Kuehleborn's World

‘u’ — the First Authentic Klingon Opera On Earth

kuehleborn — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:04:26 +0000

The Klingon are known as passionate opera-lovers. However very little is known about their highly evolved form of musical expression here on earth. Floris Schönfeld has managed to lay his hands on some fragments of a masterpiece of the batlh jachlut or Honorable Battle opera. Its title is ‘u’, which can be translated as ‘universe’ or ‘universal’. It will be the basis for the opera ‘u’, the first complete, authentic Klingon opera here on earth.

The next performance of the opera ‘u’ will be:
9, 10, 11 and 12 September 2010
Theater Zeebelt, De Constant Rebecqueplein 20A, The Hague
For reservations email kassa@zeebelt.nl or call +31 (0) 70 3656546

Links:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Hackers blind quantum cryptographers

kuehleborn — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:48:17 +0000

Lasers crack commercial encryption systems, leaving no trace.
Zeeya Merali
Quantum hackers have performed the first ‘invisible’ attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Links:

Hackers blind quantum cryptographers
Discussion at Slashdot

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

RememberTheMilk app free for iPhone

kuehleborn — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:47:55 +0000

Popular GTD-application Remember The Milk is releasing their iPhone app for free to all users. Until now you had to pay $25 yearly to have advantage of synchronizing with your iPhone. There still is a small limitation: if you’ve got a free account, RTM can sync once, manually, every 24 hours, and it won’t support push notifications. No problem for me, but I hope RTM will make the Android app free too.

Until then I’ll try the services by Toodledo and the Android app Got To Do to remember the milk.

Mobile Notetaking apps

kuehleborn — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:26:12 +0000

Last month LifeHacker had a High Five about the best Mobile Note Taking Tool. Always interesting.

I think the golden days of my Moleskine notebooks and indexing the information will soon be over

As expected, Evernote won, with 45,5%. Okay, I use Evernote too, and it’s pretty complete (which also may be a little boring), especially now they have invented The Trunk. Interesting applications from The Trunk that I use are integation with Dial2Do (actually called Voice2Note) and with the Nitro PDF-reader. Since it is a Trunk, there are a lot more applications than you could ever use; e.g. there is also a GTD program: Nozbe. Unfortunately, Nozbe is rather expensive; a free account will offer you almost nothing (unlimited tasks, but only a few contexts. So, to Get my Things Done, I still prefer Remember The Milk. This is completely free, the pro-version – necessary only if you want to use the Android app – costs only $ 25 a year, where Nozbe’s cheapest plan will make your wallet $ 89,95 thinner every year. And – until now Nozbe only has an app for iPhone.

Okay, back to Note Taking: there were also some interesting apps mentioned that were unknown to me: 3banana and Simplenote, both of them (especially 3 banana) worth a try.

I wonder why Diigo has never been mentioned at LifeHacker. It is a real good bookmarking service, that allows you to Blog, MiniBlog and MicroBlog, add sticky notes on the webpage and more, all from a simple bookmarklet (the “Diigolet”) or (if you prefer that) from a toolbar. That is: it is also a kind of note-taking, the mobile app, “Power Note”, allows you to upload text messages, snapshots and images and looks and works better than the Evernote app – IMHO. It also exports your bookmarks to your Delicious-account. Since Evernote can import your Delicious-bookmarks, and Diigo copies your bookmarks automatically to Delicious, it should be great if Evernote and Diigo could talk together, because Diigo and Evernote are both good, but there a few differences. You need them both to have the most complete Note Taking tool, but now you need to update your Delicious to Evernote every now and then.

Note-taking and bookmarking become more and more integrated, but for old fashioned pen-and-paper monotasking Geeks there is still is the Cornell method of notetaking. If you need the TreeWare: here you’ll find some templates.

A new bookmarking tool, with a completely different perspective than other tools, is Historious, that promises full text search and slick quick super-fast bookmarking. No tags, just type in some key-words from the article you are looking for, and historious will find it. Unfortunately, it is also a monotasking application, and above all: not mobile (until now), and that was the topic of this post

Some Geek Pictures

kuehleborn — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:31:18 +0000

I’m in the process of rethinking the design of this website. I like the current theme very much, but it has a few stubborn nuisances. But: another theme means: another banner, and another banner means: doing some personalizing with graphics. The point is: I’m not very good with graphics, so I usually try to find something on the web. I didn’t found what I was looking for yet, but I found some very amusing pictures, that I want to show here:

Inspired by Escher’s “Realtivity” litho with lego. I found it here, but the original (without the text, but with a description) is here.

This picture has been recycled on the web a lot of times, and that demonstrates how you should always protect a good idea before others use it for their own purposes.

The next picture by Hugh MacLeod is licensed by a Creative Commons License. I like it because the transhuman twist in it.

The Geek Shades, in the next picture, combine a very non-geek outdoors-activity (enjoying sheer sunlight) with tools for geeking. Very useful if you are dating a non-geek girlfriend who wants to go to the beach, while you actually want to do some tinkering.

Talking about tinkering: how often have I struggled with my, or someone else’s, computer to remove the cover of it. While replacing the harddisk or plugging in a new card or memory cost me only a few minutes, removing the cover, especially with a Compaq computer, can take you an hour or more. This picture compares the desperate tussle of the computer geek with the Kama Sutra:

The last picture is pathetic. I have included it in this post because I collect owls, and I have some cuddly owls in my home. My collections is here, on my personal website, with a description in Dutch, and some others on my Flickr stream. But this one, pretending to

to keep your spirit up, while rushing for the piled-up work.

is just silly.

Droid X promo

kuehleborn — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:47:21 +0000

Via: Geek.com

Verizon Wireless unveiled a Droid successor dubbed the Droid X at a New York event last Thursday, the day before the iPhone 4 launch.
The press conference was pretty much smooth sailing except for the Verizon PR staffers rudely preventing a Silicon Valley Insider journalist from filming a size comparison between the Droid X and iPhone 4. The journalists attending the conference were also shown the below promo video highlighting key features of the Droid X, including its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen in 16:9 format, a 1GHz Texas Instruments processor, a dual-flash eight-megapixel camera with HD capture, 720p playback via HDMI, home electronics syncing with DLNA, the ability to turn the phone into a wireless hotspot for up to five WiFi devices, and more.

Yoono as a Twitter Client

kuehleborn — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:08:15 +0000

Yoono is free software that allows you to connect and share with all your social networks and instant messaging services in one place. I’ve tried a lot of other applications that brought together my social web activities, like Pidgin (only Instant messaging), Digsby (very nice and more than only IM, but not portable) and Tweetdeck – beautiful UI, but, again, not portable and designed almost exclusively for Twitter.

When I discovered Yoono, life became worth living, or at least: I grokked finally how useful Twitter could be as a social dashboard, while still giving me the opportunity to IM and to share films and pictures. It is available as a Firefox add-on, that works fine with my desktop-version of Firefox, but for some arcane reasons didn’t talk with my portable Firefox. No problem, there is also a Portable desktop-version.

The desktop version has the “Discovery” feature for related websites and more, like the good old “Juice“- add-on (that isn’t compatible with Firefox > 3.5), so this feature is not available when I’m at my work.
well, you can’t always get what you want.

Via CrunchBase:

Yoono develops products designed to simplify social life on the web by centralizing all social networks and instant messaging in a single browser sidebar or desktop app. Yoono’s sidebar enables users to get friend updates automatically wherever they are on the web and update their status instantly across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networks. Yoono also shows users personalized recommendations for related websites, products, videos, and more based on the page they are viewing. Users can share these discoveries with their friends via their social networks or IM clients.

Listography: life in lists

kuehleborn — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:17:55 +0000

Create your personal database of lists: autobiographical lists, to-do lists, catalogues, wishlists, top tens, and more. Try the list topic generator.

http://listography.com

There once was also a "OnMyList"website, that I have tried one or two times. I made some listst there, but then I forgot about it. However, this is a new website with lists and the sample page looks more like the pageflakes of lists. LifeLogging in Lists!

Doctor Who: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Daleks

kuehleborn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:51:29 +0000

Great video by Andrew Orton, aka solidbronze.

I don’t know how he did it. Also very nice is the “trailer of the third and lost Dalek film, made in 1967″.

Everyone knows that there were two Dalek films in the 1960s starring Peter Cushing. It’s not generally knwon that there was a third film made in 1967, based on the Doctor Who TV serial ‘The Chase’. The master print of the film was lost in a fire in the Aaru / Amicus archives before the film was officially released. In 2009, in a box of dusty, charred old film canisters in the basement of a church in northern England, I located the last surviving footage from this film.
All that survived was the trailer…

Sure

Some info about the Daleks is here, of course. Here is a screenshot of the Dalek, taken from Andrew Orton’s film:

More on Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, Phrases from THHGTTG.

Time Tracking

kuehleborn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:56:50 +0000

Computers make us more productive, at least when we use the computer simply as a tool for realizing your ideas. When I have the 1% inspiration, my computer will do the 99% perspiration, which allows me to have some more inspiration or enjoying some free time.
And there I hit the problem: will I use the computer as a workhorse, where it actually has been invented for, or as a collection of games (I admit, sometimes I do play Chess or Go at my computer), like a communication centre (Skype, IM, SocialWeb), or simply as a multimedia collection of mp3′s, funny pics and movies (don’t ask)?
The only way to know is to track the time you spend behind your screen to evaluate your behaviour. There are several applications avaialable on the web, all with their own pros and cons. However, you can’t have all the goodies in the store, so I use Manic Time, especially while it stores a lot of data, all locally.

That is also the downside of it, because who on earth only works at only one computer? So time you spend behind your computer is only partially measured.
Recently – I didn’t visit their website for a longtime – I noticed they also build a portable version and that, as you, dear reader, may know, is entirely my thing! So now I have Manic Time on my 350G Portable Disc and I can log all my activity wherever I am.
Okay, ManicTime is a private thing, and there is nothing wrong with that, but this is not the purpose of the Web 2.0! You should share everything you do – and this is also a great incentive to be as productive as you can. So, is you go all the way and want to confess to the public about your counterproductive behaviour you should use Wakoopa, that has everything including widgets for your Blog and full Facebook integration.
Another tool is the Toggl-timer. This is a great tool if you have your own business and want to determine what to charge your clients (supposed this is time-based).