Apple – iPod – Which iPod are you? I simply can’t let that go without a note. Today Apple announced the new iPod product line. As you may know I started this blog very much with the purchase of my first iPod (Photo or 4G with 20 GB) which I actually still use. Very much indeed. Now they have redesigned … Read More
Vague Law Scares Off Toolmakers in Germany
Vague Law Scares Off Toolmakers in Germany Very much to my surprise I didn’t notice this earlier: German government created a law that makes it illegal to possess, use, produce, or distrubute “hacker tools”. So if you help someone to break into a computer system by providing (producing, selling etc.) either passwords or software tools, which serve this purpose, you … Read More
Freedom of Choice
I’ve just been watching two interesting TED talks by Bryan Schwartz and Dan Gilbert – yes I’m slowly going through all of them – both of which carry strong ideas about “choice”.If you are in my parents age (born around the 1950s) and even more so if you’re part of my generation (born in the 1980’s) you probably noticed that … Read More
Video Games = Art Question Mark
:: rogerebert.com :: Commentary :: Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (xhtml) I don’t know if you heard about it but when crawling through my rss feeds I found an entry on the discussion of movie critic Roger Ebert who doesn’t consider video games to be art. Full stop. I actually found it in the blog of game designer and … Read More
Food: The potato-salad-fish-fingers-Sub
I decided to start a new series of blog entries about something I do quite regularly. I like to cook. I also like to eat (what seems like a neat coincidence) but I love to experiment with new recipes and I have several books and the web to retrieve them from. I’m quite into italian and greek food but I … Read More
Starting a Second Life
I’ve been to second life a few times because it is a big subject in media research at the moment. However, I always try to have a subjective perspective in addition to what is said objectively. A few weeks ago I decided that I should personify my avatar so I started to work on that. It took some time to … Read More
New Music on iTunes – now DRM-free!!
It’s been announced a while ago but as of today I started using iTunes Plus. iTunes Plus offers music and videos in better sound quality and without DRM at a slightly increased price (1,29 € per song in Germany, 1,99 € per video, albums prices remain). This is possible because music publisher EMI agreed to offer his music catalog for … Read More
Episodic Gaming – Sam'n'Max and Dreamfall Chapters
I just listened to a Podcast available over at Gamasutra (Link to source) where Dan Connors (CEO of Telltale Games) talks on how the idea of episodic gaming works out for Telltale and it recent releases of episodes from the Sam and Max Season 1.I find this very interesting since episodic gaming especially in my special favourite genre of adventure … Read More
I'm with Wii…
Yes, I finally did it. I had thought about it prior to christmas but it was sold out back then and so I had to wait. But on Monday I got my brand new Nintendo Wii!!!!I’m pretty connected with Nintendo. The first gaming concole my mother bought for us was the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). I played “Super Mario Brothers” … Read More
Should Germans Laugh About Hitler?
article at Spiegel Online This question was asked last week prior to the release of director Dani Levy’s new movie “Mein Führer” starring german comedian Helge Schneider as Adolf Hitler. Well, you can read what others said about that. I prefer to know what I talk about (well, sometimes) and therefore I went to see the movie tonight. In short: … Read More
Gamasutra – Second Life Goes Open Source
The article This is really interesting: Linden Lab announced that they open the sources of the viewer software needed to access the Second Life grid to the public so that everybody is now able to change and (hopefully) improve the software. It might be ported to different devices etc. and that immediately reminded me of the Metaverse as depicted in … Read More
George Carlin / Blogger out of beta
Well, christmas is over (I sent out christmas wishes on deviantArt this year, so you’d like to read them out here) and therefore it’s time for some serious senseless wisdom again. I just read my daily joke newsletter Cyberjoke 3000â„¢ by Al Lowe and he introduced a video of comedian George Carlin talking about him being a modern man. It’s … Read More