emconsteroids

Who would have thought this? The Sun promotes QR Codes on it’s yesterday issue. On page three to boot:

This is a QR code, a new kind of barcode, and it will revolutionalise the way you use your mobile – and the way you read your Sun.

A true story by Douglas Adams

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind.

Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

(Excerpted from “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time” by Douglas Adams)

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. “In English,” he said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

This is how long my iPod is predicted to live for according to the iPod Death Clock.

There is a pretty neat application called Plazes for your mac that registers your location. Needless to say, you can use this together with Adium so it sets your status message to where you’re currently at. Setting it up is simple:

1.) Go to and register at Plazes
2.) Download Adium
3.) Download the script from Adium Extras, that allows you to hook up Adium with Plazes.

You can install the extra easily via web:

Then you just setup your parameters:

You can use these parameters:

%_plazename
%_plazecity
%_plazestate
%_plazecountry
%_plazelat
%_plazelon
%_plazeurl

The script assumes you use the Plazer app to connect to Plazes and that your username and password are therefore stored in the Keychain under the name “Plazes”. If you do not use Plazer and want to use this Plugin (I have no idea why you would want that, but hey) you can create the entry in your keychain yourself.

Adium will ask permission to access the keychain every time the script is used. You can select “Always allow”, but for some reason this only works for the duration of one session (I have no idea why). To allow Adium to access the username and password every time without asking, add Adium to the list of programs in the keychains item under access control.

You will end up with something like this:

Thanks to Lukas Vermeer and Peter Rukavina!

1. You say “the City” and expect everyone to know which part of town you are talking about.
2. You have never been to The Tower or Madame Tussauds but love Brighton.
3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Shepherds Bush to Elephant & Castle at 3:30 on the Friday before a long weekend, but can’t find Dorset on a map.
4. Hookers and the homeless are invisible.
5. You step over people who collapse on the Tube.
6. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multilingual.
7. You’ve considered stabbing someone.
8. Your door has more than three locks.
9. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.
10. You call an 8′ x 10′ plot of patchy grass a garden.
11. You consider Essex the “countryside”.
12. You think Hyde Park is “nature”.
13. You’re paying 1,200 a month for a studio the size of a walk-in wardrobe and you think it’s a “bargain”.
14. Shopping in suburban supermarkets and shopping malls gives you a severe attack of agoraphobia.
15. You pay more each month to park your car than most people in the UK pay in rent.
16. You pay 3 pounds without blinking for a beer that cost the bar 28p.
17. You actually take fashion seriously.
18. You have 27 different menus next to your telephone.
19. The UK west of Heathrow is still theoretical to you.
20. You’re suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.
21. Your idea of personal space is no one actually physically standing on you.
22. £50 worth of groceries fit in one plastic bag.
23. You have a minimum of five “worst cab ride ever” stories.
24. You don’t hear sirens anymore.
25. You’ve mentally blocked out all thoughts of the city’s air/water Quality and what it’s doing to your insides.
26. You live in a building with a larger population than most towns.
27. Your cleaner is Portuguese, your grocer is Somali, your butcher is halal, your deli man is Israeli, your landlord is Italian, your laundry guy is Philippino, your bartender is Australian, your favourite diner owner is Greek, the watch seller on your corner is Senegalese, your last cabbie was African, your newsagent is Indian and your local English chippie owner is Turkish.
28. You wouldn’t want to live anywhere else until you get married.
29. You roll your eyes and say ‘tsk’ at the news that someone has thrown himself under a tube train.
30. Your day is ruined if you don’t get a copy of Metro on the way to work.

(via e-mail)

Isn’t it everyone’s dream to be able to fly just like a bird? Guess what! We’ve come a step closer to that dream. And you can do it straight from your computer. Check this out:

A Japanese modder created this custom 5mm Aluminum A5052 case for his iPod — which can stop a 0.22 bullet — to prevent it from being crushed by the handrail on those busy subway trains.

More strange iPod cases on techeblog

Flickr introduced geotagging a couple of days ago … but Yahoo! maps is still a bit disappointing. Low resolution, poor street maps, slow and not an as usable interface as Google Maps.

But there is a very good alternative to Flickr geotagging: loc.alize.us! It allows you to set the location of an flickr image on google maps via a single click on your bookmarks toolbar! Try it out!

These are pictures from my hometown Bern.