geek imparts experiences

Last Saturday I visited the University town Oxford, a place where many famous people have studied. People like Stephen Hawking, Ernest Rutherford, Rowan Atkinson, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Richard von Weizsäcker, Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron.
It is not a very big city with its 150 thousand inhabitants, but a very nice, clean and neat city. The ancient houses inspire every visitor and lets them feel the uniqueness of that place. As one of my friends describe fittingly, you can virtually feel literature coming out off the walls. It was a really nice trip and I definitely recommend it to everybody.
I guess now I should also visit Cambridge to find out which of the two is better!

Hiya my fellow blog readers, it’s been a while since my last post. Today, I would like to share again some nice links with you and I will start with some pretty fascinating talks of the 26C3 (Chaos Communication Congress ) in Berlin. There is firstly the talk about liquid democracy, a very interesting talk about a new approach to make democracy more exiting again and involve people. Unfortunately the talk was held in German, but you can find some basically ideas on the English Wikipedia.

Secondly there is the presentation about conlang (constructed language). I just can say amazing, this guy invents a language in 30 minutes, a must see, you wont be disappointed.

Also I want to mention the great talk about Wikileaks, which everybody should know by now. They talk about the past year and even more important about what they planing to do and that is a lot. Watch here.

On the page of the Fabian Hemmert, who is a design researcher at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, you can find some innovative design studies rather ideas of the mobiles phones in the future. Phones that are able to change their shape or shift their weight, which is pretty cool!

The following links I like to share with you are more interesting for the programmers of you. There is first the Friend2Friend project, which is also a absoulutly new and inovative idea about how to share data and applications.

The dyncall project is an even so great idea. It is a framework that can be called and used by many different programming languages and is also pretty much running on all platforms.

The last I would like to share with you in this issue of my link compilation is the for me new shell called fish shell, which brings some really cool features. Take a look on the screenshots here to get an impression.

If there is somebody who still thinks it is not or just a bit snowing in UK should see the pictures following, to be proven wrong!

Hi everyone, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas in the circle of the family and loved ones! In preperation for the celebration here a impression from a Christmas concert in my city of the last year!

Lets start with a new search engine called leapfish which claims to be a real time search engine. Which means the database index includes content just a few minutes old from Web 2.0 services like twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube and co.

The project SixthSense by Pranav Mistry is as the website says:  a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

In late July this year Parag Khanna has hold a presentation at the TED Global conference about the ‘Invisible Maps‘ of our world. He shows his vision about how to make the honourable dream of a border less world in peace could come true.

The next tip needs not much to explain the film below will do it for every passionate gamer in the world!

This could be a Christmas present for people with the required purse ^^. I am talking about the stylish, ultra-weight and and very expensive electronic motorbike which you can admire in the following spot.

Another two inspiring TED talks I have watched recently are Lewis Pugh swimming at the North Pole and Magnus Larsson’s idea how to turn dunes into architecture to address the threat of desertification.

The Solar Impulse project is about solar powered plane of captain Bertrand Piccard. For me it is almost like a perpetuum mobile, even if that is not quite true it feels like that if you imagine a plane which can fly as long as it gets energy by the sun!

For the musicians under my blog readers this tip will be very exciting, as it shows an guitar combining traditional acoustic values and digital capabilities developed at the MIT Media Lab and called the Chameleon Guitar.

In this paragraph I just want to mention a few more TED talks. Firstly, Zach Kaplan’s and Keith Schacht’s demo of toys from the future. Further on the incredibly dance performance by Pilobolus and the impressive water filter by Michael Pritchard. Finishing, with a talk about architecture I really like by Bjarke Ingels and a solution to get rid of the cable mess with wireless electricity by Eric Giler.

Healthmap is useful mesh up to be aware of what is going on in the world in disease  matters.

Within the STELLA project, researchers have been able to develop new technologies to realize stretchable circuit boards as you can see in the following spot showing a dress with illuminating lights.

Last weekend I visited Edinburgh in Scotland – the city where Sean Connery was born, and the place of inspiration for writers such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. The roots of the residents called ‘Scots‘ (or even sometimes Scotch) are hundreds of years old, deriving from tribes who lived there as a confederation known as the Picts. Most of the unique culture has survived to the present time; for instance, the Kilt and the traditional Scottish music. However, the Scottish language, Gaelic, seems to be threatened with extinction, as only around sixty-thousand people are able to speak it.
Edinburgh itself is a wonderful old city with a lot things worth seeing. Therefore, on this occasion, we spent the whole weekend there. On Saturday we had amazing weather, with a lot of sunshine and just a bit of rain in the evening, but it stopped raining in time for the Halloween spectacle in the city centre. Sunday was completely different and absolutely atrocious as it was coming down in buckets the whole day – but we made the best of it! I hope you enjoy the gorgeous pictures of the trip.

The first link is about a presentation hold a few weeks ago at the University of Manchester about which part cloud computing could play in future development of the web and managment of data.

The next link you could call, google street view advanced. It is an website which enables you to do go on a sight seeing trip, just at your own PC. At this moment it provides data for a some major cities in Germany which are Bonn, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln and München. The website shows in which direction the development is going and how rich the potential of such applications can be.

For me a world without wikis like mediawiki or moinmoin is hardly imaginable. The Blikis combine now the world of blogs with the world of wikis and time will show us if people are going to like it or not

GoogieSpell is an nice implementation of a spell checker which you can use in your own web-application. It should be worth to have a look on it, if you like to add a spell-checker to your web-application without going through big trouble, especially if you just have restricted access to your web server and you are not able to install any software.

Last but not least is a link to a post

I found looking for a nice software with graphical interface to merge PDF files with Linux. It makes your life much more easier if you want to merge various files and you do not know in which order you want them to merge.

This week I was in the cottage Lyme Park not far from Manchester. Beside the wonderful old house with its old furniture and art we could see the porperties garden as well as the huge surrounding park. Once more I have seen a absolutly different perspective compared to the city of Manchester.

This weekend I visited York a old, really English city with it’s minister, the city wall and medieval houses. This time I traveled there with the International Society of Manchester and just after we reached the park space we started our sight seeing tour. We are two German students, one French and of course me. We all liked the nice ambiance of the city with it’s old buildings and green areas near the river. It corresponded exactly to the cliché I had about England and what I expected to see before I came to Manchester.

Two weeks ago we did a hike in the countryside of the Peak Ditrict, southeast of Manchester. Such a weekend trip into the impressive and rough nature of England with it’s fresh air and chilly temperature is a welcome change to the crowded, noisy and bustling city on the weekdays. It was recreative as well as huge fun jumping from mud puddle to mud puddle. There is nothing more to say about, just have a look at the amazing pictures and you will get an impression.