Life as an Artificial Lifeform

During betatesting I need to re-install OSX roughly every 2 weeks. Its all no problem on my big machine where I have a seed partition and just let the OSX installer grab my user data from the old system. Also not much changes on this system inside the /User folder as all my changing things like email etc. are on the powerbook and this machine is only for production.
Yet on mentioned powerbook it has been a real pain. As I get many mails, chat logs and other stuff that changes in my roughly 2.9GB homefolder I have to manually back this up and then reinstall it and correct the permissions. I have been looking for some way to change this by having a symlink /User folder on a different partition. Now the Appleseeders came to help and gave me a link.
Here are the instructions on how to do it from the command line. Works well so far.

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html

UPDATE:
After sifting through another beta install I thought I would like to enlighten the world with some more explanations then there are on the original webpage explaining how to move your system folder or how to choose a system folder on another partition without moving...

Obviously the following line (the ditto command) copies your user to "OtherPartition" which can also be a subfolder of said partition (/OtherPartition/Subfolder/User )

sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Users /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users

the next one is the important one that actually sets your user to the new directory in the netinfo utility:

sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username

then you delete your original user directory in /Users/... Only do this if you are certain that your moved directory works as expected (logging out and back in)

sudo rm -dr /Users

then you tell the OS and all Apps that your new /Users/ is in the new location via symlinking it.

sudo ln -s /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users /Users

But what if you didn´t copy the user but want to use a user that you moved from somehwere else (or moved before you installed OSX anew)?

1. Make a new temporary user with the name of the user you want to use.
2. Set owner of the directory that holds the user you want to use to the user you just created.
sudo chown createduser:admin /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser
3. Set permissions to read.write.execute user only.
sudo chmod 700 /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser
4. Put in the above.
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser

5. Now you could delete your new User and symlink the new User Directory as seen above... I run it without it and have the created user as backup in there. I think that is a good way to do it...

Posted by fALk at 21:01 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are frequent to this blog you heard my multiple ramblings on how bad i think television is for the population on the planet. Actually I did something I rarely do - criticize without having a handy solution. The world will breath again the solution is here and its even better then I ever thought as it combines two of the three coolest web-technologies and puts it in an interface as easy to use as a TV box. The ANT is here and their slogan is "ANT´s not television". The slogan is a ripoff from "GNU´s not Linux" and could not be better suited. ANT gives you a nice clean interface as easy to use as the Quicktime Player and a TV set fused together.
The cool thing: its actually nothing more then an RSS feed reader. Yes this little "rss feed" or "xml feed" or "atom feed" you see on the right of many blogs and more and more newssites is used to give you an almost TV like experience. You alter the RSS feed a little (for example in movable type you put <$MTEntryRelEnclosures$> in the RSS 2.0 feed template) and then put in a rel="enclosure" in between your link to the movie you post and from that the ANT filters out the movies. You subscribe to the feed through ANT and click on refresh and there you go. You just watch the movies as they come in. You can refresh all of your subscribed feeds during the night and watch true Blog TV in the morning. You have to try it out to see how cool and easy this is.
After you download ANT you have some pre-installed feeds in there. You can just go to add to add another feed like the one for my vj-blog (copy link).
This programs brings you the closest to TV experience on the web while at the same time beeing MILES away from beeing TV as this is truly giving everyone the right to be a publisher of their own TV channel - on demand and fast :)

Posted by fALk at 12:19 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some have gotten to it through unknown dark channels. Some have seen my new email footer, some belong to the VideoBlogging community but most have not seen it yet as I am still in the preparation phase (I thought). The feedback I got already without making it public at large has pushed me to the point where I prematurely have to announce my "little" side project. A true VJ blog. Why? because the google.com ranking for "vj blog" shows me in first place out of 159.000 search queries - for a reason totally unknown to me. Actually this is the first day you see entries that have "blog" and "vj" in the same sentence. Since a lot of people seemed to come to me from google through the term vj blog I have thought about how a real VJ blog should look like. And here it is. If you want my full thoughts on it you have to navigate to the first entry. To sum it up a little excerpt from said entry:

The idea is to collect visual information through the day and post a short vj loop that incorporates personal interesting pictures and movies from the day. A longer cut up of all the week in vj loops will come on (some) weekends.

And while we are on topic. Video Blogging seems all the hype right now. The mailinglist burst out with over 400 mails in 3 days and the community is one of the most active, happy, futuristic forward looking I have ever joined on the net. They truly believe that what they do will change the web and change TV and this is actually what got me hooked.
Is videoblogging the potential TV killer? If you just look at the blogs through a webbrowser you might not think so but the true killer application for videoblogging is the ANT. Since the ANT is SOOO cool I will have a new blog entry just for this in the next 10 minutes so hold on :)

Posted by fALk at 11:53 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AVIT returns to its hometurf again this year. Birmingham in the UK is the place to be from april 25th to may 1st – if you are a VJ. This years AVIT Uk will be a little different then the former. It runs a whole week instead only an extended weekend and the emphasis is clearly on education rather then showcase. Not to say that there won´t be any showcases - drop beats not bombs will be an event that features AVIT VJs with political content for example.
Personally I will be there the whole week and will hold a talk on narrative VJing and have a showcase at the mix labs educational show without beat support by fRED but hopefully with music by MoGreens. Also I will unveil the first true VJ blog to the VJ masses.

Posted by fALk at 11:27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe its just me beeing a vj but I find this new phone prototype almost more useful then the camera phones. It looks like a normal cell phone but has a projection system build in where you can display a keyboard or presentations in front of a small audience. Yeahhhh a beamer in a cellphone. And its not even the normal LCD beamer type - its a LASER beamer. Something that was developed for big projection systems by schneider 3-5 years ago but never saw the light (literally) as an actual product. Now this tech goes into mobile phones. I hope they make it color and stronger and then put it into an iPod... maybe Mr. Jobs is then not so against video playing iPods anymore ;)
Imagine all the movies you gonna see in a commuter train when all the iPod junkies project their movies onto the ceiling.

Posted by fALk at 23:22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since he seems a little shy with the announcement I think today is the day to welcome him to the blogosphere with his new blog fRELHI_V1.0. The idea for his blog is told shortly. He got a VJ commitment for two month in New Dehli /India for a new club there and will also do vj lectures. Its all pretty exiting and seeing a VJ take of for gigs into another continent can only mean good things for all of us. I wish him all the best over there and eagerly await his entries. Go check it out.

http://www.prototypen.com/blog/fred

Posted by fALk at 11:10 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New Scientist is reporting that the University of Bath (apparently with no connection to a former iraqi regime) is developing a 3d Printer for everyone. 3D printers in todays use cost from $25.000 upward and are hard to assemble, manufacture and maintain as they contain high precision laser equipment. When the first 3D rapid prototyping printers came to market (back in the 70s) the inventors thought by the mid 80s everyone would have a 3d printer at home – this has not happened to the day. Adrian Bowyer of said UK University wants to bring this futuristic vision to life. By making a design that does not need the expensive laser he is pursuing a machine that could even replicate itself. But fear not that the machine makes millions of babies when you forgot to turn it off. You still have to assemble the individual copy parts on your own and put in a bought microprocessor to actually make the copy fully functional.
Now this is one research that could have a bigger impact then the TV, the Microwave and Powerlines alltogether, because in theory you could download design from the internet and print em out for just the cost of the raw material (which is an alloy, lead, tin combination for metal parts and some plastic/glue compound for the plastic parts). Read: you can make all the plastic/electric toys you ever dreamed of in a perfect fashion. Mr. Bowyer also wants all the designs to be somehow open source - means you get them all for free on the net once this thing goes into production. The total cost for the machine is $500 so affordable to most. Basically you have your own personal assembly line in the living room that can make you own customized gadgets or replace broken parts in you household etc etc. If that is not cool I don´t know. You could make all the little thing you always wanted to make... I hope he succeeds with his invention.

Posted by fALk at 14:58 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the lone wolfs fighting for a free open digital culture - next to Linus Torwald - is Lawrence Lessig. He is one of the idea founders behind Creative commons and most free copy rights management ideas that we are seeing today are based on his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace from 1999. Now he is doing an update to this book as we are in the next century and he does this by - very 21st century style - opening up a wiki and let everyone interested in copyrights of the digital age take part in writing the book. The whole wiki is published under - of course - a special Creative Common Wiki License (beta) and all money he makes from selling the book will go to the Creative Commons Foundation. Sounds all good and I hope he makes again a big impact on revolutionizing the current copyright system.
I would like to point out that most artistic work comming out of the Prototypen - like the music from Klartext or all of our blogs or my code releases - are under some form of Creative Common or GPL licenses and the spirit is share alike and mention us. I ultimately think that this is the only way to a free culture with a free art and knowledge exchange. We want to move forward and not go back to the middle ages were all information and creativity was controlled by one entity. Back then it was the church today its the corporations (and to some part the corporate puppet governments).

Posted by fALk at 14:43 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

From time to time I get across articles that talk about the state of the once beloved lead medium TV. All of the articles that talk about TV in general forecast a dark shadowy future. So does todays article on telepolis (german). It tries to de-sect the mythos that TV is the guidance media of our times and compares it to the other medias that have had a much deeper impact on society and still have (printed word). The article fails on one major point: it argues that TV might not be heavily infulencing society. I think that everyone who knows someone who watches TV will say this is simply not true. The attention grabbing medium has wasted so much time of so many individuals that its impact on society can not be downplayed for that reason alone. Also the "slim trendy beautiful" generation that is now in its mid 20s to mid 30s was influenced by TV - because the TV was portraying this culture of all things must be beautiful trendy and chic. Without a TV picture most girls wouldn´t know that they have to be slim to be accepted or boys know how to move to the latest hihop dance rythms. The good thing about all this is that I see more and more people hating TV leaving it off most of the time mostly because of VERY shitty content that gets worse by the day. The heise article states that the bad quality is because that quotas are the only way to messure the "quality" of a TV program and to crank out high numbers of people you have to be as broad as possible. Now if I follow that thought I think the mass population is doing anything to make TV as relevant as any other medium and loose its leadership status among print and radio and internet. So people continue watch stupid soaps and when you are bored throw away the TV all together - then you have contributed to the media revolution and have helped future generations not becoming corporate influenced couch potatoes ....

Posted by fALk at 14:19 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aljazeera.com is reporting what those following the happenings in iraq outside the mainstream media already know. The Town of Fallujah is still embattled and now about 70% of all houses in the town are completely destroyed and every single one of the other 30% shows extensive damage. Which means that the whole town is completely destroyed. And the fight is not over yet. The insurgents are still in control of portions of Fallujah. People returning finding their dead neighbors who got eaten by their own dogs and only rubble where ones their homes stood. To make it even less encouraging for the inhabitants to go back to the city you are not allowed to go on the street when the sun is not on the sky and you still have to give finger and iris print to the American Army and wear a badge to the outside that shows you are "registred". This practice somehow reminds me of a yellow star that all jews had to wear in Nazi Germany after they got registred - only that this yellow star had not your fingerprint and iris scan with it. Right now Fallujah looks more like a huge prison camp then a healthy town. And get this the LA Times writes the following sentence:

It seems that the U.S. is "confident that residents will come to accept that the destruction was necessary to rid Fallujah of the insurgents who had controlled the city,"

Right! Not that most of the residents support the insurgent and want nothing more then getting the USA out of their town - no they will probably think its totally fine that all they had is destroyed and that with the little they have left they can now restart a new live with even less. If you still draw no connection between modern day America and old Nazi Germany you live behind the moon. The tacticts are just much more refined. The american government has learned a lot in WWII and Vietnam on how to please the masses. The masses has forgotten about the atrocities of the pst wars and the media control is much much better as you have only a few media conglomerates that define the public opinion (at least in the US, but I doubt its much better anywhere).

Posted by fALk at 12:35 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Star Wars Episode III Trailer

The last (or middle depends on how you look at it) episode of the biggest saga in movie making history will hit the theater screen on May 15th 2005. Will it be so disappointing like the first two episodes that came and went in all its digital glory just to be extremely lacking in story telling and fxs compared to the classic last three episode from the 1970s and 1980s.
The Trailer for Episode III - Revenge of the Sith is now available and it does look good - but the trailers for the first two episodes also looked very promising and the movies were rather disappointing. I guess we will see soon enough how the saga unfolds and the Jedi got to fight the once great prosperous republik.

Posted by fALk at 12:14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just read on Slashdot that the bloggers are out to fight the blog spam by googlebombing certain search terms like Online Poker and redirecting them to the special Wikipedia site dedicated to online poker. Now this might seem unfair for google but it does help awareness of the blog spam problem which everyone who has a blog seems to fight and at the same time raise awareness for the great Wikipedia project. Now I feel better and hope those spammers go away. Online Poker as words or part of URL is banned in my comments btw. At the moment the term Online Poker ranks 3rd in google.com

Posted by fALk at 17:27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the maker of VJCentral - Mr eXhale from Switzerland comes a community website of a different kind. Something that is of deep interest to me as I personally research the true meaning of spiritual interconnectivity - a topic that always comes up in my dreams and visions of the future... if that all sounds like I am stoned let me provide you with a quote from an articel that eXhale put out and that I kind of agree with:

We do not need technology to reconnect to each others, to find informations or to pass it around. We are already all spiritually connected and all these activities can be done in synchronicity but it requires patience and trust in the universe; we must stop listening to our ego which try to force things on as many people as possible.

And this thought goes deeper then one might imagine and it might be the reason we have communication technology in the first place (to point out that this connection is indeed happening). I do not agree with eX that all utterly bad and part of a dark self emanating conspiracy theory. I do think technology will finally help us to find this connection and make it apparent even to the last that we are all one.

Posted by fALk at 13:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This questions goes around the blogs and press these days and I have a few thoughts that I would like to share in the hope they may be heard.
I personally have no good writing skills - neither in english nor in german - I have always had bad grades in school when it came to literature and writing. But I have opinions, and I have knowledge that some might not have and seek. I have information regarding me and my surrounding that might be interesting to others as those are things that others do not have access to - either because they are on a totally different planetary location or they do not know the same persons.
So for me a blog is to share my knowledge and share my information (as much as I legally can) and share my thoughts to give a piece of foundation to an understanding of the world races and ultimately for peace...
So are blogger journalists? Should they be granted the same rights as journalists? I think the questions should be turned around. Why are there people called journalists having more rights to obtain information then a normal citizen. Why can no normal citizen walk in a "press conference" and ask question that they think personally affects them? Why can no normal citizen request information that they think they have a valid concern about. Things that a normal journalist would never think of because it does not affect them personally?
My point is: every person on this planet should have the same access to all information available - be it a professional journalist who can write beautiful sentences or a common man who just writes about its gut feelings. I think the real revolution is the media revolution and only if everyone has the same unrestricted access and the same possibilities to write then we can talk about a free press. The second point always seemed the hardest. How can you give a lot of people an international voice that has the same outreach as tradtional media like TV. That point is now mute with the advent of blogging and the internet. Now we need to give us all the same voice legally. Now we have to ask for unrestricted access to all information for everybody only if we get this we will have true personal unbiased freedom of speech and freedom of thought (which is even more important). Only then we will have the power to make people wake up from their consume driven slavery....

Posted by fALk at 11:48 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I stumbled across a link on VJForums that I think is utterly cool. There is a company that sells professional shredding equipment to destroy just about anything you might want to destroy. Boats, Computers, Plastic toys, couches concrete steel. You name it they can shred it. And to show us all how it works they have videos on their website showing the shredder in action on various stuff. I personally found the plastic toy destruction very sad... Now if you could put in nuklear weapons then the world would be safer.

WATCH IT SHRED

Posted by fALk at 12:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via kluge.de come a link to to a very interesting radio concept website. LAST.FM is a way to make a personalized radio station that plays only your music. In return you can listen to radio stations that are near in taste with yours. You put together a playlist with your favorite songs (hey you can even block songs that will never appear to be even accidentely selected by you) then you hit play and it plays them. The website then figures out who else has a similar taste in music and offers to listen to their personized tracks. Interesting concept.

Posted by fALk at 14:17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have finally an official website for our local small sub.culture club. The Curie Club is locally the only way to get exposed to true subculture in sound and vision - our word for that is optophonic. Local young artists and people interesting doing something for our sub.cultural needs get together here and make something very cool. The website is still in its infancy but if you always wanted to know what goes on in a small suburb of Berlin and know some german head over to the Curie Club. We always welcome new people - local or global - who want to help in any way to make this club something special. Drop us a line if you are interested.

Posted by fALk at 0:08 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had internal debate with myself if I should do this post but the video I accidently found on the net yesterday really stayed in my mind. First I want to say that I hate war and violence from whatever side it comes. Yesterday marked the day where the 1500th US soldier died in Iraq - that means the Iraq war has been half as devestating to normal US citizens as the September 11 attacks. I do feel strongly with those families who had no other choice as to send their children into the war as they struggle daily survival in debt ruling america under a president that wants to conquer the world. I also feel for the families of the 18.000 (low estimate) Iraqies that died in the last two years of the invasion that was sold to them as liberation. So yesterday I found a clip that shows how the daily life of the ordinary soldiers on the american front line looks like - where those 1.500 death come from. I want to extremely caution if you are a light soul - I can not get this out of my head. I do not sympathize for the brutal killing of any human life on either side and I am sure there are even more shocking pictures that could be recorded from the other point of view. Its just that those would not fit into any pro american propaganda.

american convoy explosion

a guardian artikel on the subjekt

Posted by fALk at 11:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After 14 years Berlins last standing club from the good old times will close its door in its old location "Leipziger Strasse" close to the Potsdamer Platz. The Tresor is the club most remember beeing exposed to techno first (right next to the e-werk which was closed years ago) and is still one of the best clubs in town when it comes to pure electronic music. The Tresor headquarter is looking for a new location (or has already one and doesn´t want to tell anyone ;) but the old building which was a former bank and has a massive tresor room downstairs that got the club the name will be remembered as pure underground location with exessive parties.
To celebrate the last birthday - 14 years - the Tresor crew gives everyone a massive four day party starting next Wednesday March 9th and ending Saturday March 12th. audio acts include:

Rhythym & Sound 45 Session Feat. Paul St. Hillaire & Friends
Francois K.
Surgeon
Neil Landstrumm + Bill Youngman
Phonique
Stewart Walker
James Pennington aka Suburbian Knight
Tresor Headquarter Allstars
and many many more...

As for visuals prototypen is providing the booking for the VJs during the event. We have invited what we think is a good mix of artists that fit into the Globus/Tresor environment.

These include:
zelabo (fr) who stunned us with their beautiful set at AVIT
videokonferenz feat. videoking (hamburg) resident at click808 and moonbootika
proto.beamaz: fRED&fALk (berlin) we don´t want to miss this great party :)
spark (uk) Big Chill, AVIT Uk -> one of the best mixers of graphic and video

All these will be presented on the upper floor Globus on a massive Backlit Video Projection Wall.

We hope to see lots of familiar faces and have all great good bye birthday party.

Posted by fALk at 16:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)