Global Playboys.net

Don’t download movies illegally. It’s like ripping out a human heart.

The Pirate Bay is one of the driving forces in the decentralization of media distribution. This Tuesday 18 million peers were connected. That’s around 5.5 million more than Skype has on an average day. Pretty impressive. Torrentfreak writes:

Yesterday, the tracker broke a new record, with close to 18 million active users on “TV-torrent Tuesday“, and at the current rate, they will be tracking 20 million peers a few weeks from now.

In most companies Office 2007 still has to catch on. Usually it’s middle-aged power users who are reluctant to switch. In my internship I prepared 2 little presentations in German dealing with this issue. The first one describes the new design philiosophy and why Microsoft decided to introduce a new interface. There is also some compressed information on the new file format and how to build your own ribbons. The second deals with new functions in Excel 2007. I have put all the relevant files mentioned in the presentation in a separate file. Feel free to download them for personal use. The attached files are copyrighted by the respective authors.

Presentation 1: Office 2007 – new functions and interface
Presentation 2: Excel 2007 – new functions
Relevant files

The standard calculator of Mac OSX might be right for my granny, but not for a real techie. Recently I was asked how to convert 50 billion byte to MB. Usually I would enter 10^9/1024^2. Try to punch this into the default calculator. No way.

PEMDAS from Donkey Entertainment is more useful.

If you should ever need some nice pictures for a project and don’t wanna worry about licensing, have a look at the Flickr Commons. Especially the ones from the Library of Congress. Nice stuff. I really hope they put everything on flickr soon.

Today I tried to remove all my data from the various google services I had been using over the last couple years and leave the data monster. Biggest effort was to delete all the contacts in my address book. There were around 900 and you can only delete 20 at a time. I also found google docs from like 2 years ago. Really scary. My web history showed around 1500 search querys a month for the last year. I don’t like being profiled like that.

From now on I keep whatever I can on my own server. That inclueds webhosting, email, bookmarks and openid. Works better than expected so far and gives you lots of flexibility. The only thing I couldn’t substitute so far is google reader. There is an opensource rss reader, you can install on your server, but it’s not really what I’m looking for. For the moment I’m at bloglines, which I find pretty nice.

I’m not sure if the whole thing was worth the effort, but if things on the internet continue to move in the direction we’re moving now, it’s gonna be nasty.

I encourage everyone to make a similar move and try to reduce it’s data footprint. Here are some practical advises:

• Searching: use http://scroogle.org. You get the same results as from google, but without the spying. They also have a SSL-Version at https://ssl.scroogle.org/. Very handy.

• RSS Reader: This was my main issue, why I decided to stick with google for such a long time. Try Bloglines Beta. They have similar features and accept OpenID.

• E-Mail: Lavabit offers fully encrypted, free E-Mails with a strong focus on privacy.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.  –Kevin Rose

A great day for web 2.0!!

This will be the next big thing: Forget your keyboard and mouse! Apple is already working on it. Imagine a tablet pc with this kind of display and a flashdrive. This would be a completley new way how we interact with computers.

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Be sure to check out Jeff Han’s demonstration and his homepage.