I invested some time in studying Apple’s current implementation of M4B
files and found a way implement a regular frame-based Video-File in
there. I searched some Open Source Utilities to aid me an my way, wrote
a Python script to generate such a file, tried it in iTunes, and was
amazed. The file shows Video-Content in iTunes, without running the
Quicktime-Player (Video is shown in the Cover-Window). It’s basically
just a hack which adds a new Cover-Frame every 4ms (which is basically
regular 25fps PAL Video). However, when I, then, tried it on my iPod
Photo (20gb U2 Edition), it crashed directly. Upon starting the file it
crashed and rebooted. I tried some other File variations and got always
the same results. I’m anyways releasing this file as it still might be
that other iPod Color Models may play it, who knows, there could be
hardware differences between the U2 edition and the other editions.
So, grab the unofficial first iPod Video File here and wonder how it crashes your iPod
Btw. I’m in no way responsible for any damage done to your iPod by playing and or using this file.
If there’s interest, I’ll release the how-to create those videos, too.

Download the File here:

I’ve finally been to the cinema in order to watch Hitch Hikers Guide To
The Galaxy on Tuesday. I went (as usual) with Ambro, as we both enjoy
watching them non-dubbed in original language (and as it’s always fun
with him). Good movie, I  liked it. I’ve read some not-so-good
reviews, but I actually really liked it. I’m already looking forward to
the DVD (something I hardly have after watching a movie). After I had
watched that movie some good memories came back:

I’ve been a huge Douglas Adams fan since I first read his book entitled
‘Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy’ back in 1992 when I was about 13
years old. Back then there happened to be a german Computer Game
Magazine called ‘Play Time’ (the name alone was worth buying the
magazine ). I bought it every month as I was deep into playing
Videogames, but there was another gem in each months release: The
reader’s letter section. The guy responding to the reader’s letters was
clearly insane. His name was ‘Rainer Rosshirt’ (another name justifying
buying the mag.) and he had a great sense of humor. In fact his column
was so funny that I laughed tears from time to time. Ah, jolly good
memories. However, someday one of the readers asked if Rainer would
happen to be a fan of ‘Douglas Adams’ literature as his humor seemed to
be pretty close. Rainer answered with yes, explained that he loved that
mysterious (to me) Douglas Adams, and I went and ordered ‘Hitch Hikers
Guide To The Galaxy’ on the very same day.
Now, when I ordered that book I knew nothing about it. Nothing about
the story, nothing about Douglas Adams. I hadn’t heard about it before,
and Internet didn’t exist at that time (at least where I lived ).
So my expectations were high. So the book arrived, and here comes the whole point
of this post:
I looked at the cover and wondered about it’s meaning (and thus about
the book). And after I had (with much joy) finished the book, I still
wondered about the cover’s meaning. The cover had in no way any
resemblance with the book. Nada. So, if you’ve read the book or watched
the movie you should know about the story, so compare: Here’s a pic of
the book I bought in 1992 (note how worn out it is)

Amazing, isn’t it
I wonder how this cover made it onto the book (warning spoiler time).
Did someone say to the art guy “hey, it’s a book about someone with a
computer going through space”? In fact the only connection between this
cover and the content seems to be space and the computer. However,
since the HitchHiker Device in the book is clearly described as
something quite different from a computer it’s not a real connection.

After I had finished that book I bought the other parts of the series.
Some of them had covers which were even worse; one of them has a cover
which is clearly stolen from Issac Assimovs Robot Universe
(Positron-Brain stuff). I’ll post those covers later on

How could those things happen? Ideas?

Ay, it’s been over a week since I returned and I didn’t write anything
about it yet, sorry. But I’ve sorta lacked the interest in writing
about my announced vacation. So, if you actually follow this blog (more
or less closely) you might have noticed that I evaluated either Italy
or Spain as my vacational target. Well things didn’t work out that way.
We tried to go mega-last-minute, read: we took our luggage, went to the
airport, and tried to find a flight within the next 1-6 hours. That
turned out to be quite impossible as there weren’t enough flights left.
Those who were were either way too expensive or didn’t meet our
holiday-schedule. So we, drunk with sadness, drove back home and, on
the way back home, decided to go and visited friends in Hamburg
instead.
So instead of party in Spain we got party in Hamburg, which was
actually quite funny. We visited my cousin christoph and his friend
mark, and we had lots of fun exploring the local river ‘Elbe’ and it’s
small sibling ‘Alster’. The best part was though that we luckily
managed to go onto this vacation within some of the really rare sunny
days of this year’s summer. I think we had about 20 sunny days this
summer here in germany (since April), and we managed to have 3 of em
while in hamburg. It was a nice vacation. And I’ll see to it that I
visit Christoph more often as Hamburg rocks.
I enclosed some pictures, you can find more in my flickr.

That’s the haven, one can see the luck we had concerning the weather

The three of us preparing for a barbecue (from left to right: christoph, daniel, me)

Christoph and me posing for the camera in a local pub. (They had really
good live music from a guy from dublin there, awesome stuff) The pub’s
name was (I think, mind you but I was drunk) ‘The Academy’

If everything works well, I should sit on a plane to spain tomorrow. If
everything works not so well I should sit on a plane to italy tomorrow.
And if nothing works I should sit in front of this computer again
tomorrow.
We’ll try ulti-last-minute tomorrow. We’ll drive to the airport and see
whether we can find a flight to spain or italy tomorrow. Vacation would
rock, lets see if that works out.

Whats gonna happen to the internet, google, future media.. This is an
interesting glance into the future, maybe a bit left-minded and maybe a
bit too naive, but still nice to watch.

http://atog.ch/stuff/new_york_times_offline.swf

That’s me. Smelly bastard. That’s at about 23pm at work. The beer came free. yay.

I had a hell of a week. We had several deadlines coming up at work this
week, and in addition to that my main-co-worker had one week off. So I
was pretty much alone and had to work on things I didn’t know jack
about because they had been his tasks before. I worked like mad,
organized, structurized, and tried as hard as possible to somehow meet
these deadlines. The deeper I got into it, the more I lost contact to
the real world outside of my 4 Screens at work. They say that
programmers, when really situated in a problem, leave the material
world and enter something described as (couldn’t-find-it-on-wikipedia).
That kind of thing happened to me. I stopped talking to my co-workers,
sat all day with my iPod in front of the screens and coded like mad,
reimplemented a bluetooth-interface, reimplemented a http-interface and
debugged some c-parts of our software (which was quite difficult since
I only code c once every 3-4 months so I had to ‘get into it’ again).
Even after work, at home, I didn’t leave this state and thus I cared
less and less for my outer me. I stopped shaving, I stopped showering,
I stopped eating, and more or less lived on coffee and water. On friday
then the non-plus-ultra happened and I fetched a cold which resulted in
a terrible headdache throughout the whole day, making it even more
difficult for me to concentrate on the subject. We kinda missed the
deadline, but we kinda managed to still fullfill the task. Difficult to
explain. I have one week off work now. I feel better now. The cold is
gone and I showered. And I shaved. And I ate again (good argentinian
meat). And I answered mails, And I talked to a friend via phone (real
world (!)). And I spend one whole day outside.
So. I’m back. And I’m still on fire.

Stupid Idea yea, but with the arrival of Dale Norths ‘right out of the
blue’ today I thought I’d share my collection. When in mid 2000 I
joined other people who had an Interest in VideoGameMusic little did I
know what would grow out of this (not only for me but generally
speaking). Over the years several so-called remixers released albums or
were featured on collaberation albums. Here one can see which of em I
own myself
Head over here to see which of those albums is what.

Most of you probably didn’t believe in it anymore, here it is, a new track release on Sarbatka (!) after almost two years a pretty surprising – if not astonishing – event.
Especially since it’s not the long-mentioned “Just a friend”, that one is still only avaible on the Joe Cam Hits & Misses CD.
I’m going to remix it again before I’ll release it here, I like it alot
but there’s still room for improvement and I wanna build on that.
Now back to the current release, “a faint smile”. This is nothing too
special, it’s more a back to the roots; Most of the older Sarbatka
tracks were build in 2-3 days while for example Just a friend took 2-3
weeks. This is – of course – a quality indication which “a faint smile”
lacks, but anyhow I wanted to move from quality over quantity to
quantity over quality, if only to provide some sort of justification
for the sheer existance of this site.

What is to be expected now? I don’t know, I’m still quite busy, but my
current war against procrastination seems to fruit, not only because I
released this track, but also due to the relaunch of www.terhech.de
and other things to come. So it could be that I, although I have little
spare time left, will be able to release more tracks in the future,
maybe even the one or other game remix again.
Apart from that there’s still “Just a friend” on the horizon, and while you’re waiting for it to appear here, I still strongly advise you to buy it now because the album rocks and it’s a good bargain.

Finally. I’ve been shifting this for a long time, having started this
as a reason do implement a blog system with MVC in Ruby-On-Rails it
ended now in being only an enhancement to my old blog system I wrote
myself (Labelled it ‘junkblog’).  I wanted to implement this whole
blog in Rails so I could learn rails and understand the concept behind
it. However, I couldn’t do this timewise, so I took the expected
functionality and implemented it in straight php/smarty so I could – at
least – push the new layout online since I never liked the old one
much.
There’re, as you can see, more options now, and everything is
implemented so I can expand it even more in the feature (if I ever find
that time..)
For now it’s just additional personal information, slightly better usability and a, hopefully, nicer layout.

Thanks for listening And, I’d love to get some reactions from you,
do you like the new layout better than the old one? What bugs you about
it? Comments appreciated
thanks a lot.ez

I’ve been playing around with the new Apple Mighty Mouse since
yesterday (got it at work immediately after release), and I thought I’d
share a small review in case somebody who reads this blog is currently
on verge of buying one of those gadgets.
The mouse looks great, and perfectly accompagnies anything from the
Apple Product palette. The packaging is nothing special compared with
other Apple products, there’s a small disc and one needs to install a
driver and reboot Mac OS X in order to use the full mouse-functionalty
(Basic Functions work out of the box).
The Mouse still looks like a one-button mouse, and feels like one too.
Apple build a technology that can distinguish whether you’re doing a
left or right click by sensors, and here’s problem one I have with this
mouse: I always keep my left finger on the button when I right-click,
and since my finger sits on the button the mouse thinks I’m doing a
left-click. So as long as you have your left finger on the button (and
not lingerin atop it) you can’t right-click. That’s, imho, a bad
solution and makes it a bit impractical for me to use the right mouse
button as I currently can’t change my right-click behaviour although I
tried, it’s rooted too deep
The next problem I have with this mouse are  the squeez-buttons.
They’re at a position where I can’t reach them with my thumb, not even
if I try hard: I have to change the position of my whole hand on the
mouse in order to press them, and since that’s not really good for any
workflow I reckon I won’t use these buttons much. I even tried to
change the position of my palm on the mouse so I could just reach these
squeeze-buttons only to discover that this position didn’t allow me to
use the scroll-button anymore. Which brings me to the next thing: The
scroll-ball. I find the scrolling a bit slow (although I set it to
full-speed in the preferences), and I find that I sometimes have to try
twice until it starts to scroll. The mouse-wheel on my old logitech
here works better, albeit it can only scroll on the y-axis. The ability
to scroll x and y is a great enrichment to my workflow and I love it,
it just could be a bit faster, scrolling in photoshop is so slow that
it’s faster for me to change the tool and scroll by pressing the left
button.
As a conclusion I can say that I wouldn’t buy this mouse myself, now
that I have it here at work. I’d rather go for one of those 7Button
logitech beasts which offer x/y scrolling as well (although I’m not
sure if that logitech x/y scrolling is supported under mac os x).
If however, my palm would fit this mouse (which it doesn’t) I’d
probably be quite happy with it (and given that I could right-click
with my left finger on the mouse)