Headshot of Amazing

You are now invited to join me on a late afternoon walk along the lake of Locarno, Switzerland. It is the beginning of June and after a completely overcast day around 5pm the sun came out and bathed the trees on the esplanade in a warm light. People came out from cafes to take a walk in t-shirts or ride their bikes along the lake. Once in a while you can hear some waves hitting the stones when a boat came by a little bit further out on the water. Continue reading

Since Leopard, emptying the trash was taking HOURS to complete because of the system’s default to actually overwrite all bits of a deleted file. Even though this might be secure to a certain degree, it is still BS for everyday use, because first of all not all data is that sensitive, second it drains battery and third it decreases your harddrive’s life expectancy and most importantly: it just takes too long. I finally found the option to turn this thing off:

1. Go to Finder preferences
2. Go to Advanced
3. Untick “Empty Trash securely”

I know its not a big thing,but… before you apple fanboys are sending me your facepalms: I am not a regular user (just using a macbook pro on the road) and things like this can really drive me crazy and i do not know intuitively where to look for them on mac. So i was very happy to find this little Sanity Saver. Still wondering why i can’t just select between “Empty Trash” and “Empty Trash Securely” in the moment he is anyway popping up a confirmation dialog…

Most websites today are full of ads, links, pictures and stuff that distract you from their actual content you would like to read. That’s why I try to keep this blog as clean and minimalistic as possible. And that’s why there is a browser plugin called “Readability”.

http://vimeo.com/3445774

Check out: lab.arc90.com/​experiments/​readability

This is the first recording I made today while walking around in my neighborhood. Summer finally started and you could feel the smooth warmth of the sun on your skin while a gentle wind was moving the air around you. Not far from my home there are some bank buildings, the stadium, a huge fair hall and a techno club called OXA (which is famous within the Zurich area). Even though it can be a very busy areal on weekdays and nights, during weekend days there are almost no people around, giving me the perfect opportunity to start my first recordings of the Auralfloat project. What fascinated me was the realization that when recording audio, i have to learn to hear from scratch – almost like a photographer has to learn how to perfectly frame his shots, perspectives, the constellation of objects and lights within the scene. For example in my recordings you hear the wind and footsteps, which i almost did not realize while recording it. I also did not realize how many airplanes or even distant cars are recognizable from where i have been. But i left the recordings as they are (no editing), because I think there will be a lot of learning going on and i am really looking forward to experiment with it in the future. I hope you will like it as well and I would be very happy about any feedback you can give. Continue reading

One year has passed since i published the last mix. And it was also on the 1st of May. Well, this time it’s a little bit later – but: I actually started working on it on the weekend of the 1st. So consider this my yearly contribution under the subject “Dance into May“.

This time i collected many very different tracks over the course of the year which i wanted to put together in one only mix. This i consider the perfect combination or “mixtape” if you will, for work or travel even though it was not that easy to jump through all the different styles. But i did not want to leave any of the pieces out.

So, I started with some of the most impressive ambient sounds i have ever listened to. One of them is by Lisa Gerrard, who in my opinion has the most amazing voice on this planet. I mean chill-down-the-spine-every-single-time kind of amazing! I really suggest you to look up some live concert’s clips on youtube if you don’t know her yet. Those sounds then will soon fade into some progressive house which climaxes in a pushing dubstep. After that the mix keeps flowing nicely up and down the electro/progressive and even minimal house line until it finishes with an excellent chillout track – which is kind of my favorite tune in the last couple of months.

You can download or stream the mix on the Music section of my blog. All I am asking is to please give me feedback on what you think about this journey of my favorite tracks of the past 365 days.

Listen:

Download or Stream in the Music section

Here is the playlist:

Bluetech – Worthy
Dead Can Dance (Lisa Gerrard) – The Host Of Seraphim
Cell – Floating Retention
Solar Fields – Introduction
Ten Madison – Humans
Trentemoller – Beta Boy
Dousk – Lein (Original Mix)
Tonecast – Murder Fingerprints (Original Mix)
Daniel Portmann – Virtual Suicide (Original Mix)
Noisia – Machine Gun (Spor Remix)
The Madison – Liquid Sky (Original Mix)
Evren Ulusoy & Sezer Uysal – Are You Deaf (Cid Inc Remix)
EE2 – Suddle Movements (Brian Kage Remix)
Ricky Ryan – Flower Bomb (Kobana And Mario Hatchet Remix)
Pleasurekraft – Tarantula (Original Mix)
Darin Epsilon & Paronator – Esperanto (Original Mix)
Trentemoller- Late night cab driving
Bodytemp – Kalm (Original Mix)
Carbon Based Lifeforms – Epicentre (Second Movement)
Secede – Leraine

Scarlett has some nice combo combat moves - some of them are realized in bullet time.

I would like to present to you a nice find of the german game kitchen. The first time I discovered some information about it was quite a while ago in a game developers magazine called Making Games. They presented Deck13 from Frankfurt/Main who was working at that point on an action role playing game called ‘Venetica’ and has received already a few national developer prices for its series of ‘Ankh‘. What immediately caught my eye was the level of detail they put into the animation, facial expression and clothing of the female protagonist character ‘Scarlett’. I knew at that point that i had to play this game, but by its release on 4. September 2009 it went somehow forgotten to me again.

When I actually got my hands on it one year after (it was winter by that time), I really felt like diving into a fantastic story that reveals the potential to take me away from the gray, cold days. Now that i finished it a few weeks a go, here is what i liked and disliked about the game… Continue reading

DICE/EA has kept us waiting for long enough now and according to their tweets the development of Battlefield 3 is making great progress. Now they have released the full 12 minutes trailer of which we have already seen most parts in their previous releases – but now in a consecutive story line with a few scenes that have not been shown before…

The most impressive would be the earthquake in the end followed by some more sneak preview scenes that make your jaw drop. I feel totally immersed into the atmosphere – especially I love those majestic sound effects!

Cant wait to see some multiplayer now… this truly seems to get epic!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw9z6RWkCng

Shooting of The Hobbit started and Peter Jackson just released a first look behind the scenes, or to be precise: onto some of the sets and the wardrobe. I kind of forgot that he tried to start working on that movie until today but i immediately got curious about it, especially because i have actually been reading the book when i was a kid…

The movie is going to be released in two parts: the firtst 19. december 2012 and part two somewhere december 2013.

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More information on The Hobbit on Wikipedia and IMBD.

It just so happens once in a while that i just accidentally come across a new game that is going to be released soon, of which i have never heart before but which seems to have a lot of potential to catch my attention in the long run. One of those games is “From Dust” which is the working title of a new Ubisoft game by Eric Chahi. It is a god game, where you (the god) are in control of some natural elements (in this case sand, lava, water and vegetation) to form the world for the human inhabitants by preventing disasters, creating living space or causing havoc (probably like many god games where Populous was the first i remember playing). Why am i mentioning this game after we have played so many other similar games already until exhaustion? Well, it is definitely the art style of this one that fascinated me. There is not much info on the gameplay as of now, but i can see a lot of potential there. Basically i just wanted to let you know that i will keep my eye on this game. Release date is somewhere around summer 2011. I just hope that it will not fail to fulfill my expectations as Black & White did some time ago. Even though i am not much into this kind of games anymore, i can imagine that it would be relaxing to play one of those endless single player modes all by myself for a change (there is no multiplayer announced). I am impatiently now waiting for more details on the gameplay itself and see what it turns into…

I found this video of an early game engine demo:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKQCAxizrA

Another teaser with similar clips from the demo plus some pictures can be found on the official homepage.

There is also an interview with its creator Eric about the ideas behind the game on youtube:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV4xE4tFolo

Do you also have those days sometimes where everything seems to go wrong? Well, how about a day where everything you try actually works?! Watch how that would be like:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ-Nw8RAn_U

I do not claim this is NOT an average day for them, but what if it wasn’t? What do you think how many hours of video those guys accumulated until they finally got the intended results? I admire their patience in that case, otherwise i admire their skills! Oh and the choice of music fits excellent too. Thumbs up!