see many US made cars in Germany. Robots don’t need unions. Things have changed so dramatically in the last 10, 20 years. But the political system and peoples minds and perceptions are stuck in some fairy tale land of the 50s.

Yesterday two ’science stories’ ‘broke’: “Neutrinos traveling faster than light” and “Computers can read images out of the brain”. I am borderline clueless on matters of physics, so I leave that one alone. The fMRI mashup by Nishimoto et al is borderline in my view. The presentation of their findings makes it way to easy to drum up headlines like “Brain Imaging Reveals What You’re Watching” or “Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video ”

Only spending little time with the setup it seems that the experiement pretty much reveals that 5,000 hours of youtube video are so stereotypical that even a fMRI of the v1 can match some patterns back. For a given individual, after hours of learning. To suggest that the video shown on the right as ‘coming out’ of the brain is extremely misleading.

Having two of those studies in one day means nothing of course. But one can go off on a tangent and wonder why - I am sure wonderful - people and scientists drop science in exchange for head lines and eyeball. Maybe it is time to decide over the 2012 budget? And I am sure that given realities of today it is much to get money for “we can go back in time” or “we can film your dreams”.

I have doubts that the Manhattan Project would have a chance today. Rewind to 1940: Some professors had drawn some numbers on chalk board. Up this day only very few
people understood what they were talking about. I certainly have no clue. They had no computer simulated films. They had no precedence. The bomb they were talking about
was by multiple magnitudes bigger than anything that had done before. There was nothing in reality to show for. Just scribblings on a chalkboard. And some common consensus among a few people. One could see this happening if they would have asked to disappear into the desert to do a bit of thinking. But they needed a bit more: Factories bigger than anything else that had been built. And 10% of all electricity in the entire US to run them. To make a handful of matter that -according to science- might make one big boom.
All based on science. And politicians and military people did go with it. And they built different models that both worked after five years.

iTunes just rejected to play a song that I purchased 3 years ago, since it told me I need to authenticate my current computer.
Instead of trying to figure out what is broken with the Apple authentication for that song I just went ahead and bought it again on Amazon. Without CRM.

Apple is notorious for having one of the worst user management systems for their online services. The documentation of my Apple ID changes and resets
spans many pages. There are none for other systems and services that I used equally long.

Funny how one company can be so great in a couple of areas and fail so consistently in others.

Adweek ventures into cultural history. And - in my opinion - they actually do succeed.

On a recent Macbook Pro (i7, Macbook Pro 8.1) post Feb 2011 I did not have much love from a kernel driver. Oddly google was not that helpful.

/var/log/system.log system log complained along the lines of:

[0x0-0x30030].WebToGo.ePlus2_1[1106]:
/System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardActivateDriver.kext failed to load -
(libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found;
check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).

The fix was pretty simple: Just boot the machine into 32bit mode. Turns out the default boot mode is 64bit on later hardware. One way to find out which OS mode you run is to go to:

About this Mac
More Info …
click directly on the Software item on the left.

You will see 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: “Yes” in the second last line.

If you hold the numbers 3 and 2 during boot then you will be in 32bit mode and get probably much more love from 32 bit extension. In my case it was an Aldi Surfstick S4012 based on a Huawei one that caused some grief in 64bit.

Since not many 64 native machines are out there it explains why this topic is not easier to google right now.

Some people say that humans genetically mutate to become better typists and cite the increased incidence rate of media artery cases. Oddly “homo facebookinensis” is still a noogle.

I made a map of the current ecoli outbreak in Germany.

There is actually also a german version: Ehec Karte Deutschland

Gamma Slamma is a great little tool to remove gamma flags in PNG files. You just drop files on it. Simple as that.
Unfortunately 4 years after its inception it is increasingly 404ing. So here a link to the DMG in case you need to download it:
GammaSlamma 1.1

A, the good old days, when I had hair (well kinda) and computers were large, big and expensive.
These emulators from Nvidia reminded me of that time back last century.
And they also get to show how much horsepower actually is in a modern day GPU.

Honest logos. Could easily be extended. Probably since companies with much to hide pay more for their branding.

A great illustration of how the user experience of getting your movie going is quiet different depending on if you have paid for it - or not.

On the carton of orange juice it reads “low in saturated fat”. Orange juice, fat?? WTF. What are they thinking. How many people ever considered OJ to be fatty? Pretty clear which country you are in when you read this kind of ‘nutrition information’.

Switching machines I realized that I had to re-install webmailer. This wonderful preference plane lets you launch any web based mail program whenever your default mail application would be launched.

I have used it for years. Thousands of times. And it always worked.

And I failed to appreciate that. Going through our lives our attention is where we need to act or avoid. The broken and annoying stuff is what we notice.

All the well working things that surround us go naturally under appreciated. And, since people have piled up allot of technology and culture in the last couple of generations there is actually a huge amount of that.

If a thousand items worked and one does not, that one will be all we think about.

brand feedback

via Eric Alba.

in 3D and 1.8D


main() {char q=34,n=10,*a="main() {char q=34,n=10,*a=%c%s%c; printf(a,q,a,q,n);}%c"; printf(a,q,a,q,n);}


Lovely find here

So, you think you are super cool, since you ordered a gulfstream private jet?

Well, unfortunately there are still a couple of people that 1-up you. By a long shot.

Boeing builts 747s since the late sixties. What meant to be used for cargo, since all long passenger flight would go super sonic soon anyway, became the largest passenger plane. Until recently: Airbus finally trumped those huge 747 jumbos with their dead ugly A380 a few years ago.

One of those 43 sold A380s will actually be converted into a flying palace.

Boeing revealed their new 747-8i yesterday:

Turns out that 7 out of the 28 ordered 787-8i will be sold to “VIP clients” as well. The super rich certainly got allot richer in the last years.

Usually that kind of wealth can afford to remain invisible. Having the worlds largest passenger jet converted to your liking gives a glimpse how a billionaire rolls in 2011.

A good summary of what happened to Nokia. Point is that engineers can not run the show. But -of course- all the prettiest design in the world can not safe a project / company if the underlying technology is not up to the task.