Monat: November 2004

The year is going to its end, and I have to check all the figures of my company for the past year: for myself, the fiscal and the bank. And well, I hate this work – I´m not the guy for the numbers. So I´m thinking about syncing and standardisation: in germany (and I guess in the rest of the world, too) all invoices etc. have special fields by law: netto, brutto, vat, date, name…so why the hell does every company make its own invoices on paper? This would be a perfect piece for standardisation and automation: we need a kind of „financial-online-center (FOC)“ with a unique id for every person/company. Everyone who normally sends you an incoice by paper, could fill in the right fields in your FOC, and you get a whole list of all of your invoices. You then can „check them out“ so that they are paid. You can sort and organize them, get deeper into them at the end of the year, send them to the fiscals. No Paper, no missing documents, no mistakes. Hey, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, …, why can´t you make our life a little bit easier 😉

…they are everywhere…;-)

When I found this site, my eyes became wet: c64.com offers all (and I really mean *all*) C64 games I have ever played – and I played lots of them. You can download every single one of them there *for free*. Remember „vermeer“, or may favourite game „kennedy approach“? So, the first thing I did was to find a suitable emulator. And there is one very good for mac osx, it´s called „frodo“. It is very good and stable, though it had problems to realize my keyboard as a „joystick“. But I wanted the full experience: Since I´ve a modchipped Xbox (xecuter 2) with a build in 60gb HD and running linux-ftp server, I got FrodoX – a Frodo port to the Xbox – and it really kicks ass…It recognizes the gamepads as joystick devices, and if you ever need keyboard support for any game , you can choose letters from a quicklist. I´m back in the good ol´days! But know what: Somehow I had in my mind, that the graphics of the games were much better – it´s a case of childish phantasie…;-)

Well, how cool is this:

:I´m watching movie trailers – STREAMING… This is the new Motorola E 1000 UMTS – and it really rocks! I don´t like the skin of the Operating System – it´s a little bit too stylie, and therefore not very comfortable to use. But the Quality of the screen is: WOW! You can choose to watch your movies *fullscreen* – just turn the device 90 degrees. The speed of UMTS is really outstanding – though respond rates are very low (every site-change takes a lot of time – when you are on a site navigation and loading of the movies and pictures etc. is *very* fast) The protal of Vodafone is still at the beginning – and prices are exorbitant – do you want to watch a 0.50 min stream of a Bundesliga-match? It´s 0,49 EUR (about 300k)! But time will bring lower rates, I´m sure. All in all, this mobile device is really cool (even video-phoning is possible – just switch between the two installed cameras 😉 ) I´m really looking forward to the times UMTS will be cheaper…

mmhh…the famous german news portal spiegel.de seems to be offline…wow, I´ve never expected such thing to happen there…(Mo, 041511, 17:40 CET)

Now, this is really cool: gnump3d  is an open source streaming server. It automatically detects all the media on your disk, and serves it as mp3-stream on Port 8888 . Since I´ve got a flatrate, I like to have all my music on my linux box at home, serving it for me, so that I can listen to it everywhere I have a internet connection. The quality is brilliant: you even can select between different playlists, or make your own. When you give user/pass to your friend, they are able to listen to your music. (This all somehow reminds me of last.fm 😉

It somehow is spreading through the community, that streaming (mobile) musicclips  will be a  great thing. We are working on this   for quite a long time – as we are delivering our content on Flash – Basis, we currently have the problem, that "Flash-Lite 1.1" is of a Flash-4 Player niveau, and not capable of all our streaming features. We instantly hope that Macromedia will soon upgrade the Lite Version. 

…and you have´nt missed one playmate? Test it and get all oh them from ´60 to ´00

What a cool and astouning site: 10×10 gives you a view on the latest news of the 100 most imtortant news sources. And even from a designer´s point of view, they have done a great job. There are 100 photos taken from the sources article, and they are used as a menu.

Of course there had to be some conspiracy theories after the election, and have to say, that I´m quite fascinated of this

one: these are the statistics of the voting machines in florida. As you see, there have been more registrated democrats than republicans, and many of them voted bush? Ehm, excuse me: where these machines manipulated? (these are the figures the graphs are based on). (from David Weinberger)