Sebastian’s blog

Inspiring talk.
(Thx ShadowIce)

Posted on July 30th, 2008 under Life. Comments: None

I saw this movie on Thursday.
I give it 4 / 10.
Good
It really feels like X-Files.
The atmosphere is there, Mulder and Scully are there, the weird stories are there.
If you’ve always waited for another film partly set in the morning snow, this is for you.
The slowly-typed labels have a comeback as well.
Bad
Unfortunately, although the story would [...]

Posted on July 27th, 2008 under Movies & Series. Comments: None

We all know the famous scene from Frank Miller’s 300 where Leonidas casts the Persian messengers into the pit, shouting “This is Sparta!“.
It has been reproduced ad absurdum into all kinds of image macros and memes.
Now, we all know the movie is not actually close to historic truth.
People who don’t realize this are just idiots.
Or [...]

Posted on July 23rd, 2008 under Movies & Series. Comments: None

I will go to Sardinia for 2,5 weeks in August.
I recently changed my bank accounts, and the new one gave me a free Visa card.
All is well for renting a car, right?
Not really.
The Visa cards you get for free from banks are debit cards, usually.
In Germany, they are known as “Direktkarte“.
This means they will charge [...]

Posted on July 23rd, 2008 under Life. Comments: None

It seems I have not yet blogged about GNOME Do.
GNOME Do is an application like Quicksilver (MacOS X) and GNOME Launch Box.
So, what is it? I always describe it as “command line for the desktop“.
You open Do with a simple keystroke. Then you just type away, and control your system. You can just type application [...]

Posted on July 16th, 2008 under Linux. Comments: 1

I had good news today (my diploma thesis is due next Tuesday, so I still got some time), and I wasn’t really in the mood for cooking, so - against all common sense - I walked towards the McDonalds on my way home.
Unfortunately for McD, fortunate for me, there’s a new Italian restaurant right next [...]

Posted on July 15th, 2008 under Food, Life. Comments: None

Oh wow, I’m close to tears from the laughing.
cracked.com has 6 ways to save gas in your car. And any open-minded person would immediately recognize the scam in each of them, because if things sound too good to be true, they usually are.

Intake Twister & Tornado Fuel Saver: Mini-tornadoes will improve air-intake.
Of course, [...]

Posted on July 15th, 2008 under Life. Comments: 1

And another great video.
Johnny Long is a security expert/hacker. In this video, he explains the skills of no-tech hacking, hacking without any electrionic devices:

Social engineering
Lock picking
Shoulder-surfing
The most obvious ways to hack somebody’s life/job

Really an interesting view. Sheds new light on the stupidity of people.
And kinda enlightening: I didn’t know you can hack Kensington computer [...]

Posted on July 15th, 2008 under Life. Comments: None

I just saw an awesome Google Techtalk with Geoffrey Hinton.
Hinton is a professor of machine learning at the University of Toronto.
In his talk, he showed a new type of neural network, which quite impressed me. Instead of only relying on putting data into a neural network and changing parameters here and there, he uses the [...]

Posted on July 14th, 2008 under Software. Comments: None