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Friday, July 4. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
mixed
I played around a bit, and here are some samples of SPORE-creatures:

As "caPri" mentioned, my shark "Frette Fiche" is referred to at grubismus.blogspot.com.
Friday, June 27. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
software
The game Spore by Will Wright is coming and its publisher Electronic Arts released the Creature Editor as a standalone program in advance. To keep it short: It's amazing! - And highly addictive.
There is a free demo version of the creature editor available, the full version costs about 10 Euros.
Continue reading "The Fifth Day - Let there be living creatures"
Wednesday, June 18. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
free & open source
Reading for free?
With Project Gutenberg that's possible with over 25.000 books. You can download classic books, ranging from Homer's Iliad to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, or H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in a variety of formats. Usually plain text format and HTML-versions are available, but often even additional formats like the plucker e-book reader format or even audio books in mp3 format are available.
The main languages are Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog, but alltogether there are books in over 40 languages between Afrikaans and Yiddish.
Continue reading "Read for Free - Project Gutenberg"
Friday, June 6. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
my 2 cents
As reported by the Washington Post, the "nuclear power plant ["Hatch", near Baxley] in Georgia was recently forced into an emergency shutdown for 48 hours after a software update was installed on a single computer [...] operating on the plant's business network."
WHAT?
Continue reading "Nuclear Web 2.0!"
Wednesday, June 4. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
free & open source
,
mixed
While the media world whines about it's loss of sales, the open source movement produces more and more excellent content. Using up-to-date open source 3D tools, two beautifully rendered movies went public:

The 10 minute animated movie Big Buck Bunny is a must see. It is available on its own homepage in a variety of formats and sizes and completely open source.
Another, older open source movie you should have a look at is elephants dream ( (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org), released under the creative commons licence.
Friday, May 23. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
free & open source
PortableApps is a very nice software suite for the ultra mobile windows user. You can download many applications that have been made portable, which means they can be run from a USB pen drive or similar devices, storing their data on the stick and (ideally) leaving no traces behind on the host machine.
Continue reading "Portable Workplace"
Tuesday, May 6. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
linux
,
thinkpad
I must say that my recent system upgrade from Ubuntu/Xunbuntu 7.10 to 8.04 went with astonishing little fuss. As I described earlier, I had the usual problems with my broadcom WLAN driver and some trouble getting Compiz to work on my outdated graphics card, but all together the transition was easy and smooth.
And I like a lot of the changes:
Continue reading "My transition to Ubuntu 8.04 (Conclusion)"
Tuesday, April 29. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
linux
,
thinkpad
After having solved the WLAN problem, I am now trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 (or hardy heron) to deliver what version 7.10 did on my T40.
Getting Compiz to work
I loved Compiz. Using xfce for speed, it worked very nice and fast and some functions make work a little easier (not wobbly windows but the zoom feature and some other plugins are great).
Now, what happened? My T40 laptop has an ATI Mobility 7500 graphics card and that is blacklisted for Compiz in 8.04. It wasn't in 7.10. After an hour of surfing the ubuntuforums, I found a solution from a user named Rocket2DMn. I tried it and without a hitch, compiz works on my machine.
UPDATE: The Ubuntu developer RAOF explained how to solve the problem in a more secure way:
Continue reading "My transition to Ubuntu 8.04 (Compiz)"
Friday, April 25. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
linux
,
thinkpad
I tried out gnome on my T40 laptop, but after being used to the quick xfce4 desktop environment, it's reactions on events and input felt too slow and so I switched back.
But I missed compiz! Damn, it's addicting!
I tried to run it after starting a standard xfce session and it worked perfectly. Based on that, this is how I made xfce/Compiz/Emerald my default setup:
Continue reading "Xfce on a cube"
Friday, April 25. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
software
From the first day on, I used WinAmp. Apart from Pegasus Mail it is my longest used piece of Software. But in the last years, it was developed in a direction I didn't need, like that cluttered and inefficient media library. With mixed feelings I tried out another Player, called AIMP2 ... and uninstalled Winamp right away.
AIMP2 standard skin (the picture belongs to http://www.aimp.ru)
Continue reading "AIMP2 - Where WinAmp should have gone."
Friday, April 25. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
the blog
phees' dissections is running on the Serendipity v1.3.1 engine, now. The upgrade process was as easy as winking, should there be any problem, please comment or send a note at blog [a t] phees (do t) de.
Thanks.
Tuesday, April 22. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
mixed
I spent the better part of two hours in trying to get my WLAN working again. My router worked flawlessly, winking ironically with it's LEDs, a hardwired XP box was running perfectly, and a ThinkPad (XP again) had no wireless problems. But with the second ThinkPad, boasting Xubuntu, I had no chance to get that wireless working again. I went through countless cycles of reentering my random-generated, super-secure and completely unmemorisable WPA keys, resetting login keyrings, setting up static IPs, trying DHCP, editing config files, pinging around and so on.
From a certain point on, I seemed to gain a foothold and started taking notes to put them on the blog. Some heavy editing on those notes leaves an important lesson for setting up your WPA secured network:
Continue reading "debugging brain.d"
Friday, April 11. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
linux
,
thinkpad
I love tpb!
It's a linux program to manage the Thinkpad's buttons. Agreed, in default configuration it is an ugly blotch on your screen, but with a bit of tuning, it can look quite nice and nearly sexy.
Let's work on that:
Continue reading "tpb can look good"
Friday, April 11. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
linux
,
thinkpad
With me switching from xfce to gnome desktop, synaptic automatically removed tpb, a program that manages the special buttons of my T40 Thinkpad. The reason I could find on ubuntu forums was a comment, it would interfere with the internal hotkey management of gnome. Distrustful as I am, I chose to verify that issue...
Continue reading "Thinkpad buttons and gnome DO mix!"
Friday, April 11. 2008
Posted by
dr.phees
in
the blog
wow! phees.de has a brand new blog!
and now?
it will take a while to set it up the way it's meant. be patient.
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