chillu.com

Update (04/10/2007): This article has been lifehacked. Thanks for all your comments!

Being a programmer, I crouch in front of computers a lot – obviously you want to avoid being a cripple with 30 and get an ergonomic workplace. Usually this means having a separately adjustable keyboard and screen in addition to my Macbook Pro. Currently i don’t have this luxury, so I came up with a really simple laptop stand to rise the screen-height and have a more relaxed wrist position.

This has been done before (a lot). Some of them are just clumsy, look bad, or can’t be applied to Apple laptops because of the limited bending-angle of their screens. I’m suprised nobody looked at the obvious, and constructed a stand from a ring-binder. Its very cheap, easy to build, portable, and in addition contains most of the clutter i need on my desk (post-its, pen, my two external drives). You can even bundle any cables through the metal hole present in most binders. And most important: It perfectly fits the color of my laptop! *g

What you need

1. A stable ring binder, optimally with the latch not sticking out of the top to prevent scratches
2. 40cm aluminium rail (0.5mm thick, 1.5cm depth/height), normally used for securing edges, its available in every utility store
3. 40×1cm felt or fabric, to prevent scratches
4. Double-sided adhesive tape
5. Two small metal clamps, normally used for securing letters
6. Optional: Some black anti-slide mat to cover the ring binder

Instructions

1. Cut the aluminium rail to the length of the ring binder with a metal saw
2. Round the cutting edges
3. Place adhesive tape on one inner side of the rail
4. Drill two holes towards the sides big enough to hold the metal clamps
5. Fit rail to one edge of the ring binder
6. Drill holes through the binder as well, and secure them with the metal clamps
7. Fit the strip of felt on the other inner side of the rail (which will hold the laptop)
8. Secure the sides of the clamps facing the laptop-bottom with tape to avoid scratches

Warning

If your laptop-bottom tends to heat up with high CPU-usage, a paper-based ring binder might pose a fire hazard. Consider using an aluminium binder, leave some room for ventilation, or cut venting-holes into the binder top.

Pictures

Well, switching my blog to Mephisto was one thing, but taming a fastcgi-server on my shared-hosting-provider Site5 is a completely different story. Being the usual geek, I’ve applied way too much technology to a simple problem: Capistrano promises a solid automated deployment process, and is often used for Rails-based apps. Very interesting concept, and for more scientific than practical reasons I’ve spend nearly two days configuring this tool for chillu.com. Well, i’ve ended up 90% done, and an embarassing downtime while debugging fastcgi and mysterious rails-logs – sorry for that!

On the way back to Germany I had a little “asia-preview” by staying in Singapore for two nights. As so often, the internet was very useful for figuring out to do in this timespan, and so I followed a wiki-based itinary from wikitravel.
Day 1 was dedicated to shopping on Orchard Street, a 2km-street with at least a dozen multi-storey shopping malls – it actually took me the better part of the day to walk through it. As I couldn’t think of any electronics I could buy cheaper there, I got through it without spending much (apart from an awesome robopet for my godson). I saw at huge armada of electronic-shops on the way, selling everything from cellphone-covers over phonecards to digicams – sometimes as many as five on a single mall-floor. Interesting sidenote: Lots of asians switch to badass digital SLRs, with 600mm-lenses, external flash and all the shebang (I’m getting rid of mine, because its just too bulky to carry around).
So my first impression of the city wasn’t too overwhelming, with lots of concrete and in-your-face capitalism (“world’s only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations”). Although it’s a very safe city, I feld kinda awkward being in a place where a death penalty is executed every six days in average (way more than in China), on relatively low charges as trafficking 500g of marihuana.
After an exhausting afternoon with unbearable humidity I was ready to sample some Singaporean food – and tried the highly recommended “black pepper crab”. It was quite a fight between us two, with pityful waiters bringing me more napkins because my hands were nearly black with soy sauce – fun times!
Day 2 proved to be more cultural and interesting: Chinatown with its innumerous booths selling random stuff, and a very crowded Little India – I must have seen the whole male indian population of Singapore chatting on the space of three blocks, without any apparent reason for gathering. Had an in-depth personal introduction into the art of Japanese tea-brewing (at Tea Chapter), a very formalized process with lots of utilities. Today my culinary choices were “tea eggs” and shark fins – couldn’t get me to try the fishhead curry.
I really wanted to try asian pastry as well, but couldn’t go near any bakery – because they mostly sell some weird fruit called “durian” there, with a sweet smell unbearable for most europeans. The smell is so bad that its actually forbidden to bring the fruit on the subway haha.
The public transport in Singapore is awesome, with modern stations, prepaid ticket-cards and a well-planned network its super-easy to get around in the city.
So overall Singapore left a pretty mixed picture, no place I would want to live (especially because of the authoritarian regime) – but definetly worth a two-day stop.

Good read on Singapore in Wired Magazine: “Disneyland with Death Penalty” Some photos on flickr

Time flies, especially with a fun job in an awesome city on the other end of the globe. So the expiry of my Work&Travel visa advanced quickly, and the inevitable flight back to Germany proved a good opportunity for a holiday. I always wondered why people would live in such a crazy continent as Australia, so the goal was obvious – three weeks of sun, beaches and dangerous animals on the east coast. I left Wellington on a sunny winter day, still a bit hung-over from my farewell-party, trying to decide if I’m sad about leaving or looking forward to the way ahead. My first impression of Sydney was their massive two-level subways – with hinged backseats that can change orientation to form group seating. Inventive bunch, those Australians! For its stretch of over 1500 square kilometers including suburbs, the inner city is quite walkable – I love to explore cities on foot, and find all those random places that you would miss on a subway- or bustour. For example, I wouldn’t have ended up in the viewing-booth backyard of an “adult shop” while looking for a second-hand bookshop (which closed down in the meantime, but still had its advertisement up…). I had my “Wow, I’m actually in Sydney!”-moment when arriving at the harbourfront with the gravity-defying Sydney Opera House. My trusty “Lonely Planet”-guide informed me that it was built back in the 60s, for ten times the original estimate – glad this doesn’t just happen to software projects hehe. Next stop for the hungry traveller was Chinatown – if you like asian food, thats the place to be (a third of Sydneysiders are born overseas, lots of asian influences). Sydney was surprisingly cold and rainy (so much about sunny Australia and windy Wellington! g*), so I started figuring out my further trip and booking stuff (very “un-german” not to have this sorted already, as my kiwi-mates would say). I “fast-forwarded” the route between Sydney and Brisbane to flee from the cold south. Traveling in Australia usually means crossing the equivalent of a medium-sized european country towards the next city – while the east-coast looks quite compact on a map, I actually did over 3000km of bus-travel – so going to Brisbane meant a 15h tour. On the way I’ve seen a couple dozen “roadkills” – actually I’ve seen more dead than live kangaroos here (an inevitable thing with roughly 60 million of them throughout the continent). From Brisbane onwards I enjoyed the usual mix of beaches and island-trips (with way too little time for beach bumming!). I’ve had a look where my former flatmates Sepp and Eva did their study abroad near Surfers Paradise (lucky bastards! *g), in the aptly dubbed “Miami of Australia”. East-coast Australia feels a lot more american than british, with climatized shopping-malls, oversized roads and highrise beach-resorts. To sample a bit less “califoria-style” Australia, we deviated into the outback and stayed a night on the Krombit Cattle Farm, complete with whip-cracking, lasso-throwing and riding the electric bull (a mere 12 seconds before my nuts where crushed and I fell off) – fun times! I was pretty occupied searching the dust for anything dangerous, of which the Australians have quite an assortment – any living thing here seems set to shorten your life in a grueling and painful way. I mean heck, even birds try to kill you here by slashing open your chest. Teacup-sized jellyfish have enough poison to kill a roomful of people, and spiders get big enough to catch small birds. Ah, and the usual sharks and crocodiles, which kinda take the fun out of swimming and living near water. Having said that, Australians are pretty relaxed about any immanent death-threats – and I’ve seen very few dangerous animals that weren’t caged. Even when doing my diving certificate on the Great Barrier Reef, the only thing remotely concerning was a small stingray. Before I really knew it, I found myself on a plane to Singapore, contemplating about this strange continent. Australians are a fascinating bunch with a great attitude, and manage to squeeze out a lot of lifestyle from this barren land. Definetly going back there, mate! :) Some Photos on flickr

After all the talk about “the real life” on my blog, it is clearly time for a geeky post ;) Today I’m moving another part of my digital life online: Bookmarks. I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but I evaluated the options for quite a while. I wasn’t too impressed with the feature-set and user interface of deli.cio.us (besides the fact that I can never remember where to put those damn dots…). The release of ma.gnolia was more exciting, providing ratings, private bookmarks, nice typography and more social features. I’m totally digging (no pun intended) the concept of tagging, and have been pretty busy converting my “web 1.0”-hierarchy to sensible tags – take a look. Apple, can you please give me a filesystem that natively supports tags? (and I’m not talking about those stinkin’ smart folders, which are basically fake filesystem-searches). Two reasons why it took me so long to make the switch are speed and integration: Magnolia was painfully slow when it was released in 2006. And I was under the impression that the process of creating a new bookmark online wasn’t unobtrusive enough to actually be useable. Thanks to Safari, I call the ma.gnolia-bookmarklet by simply pressing Apple+1 now, easy as pie. These days, I’m always wondering what I get back for putting stuff on the interwebs. One of the biggest advantages for being active on last.fm is that you get music recommendations based on your input. It would be great to have these fuzzy recommendations for all kinds of services, say “People who read this feed are also interested in” or “People with similar bookmarks”.

It probably took some days and about 20.000km of travel to realize: Wow, I’m really finished, and a new chapter in my life is about to start. I just graduated from University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, after four years of studies. And after a lot of administrative chaos, I could now print “Bachelor of Arts (hons) in Media Production” on my oversized (non-existent) business cards.
In the meantime I spent three months hacking away on my pet-project and bachelor-thesis “Syndicure” – a web-based collaborative RSS-reader for info-junkies (more details on the developer weblog).
So, next chapter: I’ve never been away from sweet home Germany for more than a couple of weeks, and it’s about time to change that. Starting in August, I’ll be doing an internship at Silverstripe, in Wellington. New Zealand. They’re a young innovative company in a vibrant metropole, so probably a perfect place to spend five months of serious web-development. Although I still have to look at the spinning globe of Google Earth to grasp how far away New Zealand actually is, I’m really looking forward to this experience.

Do you still remember Al Gore? I just stumbled over a flaming pledge for environmental protection by this former vice-president of the U.S.. It’s not only a stunning example of a well-prepared presentation, but also contains very interesting insights by a man who nearly became head of the american administration – and even if he would talk more moderate if he actually won the election, there is still hope…
In fact the presentation was so good that somebody made a movie around it: An Inconvenient Truth (Trailer on apple.com), which is released in the U.S. these days (unfortunately we still have to wait until September to see it in Germany). [via Presentation Zen: “Al Gore – another presenter extraordinaire?”]
P.S.: Al Gore sits on the board of directors at Apple Computer Inc., which earns him some extra points of course ;)

There are innumerous posts about getting things done (GTD), and I spent so much time reading them that I actually didn’t get anything done ;) So, what would a geek-blog be without it’s GTD-post – here’s my take on the topic: Organization of your life’s daily actions basically needs a consistent system. I tried really basic stuff such as moleskines (handwriting sucks) and text-files (too unflexible). Then I switched to Circusponies Notebook (no todo-categories), Backpack (online-only) and Burnoutmenu (clumsy UI). All this systems failed for the stated reasons – I needed cross-platform compatibility in case my Powerbook dies again, offline-access and an intelligent GUI that does not get in my way.

After several weeks of testing, I’m still excited about a simple HTML-tool that now keeps all my todos: NextAction. Somehow in my development-life, I missed the fact that webpages can save data to theirselves via Javascript and JSON – I mean, how cool is that?! By that, you can have a full-blown interactive web-app in a single file, in the case of NextAction executable in every Mozilla-based browser. NextAction is really tailored towards GTD, with action-contexts (a very important principle to learn), actions for the next X days and human-friendly due-dates (“next month” instead of 2006/04/01). Of course, it’s interface is freely customizable via CSS – I’m planning to do a chillu.com-skin for it ;) To make this web-app behave more “desktoppy”, I’m loading it into a seperate browser (Camino) showing only this page without any title-bars. By this, I can instantly switch to my todo-list, and don’t clutter it with tabs of other websites – simple access is everything.

So, having a functional system that I trust, the only thing I have to learn is actually implementing good GTD – I still have those monster-todos floating around in my list that are not “actionable” in the original sense – they can’t be accomplished in a simple sitting. I guess I have to do some more GTD-reading... before I get things done… g

Trying to develop after the open-source-principle “Publish early and often” I’m releasing some “under the hood”-updates to this website. A new design is on the way, but for today the focus is on content and functionality. I’m very inspired by the fresh ideas of signal vs. noise, the weblog by Ruby-on-Rails-creator 37signals – especially one post titled “A challenge for 2006: Cut your site in half”. So, what’s been done:

• CMS-Upgrade to Typo3 4.0RC1
• more RSS-formats (RSS0.91, Atom, RDF)
• language specific blog-view ("show only english posts")
• focus on a single web-portfolio (and a tiny link to "other works")
• updated "about"-section
• named my "thoughts"-section what it really is: a "blog" (to hell with those pseudo-individual wording
• dumped the "fr33 the pixel"-tagline – I’ve never known what it meant anyways…
• mini-blogroll (with xfn-tags)
• RSS-feed on recent works
• improved human-readable urls (RealURL rocks!)
• temporarily disabled the styleswitcher due to incompatibilities with the new Typo3-version

Update: Comments are not working…again sigh

Yay, my first OSX-application is ready: “ColorThing” – the outcome of the “Interactive Ccocoa”-course in my current studies. The (very creative) title signifies an evenly creative and complex task: Getting some average colors out of multiple source-images and … well, save them (into Photoshop-palettes). I know, it probably won’t be the next Delicious Library, but I sure had a lot of fun doing the interface-design and working with all those cool OSX-technologies. Thanks to Iven, Carsten, Sepp and Emerson for their support! Download ColorThing for MacOSX Update: Iven just told me that the current version of ColorThing was a developer build which does not run on other computers – dammit. New version is attached, as an Universal binary (whohoo). And for all those miserable windows-users: a screenshot ;)

Our parents probably owned a dozen albums that carried them through their whole youth – nowadays, I’m already getting bored of the 4392 songs on my harddrive. I’m listening to the same music over and over again… Time for a fresh approach: Web-based collaborative listening! The free service “Last.fm” analyzes your musical taste by tracking iTunes (and for all you interface-masochists: It does WinAmp, too ;). Based on this data, Last.fm gives you a personalized radio-station. Unlike Pandora this personalization is much more than an algorithm: You can join music-groups, build a network of friends with the same musical taste, you can even tag music-collections and choose them as your new radiostation! Charts are generated globally, on a specific country (I always wondered what people are listening in Azerbaijan g), on a specific band, tag, usergroup. If I like a new song from my personal stream, I click on the bandname to get their tags, usergroups, best songs – well, you get the idea: everything’s interconnected :) The idea of personalized music is not new, but Last.fm is probably the first service which really kicks ass doing it – check it out!

To keep me from falling asleep in mid-day due to jetlag, I’m compiling some words on my trip. This won’t be a lenghty day-by-day travel-story, I promise – just some things that come to my mind. For the record, I’ve been to: San Francisco, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Laughlin, Las Vegas, Laughlin, Grand Canyon, Sedona, Los Angeles, Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, Carmel.

Nature At some places, you can randomly point your camera somewhere, and every shot seems like a postcard – nature in California and Nevada is rough, beautiful and always with a glazing blue sky. At length, it’s even a bit too much – after seeing so much impressive nature, Grand Canyon was just “another kinda big valley”.

Civilisation I love the way Americans deal with “public design”: totally weird traffic-signage, very colorful storefronts and emergency-cars that look like they’re out of a museum. Everybody seems to be crazy about giant shiny cars – most of the SUVs on the streets could easily transport a Smart in their trunk…The waste of energy and water is hilarious: It’s one thing to build a two-million-city like Las Vegas far off in the desert. But Americans don’t give a damn about recycling their precious goods, even if they have to import everything hundreds of miles into the desert: E.g., in most restaurants, plates and dishes are plastics, thrown away together with dinner-leftovers and glass-bottles – WTF?!. Another thing: Apple is everywhere! Windows-laptops are the absolute minority in hotel-lobbys etc., and you can’t drive two miles without hitting a larger-than-life iPod-ad – it’s fantastic ;D Then, Americans try to imitate europe whereever they can: hotels look like english 19th-century golf-clubs, the waitresses proud themselves with their “coffee from Holland” (I always knew the best coffee-regions are at the north-sea…g). In Vegas, Malls and Hotels are mini-replicas of Paris or Venice, complete with indoor sunsets – just, well…crazy.

Customs American breakfast (ham, eggs, sirup, bacon, muffins, fruits) rocks! I hardly eat any breakfast, but I bet I would be fat as a whale if all that was common in Germany ;)

Places I never thought I would say that…Vegas is the place to be! I played only once, winning 45$ out of 5$ – I’m hooked ;) If I ever would choose to live at the U.S. westcoast, it’d probably look something like this: doing my master at UCSB in Santa Barbara (beauuutiful indy-student seaside-town), work a few years in Palo Alto (or Cupertino), win some millions in Vegas and retire in Sedona (always-sunny and quiet creek-town).

OK, so everything in the U.S. seems to be bigger, colder, hotter, fatter, sweeter, cheaper, low-carb-ier, more colorful – but better? Hm, I’m happy to be back in good old Germany, to be honest ;)

So…what’s an Apple-Geeks first visit in SF? Apple-Store! Nice People, more iPods than actual Macs, a first look on the Mighty Mouse (which seems not so mighty at all…) – check my Flickr-Set!

Apple – Events – MacExpo 2005, 8th image. g Though I’d rather like to appear here, or here or here. Well, someday… :)

Today I stumbled upon a nice comic about music-piracy and stuff – interesting and easy read. Another article that kept me nodding in acknowledgement was written by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) some time ago. While the music industry is figuring out how to sustain their overblown distribution-channels, have a look at some free projects: Wired Mixter, London Booted and Mercedes Benz Mixed-Tape, which celebrates it’s 1st anniversary these days (and is done by Scholz & Volkmer, so it’s kinda self-promotion g).