Thousands of criminal proceedings against Internet coffee buyers - Coffee tax. Of course. Why customs does not collect it directly from incoming packages (so far, customs has stuck its fingers into my packages - although not coffee - every time), no one has explained ...
Linkblog - 6.11.2006 - 23.11.2006
Flickr: Camera Finder - common camera types on Flickr. What does that say? Not much, except that Flickr users use cameras.
Controlled heroin distribution on the verge of ending? - successful reintegration of heroin addicts, lives at stake (and demonstrably saved from the vicious cycle of addiction by the program), but what is politics doing? Riding on principles because such things just shouldn't exist. And presumably, all the Union bigwigs are at home getting drunk.
SAP Network use - Port numbers of the horror ERP system ...
The Rolex Awards: a cheap technique for food preservation, M. B. Abba - a refrigerator made of two clay pots and water. A modern rediscovery (2000, some say even invention) of a historical technique - can be made by hand. Genius.
United States Patent Application: 0060242178 - tagging, commenting, etc. on media, such as images, videos, etc. Will Yahoo then probably sell patent rights to Google (YouTube)?
3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop: Books: Luke Ahearn - just blogged to remind myself to get it later (be careful, Amazon link).
Coccinella | Jabber client with integrated whiteboard - multiplatform, apparently in TCL (at least extendable in TCL).
Demands for banning killer games are getting louder - funny. I am absolutely sure that you cannot get firearms in a computer game that you can then use to shoot around in real life. But politics does not ask about the origin of the weapons, only that computer games must be banned (whereas games glorifying violence are already banned - banning more than banning somehow doesn't do anything, does it?). Activism instead of thinking.
The Dark Side of Game Texturing: Books: David Franson - another book (again Amazon, sorry) about textures.
Cracked it! - and what did they crack? The British RFID passport.
Getting Cute with the GPL - don't do it.
Online price comparison for dental patients banned - the panic fear of the informed patient.
Shooting at School in Emsdetten - Detten? School shooter? What's going on here?
Stopping spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP) - hmm. Transparent SMTP proxy. Unfortunately in Perl - my experiences in that direction were rather negative so far.
If I dig a very deep hole, where do I end up? - cool Google Map Mashup - select a point and calculate where a deep hole through the Earth comes out.
The Zfone Project - Encryption-Proxy for VOIP Clients.
E-Mail account only with ID card? - ok, if this goes through, we can say goodbye to any form of reason on the Internet. And anyone who still offers services as a provider should think carefully about it ...
StudiVZ - The Hitler Screenshot and the Buyer Facebook - hey, hello toilet, here arm of fool. Or something like that. Up to the shoulder.
The Lotto Mandatory Proxy - once again, a huge drama. Due to the lottery monopoly, are we facing new nonsense blocking demands? In what kind of banana republic do we actually live here ...
E-Voting - the PTB in a state of explanation. The PTB director comes across as quite helpless in that interview.
Freie Wähler feel blackmailed: Koch dismisses allegations as "absurd" - something new from our strangest "democrat" from Hesse ...
Merkel advocates for more surveillance despite high security - they can't get enough. Meanwhile, they don't even bother to come up with lies anymore ...
JMRI Defense: Our Story So Far - about the fight of a model railway project against a scammer.
Richter strengthen data protection for insured parties - it would be nice if this also applied to other insurances (e.g. dental supplementary insurance) ...
Basso to Discovery - well, Discovery has experience with captains under doping suspicion. After all, they have won 7 Tours this way. The self-commitment of the Pro-Tour teams is worth nothing.
Croatia - Plitvicka Jezera National Park - waterfalls, Plitvicka, Croatia - very beautiful nature photographs.
Interior Minister Schünemann: T-Mobile obstructs law enforcement - cute. T-Online only accepts location determination orders from authorities via an expensive 0900 number.
TEH INTERNETS - Chat abbreviations explained graphically.
Woo Math: Steiner and Theosophical Math - Waldorf-Quark from a different angle.
CSSEdit - looks interesting, GUI editor for stylesheets. However, I am still a fanatical vi user when it comes to HTML and CSS ...
The Myths of Employers - about employer FUD.
Fefe's Blog about the endgame fantasies of the US military. Does this all sound damn familiar to anyone?
JumpBox - not such a bad idea: virtual machines with pre-installed software, not just for testing, but directly as a productive environment.
Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components - free plugin to play a lot of video formats with the Quicktime Player.
Statistics on copyright infringements are exaggerated - never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself.
Study: Every fourth German wishes for a single party of the "Volksgemeinschaft" - how we like to tell ourselves that this is all just a fringe phenomenon, and how wrong this claim is. Ultimately a failure of politics and the education system, but also of society itself.
Data protection expert openly talks about the path to a surveillance state - don't worry, won't impress anyone, we'll continue as planned. Civil rights don't interest anyone anymore.
Efficient JavaScript - you should definitely go through it, can't hurt.
Fission for Mac OS X - lossless audio file editing. Nice addition to Audio Hijacker by the same manufacturer, e.g. for recording life events on the internet ...
inches - yikes!
Light Zone - interesting tool for image editing. Not too expensive, demo available, in Java (and actually portable across multiple platforms). Sounds at least interesting for a test.
Personal selection via facial analysis: Telltale bump on the head - "Phrenology was ultimately also the basis for the racial science popular during the Nazi era".
Judgment: T-Online may not store connection data - unfortunately only for one customer and for everyone else another lawsuit would be necessary. Such an absurd thing - the BGH finds that T-Online acts unlawfully, but simply ignores that they will continue to do so for a million (or however many) other users ... this is then called a rule of law ...
VIA closes driver sources - it would be best to simply boycott VIA. Somehow, the company is just too arrogant.
World Mysteries - Voynich Manuscript - strange ...
Ballmer Invites Patent Talks with Competing Linux Vendors - well, now it seems Microsoft is trying to crack the Linux market. They will look pretty stupid if they only reach the commercial distributions and the free distributions just give them the middle finger ...
Bill Gates warns of digital divide in Germany - "Their goal is to make four million people fit for dealing with information technology in professional life by 2010." - well, "to indoctrinate for Microsoft products" probably describes the goals of an MS campaign better. And our politicians obediently hold the ladder.