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Public lettering: two for the day
A glimpse into the Industrial Night and Magic archives:
Public lettering I: Vodafone >
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Public lettering II: Thier Pils (local beer)
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
More Industrial Night and Magic
Most places are boring. If boring is the new cool, many of them would freeze over.
A new photo series has been posted over at Industrial Light and Magic. It shows the new administration building in Dortmund-Hörde which is situated midway between the former Hoesch Phoenix blast furnaces plant and the Hoesch Phoenix steel mill. The photos have been taken as a by-product while en route to our actual shooting location, but it turned out that they deserve their own gallery. Some of these new photos will be history soon: starting June 11, the top six of the eight floors of the savings bank building you can see on two of the photos will get removed.
Industrial Night and Magic: Hoerde Municipality >
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Birthday gift
A bursting tire at 170 kph isn't exactly the kind of thing most of us can enjoy, but it is what happend on my birthday while en route to the Ruhrfestspiele. Once you made sure you won't lose it, quite an interesting experience. No damages, no injuries occured - a nice birthday gift.
If this should happen to you: don't let yourself be distracted by the bang and do not brake immediately. Stay on the gas or even step further on it for a short while to stabilize the car. Gently countersteer to keep it in its lane. Once you stabilized the car, gently slow down and pull over.
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Back online
As a little birthday gift, my stone aged Siemens DSL NTBBA suddenly stopped working, so I got myself a brand-spanking-new Linksys WAG54G Wireless-G ADSL Gateway. It incorporates an ADSL modem, router, 54 MBit WLAN access point and a simple 4-ports 10/100 Mbit switch into a single small box at just 129 € street price. Setting it up has been a breeze, and apart from monitoring logs, this is fire and forget. So far: recommended.
And the days offline? A good experience. I didn't even think about setting up the ISDN fallback.
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Birthday Cake
The author has left the building to see some live music and has deposited some birthday cake on the table. Serve yourself at midnight while supplies last.
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GPRS-Flatrate: Geht doch
GRPS ist bekanntlich ein teurer Spaß, und während ein hochpreisiger Provider eine kompliziert aufgebaute Batterie teurer GPRS-Optionen in Stellung bringt, kommt mein Anbieter O2 gerade mal mit einer einzigen ähnlichen Option daher, deren Nutzen auf den ersten Blick aber ähnlich bescheiden zu sein scheint wie ihr Preis: mit der WAP-Flatrate im Surf- und E-Mail Aktiv-Pack für 4,95 € pro Monat unbegrenzten Zugriff auf alle WAP-Seiten. Was als Produktbeschreibung hinreichend vereinfacht ausgedrückt ist, heißt in der Realität aber nichts anderes als: unbregenzt viel Traffic über den WAP-APN. Man nehme ein Handy mit größerem Farbdisplay wie das SonyEricsson P900 oder das Nokia 6600, installiere, falls noch nicht vorhanden, einen (X)HTML-Browser, Mail Client oder News-Aggregator, fertig. Alles, was nicht über den WAP-APN läuft, wird natürlich weiterhin nach Menge abgerechnet. Mit dem Notebook über das im Handy eingebaute Modem zu surfen bleibt also teuer.
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Compulsory askers, rocket science
From time to time people that think surfing with Mozilla and running Windows 2000 is unnecessary geeky behaviour reapproach me to ask if I finally had changed my mind and would now run this mighty fine new piece of MSFT software.
Good thing about MSFT software is that whatever timespan those compulsory askers let pass, someone already has found a new security hole that is even bigger than those before, so I just have to point my askers to the site describing the new hole. Example: Outlook 2003 in its default setting plus some HTML email. Result: "Silent delivery and installation of an executable on the target computer, no client input other than reading an email".
Even better, "full screen video advertisements on opening the mail message" comes as a free add-on. "In typical fashion despite the settings in the Windows Media Player being set to 'disallow' scripting in media files, despite Outlook 2003's 'highly' secure default setting of view html content in the so-called 'restricted zone'; it all still works!"
Via Phil Rignalda, the full Bugtraq report >
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What's the story behind this shot?
I'd really like to know >
(Once there, click the preview image to enlarge)
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Reducing digital photo noise
While many digital cameras can provide low-noise results on ISO 50, noise level often sharply increases on higher ISO settings if you do not use a DSLR. With many viewfinder cameras like my trusted Canon PowerShot S40, noise at ISO 200 or even ISO 400 on longer exposure times can be a showstopper - if no postprocessing is applied. But while sharpening is easy to handle, reducing noise is a bit more complicated, as most noise reduction features greatly reduce image sharpness and smear details and textures. This Photoshop Actions set helps out. Posted by the man behind Houserdesign on the Topleftpixel / Daily Dose of Imagery forum, it applies several layer and mask operations and lets you choose between different levels of noise reduction. But does it maintain sharpness and details? Yes. A series of ISO 400 photos that looked way too messy before now look like decent ISO 100 shots. Also good for adding even more crispness to ISO 50 shots. Recommended.
Topleftpixel forum thread >
Photoshop actions file (.atn) >
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Where have all the comments gone?
In case you are missing a comment or two on this weblog: they will return as soon as I will have set up some anti-spam measures which include purging the database from existing spam. Do these measures include a migration away from MT2.6? No, most likely they do not.
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Hugh Macleod
Hugh Macleod's "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" are hugely popular in blogworld, and I like them since I first came across them quite a while ago at Ben Hammersley's blog.
Anders Jacobsen has met this guy >
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Maiden live
Sam Javanrouh not only runs Daily Dose of Imagery, an excellent photoblog, but also has stunning Iron Maiden (example, background) and Björk live in concert series. Crispness and noise level of his photo underline the good opinion I have of the Canon PowerShot G3 which can deliver DSLR-like results.
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One for the day
Ruhrstahl/Rheinstahl/ThyssenKrupp steel mill Henrichshütte, Hattingen, Germany
Click to enlarge
I will skip the rant on why it has been evil to tear down this steel mill for now. Just click the preview to enlarge and enjoy the photo. Most of what can be seen on it has vanished during the last few weeks.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
ExpressionEngine!
pMachine is giving away 1250 free copies of ExpressionEngine. I received my copy this morning and am really curious to test drive it. Related: François Nonnenmacher has a MT3 vs. EE comparison (via Heiko). He also has a good piece on MT3: Much ado about nothing? (via Martin).
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A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools
While this Dr. Dobb's Journal story doesn't come up with something particulary new, it nicely sums up "why our tools aren't good enough and what we should do about it", which the author thinks is to finally come up with a shared conceptual framework and a shared language for modeling documents.
Eugene Eric Kim: A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools >
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Typeradio - Now we are talking
Typeradio. Broadcasting May 13-16. FM 95.3 in Berlin, MP3 stream elsewhere. Via Coudal.
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Six Apart: Bad press, low credibility
If you want to know what "bad press" is, skim through the trackbacks to Mena Trott's last posting.
If you want to know what "low credibility" is, remember Mena Trott asking us to trust her (which is, when done by a company, no different from a doctor who has bad news), promising to improve the then non-existing communication between company and users, presenting TypeKey as a nice to have goodie that you don't have to use if you don't want to, while Ben Trott preferred to withdraw from the discussion on this blog as soon as the questions got to the point.
And what did we get? A bizarre licensing model with an idiosyncratic definition of "commitment to a free version" that doesn't even grant free licenses to schools or NGOs or basically anyone who uses MT for what it is build for, for handling multiple blogs. A weblog that wanted "to show the inner workings of a start-up", but is a filled with poor marketing rhetorics and thus fails to comply with its own demands. And TypeKey? As shown before, it has nothing to do with fighting spam, as Ben so fiercely wanted to make us believe. It is so central to Six Apart's business strategy that you can't even download the free version of MT3 without having a TypeKey account. To quote vowe: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
RELATED ON THIS WEBLOG
2004-05-13 Movable Payware is out
2004-03-22 TypeKey, the right lever?
2004-03-20 TypeKey ?!
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Minor CSS modifications
There are some minor CSS modifications on the main page of this blog. Just hit F5 once or twice when visiting it with your browser.
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Movable Payware is out
In what is called "generous limits on weblogs and authors", you will have to pay 69,95 $ or more for MT3 if your weblog has more than one author or is of commerical nature (is placing Google Ads commercial activity?). What do you get? TypeKey. Err, "more than just an extensible architecture, [but also] great comment management, moderation, and registration tools." Time to wipe the MT3 alpha version from my harddisk.
The full announcements in all their cheesy new! improved! better! faster! wider! rhetorics are here and here.
P.S. Due to Six Apart's "commitment to a free version", such a version will be available, from a tiny little box well below the fold filled with a "no, you can't have that on the free version" list. Interestingly enough, it also lists "No access to fee-based services". How will such services look like?
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XML with PHP4, PHP5
KEITH DEVEN'S XML LIBRARY FOR PHP4
"The library gives you two functions, XML_unserialize() and XML_serialize(). XML_unserialize() takes an XML document and returns a PHP data structure, and XML_serialize() takes a PHP data structure and returns an XML document. Real easy. I've also provided an XML to PHP translator that lets you test it out." It will get even better with PHP5:
PROCESSING LARGE XML DOCUMENTS WITH PHP 5
The Bitflux Blog on Processing Large XML Documents with PHP 5 describes how the title of a weblog entry with a specific ID has been extracted from a 10 MB XML file. "To sum up: XMLReader is a powerfull extension to parse large XML documents, it's usually much faster than SAX (twice as fast), while still scaling without problems on the memory side. With the expand() method, it's now also possible to mix the features of DOM/SimpleXML/XSLT with XMLReader, if you only have to process parts of an XML document."
MORE PHP5 XML GOODIES
Christian Stocker: Workshop: XML in PHP5
Simon Willison: XML highlights for PHP 5
Adam Trachtenberg: Using PHP 5's SimpleXML
And related, for even niftier access to document elements: Tidying up [and parse, and clean, and extract] your HTML with PHP
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All the news that's fit to print?
Heiko criticises that in German media "a tornado in Kansas usually gets more coverage than a neighborhood shooting in Berlin". Horst Prillinger reports that when in his library "a total of 293 books from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were totally soaked, some probably damaged beyond repair [...] the evening news brought a report about the baby elephant at Vienna Zoo taking a bath." And after Papa Scott figured out than when you are abroad, Germany's most visited news website, Boulevard Online is basically useless, he now steps in as a translator at David's Medienkritik. Even if this blog is of questionable political attitude and "even if Germans and Americans tend to disagree, at Medienkritik they're at least talking to one another", so it might be a good thing to support. And hey, "at least the first post was fun. I felt like I was behind enemy lines, writing headlines for the Bild-Zeitung."
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More Mozilla/Firefox right-click goodies
So now, we have four toolkits to right-click-integrate your favourite aggregrator into your favourite browser:
Did I omit any? If so, please add them in the comments.
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More isolated than the enemy
John Robb has a look at the current U.S. situation in the self-proclaimed Global War on Terror under the light of Col. John Boyd strategy "to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors." He concludes:
"From this analysis it is clear that the US is, as the result of this war, more isolated than our enemy. However, Boyd suggests that the best corrective action is for the US to articulate a grand unifying vision for this war."
John Robb's Global Guerrilas: Boyd on Grand Strategy >
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Clash of Civilizations?
Daß es schiefgehen könnte könnte, ein arabischen Land zwecks Adaptierung eines wie auch immer gearteten faschistischen Machtplans zu besetzen, während man gleichzeitig die Öffentlichkeit über die wahren Motive nach Strich und Faden belügt, liegt auf der Hand. Abu Ghraib könnte da richtig nach vorne bringen. Boulevard Online berichtet:
"Plötzlich bekommt der 'Clash of Civilizations', Leitbegriff des amerikanischen Politologen Samuel Huntington, einen ganz anderen Akzent. Plötzlich erscheint die arabisch-muslimische Welt tatsächlich als Opfer des eroberungswütigen christlich-kapitalistischen Westens - von der Gier nach Öl bis zur flagranten Demütigung der islamischen Gesellschaft. Alle düsteren Verschwörungstheorien, die Amerika und den Westen immer und überall für das Unheil in der Welt verantwortlich machen, finden nun ihre bequeme, dabei schrecklich glänzende Rechtfertigung."
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Use of GSM transmitter coordinates for geotagging?
Similar to digital photos that are time tagged, geotagging is to (automagically) add geographical metadata like latitude and longitude to content items. Geotagging photos of public lettering could be a good example. Public Lettering can appear in an infinite number of places while the exact location is an essential part of the photo's context.
My digital camera records timestamps in the EXIF data, so a second device should record geographic coordinates over time and timestamp these, and software would glue those two datasets together. The obvious solution is to use a handheld GPS receive. Current models are small, leightweight, cheap and powerful; some even output recorded tracks and waypoints in XML format. As I don't have a GPS receiver, enter solution 2: To use a GSM cell phone.
My provider O2 Germany has all its cells transmit their geographical coordinates and segment ID (?) as cellbroadcasting messages. (This is for their "Homezone" feature that gives you lower rates in a nearly circular area around a location you specifiy, eg. your house). So if you log all incoming CB messages on a computer, you get a timestamped list of the coordinates of all cells used (actually, one could even log the coordinates of the main cells and of up to six neighbouring cells). When adding data available on the net, like cell surface or antenna directions, the resulting waypoint list could be a "good enough" solution. Accuracy would be higher in urban areas with a higher cell density (read: less surface served per cell) and would decrease significantly in rural areas where single cells can serve several square kilometers. More on that later after I will have recorded some sample data sets.
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Public Lettering
Brighton, UK, April 2003
Click photo to enlarge
Typography is an art I can truly enjoy. A considerable part of my book collection has been bought just for its typography, cover design and paper quality. But some of the most interesting typography can be found in public places: street signs, shop names, even ads. You can call it urban or public typography or lettering, and it is basically everywhere: sometimes large and loud and obvious, sometimes small and hidden. Arial and Times New Roman horrors right next to Neutraface and Art Deco pleasures. I could show you a road which pubic lettering consists almost entirely of Arial. Anyone would recognise it as visual pollution of its worst kind. But just some minute away from that doomed place I could show you a road full of beautifully crafted handpainted signs. In a strange way, they make that place dull and boring, but if you think the cars away, you could feel teleported into the late 1950ies. If I lost interest in industrial photography, public lettering would be one of my subjects.
Public Lettering examples
NoRevelance Hand-painted and hand-crafted signs
Type and Lettering in Stockholm
Public Lettering - a walk in central London
Dirk Hesse (from Dortmund): Born in the Fifties
Watch the Signs - Vienna as captured during last year's blogtalk
Note: This list does not include the most comprehensive site on public lettering I've found so far. Created and constantly updated by an individual in the US, it has hundreds of photos arranged chronologically, starting back in 2001 or 2002. As I don't find the link anymore, pointers are appreciated. Thanks.
Related on the interweb
Local Projects: City of Memory
Local Projects: Memory Maps
Related on this blog
2004-05-09 Use of GSM transmitter coordinates for geotagging?
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On Social Software Consultancy
Matt Webb of interconnected.org: "With Jack Schulze, I've been doing a little consultancy at TimeBank recently on how thinking in social software, adaptive design and associated areas can improve a couple of their projects, and tie into their strategic thinking." A summary of what has been used as project input >
RELATED
Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs: "Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how to promote balance or equilibrium."
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Patterns
Depending on how dry you see things, you can see some patterns reappear throughout different contexts and situations. Recently, a friend told me about how she and a friend of hers entered the house of a young man giving a party when that young man was the target of her friend's amorous advances - they are a couple up to this day. It occured to me that the underlying basic pattern is no different from that we used in the army when training how to free wounded or other persons in house-to-house fighting situations. Twisted thinking? Not so. Pattern can be an excellent tool in translating contexts which can be an excellent tool in solution finding. Now just don't confuse that with simply applying existing patterns to a situation. In most cases, that doesn't solve the situation and doesn't give you new ideas either.
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Have Low Fuel
HLF probably is the worst domain name you can paint on an aircraft: Warning warning warning. Have low fuel. Declaring emergency :-)
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:: in category Aviation, Air and Space
Tune of the day
All style, no substance, but fast and fun: The Killers - Somebody told me. Good one for hanging out at the club. Music: Windows Media, Real. Video: Windows Media, Real Media. Official site: Thekillersmusic.com.
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:: in category Music
8. Mai: Befreiung
Befreiung aus der Sicht eines volkseigenen Presseorgans - der Ostblog zitiert aus "Guter Rat" 2/85, Verlag für die Frau, DDR Leipzig-Berlin:
"Als vor 40 Jahren die ersten sowjetischen Panzer und Lkws in unsere Städte und Dörfer rollten, glaubte so manch einer, nun sei das absolute Ende gekommen - ein Ende mit Schrecken, wie es die faschistische Propaganda allen weiszumachen versucht hatte. Doch es bedurfte nur kurzer Zeit, und viele Menschen begriffen, daß der Sieg der Sowjetarmee über den Faschismus Beginn eines neuen, besseren Lebens war. Trotz der unzähligen Opfer des Krieges reichte der Sowjetstaat unserem Land sofort die Hand zum Freundschaftsbund, mit sowjetischen Menschen schlossen wir in den vier Jahrzehnten viele persönliche Freundschaften."
Ostblog: Erziehung zur Freundschaft >
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6. Mai: Der Sturz des Visionärs
Den Feind im Rücken: Brandt, Guillaume im April 1974
"Ein Spion, Frauengeschichten, Freunde, die zu Gegnern wurden – bis heute ist unklar, was Regierungschef Willy Brandt in den Tagen der Spionage-Affäre um Günther Guillaume wirklich zur Aufgabe bewegte." Hans-Werner Kilz in der Süddeutschen:
30 Jahre Brandt-Rücktritt: Der Sturz des Visionärs >
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Premium Content, Baby
Cats, looking at computer screens with photos of cats looking at computer screens with photos of cats looking....
The Infinite Cat Project >
(via WorldWideKlein)
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New England Ruins
New on my compatible minds list: Rob Dobi from Rhode Island who photographs industrial New England Ruins >
(via fellow Dortmund blogger Dirk Hesse)
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Rescue Roll
As seen on Haus Aden coal mine, shaft 2 control room. This is an active shaft, but we've learned about cover and camouflage before, haven't we.
Rescue Roll >
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One for the day
The Estherslope Mining Company. May 03, 2004. Click image to enlarge.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Eight Months
Eight months without smoking now. To be filed unter dry, not under clean. Sometimes, it can consume impressives amounts of energy. Still well worth the hassle. Don't want that 50+ pieces per day habit back at any price. Track Album of the day: Tanzwut - Eisenmann The Awesome Machine - Under the Influence (2002).
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Bossmania
Perhaps I am just an old school fart here, but does live music get any better than this? Probably not. Just got readdicted after some months of abstinence.
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:: in category Music
