emconsteroids

Using animals is always a very effective way to draw attention in advertising. Even better if there is a quick-witted twist to it. Check out this funny Pedegree advertising:

Via: Design/Advertising Goodness

This morning, I discovered to my shocking surprise, that my MagSafe Adapter has severe damage! Last night, I noticed, the adapter was *very* hot so unplugged it. This morning, when I had a closer look, I noticed that it was melted through and there where wires coming out the hole.

Thank God I have unplugged the cable. Nobody knows what could have happened if I would have left it in overnight!

I am heading to the Apple Store right now and keep you posted on what’s happening.

Applications always come with dozens and dozens of shortcuts. Most of the time however, only a small percentage of it is actually being used. Here is a list of keys, I use very often in Firefox, ordered by frequency:

Note: Apple is actually the CTRL Key on PC, I am referring to the UK Keyboard Layout (PC Version).

Feel free to add your own favorite shortcuts.

I talked about how we will consume news in the future before. However, this is the first post of a now newly created series of entries in my blog called “How we will do stuff in the future”. To start off, I would like to point to a very common problem in humankind: Navigation. I believe, the way we put ourselves into local context will change profoundly in the future. We will be able to track any information about ourselves in the current position and in the nearby surrounding. Searching for the word “Restaurant” in the middle of Oxford Street in London will give you completely different result than querying the same word on top of the Himalaya. Mapping is therefore key. Mapping not only of physical objects but also about meta information of physical objects. Your mobile device will be able to query these information in real time (e.g. traffic information) and this will have an impact on how and which way you choose to travel.

In fact, at the moment, we are already pretty close to such an infrastructure. We have GPS technology to pinpoint our location, we have satellite images and street maps of almost every relevant place in the world. Furthermore, we have the world wide web that contains information about most of the places in the world.

So all we have to do now is connecting the dots to the big picture.

Below, you see two different images of the same thing:

Piz Muragl KMZ

With a wirelessly connected device such as a mobile phone you can easily have both images at the same time: Standing on the spot and looking at the scenery while downloading the same scenery to your mobile device. Including all necessary information such as street names, directions, traffic or weather information.

All this will become even more interesting, as soon as you are not only down- but also uploading information and connecting to peers in your imminent or not-so-imminent surrounding!

There are five ways of adding your Amazon Wishlist to your blog, as about.com describes. I have just added my Wishlist Link for the moment, because I am experiencing performance issues with the the mashup of my homepage. Until I have found a decent solution for the aggregation of the various XML Feeds I will stick to the link. I may have to implement a server-side XML aggregator that caches the feeds.

Btw, if you are experiencing performance problems with external script sources, you may want to have a look at the DEFER attribute, which prevents the browser from waiting for the script results before parsing the output.

I have recently decided to quit blogging on Blogger and migrate my entire blog to WordPress.

The migration to WordPress turned out to be much easier than anticipated. In fact, WortPress comes with an out-of-the-box solution for migrating from other blogs including Blogger.com. It’s just a matter of a key press, and the whole process is completely automated. (However Google recently changed their API which may cause some problem. But you can still migrate from RSS if you don’t mind losing your comments.)

Obviously, you now need to forward the user accessing your old blog to the new blog. Therefore I wrote a little JavaScript snippet, that does the trick:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
	// read what is in the TITLE tag of the site that has been called
	// assuming the post has the same content in the new blog, we can
	// then search for title contents and assume the search results point
	// to the same article on the new blog.
	var mylocation = document.title;
	// function definition
	get_new_location = function(mylocation){
		// replace fuzzy stuff added by blogger.com
		mylocation = mylocation.replace("emclog: ", "");
		// redirect the user to the search query of the new blog
		window.location.href = "http://emcons.net/blog/index.php?s="+mylocation;
	};
</script>

…

Then call the javascript function on loading the page:

<body onload="get_new_location(mylocation);">

That’s it. Have fun!

Did you too ever wanted to know, how airplanes get painted? Here you go:

You see the ranges of the missiles currently tested by the countries outlined in red, namely Iran and North Korea. (Click to open large image)

Source: “Europe in a Changing World”, a presentation by Josef Janning, Head of International Relations Program at the Bertelsmann Stiftung during the 10th International Bertelsmann Forum, Fall 2006 in Berlin, Germany

Link to Bertelsmann Stiftung who kindly provided this information.

You should always set a master password in Firefox. For the sake of convenience though, nobody does. This leads into a major security threat: Go to the Firefox “Preferences” click on “Privacy” and then on the “Passwords” tab. You will see something like:

Click on the button in the bottom left saying “View Saved Passwords”. Then a new window pops up and there is another button, saying “Show Passwords” and another dialog box asking for confirmation. But that’s about it. There you go! All passwords can be seen in blank text!

Yesterday, Google acquired YouTube which surprised a lot of people in the industry. After all Google already has its own video service. So what could be a good reason to spend another 1.6 bn US Dollars? I think it’s the brand. YouTube’s clever moves focussing on connectivity, enabling easy ways of linking and embedding their content into third party sites or applications lead them to one of the best known online brands in the world. And all this just within the tiny time span of 18 months. But Google too is one of the best known online brands in the world. So why should they buy something famous to become famous, if they already are famous?

I think the strategy is obvious: Video content is the kind of content, that users are willing to pay for. Video on demand/digital TV is a good example. On top of that, video is a very suitable channel to distribute advertising content. I believe, Google will use YouTube as a vehicle to escalate the usage of Google Checkout and therefore push PayPal from their throne. Google Checkout is by far the most promising product out of their palette. All it needs is the world wide acceptance and a proper application. And the world needs a reason to use Google Checkout. Wouldn’t video just be ideal for that?

PS: I can see a product where everybody can upload their own videos and actually *sell* them. Obviously all transactions and user accounts would require Google Checkout. Imagine how the next lonelygirl15 will become rich and trigger a torrent of imitators… all in the benefit of Google.