Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Nicht live vom Chaos Communication Congress aber über ihn mit einem Eindruck von ErstbesucherInnen ein wenig Kritik ein wenig Einblicke. Noch gute Ausgehtips für Sylvester und heute und morgen und so und Links für 10 in einer Minute. Alles aus dem halligen Proto.Office mit illegalem LiveStream vom Maschinenraum als musikalische Untermalung.

Wie immer am besten den podcast subscriben (iTunes -> Erweitert -> Podcast abbonieren -> link reinkopieren)

http://www.prototypen.com/radio/index.xml

oder durch den iTunes Music Store abbonieren (muss man nur auf Link drücken und dann im Musik Store auf abbonieren gehen)
Radio Prototypen im iTunes Music Store

oder direkt speichern unter
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/rP_08b_VolldampfVorraus.m4a

Links des podcast im Enhanced Teil des MPG4 ausserdem im Lyrics Teil und hier:

Basti aka DJ Seagle
24C3: Volldampf Vorraus
maschinenraum
24c3 Abschlussparty Cbase
Odysee Im Tacheles
AquaRitter/Feieralarm
Back to Basic Party
Sylvester im Deep
DaFont.com
Anarchist Action Figure
Webseiten die Keiner braucht
HipHop Classic im Affenclub

Posted by fALk at 18:47 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just stumbled across the space.com website and find it hacked. Funny guys the script kiddies arabian 1337 h4x0rz,

Posted by fALk at 19:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ein wenig spät und durch eine MacOS 9 Garageband limitation (kann nur 2GB daten verarbeiten - böse apple böse! ) in zwei teilen. Dafür umsolänger und mit viel humor.

Heute eine lustiges Potpourri in zwei Teilen mit gefährlichem Halbwissen über den Vorwahlkampf in den USA, verbotenen Mülltüten, Webdesign Zweepunktbeta, einem absolut missglücktem Jahresrückblick ein wenig Tod für die Musikindustrie Einblicke in das Denken aufstrebender Bands, wenigen Ausgehtips und großartig schrägen links and so viel gelache das einem warm ums Herz werden muss zur Osterzeit.

Wie immer am besten den podcast subscriben (iTunes -> Erweitert -> Podcast abbonieren -> link reinkopieren)
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/index.xml

oder durch den iTunes Music Store abbonieren (muss man nur auf Link drücken und dann im Musik Store auf abbonieren gehen)
Radio Prototypen im iTunes Music Store

oder direkt speichern unter
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/rP_0_7b__mobile_paper_dub_P1.m4a

http://www.prototypen.com/radio/rP_0_7b__mobile_paper_dub_P2.m4a

Hier die Links (auch im enhanced PodcastFormat sowie im Lyrics Teil vorhanden):

Part 1
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Hintergrund Musik: DUBRoom
5 years Creative Commons
pR 0.8b Live vom Chaos Communication Congress
Feature Musik: jatari.org
Warum Steglitz uncool ist
Kucinich
Rudy Giuliani
McCain
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John Edwards
Lakota Indina are free
Ron Paul
Mike Huckabee
Staging Nukes for Iran War
Feature Musik: jatari.org
In Rawanda werden Plastktüten verboten
Politisch Korrekte Werbung
Spreeblicks neues Blog System?
Punkrawker.de kann nicht verlinkt werden
Der WebZweiNull Look Bash
Präsentation über das "Web 2.o Design"
Make My Logo Bigger
Jatari: Charge

Part 2
-----------
MTV propagiert den offiziellen Tod der Musikindustrie
Wired Artikle über das Bandsurvival im 21a href="Jhd
Radiohead Dead AirSpace
Musik: Dubroom.org
Smoky Taste Flavor im Kufa
HipHop Classics
Choas Communication Congress 24
Silvester in Potsdam for free
The funniest flowcharts on the net
Gizmos aus anderer Zeit
Politisch korrekte Werbung
The Now Clock
Delutube - gelöschte YouTube Video schauen
the wayback machine
Mogulus YouTubeLiveTV
fabchannel.com

Frohe Ostern

Posted by fALk at 21:14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its the "stumble along the web and trip over your past" day it seems. A collection of old christmas cards from the Soviet Union back from the old days - images that just get you this homey feeling when you grew up in a East-Block state.

http://www.mazaika.com/postcard/aerospace0.htm

Posted by fALk at 7:44 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my former times I lived in the US midwest for almost a year - namely South Dakota. The town I lived in was named "Custer" after the general who murdered about 80% of the local indigenous population. This town is also near Mount Rushmore the memorial of US presidents inside the heart of the holy land of the Lakota Indians called the Black Hills - even nearer is the much bigger monument of Crazy Horse - the last leader of the Dakota - who led them Canada to flee from the white murderers (the memorial has a very interesting story read at the link above). Forced to come back because of an unusual cold winter they had to sign treaties with the white giving up most of their land or face total eradication - by that time the US had already killed more native Americans then Germany ever killed Jews.

Now about 150 years later the descendants of the former great leaders of the Dakota Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse have unilateral withdrawn from the forced treaty and declared their land free from US rule. The claimed land spans parts of Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. They are already vying for diplomatic ties with other countries.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

That doesn´t mean that the US is just allowing it to happen - of course they have not ratified a UN treaty on indigenous right because it clashes with their own "laws" or better interest but nonetheless the Lakota territory in my experience was already a no go area for americans when I was there 13 years ago basically making it independent (most drove around the area - making 600 mile detour). The native Americans never really integrated themselves nor where they integrated by the US. The school I went to back then had not a single native American in its row and it was situated basically 20 miles outside of the territories.

I wish the the very charismatic people of the Lakota tribes big luck in their endeavor to become free after all that has been done to them in the past.

google<->AFP News

Posted by fALk at 7:11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While there has been many praise for the iPhone over the past month and many many words written I just can´t resist to also write something about now that I finally have a test unit for two days/nights.

I got the phone simlock free (and the person who owns it wanted it with the newest firmware so he gave it to me to make it work) but apparently not jailbroken. So basically quite virgin.

Generally the build quality and overall simple user experience is everything Apple advertised - its easy as hell the gesture multitouch works beautifully and the lag that I feared is almost noexistent (it could get slightly better but its totally alright how it is). The graphics are speedy the zooms are fast the camera is good - heck even the loudspeakers rock for their size. So generally its freaking great 1.0 product that Apple has build there (I would even say its Apples best 1.0 product ever).

BUT.... I was done playing with it after 5 minutes and think I would get bored with the limited functionality after 3 days - at least in its virgin unbroken form.
So since the update to 1.1.2 the person wanted involves some tempering and jailbreaking the thing I was also able to install 3rd party apps - like a NES emulator and this is where the device gets much more interesting. But the procedures to jailbreak and the upload stuff to it is nothing for the lighthearted and nothing the average joe does. Just google maps gootube and a clock are just not justifying the products revolutionary underpinnings.

What I really find stupid: No downloads from the net -> HELLO 21st century -> I want to keep some stuff I see - like quicktime movies or mp3s or such - even legal ones you know.
No direct podcast subscribe?!! WTF now that we are producing a podcast here I wanted to see how it looks on the phone -> well either through your computer iTunes or not at all. Not even throught the iTunes Music Store app that sits on the phone - HOW FREAKING LAME.

For the rest I got too bored with it - I rather lug around my lappy for a while until things have matured. great that there are enough early adopters to fund apples research - I for once will not be part -> I think the Newton2100 still has the slight edge over the iPhone in regard of coolness factor when it came out (no I mean that 100% serious).

Interface totally great, build quality totally great, usefullness not there yet.

Posted by fALk at 12:38 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of these website where you go and think "wow" - its great even so too heavely on the flash side for my liking but content is king and this side has plenty. I still try to wrap my head around it but it seems like a kind of social networking side for artificial lifeforms - or carbon lifeforms with an artficial mind. Its about postsingularity and the positive advancement of humans - its great. Some of the art on there is simply stunning. Some of the shortfilms are moving you know just a great interesting site to check by. Invitation only if you want to join the team.

Blog Entries there include "I Don´t Think I Believe in Infinity" or "Algorithms are the intellectual currency of the future" or "Mystery space machines overhead" - if this is stuff you like with futuristic images then you should check out spacecollective.org"

All pictures from the space collective website - get the correct copyright ownership over there!

Posted by fALk at 12:14 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yeah I am not kidding. The pictured building is a structure that is currently build in Madrid, Spain and is so unique and cool it almost hyperstunning and could transform the world as we know it in a heartbeat (well almost).
The building collects energy through good old solarcells, it then sells the energy to the corporate energy grid, meanwhile it produces a bit more energy and helps itself to be - well - selfsufficient. Still not convinced? Well it uses some of that energy to produce Oxygen - thats right - so I guess it takes out the C in the airs CO2 and release the Os. Too green for you? Well it also serves as a public gathering place of some sort (read: kickass futuristic concert hall) so it also produces friends and keeps the local community together.
This is a total all in one wonder building that has no predessors as far as I know and could revolutionize the way we look at buildings in the future - they could become all Oxygen and Energy producing trees and meanwhile be friendly to the people living around them like the Oaks used to be for the germans who gathered underneath them and used them for energy and they made Oxygen too :) This concept is also the total opposite to polluting coal/oil and cancerous nuclear energy generators of last century.

read more on gizmodo

Posted by fALk at 11:58 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems bitching on a blogs comments has for once done something - or so the official Internet Exploder Blog claims. The new upcoming IE8 passes allegedly the famous ACID2 test to test browser compatibility regarding CSS2.1. That comes about four days after a lot of people did a lot of Microsoft bashing for them announcing the browser name but no other information. This bashing was about the loudest Microsoft bashing I have heard since five years when longhorn was first delayed. Some peeps - including me - have written that they abondon each and every browser hack out there whenever possible and just adhere to Webstandards as written in the W3C standards pages and checked with the CSS and HTML validators. Yesterday they responded with a "we are listening" post and a picture allegedly showing a IE8 browser window with a functioning ACID2 smily on it.
My first reaction "Yeah I believe it when I see it"
My second reaction "did all the bashing for once really achieve one of the greatest gift to the internet since the birth of the browser?"

IE8 is supposed to go into public beta next spring.

That means - No feeling guilty if you doing standard conform websites because in 3 years they will just work on any major browser :) if not then microsoft looses its last bit of credibility that they might have.

Oh Microsoft ACID2 passing comes about 4 years after Safari and 1 year after Firefox -just for the record.

Microsoft Blog Entry about IE8 passing the ACID test

Working ACID2 test to test your browser

A couple of comments on the blog over there

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:01 PM by Victoria
Awesome, so you'll finally be standards complient when IE8 launches in 2012?

Great news.
--------------

e: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:13 PM by Robbo
passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ...

---------------

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:23 PM by Chris
Finally.

I'm happy IE8 is finally taking steps toward this. The browser is years behind.

---------------

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 6:41 PM by Aleksey V lazar
I see a smiley, but I'd like a running build to test this and other things by myself. I can make this smiley image in two minutes :)

Really, one must be naive to buy into this sort of PR/marketing nonsense and to think anyone at Microsoft (at least decisions makers) gives a damn about web developers or web standards. What they care about (by definition) is market share and share price. None of this would occur if it wasn't for other browsers chipping away at browser market.

Posted by fALk at 10:56 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wegen terminlicher Probleme wird Radio Prototypen diesmal erst am Samstag online gehen.

Posted by fALk at 10:53 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. The map is inherently political-- and the contributions to this book wear their politics on their sleeves.

and it looks very pretty and powerful from the "look inside this book" that is offered on the website...

www.an-atlas.com

Posted by fALk at 8:28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A hillarious movie rant on slashfilm.com about the over(ab)use of a single font: Trajan. Its on movieposter, titles credits -> everywhere.
All horror movies released in the past 5 years have it so does AI, Geisha, HotelRuanda and about any other movie out there. Its the font to rule them all - so the guy in the video (who I probably should know but I don´t some typophiles out there probably know him right?). Creativity in Hollywood 2.0.

Posted by fALk at 8:06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well if you didn´t like the iPhone until now you might start liking it as someone has hacked the thing to record video -> with the full resolution of the camera -> thats 2.9 megapixels of video or roughly HDV resoltion. No word on compression algorythm, codec but at the moment the app can record at 10fps and when finished at 45fps! Thats more then any kind of camera below 5000 Euro can do at the moment (in that resolution with that framerate). Somehow the iPhone just became cheap.
The restraining factor is the onboard memory with just 8 GB its only 5 seconds of fun at the moment.

http://hollywoodstory.tistory.com/ has the link to the Drunkenbass for your unlocked iPhone to record video at extreme resolutions. If anyone has an iPhone please tell me if this is uncompressed?!!

UPDATE: Link above links to correct article now!

Posted by fALk at 15:55 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ugh... Berlin company Mental Images - mostly known for its Mental Ray Rendering Technology which is included in the three biggest 3D applications out there (max, maya, softimage) and used in a lot of major film productions throughout the world has been bought out by NVIDIA the one of two graphic cards company (not only but you get the point).

The combination of mental images and NVIDIA united some of the greatest talents in the visual computing industry. This strategic combination enables the development of tools and technologies to advance the state of visualization. These solutions are optimized for next generation computing architectures and create new product categories for both hardware and software solutions.

This means only one thing: Realtime Raytracing - or less technical Realtime super duper photorealism - is around the corner very soon now - otherwise this takeover would not make sense. I love Mental Ray for its realism - the rendertimes are unbelievable high at the moment - even for small scenes. Now that NVidia has snatched the code I expect that they put the turbo in the rendering software via their graphic cards that have become more general purpose processing devices then graphic cards lately.

This is good. :) Hail the day when there are no rendering times anymore.

NVidia Press release

Posted by fALk at 15:06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Und deswegen gibts nen neuen podcast mit viel lässigem und manchmal zu lautem dub, viel zu gefährlichem klima halbwissen, den ultimativen OpenSource Webapplikationen und Browser Rant juten Ausgehtips für heute und morgen und Weihnachten und so und natürlich auch ein paar interessanten Links für mehr als 10.

oh und alle links auch im lyrics teil des podcasts ab heute! speziell für die mobilen iPod Users :)

Wie immer am besten den podcast subscriben (iTunes -> Erweitert -> Podcast abbonieren -> link reinkopieren)
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/index.xml

oder durch den iTunes Music Store abbonieren (muss man nur auf Link drücken und dann im Musik Store auf abbonieren gehen)
Radio Prototypen im iTunes Music Store

oder direkt speichern unter
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/radioprototypen_0_6b_jungpioniere.m4a

Ja irgendwann auch mal direkt im browser ;)

Links:
LittleCountry.Net Hintergrund Musik
Musik Heute: King Dubby
KingTubby in wikipedia
King Tubby im roots archive (dieser link ist nicht im podcast sorry)
Gefährliches Halbwissen II: Englands CO2 Schwindel
Der persönliche CO2 Rechner
Drupal
Movable Type ist Open Source
wordpress
Reaggy Clash im Affenclub
rocketeer sound
Orden der Perpetuellen Indulgenz KOMMEN NICHT!!!
Wicket Weihnachtsmarkt Vol. II
Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra
Wabe Berlin
Hit and Run Kino (achtung eine email adresse zum einschreiben in eine mailingliste!)
ffffound.com bookmarking und tagging für Bilder
Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad
Boost Car Remote With Skull
Laserätzen
Chaos Communication Congress 23 Doku

Posted by fALk at 13:17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

and any nonstandard complient bullshit.

I am fed up. I am a single person webdeveloper who just wants to present some work that is normally not even netcentric. The hours I spend to make everything I program work on every browser can be counted in the thousands by now (and I am truly not exagerating). All I will do from now on is program W3C specified code. I do not care if it looks not good in every browser out there - as long as it works in lynx(pure text browser) and gets through css and html validators 100% and looks good in my reference browser - which is WebKit (Safari). My browser statistic show a huge market drop of Internet Explorer to the point where Firefox has taken over the lead (30:50 the rest beeing Safari and all others under 1%). But its not only Microsoft its also Firefox who will suffer. The only browser that consistently shows the result I want when program to strict W3C guidelines is Safari - there is no but and everyone trying this out should notice this. Firefox with its stupid moz- tags can go to hell to. I program once and that is for a standard compliant web and I would urge every developer out there who is able to to do the same. Make the browser vendors make THEIR product work with us not us work with their products. There is now enough competition out there that the market should decide and once half the webpages look strange with a certain browser the market share will drop like a lead ball into a cream cake.
Seeing that Microsoft is probably off 2 years from Internet Exploder 8 (the major announcement was that it is called IE8 - not that it is finally standard compliant) and that Firefox just completely fucked up a layout that I created over two day through an update from 2.0.0.6 to 2.0.0.11 (textarea not accepting em input like it should). I stick to Safari as this has shown the most consistent in standard conform over the years and is the only browser who passes the ACID test and is the only browser who can perform almost any standard javscript function how its meant to.
I am not saying that my websites won´t work in Internet Explorer (or Firefox) - they certainly will - but they won´t look as pixel perfect.

Oh and I forgot to mention Opera - I hate this 1% market share browser with its own 100% quirks and I will not even test any future site in it. If you do a 3rd party browser make damn sure its 100% standard compliant because except for geeks noone will do you the favour anymore.

I hear more and more webdevelopers being fed up with the nonstandard compliant bullshit that is out there and I hope this turns into a tide that makes all developers of browsers listen and make damn sure their product is W3C standard compliant inside out. This is much more important then to supply 100+ plugins, interface skin hooks or activeNIX controls. Gets the basics done first and add nice stuff later - WebKit is the only browser platform that seems to adhere to that rule. Together with the new Debug Tools that come with Safari this is also the nicest platform to develop for (sorry FireBug you just lost a advocate as the new nightly builds of Webkit allow you to edit your source code right inside the browser!)

The great thing about going standard compliant is that once the browsers are getting standard compliant your webpages magically start looking better ;)

Posted by fALk at 10:04 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As noted before Movable Type has been put under the GPL (Gnu General Public License) which means its open source and free as in speech and the bare bone version also free as in beer. We have used Movable Type from the beginning and just couldn´t - wouldn´t want to to migrate to a different platform as it always seemed to much hassle. Also we coughed up the small fee for a multisite blog (that was a point where we almost switched). This is all past us now and it seems we have bet on a long distance horse with our blogging software. Now I think a company developing the software and having their business model not to sell the software but to sell distributions and support will be the business model for all software rather sooner then later (quote me in 10 years). Because with a truly open source approach you have tons of helping hands in your code to make it better more stable faster secure and saturate it with plugged in feature at no cost. You as a company are still the ones who know the software best (you coded it from the start) so you are probably the best to help big corporations to install it - meanwhile the free nature of your software allows anyone to get used to and train them self to use it, generating a legion of enthusiast who in return will advocate your software over closed source alternatives giving you company a sustainable income - everyone is happy. This approach is also in my opinion much better then the all non leader community approach of free software (for example wordpress) with no real direction and to many side roads leading to stagnation or confusion among users (drupal is also one of those beasts, buts thats about to change to).
As said I think sooner or later most of the software industry comes around this business model. I am very happy that I don´t need to think about migrating the two active blogs.

Posted by fALk at 8:15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The climate conference in Bali is shaping up to be a big western lifestyle basher. While Costa Rica, Mexico and Cuba are hard at work to become carbon neutral by 2011 through the planting of 5 million trees each (hey what an interesting idea!) China is accusing the US - rightly so - of overconsumption and an absolute wasteful lifestlye that has more impact on earth then anything else out there.

I just wonder whether it's fair to ask developing countries like China to take on binding targets or mandatory targets. I think there is much room for the United States to think whether it's possible to change (its) lifestyle and consumption patterns in order to contribute to the protection of the global climate.

Not that China has a white west - but at least they acknowledge that there is a problem - compared to the blind US polititicians - being the only ones not having signed the Kyoto protocol.

But yeah we can shop down more trees in Canada to get to the tar sands to burn more CO2 to speed up our demise - the sooner the earlier the world can start recovering from its cancerous human population.

Picture: Cellphones by Chris Jordan depicting the number of Cellphones beeing thrown away every day in the US (its 426.000 of them (yes thats almost half a million))

Posted by fALk at 8:13 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I am all for open standards and great free technology there is one piece of the "open source" world which I do not support and never will. Its the OGG container format and its accompanied video codec Theora. The open sourcers are pushing this standard so vocally that you would think their life depends on it. I have never understood this passion because there are obvious quality shortcomings in the standard and also its not as open as it seems - a company made them couldn´t make money off them (because they are just not up to snatch with modern codecs/containers) released them to the public for free opened the source code - but kept the patents just in case.
Now the only thing that does not apply for OGG are the royalties to pay for encoding and that you can have a look at the source code. That OGG was to be included as the recommended audio/video standard in HTML5 is a new to me but I am so much happier that this bid has been dropped (by pressure from Nokia and Apple mostly).
Now I wouldn´t care less if that would not be one of the areas that is vitally important to me. Video quality is really important and Theora falls short on every test I did compared to MP4/H.264. Its bigger has less quality temporal has less quality interframe its generally more blurry. This is why it has failed as a closed source codec and there is no reason to use it just because its open when it is actually a step backward. So I think the decision to leave the video format war open for the time beeing is a good one.
Now can they put a flash video ban in the HTML5 spec please - because even with the inclusion of H.264 its still a plugin in a plugin in a browser playing a resource hungry video - a total waste of processor cycles and something that keeps out 50% of the computers (even a core2 duo with dedicated graphic card chokes on some of the newer highdef flash videos on the net - I don´t even want to know what a 2 year old computer does)

"Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations)." - DECS

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1339251

The official discussion

Posted by fALk at 7:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bad news for TV as we know it doesn´t stop coming in. Today NBC is reporting that it has to pay back advertisers because their ratings have been horrendously bad. NBC is not the only one, ABC CBS and and even Murdochs FOX is among the casualties of a rating drop not ever seen. Normally the TV networks are giving out "free slots" to advertisers but there are no free slots as they have been already distributed by the first round of onslaught. Needless to say that fewer rating means fewer advertiser means fewer dollars means less quality production means lay offs means an endless downward spiral until TV is at a point were you me and the dog can compete with the production quality (and of course every freelance journalist can compete with the content).
The networks blame the plunge on "new rating measures" (reported here before) but it probably just shows a more real picture - the couch potatoes get less - the mouse potatoes become more.

http://real-us.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071211/tv_nm/nbc_dc

Posted by fALk at 7:01 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow. Sensors are SOOOOO ubercool. Now the motion capture monopoly that is Vicon and its associated studios might fall - very soon. Researchers from the MIT(USA) and MERL (Zürich, Switzerland) have created a system using of the shelf motion sensors such as the one that is found in the Wii controller and ultrasonic sound to create a $3000 motion capturing system that already rivals the vicon - and its only an alpha alpha version. They say the price could easily fall to a "couple hundret bucks". For comparison - a Vicon system that is actually usable cost upward of $250.000 - and that is in no way even close to perfect as every visual motion tracking has to deal with "blind spots" - tracking points that are invisible for a couple of frames because they are obscured by body parts or other bodies. The problems come if these points are then popping up in a different place after they had been obscured leading to absolutely unusable tracking data that has to be cleaned in a very tedious manual labour process.
The Vicon system has 5+ highresolution highspeed infrared cameras (we are talking about 2000lines resoltion and 200 frames per seconds here - you know where the price comes from) so this system will not fall in price anytime soon.

So as a 3d artist I can not stress how great it would be just to slap a <$500 motion capture system on any actor, have them do their dance and then have ready to use data. Especially since this can be employed outside a studio - so to say on set!

But also this would make the Wii look like a stone age gaming device. Imagine playing a boxing game with one of these.....

read more about it at the new scientist

or watch the youtupe video explaining the system.

Posted by fALk at 9:52 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An intriguing article on TechChrunch tries to make sense of a patent granted to google.

Consumers may purchase a variety of publications in various forms, e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books (”e-Books”), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.

Techcrunch thinks that this could lead to completely customized magazines shipped to ones house. You could for example make some search terms taxonomies and your customized super special magazine would be printed on demand (once a month or every day or whatever) and then delivered instead of your regular newspaper which wastes about 90% of its paper on stuff that is not interesting to you.

Then again do we real need to chop down more trees, shred them to pieces, dip them in highly toxic paints and put them on landfills after 10 minutes of usage? Also the whole "customize you content" approach is flawed in my opinion, because you never stumble onto something that is outside your scope of normal reading topic and accidentally could change you live.

Yet it is cool in the regard as it would take away power from the big publishers - which I find always worth a mind experiment.

Posted by fALk at 9:20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ping Mag has an entry about the Great Robot Exhebition. I have been reporting on this before - as its annual - but this year the reporting is pretty light hearted and not that amazing videos can be found (if you exclude the one armed push ups by one of our new overlords). I did however completely love this "Xray" of a robotic version of astro boy.
Now someone please go down there and make some astonishing footage please.

Posted by fALk at 8:55 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

27 years after the death of John Lennon people seem still not want it. Yoko Ono has a very lovely letter on the Imagine Peace website together with a great moving impacting video. Do you want war to be over? Boykott Companies that produce weapons, don´t vote for leaders that are into militirization and fear mongering, be positive.

Imagine Peace

Posted by fALk at 10:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pornography on the web is mostly ugly, woman discriminating, cheap and everywhere, so much nicer it is to stumble across a different or interesting or even artistic approach to the subject matter. pornsaint.org is a website that has such an approach. Some of the artwork featured on the groups website is very beautiful and inspiring.

pornsaint.org (artistically workplace safe ;)

pictures above: 1.arisu 2. visual clash & Tatum Reed

Posted by fALk at 9:50 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Immersive Environments get more and more press over the years, as they finally become more rich and interactive. Its not only the "Goggle 3D thing" anymore its also blackboxes. One of the funkier ones I have seen and one that serves to teach children a bit about tree growth (namely that they need water to grow ;) and is generally great looking is Funky Forest. Children can create trees with their bodies, divert water with handmovements all in a immersive four walled environment that has some style.

Posted by fALk at 9:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Diesmal mit dabei: fALk, Mogreens, fRED, flux

Themen: gefährlich wissende flowerpower Landmienenopfer, wahnsinnig teure Links diesmal wirklich gute Ausgehtips und viel VJ Insiderwissen von visual-berlin.org und dem chaoscommunicaton congress - und wieder ein Brummen vom Mars. Musik von Revolutionary Void.

man kann sich den super enhanced podcast hier bestellen (iTunes>Erweitert>Podcast abbonieren)
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/index.xml

oder direkt als speichern unter:
http://www.prototypen.com/radio/0.5b_revolutionary_invisible_event.m4a

Die Links im diesmaligen Podcast:
HintergrundMusik: Little Country Dot Net
Musik heute: Revolution Void
Landminen: Miss Landmine
Landminen: Dangerous Ground : Parkour Against Landmines
tag/protoRadio
Angolanische Landminen Fussballmanschafft
Flowerpower gegen Landminen
Arabidopsis Thaliana ;)
aresa.dk
Aids Gala in Potsdam
Übercaster
Chaos Congress : Volldampf voraus
VJs & DJs in den Maschinenraum
the great MoGreens
Kraftfuttermischwerk
xVw
ƒƒ Nerdset
LiveCinema: Kalkin Revelation
visual-berlin.org
visual-berlin.org homebase
VDMX 5
Affenclub.de
=ff= Wrozlaw Parano
Samstag 8. Dezember Affenclub : Vespa
Freitag 7. Dezember : Fabriketage Mainzer Strasse 39
Samstag/Sonntag 15. Dezember Möbelfarbik FREAK_MODE 4 | 24 Stundenparty viel VJ
The Idea Generator
Ikea Hacker I
Ikea Hacker II
Retro Future
Papercut Video
Papercut Video auf Drawn!
Olympic Pukes Font
Doktor Seltsam Mr. Schäuble
Bush gibt falsche Telefonnummer

Posted by fALk at 14:50 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Europeans have big buckets full of color, the Japanese yinyan balanced Lines the Afghans have their own flower culture. Beautiful Ornamentals rich in color and form deriving their influence from the great regional embroidery. Living ornaments so to say.

More Pictures and information at the humanflowerproject.

Posted by fALk at 12:09 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Diploma project, Live Cinema theory proof is beeing slowly revived to become a proper normal prototypen.com project. Please read more over at the Live Cinema Research Blog.

Update: Link korregiert...

Posted by fALk at 10:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Normally I am not posting YouTube links (flash alarm) but this is to great to pass up. How spot on can you be? Bob Dylan (no not the programming language - the singer) tells a Time Magazine reporter why big media stinks and he couldn´t be more spot on.

"They got too much to loose by printing the truth"

Posted by fALk at 10:21 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my end of TV series I always say that online video will be huge, and I can just see the eyes rolling thinking "oh you ain´t be making money with this". It seems so that some peeps are starting to make big bucks and some are earning a living already (i mean yeah already is a matter of point of view but you get the point). Top of the crop is not rocketboom who seems to have fallen of the cliff after amanda condon left the show but AskANinja. I don´t personally like ask a ninja for its too lightharted and not content deep but people like it and as the transition from tv continues first will be the lighthearted shows then more deep and specific (as can be already observed by podcast trending away from too light to at least knee deep).

Read the article about payrise in the videoblogger world over at (fittingly) TV Week.

Posted by fALk at 9:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have long been blogging about the death of TV and I stopped that lately because in my view TV is already dead as a fish. You might look at me in disbelieve pointing to the million of couch potatoes who can´t stop to be brainwashed. Yet I tell ya the end of TV is coming near you next year and the final nail in the coffin no later then 2012. Except for older people who just can not use the intertubes everyone else will have moved online for their moving image fix at a time of their choosing for a topic they are choosing. I think the decline of the TV industry will accelerate with a rapid pace that has not been seen every before because even small declines mean way less money in the TV industry which then mean way less appealing programming (which is already at a point where 95% is unwatchable to people with a tiny bit of intelligence left) which leads to fewer viewers and an accelerating downward spiral. Big production studies understand nothing about how the interwebs work - or at least not enough to save their brands over to the new medium, which is ruled by semi-pros, amateurs, small scale companies embracing open and free - something a multimilliondollarcompany can never get their head around - even if they are the once who could finance a couple of years of open and free. Now there is no bussiness model out there except advertising that works for media companies and advertising on the web is either hold by google - which is still mico payment (something big companies are not overly interested in) - or nothing (because you loose users in droves once you start making extensive use of "tradtitional" advertising on your webshows). Then there is the whole remix thing together with creative commons - something larger companies will fight nail and tooth before they understand that they have to embrace it to be successful on the anarchyweb. The whole bussiness model of media distribution has to be rethought with bandwidth prices dropping bottom floor everyone can publish everything already without having to worry to pay more then their phone bill in the end of the month. At the moment some "pay as you go" models to download "popular" shows are working because the branding effect of TV is still huge but as time goes by and people are moving away from the boob tube the branding effect will wane and people are less inclined to watch this or the other show just because everyone else is literally forced to watch it because thats the only thing on at a specific time and all your friends and coworkers are talking about it.
At that point all media producers are created equal and then its about content and great stories and great concepts and other intriguing stuff that has been amiss in the media industry in the last decade.
The bussiness model will have to be rethought and a whole industry needs to become more artistic (as in starving artistic) brand building for companies will get harder (because 99% of the population will see a value in adblockers at one point and then there is no revenue for anyone) Some might donate a bit but overall there is a point in the tunnel where things change radically in my view - then again I could be wrong, right?

The New York Times writes about it too...

Posted by fALk at 10:27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The occasional concept art that inspires you inspires me and when I stumbled across this page I was temporarily intrigued, not by the paper thin nokia concept phone, nor by the see through vaio display but the rug that can be a safe heaven or a bed or a rug...

See it all here:

http://tides.ws/2007/11/06/the-future-of-technology-its-here/

Posted by fALk at 9:56 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my diploma thesis I wrote that cinemas are seeing there end of live as a mainstream mass media and especially the multiplexes will close down in masses in the coming years. I backed this up with the continuing downwards trend of movie goers. Well this theory is coming more and more reality with germany seeing another 6.4% decline in moviegoers - thats what the head of the biggest film distribution company - constantin - in germany says. That means that since around 2000 when the decline started there are only 50% moviegoers left (between 5% and 12% decline every year) in germany - this must be absolutely devastating to an industry that had just before been in an an absolute boom cycle and just build movie theaters that could house 300% more people.
The Constantin chef says the reason is too many movies, but as always with these people living in bubbles the real reasons are much deeper. Bad movies, too expensive ticket prices (1 euro dvd rental - or even "free" from the intertubes compared to 12 euros for a cinema ticket), cheap home electronics, computer games. The last one is coming in from under the radar and its not that its "computer games" per se but the need for a complete rethought about what a story is and how we percieve visual media. PEOPLE ARE BORED with any nine act structure no matter how smart it tries to web itself into a nonlinear storyline. People are smart they predict much more then in the past and there is nothing worse then watching a movie where you roughly have an idea how its gonna end - BORING. Computer games are - by nature - needing a different approach and somehow seem to be more innovative on the story front (not all I might say - Crysis is a bad example of how to do a story line for a game imnsho).
A whole new cinematic approach that combines the couch potato aspects with the nonlinear novel story aspects packaging it all into a new media form that could then use up the empty cinema spaces would be great - yet I guess it has to get more ugly for big production houses to accept this matter of fact.

Source:
Heise News (german)
In a personal note - out of 50 movies I watched this year I did not find a single one above the line worth mentioning. They where all rubbish and I already set my standards especially low already. The only few that I thought to be entertaining and I actually enjoyed watching had been two english comedies with good actors.
Other then that there had been some that had good effects, some that had awesome camera work - epic pictures (yawn), almost none that any kind of noteworthy story and a lot that I fell asleep during watching them (and I am a media junky and I never used to fall asleep during movies - I love to be entertained if the entertaining is at least a little bit grabbing).

Posted by fALk at 8:12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our last podcast I was talking about the rollable Brunton Solar Panels. Now I stumble across a whole computer setup running linux that can be powered completely by these solar rolls because together with a 8 inch monitor (tiny) it only consumes around 20 watts (8 watt for the computer and 12 watts for the sceen). The freedom to have a working computer after the apocalypse (that hopefully will not blacken the sky) costs you $500.

See the aleutia product here:
http://www.aleutia.com/products/

PS: This product has of course more merits then giving the geek a apocalyptic backup plan - mostly aid workers in africa who need to use a computer in the wildnerness - for that I really think its great to have such technology.

Posted by fALk at 7:57 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)