mixed

Wednesday, April 29. 2009
Posted by dr.phees in mixed

A small guest contribution for Timo Grubing's Zombiblog

Saturday, April 18. 2009
Posted by dr.phees in mixed

Thursday, January 1. 2009
Posted by dr.phees in mixed

A happy new year to you all!

Thursday, September 18. 2008
Posted by dr.phees in mixed

Oh, Black Hole, Thee we fear and adore!

or

The day the earth stood jittery.

The CERN recently came to worldwide attention in a most flustering way: As a possible father of the Eater Of The Worlds, aka black hole.

(c) by Timo Grubing
available as screen backgrounds

The question is, what kind of danger really emerges from CERN's newest experiment, also known as the Large Hadron Collider? And large it really is. Buried, well out of sight in a depth of 50 to 175 meters under ground near Geneva, Switzerland, the 27 kilometer long LHC is the largest machine ever build by mankind. And according to CERN officials, it is perfectly safe. But these denials do sound too rehearsed to contain the whole truth, don't they?

Please, read the whole article. Really, do it!

(And have a look at Timo Grubing's blog, who kindly made the illustrations!)

Saturday, August 9. 2008
Posted by dr.phees in mixed

From the section:
Don't try this at home

I recently had too much time and started cleaning my PC from the inside, leaving the side panel only leaned-on. Later that day I had a cup of Starbucks' Kenya coffee watching the Simpsons and - against my usual principles - put the half empty cup on the computer.

When it started to rain I turned in my seat to close my window, catching the computer case with my knee, which left the sidepanel tilted sideways. The now falling coffee mug found the panel to be a nice springboard for it's final jump into the casing, spraying lukewarm coffee all over the innards.

Something went 'click' and the computer shut down immediately.

Cursing, I unplugged all cables and connectors and started to take the machine apart. Virtually every single part, even the harddrives and the backpanel of my machine were caffeinated. It took me the better part of two hours to scrub the parts clean. I dried them off as good as I could and reconnected everything, letting it dry over night.

Next morning I connected the cables and switched the machine on - and nothing happened. Frustrated, I switched off and on again and noticed the power LED blinking very shortly. A third try let it stay on a little longer and the fourth made the CPU fan turn a few rounds.

Irritated and in some way curious, I repeated the switching several times until the machine eventually sprung into life, leaving a strange feeling of having done some kind of electronical heart massage. But, anyway, I revived my computer. For a day the box smelled like burnt coffee - apparently I hadn't found all the coffee contaminated spots - but it works fine.

All in all my original plan of cleaning the computer left it in a clean-as-new state, which I would never have cared to work for, voluntarily.

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.

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.

Tuesday, April 22. 2008
Posted by dr.phees in mixed