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War with the cigarette spaceship

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Thousands of centuries had passed since Home Sapiens 2.0 left their home planet Earth.

Now the inevitable moment was reached. The last remaining smoker had to battle all living species in the universe to defend his right to keep smoking.

His mind was integrated in a strange space ship, which had been the case ever since a digital dump of his original brain was captured in 2035.

Read more in this new exiting book. Soon for sale in your local bookstore.

Eds links for 2009-04-30: Why does your left testicle hang lower? « Love, Sex, Attraction…and Science

Link

Why does your left testicle hang lower? « Love, Sex, Attraction…and Science
Waarom zijn je ballen niet even groot

Browsing the web via Lynx on my NAS

On here I found a question on how to browse the web via logging in to only the Synology NAS.

simply ipkg lynx and this is how google looks like:

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And this is how this weblog looks like :)

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Brilliant Set of YouTube Mixes by Kutiman

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There must have went an unbelievable amount of time (2 months as I read later) in producing this professional web album of YouTube based music mixes.

The album is named “ThruYou” and contains 7 mixes.

The creator has single handed created a new category entry in most pop encyclopedias.

You could start out listening to a mix (a good example is #05 someday) and then be amazed on how well the song sounds. Then click on “credits” and the credits will roll over the screen with the original YouTube movies (e.g. this one). When you click through to the originals you probably will make the “click in your head” how only a genius could recognize the gaps in the overall visible YouTube spectrum.

The author: Kutiman, a musician, composer, producer and animator from Israel. He is best known for creating the online music video project ThruYOU, as well as his self-titled album and collaboration with many other Israeli artists including Hadag Nahash.

Ophir Kutiel was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Zichron Yaacov. He studied piano since the age of six, and then drums and guitar at age 14. When Kutiel was 18, he moved to Tel Aviv to study Jazz at Rimon Music College.

While working at a local convenience store in Tel Aviv, Kutiel tuned into a college radio station that was playing music that was much different than the classical jazz he had been used to playing. Soon after, Sabbo, another Israeli artist and current music partner, introduced him to afrobeat and funk, including the sounds of James Brown and Fela Kuti. His obsession with Fela Kuti and the fact that his last name was similar led him to create the stage-name of Kutiman. He traveled to Jamaica to research reggae and afrobeat and work with Stephen and Damien Marley.

Kutiman was signed to Melting Pot Music, based in Cologne in 2006. Soon After, his first single, "No Groove Where I Come From" was released and soon after, he released a hit song with Karolina of Habanot Nechama, "Music is Ruling My World". His self-titled, debut album, which received an 8.2 in Pitchfork Magazine, was released in the fall of 2007. Under the Radar picked Kutiman as one of the "Artists to Watch in 2008" , along with Glasvegas and MGMT.

Kutiman has worked with many other Israeli artists and is currently working on arrangement and composition of Karolina’s solo album. He has also created animated videos for his song, "Chaser" and Hadag Nahash’s "Eze Kif".

In 2009 Kutiman released ThruYOU, an online music video project mixed from samples of YouTube videos.  After disclosing his work to just twenty friends, Kutiman’s project spread virally across the web, racking up more than one million views in less than a week. After viewing ThruYOU, open source advocate Lawrence Lessig praised the project as a pioneer of a new, less regulated form of media, saying "If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas."

On here you can find an annotated version of the album.

More Reviews:

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/9002/kutiman.html
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2009/03/heavy-sifting-a-1.html
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/03/remix_buy_the_remix.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/the-future-begins-thru-yo_b_174483.html
http://eartothesound.blogspot.com/2008/03/k-is-for-kutiman.html
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11159-kutiman/
http://mpmsite.com/index.php?area=news&view=detail&id=542

Slowie de Slowie Bloggie

This weblog is slow again. Since the admin pages are still blazingly fast it is probably something somewhere on the front end. Either I coded something very inefficient (probably), a plugin is going haywire (could be) or something in one of the widgets takes ages (could be).

So while you are waiting… I’m going to perform some tests.

update: it’s strange but as soon as I delete the cache manually (i cant delete it via the webinterface) everything goes fast again. I also notice some bot filling the cache with pages seconds after I empty it.

So… either the bad bot is ruining this or there is a cache plugin problem with maybe a specific post or page.

update 2: some minutes after i deleted the cache the problem occured again. The cache fills up amazingly quick with a lot of pages due to the bot. I think it is the Googlebot but I’m not sure. Maybe if there are too many pages in the cache that the system freezes up, seems strange but it could be. So I temporarily turned off the cache. In the past I tried other caches like supercache but I noticed that caused an immediate high peek in my cpu and memory usage on the server, it basically sky rocketed probably due to the large amount of pages.

Hmm…?

Idea about a new financial product

image I had an idea for a new financial product: the gadget-o-meter.

For end-users: you can build a wish-list of items. You can put books in there, mini camcorders, cds or even a house, whatever. You can embed the list on your website or send it to people before your birthday. It’s really the kind of wishlist you can find on a gazillion websites and of course it will have all the easy simple drag-to-browser “add-to-wishlist” button.

That on itself is not so exciting.

On the other side of the screen however is your money-o-meter, it is coupled to a special bank account especially for this purpose. It is a simple financial product: just an account which you can fill with money or which other people can fill with money. At the moment that the money-o-meter reaches a certain value then the product which is highest on the list automatically gets mailed to you so you don’t even have to think about (nice for shops to include an “add-to-gadge-o-meter” button) and ends up in your have list

The benefit is that you don’t have to do anythingimage besides adding your wishes: you will get stuff send to your house without you even looking at the gadget-o-meter. You might even forget about it and suddenly get send stuff.

Graphically this is of course a mindsketch, the endresult could look much smarter so people would have the feeling that something happens graphically when they enter money in the meter. They should dynamically see the thing move.

The revenue stream is of course on the interest on the associated bank accounts.

On the wishlist side one could partner with webshops

On the money-o-meter side one could partner with web income companies e.g. affiliates, webwritings and the hundreds of other ways to earn money on the web.

If you steal this idea then set me up a gadget-o-meter and donate me a percentage in there worth the idea, I’ll put the widget right here :)

Eds links for 2009-04-28: Digital Video Cameras – Digital Video Camcorder | Flip Video

Link

Digital Video Cameras – Digital Video Camcorder | Flip Video
Ok, lets buy a Flip too.

Eds links for 2009-04-28: Vergelijking Flip Mino (HD) & Creative Vado & Kodak Zi6

Link

Vergelijking Flip Mino (HD) & Creative Vado & Kodak Zi6
Hmm… the Creative Vado HD seems to be better

Eds links for 2009-04-28: THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube

Link

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube
We used to mix with songs on cd’s this site produces mixes with flards from youtube video’s and it sounds amazingly cool (which is why it probably already has 1646 saves on delicious).

VCF based addressbook

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I desperately need some kind of central addressbook that is useful to use. I still don’t think its there.

So I continued where I left (if you followed my  older postings on it you have a basic idea on the idea) but this time I changed the data format to .vcf.

It means that I can rightclick in Outlook and “send as VCF (complete)” to receive all VCF cards and can then simply browse through them with the help of a Jquery Tree and the VCF reader class. I can make any category / household / company / department hierarchy I want or even multiple.

Next in line is integrating the VCF writer class, that would be a cool next step.

It will take several larger efforts:

- the gui will contain Page Classes such as “administration”, “cards” or “reports” (birthdays!), these will be plugins
- the fields will also be of a plugin type e.g. birthday will consist of an administration part, a reader/data part, a viewer part and a writer part. Any field thinkable e.g. x-facebook will be it’s own plugin so people can easily add plugins for any social network or whatever usage they have in mind

I have the general architecture in my mind but I lack the time to “sit for it”. Dragging the current approach in one web application was a matter of 10 minutes. Still it’s cool that I can blazingly fast skip through my collection of vcards although it feels “i want it now” that i can not edit the data without editing the vcf file itself.

In the long run it will need merging possibilities , import/export and versioning.

I added the current version in an iframe in our home wiki so we have access to all addresses from within the home wiki.

Someone, somewhere, will see the possibilities of this.

All WordPress RSS Feeds Hosted and Managed?

imageWordPress offers feeds on anything (posts, tag pages, categories, and so on, and so on). On my blog alone it must be over 15.000 different feeds or more that are available, so I don’t have a clue what’s going on with my feeds and … I don’t want to host them from within this application, It’s really something that I typically would want to place at a 3rd party.

A while ago Samir wrote a long blog article on my question , (you should really read this  first to understand the problem). Today I found Phil Hollows answered in the comments on that blog post:

FYI FeedBlitz has launched a FeedBurner alternative (see http://tinyurl.com/dh6b7x ). We now have an OPML import facility which we haven’t tested against 9,000 feeds (largest import todate – just under 100) but it sounds like a good challenge in terms of pushing the system a little (or a lot – we’ll see).

Edward, if you’re still interested in a service please email me and we’ll figure out how to get you going phil@feedblitz.com or tweet me @phollows. You’ll need an OPML file of your feeds.

Best,

Phil Hollows
Founder, FeedBlitz.
http://www.feedblitz.com

Which you can find here: http://blog.feedblitz.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html

And now I am thinking…hmmm.. I probably would want to auto-redirect people who click on the rss feed link in WordPress on e.g. http://edward.de.leau.net/about/science (and a couple of thousand other dynamic created tags) to the new location, furthermore the new link should be auto inserted in the header of the page. It really will be a heavy thing I guess.

I think it should be more some kind of WP API to hosted RSS service provider API, so I don’t know if creating a static OPML would be the ideal thing, then again, it’s better than anything currently around.

Now, before I contact Phil I probably first have to dive into this service, let’s do that first.

Every Spartan had 20 slaves on average

imageimage At the Height of its Power, Sparta, in 400 BC, had 25.000 citizens and 500.000 slaves. I wonder if that relation (1:20) a) can also be applied to other organizations and b) if it is recursive e.g. if from the 25.000 citizens only 1190 really had the power.

E.g. that on the world ( 6.7 billion) only 6,706,993,000/21 = 319 million are really at the top of the pyramid and from that 319 million only 15 million are really influencing the decisions and only 723356 people are at the real top and from that top about 35.000 people are globally the top of the top. (affluence has about 20.000 members).

I don’t want to be a slave.

Het broertje van Maarten

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Nou… we zijn nog niet uit de naam en de deadline nadert nu vrij snel. Wat het in ieder geval niet wordt:

Abel, Alexandre ,Alexis ,Alvin ,Anne ,Antoine ,Arturo ,Augustus ,Baptiste, Benjamin ,Bram ,Brecht ,Brent ,Cas ,Cecil ,Christiaan ,Clement ,Collin , Connor ,Constantin ,Daan ,Daniel ,Darius ,Dico ,Diemo ,Dieter ,Dieuwert , Dominic ,Elias ,Emiel ,Enzo ,Etienne ,Eugene ,Ewan / Evan ,Fjodor ,Florent ,Gib ,Giel ,Gonzalo ,Hugo ,Jasper ,Jesse ,Joel ,Jonah , Jonas ,Julien ,Lars ,Laurent ,Leo ,Leopold ,Logan ,Louis ,Luc ,Lucas ,Lucian , Lucius ,Luuk/Luc ,Magnus ,Manu ,Marcel ,Marijn ,Marnix ,Max ,Maxime , Michel ,Michiel ,Milan ,Nathan/ Nate ,Nick ,Nicolas , Niels ,Paul ,philippe ,Pieke , Pieter ,Quentin ,Ricardo , Robert/robbert ,Romain , Ruben ,Sancho ,Samuel/Sam ,Sander ,sascha ,Sem ,Servaas ,Sietse ,Siem ,Stijn ,Sven ,Theo , Thijs ,Thomas ,Tim ,Timo , Tom ,Tristan ,Valentin ,Vincent ,Xander ,Xavier ,Yves ,Wiebe ,Sietze

… en dan nog de duizenden namen uit de top 100 namen sites uit Google ….

Eds links for 2009-04-25: Mobile Mini House: Pop-Up Campers Have Gone Modern!

Link

Mobile Mini House: Pop-Up Campers Have Gone Modern!
Caravan which unfolds into a luxury villa

PHP gets Namespaces

PHP gets namespaces. Finally. In the comments on Slashdot I found the funny:

Java:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access:    Foo.bar
Package access:          foo.bar.baz

C#:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access:    Foo.bar
Namespace access:        foo.bar.baz

Python:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access:    Foo.bar
Module access:           foo.bar.baz

PHP:
Attribute/Method access: $foo->bar
Static method access:    Foo::bar
Namespace access:        foo\bar\baz

The comments pretty much show the upcoming dead of php.

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