Accumulation of Win

“Man…. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.” — Dalai Lama Continue reading

They are everywhere! Even the new business cards of my company has a QR-Code on the back now. The most prominent application for them must be in advertisement, where the little block of visual bits forms the connection between print media and online content. The idea is simple: For example, on some poster that already got your attention they put this square of black and white spots. With a camera and an app on your mobile (for example Barcode Scanner on Android) you take a picture and *bam* your phone has just decrypted the URL within the code, which you can then visit without typing a single letter. Basically it works like a Barcode but with two dimensions. The one on my business card contains all my contact information, so you don’t have to scan it or even type it into your phone.

Now this dude, Brian Benchoff, found out that according to the specification, a lot of the code (up to 30%) can be “unreadable” by the phone and still be decoded. So he did the obvious, he put some stuff inside the code like so:

You should try it yourself, it actually still works and in this example gives you the URL of Mozilla Firefox if you scan it. This is actually a pretty sweet idea and if I would make my own business cards with a QR-Code on them, i would definitely integrate a logo like this as well.

Read the full Article with all the explanation why and how it works on Hackaday.com.

Check out The Top 10 QR-Code Generators in case you would like to try creating your own Codes. In addition, here is a small clip of another interesting application of QR-Codes in Korea where you can go shopping in a virtual store.

Maybe you have played the 1991 platformer ‘Another World‘ back in the Amiga or in my case Atari times. I remember the very smooth animations which in those days were just awesome compared to the frame-by-frame pixel animation most of the games had. Without any textures however the game got a certain minimalistic feel. This is what Limbo (Latin limbus, edge or boundary, referring to the “edge” of Hell) reminds me of. But I am not comparing. It is fresh. It is more creepy. And this is due to two simple design decisions: first of all it is all black and white, with an old flickering camera effect and all shapes are drawn as silhouettes only. Second, there is no music whatsoever. Just sounds and some ambient noise. And those are just awesome! Footsteps, flies and… what is that noise coming from the bushes over there?

Creepy visual art, perfect atmosphere. My new favorite parallax-scrolling puzzle platformer is called... Limbo! (sorry, Braid)

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You probably know the tune ‘Like a G6’ by Far East Movement, which by the way isn’t half bad. What I found here now is a nerdy version of that song about some heavy role playing. The title? Roll a D6.

http://vimeo.com/23248158

You might like to compare it to the original.

I already posted this clip on my facebook application page yesterday just when it was released by DICE/EA, but I know a lot of people who are not on facebook anymore. So here you have it too: The latest Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Teaser, recorded on the Multiplayer Map ‘Operation Metro’, which is going to be played like a Rush Map (as known from Bad Company 2). Enjoy the destructible environment and – what amazes me in every single trailer I have seen so far – the fantastic ambient sound effects. Pure awesomeness!

The Rush Layout of Operation Metro, with its different zones: outside and inside. Also pictured are the mcom stations to be destroyed.

While I have been near Lago Maggiore in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland, I have also been going up the stream of one of the rivers – leading into the Verzasca Valley. And by “going” i mean “driving”. Anyway… After a while you find yourself in front of a cement wall: the Contra dam. Wait a second, I know that sight: From this dam James Bond took his famous bungee jump in Goldeneye! In fact you can even do the jump yourself if you dare. Even though i just posted all those adventurous things i would like to do some day, bungee jumping was not one of them.

Contra dam aka the favorite place for Bond to Bungee Jump

Instead I continued going up the river, beyond the enormous artificial lake of the dam, and I reached a wonderful river bed carved into solid granite near a very old roman bridge. Wow. What a sight! Around this river you can climb along the rocks from one small stream to another. Near the bridge you see the mountains in the back and the water is flowing very slowly and is several meters deep. Some small streams go all around the rocks so it may very well happen that were you climb along would turn out to be a dead end after a while because you cannot cross the water except by swimming. Continue reading

I know i do. Well, not just at home. I am also at work, but its basically the same thing: there is a desk, a computer and i am sitting in my chair in front of that. Sitting, sitting, sitting. What i am doing might change depending on where I am, but no matter what that might be, i am sitting. That is why once every couple of hours i need a little inspiration to imagine I am doing things outside of the digital world and on my feet. Inspiration that might make me think “Hey, that’s EXACTLY what I always wanted to do!!” – and hopefully I am going to do that too later that week.

So i did what everyone would do nowadays: I went online (while sitting) and I was looking for awesome inspirational videos. I ended up with a handful of adventurous outdoor activity clips… interestingly, every one of those is showcasing some people going downhill in one way or the other (what that means is to be interpreted by YOU). Continue reading

My provider (Cablecom) is the most crappiest experience i ever had using internet and i have tried AOL 30 days in the 90s… Ok, they sell you 100Mbit by now, and maybe you might get that kind of speed between 4am and 6am but the latency is making the connection useless 22 hours per day: playing games, VoIP calls and streaming videos is absolutely impossible especially during rush hours (from 17h00 to 1h00). And lets be honest, what else do you need the internet for? And when?!

Its not a single occurrence either. This has been going like that since November last year. Sure, it has been ok once in a while, but i feel that every time you actually need the latency-free connection, it starts behaving like THAT:

Normal would be ±12ms to a server of that distance.

And yeah i tried already all kinds of shit: connecting with cable, connecting without router, rebooting, switching cables, using windows, macosx and ubuntu – nothing ever works. And when it comes to asking support about whats going on i just get answers like i should send them a speedtest log, use their speed-tool for windows to increase my connection’s performance or check my antivirus – well whatever… No i am not downloading on 3 computers from p2p while trying to skype! No, i am not even using a firewall. Just admit that you just sold more bandwidth in my neighborhood than you can provide and lets finally upgrade the connection accordingly or at least downgrade all of our speeds to a decent degree so everyone can enjoy their crappy connection without latency. 100Mbit my ass! I need responsiveness!! Dammit!

Creativity

This week’s top creativity inspiration for me goes to the people of Cyclecide. Those guys are plain awesome when it comes to the ‘just-do-this-thing’ mentality. I like the spirit and the circus appeal. Just would love to see them traveling around the country too… Continue reading