Monthly Archive for December, 2007
Vienna now and then: a Flickr stream showing photos of Vienna, taken at the same spots with up to a hundred years time difference.
After having tried several backup strategies I’ve decided to finally get a Mozy account: $5 a month for encrypted unlimited online storage.
I changed my opinion mainly because a friend told me last week about a terrible burglary. They stole the laptop, among a lot other things, but luckily didn’t take the external backup hard disk. It stood right next to the laptop and contained all digital photos (of a photographer). I’ve a similar setting right now, which would let me recover photos, music and other important private data in case of a hard disk crash. But in case of burglary or fire I’d be totally screwed. No insurance can bring back all my digital photographs.
Now Mozy runs in the background and takes care of my data. Good.
Until 31th December 2007 you can save 10% off the annual fee by entering the promo code DECEMBER (at least it worked for me).
New Mozy promo codes:
APRIL – 10% off an annual subscription to MozyUnlimited
APRIL2 – 10% off a biannual subscription to MozyUnlimited
A movie shot with surveillance cameras. Creepy!
Good to know that public surveillance is handled responsible and carefully:
If a hot girl walked into the mall, they tracked her from camera to camera to camera, all day long. Let’s say the camera caught under her skirt as the wind blew, they’d take that footage and post it on YouTube. They showed me their highlight reel!
If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.
Tony Benn in Sicko
Simple, but listed under “Favorite Quotes” of a person running for president of a superpower it gets a whole different meaning. [Found on Dennis Kucinich's Facebook page]
It’s always a pleasure to download music at Bleep: 320kbps drm free MP3, mostly at iTunes prices, if you’re a friend of full albums.
Was in the mood for some older stuff today…
It’s already hard to pronounce the title well, imagine doing the entire song backwards.
[found on Wholphin DVD magazine, imported by A.]
Though I’m not quite sure if “Metternich 2.0″ is the most appropriate title for this online demo, I believe something has to be done to raise public awareness about that issue.
On December 6th our government sneaked a security law amendment into the parliament. Unlike the German government, they were clever enough to dump democracy, do it secretly in order to avoid any public discussion and finally passed the amendments on the very same day, on 6th December around midnight (that already says something), without preceding parliamentary discussions.
The amendment radically enhances police surveillance rights and allows far-reaching monitoring of citizens without a control entity behind. I guess surveillance state is the term used in certain literature.
Members of the green party set up a parliamentary petition against the law (and governmental behavior). You can sign it online on their website.
Helge is using his wiki to support the petition and is providing tools – you might have noticed the page peel in the upper right corner here – and information for an online demo. [via helge.at]
Update: the Austrian parliament in action, by Maschek (in German language):
Yet another application which makes the iPhone more appealing:
MobileScrobbler connects your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch with the Last.fm social music website.
The T-Mobile Austria EDGE network can carry data speeds up to 220 kbit/s. Last.fm radio uses an MP3 stream encoded at 128 kbit/s. So I guess this should basically work, but still depends on how reliable and stable EDGE is, where I don’t have any experiences with. A 3G iPhone connected to a broader bandwith would certainly do a better job on Last.fm radio.
The definition of flat-rate in most mobile phone contracts is another questionable point: a flat-rate ending at 200 MB per month (like offered in the T-Mobile Germany iPhone data package) wouldn’t allow me to enjoy Last.fm too much.
A quick example: my daily way to work, where I usually listen to my iPod, takes 25 minutes, one way. After 5 days, Monday to Friday going to work, listening to Last.fm radio only my way to work and back, streaming at 128 kbit/s, I would have already exceeded a flat-rate of 200 MB, without even using the internet on the iPhone for something else.
That wouldn’t make sense, and is in my opinion a gadget show stopper. [via macnotes]