Media servers

Yeah, it's true. Most geeks have some kind of file server at home. But I would expect most of them to be a little smaller than this one:
http://blogs.nexenta.org/blog/2008/12/16/my-zfs-media-server/

The power of procrastination

Yeah, I know, this is something we typically read about in "Piled higher and deeper". But in the recent past, more and more authors procrastinate by contemplating about procrastination. This is one of them:

ZFS

Probably most of us have already heard about ZFS. Yeah, it's the file system that requires more energy to fill up than boiling the oceans, according to its creators.
This story however, to use it on Ubuntu, is so delicious, you have to read it. Enjoy.

Fast food (probably part) I

OMG, what do we learn from here:
"Iceland is currently the only country in Europe to have publicly accessible Taco Bell."
Shocking! Why not Greenland?

Vista sadness

This is quite funny, so I let it speak for itself:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/10/vista-bad-steals
Thanks for the link, Matt.

Decent breakfast

I recently found this recipe promising an indescribably delicious dish that will certainly turn every fucking standard day into one of the greatest days of all time:
Behoooooooooold: The Spam Breakfast Burrito!
You'll love it!

[Update:] The Spam Vegetable Strudel also sounds lovely!

The Platypus Code

It's official. The weirdness of the hodgepodge that is the platypus is now confirmed genetically. The animal is so strange, anatomically and physiologically, that British scientiests at first thought it was a hoax when it was sent from Australia in the 19th century. The animal looks like it is made up of spare parts from duck, mole and beaver. It lays eggs and is both furry and poisonous. AND it has cool electro-reception to work out where its food is swimming. Now they tell us that, true to form, it has bird, reptile and mammalian-type DNA. The fact that they sequenced it was cool enough, this just takes the cake.

T.H.E.Y.

After years of occasional thinking "dude, you have to look this up" I finally remembered to do so when I watched the corresponding Pinky and The Brain episode. T.H.E.Y. are "The Horde of Ecumenical Yodelers" and Brain explains this obscure acronym like: "They don't actually yodel... their name is but an innocent sounding smoke screen to divert attention from the group's true purpose - to rule the earth." I came to wonder whether Peter Gabriel's "Us" could mean something similar...

Human Tetris

A Swiss multimedia artist has created several nifty videos emulating classic computer games using human subjects, including the viral Human Tetris, which has been nominated for a Youtube Creative Video Award. It's so well-executed, you feel like you're actually playing the game yourself as the video runs :)

Turnover

Yes, I think I finally have hit the turnover point in my personal history of spam. It looks like in the last week I received less spam mails than delivery failure notifications for spam mails where some bastard forged my e-mail address to send spam to the rest of the world. Now, is that good or bad?

It's us geeks...

...who design chips. If you don't believe this, look for yourself:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careersarchive/people/mar02/chipf2.html

Karl Klammer

What is wrong with all the people? Not too long ago, I was forced to take a look at that horrible horrible terrible horrid Office 2007 bullshit package. It looks untidy, its toolbars are cluttering half (if not more) of my screen, its UI paradigm are totally different and weird, it was not (okay, that is not surprising at all, after all it's a genuine Microsoft product) able to open the first Powerpoint 2003 file flying around, it has this nasty shiny big button on the left hand side and it lacks the most important, cool feature of the old Office: Clippit...

...or "Karl Klammer" which is its much cooler German name that I am going to use from now. How could this happen? Actually, Karl was the reason to choose Office 2003 over any other office suite in the world. Now we can as well use LaTeX to type our one-page-letters...
By the way, why do the search expressions "Karl Klammer" and "Petition" in google not result in several sites with the attempt to bring Karl back? They only point to rant of irrelevant people how to get rid of him! Can you imagine?
Karl, you will always have a special place in my heart. Forever.

Shuffle play

I absolutely cannot find a word to describe how true this comic on xkcd regarding shuffle playing large playlists is. Can you?

Mobile phones

Telephones are the worst form of verbal human interaction. They are just horrible. End of story. The only thing that's worse are mobile phones. And that poor children are subject to mobbing these days in case they don't have a mobile phone by the time they learn to read and write is just mad. So I never found mobile phones any interesting. Until today. It seems that the OpenMoko FreeRunner can be pre-ordered now. Although that doesn't make telephone more interesting, it would be neat to have one of these devices where I can actually change things that piss me off on other crappy phones (like my own) that allow ludicrously insignificant modifications like a different fu**ing ring tone. Let's observe this in the not too distant future.

Geeky hobbies

Sometimes it is nice to actually find something cool, useful and geeky when browsing the Internet. Among the bazillions of porn pages, so-called news concerning Paris Hilton's hair colour and other waste of bandwidth, I stumbled upon some very beautiful pictures of processor dies that an engineer took on his own workbench. Respect, I say.

The inner working of a cell

Recently we came across a nice video about the inner workings of cells:
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html
Maybe next time this is recycled by Pixar for "The mitochondria movie" that tops the box office results of "The bee movie".

Intro

Okay, finally I got my guts together and created this new blog. I hope with time some other people are going to contribute as well. I decided that the first entry should be something of epic importance. Can you remember that one: