Get a Mac TV Spots

Apple released some new TV ads of the “Get a Mac” series. They’re very funny and available in high quality resolution. The spots are also available in german, but I think in original english they sound quite better. It’s hard for me to write this post because I’m rolling on the floor laughing…

Zune Desktop Theme for Windows XP

Since I have installed Windows Vista on my home box and enjoy the amazing style of the new Aero user interface, my notebook running on Windows XP becomes more and more boring. So I looked around the internet for a nice desktop theme for XP that doesn’t cost too much performance (my colleagues know: I need my RAM ).

Now I found the Zune Desktop Theme which comes originally from Microsoft. It looks quite nice and integrates with the Windows XP design mechanism. Have a look at the screenshot! If you enjoy you can download it from many sites in the net (example: techchannel.de).

I shot my mobile – the video

Last weekend I had some time to make a cut of the film we made during the “shooting” of my old mobile phone. The result takes about 3 minutes of your precious time and 12 megabytes download traffic (Windows Media Format).

My Apple Wishlist

Since a few months I’m thinking about buying an Apple. Not the fruit of course – I eat one apple every day. I’m talking about an iMac. Because at home I work most of the time with photos or videos, creating DVDs or making artworks, I wonder why the idea of a Mac wasn’t there earlier. Well, enough words – here’s my wishlist:

• Apple iMac 24″
• 2,33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 500 GB Harddisk
• 128 MB NVidia Graphics Adapter
• Iomega 1TB Ultramax external Hard-drive
• Aiport Extreme Station

The iMac

My current PC configuration for making all the stuff mentioned above is a 3,2 Ghz Intel P4 HT with 1 GB RAM and a 250 GB Serial ATA Hard-disk. Graphics are brought to my 17″-TFT-Display by a 128 MB ATI Card. So I think the Mac will perform great for me (and my new Canon EOS 400D which produces about 15MB per photo in RAW-mode )

The Ultramax drive

You think one terabyte and RAID 0 or RAID 1 is an exorbitant solution for a private user? Hmm… no I want to have my whole photo library (consists of about 10.000 photos) and the last five to ten tapes of my camcorder on harddisk to have immediate access to the content. New photos and videos are also stored there. Since I’ve lost about 500 photos and some other data by a headcrash a few years ago, I think RAID 1 is a good solution for such important data. Photos and Videos are snapshots of life an cannot be reproduced…

The Airport

I think it’s a very practical solution to plug an USB drive and a printer to the Airport Extreme Station and share it across the whole wired and wireless network. When the Mac comes, it would be the third client in the network and I don’t want to use any of those as a file or print server. So the Airport is a good solution for having a central file space and a printer connection that is always available.

Glass Effect Border

Yesterday I created a small Photoshop Action for Photoshop CS to apply a simple blurry glass effect border around the image. You can choose the amount of gaussian blur, the width of the border and the color of the small inner border.

You can freely download and use the action like you want.

First look at the Canon EOS 400D

Hmm… let’s say WOW! Last friday the package with the cam arrived at home. I made some testphotos and what should I say: this camera is simply a great tool. Speed, ergonomics and of course the image quality are phenomenal. The photo shown here is a snapshot of my cat “Shiva”. I’m currently working on a photo blog for my website for an adequate presentation platform for the photos. Stay tuned for further information…

A new toy…

I make digital photos since about 1998. My first Camera was a Casio QV-7000SX with about 1.3 Megapixels. After this camera broke under Isaac Newtons force (it fell from my office table and the lens was broken) I bought a Casio QV-4000 with about 4.1 Megapixels. With this semi-professional tool I made about 10.000 photos and every photographic need was satisfied over about four years.

But now the time has come for a new toy: Today I ordered my new Canon EOS 400D Digital SLR with about 10.0 Megapixels. Can’t wait for Thursday which is the estimated arrival day for the cam.

Visual Studio 2003, Subversion and Web-Projects

Today I ran into an error using VS2003 ASP.NET Projects and SVN for version control. The error I got when I opened a SVN-controlled web-project was “Refreshing the project failed. Unable to retrieve folder information from the server.” This error occurs, because Visual Studio 2003 cannot handle folder names starting with a period (“.”). So the most pragmatic way to get is working is to write two batch files to rename all “.svn” folders before opening the project and rename them back when synchronizing with the SVN-repository:

hide-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (.svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
ATTRIB -h "%%f"
RENAME "%%f" _svn
)

restore-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (_svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
RENAME "%%f" .svn
ATTRIB +h "%%~pf\.svn"
)


Note: this is one solution taken from tigris.org.

Before using the two batch files it may be necessary to clean the VSWebCache folder. This folder contains the structure of web projects so Visual Studio can load the projects faster. It is located in the users directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Username\VSWebCache).

PhotoImporter is growing up

Thanks to Thomas, I now have the toolbox complete to finish up the PhotoImporter for the first public 1.0 Version. Thomas wrote a tiny little .NET component for easily registering AutoPlay-Applications on Windows. Today I integrated this with the current version of PhotoImporter and made a test setup. Everything looks fine for now so I am going to make the last finishing works for the 1.0 Version.

TAO – the martial arts of noise

Yesterday we enjoyed the show “TAO – the martial art of noise” in Nuremberg. TAO are twelve highly trained people and a lot of “drum-ware” on the stage. It looks a little bit like the asian answer to “Stomp“. It was very amazing to see what man can get out of some simple (ok, some drums are at least very big) drums. Furthermore they performed highly synchronous and of course very powerful. They made about two hours of beautiful “noise” (yes, it’s loud!) and nobody on the stage seemed to be exhausted. So if you like drum music I recommend to visit this show.