recently there has been a boost with chai in different coffee houses. they use a cinnamon syrup to give it a special flavor. this is always a little sweet for me. so i tried to make chai myself.
here is what i do:
for one big cup of chai use about
2 teaspoons of black tea,
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon,
1/2 teaspoon of black grounded pepper (maybe chili or cayenne for the hard boys),
the seeds of 3 cardamon seedpods and
one clove.
put this in a teabag and infuse it for 5 minutes. add a little warm milk and sugar as you please.
you may use whole cinnamon sticks but i feel they just take way too long to flavor the tea. star anise and ginger are normally included. i haven’t had these at home so i couldn’t figure out what the dose for those would be.
I’m following about 50 people on twitter. some of them post regularly some of them from time to time.
what annoyed me was when people twittered automatically via some service about something they do VERY often (e.g. geocaching: “i found the cache XYZ”).
and now i did it myself 🙁 i posted automated messages on twitter. no actually in my case i let twitterfeed check for my flickr photo stream RSS feed for new images, that the service could then publish as twitter messages. although i explicitly set twitterfeed to only check for photos that had ‘tweet’ as tag to avoid spamming the daily image annoyed some.
thanks to mika for reminding me 🙂 i apologize for spamming you (my followers) with automated messages. i will try to avoid this in the future 😉
here why i think this is bogus:
twitter is a platform where spontaneous messages, thoughts, findings, fun facts and any type of content can be published, without the overhead of formulating a big chunk of text e.g. a blog. twitter is great to publish tiny little bits of content that are greatly incoherent. people love twitter because others remind them of stuff they did not think of and pull them a little aside from the usual dirt tracks they use in their every day online life. do not post the same stuff over and over again.
there are already platforms out there that offer a way to publish content in different ways such as video or photo sites: youtube, flickr, picasa, vimeo, etc. these platforms offer a great variety of services that users can access mostly for free. this includes distributing their content and making it accessible to others via different ways and formats: standard HTML (normal web surfing), RSS and atom feeds and maybe an API. use it!
one should not abuse a service for something it’s not! this is definitely the case when you use twitter to divert a RSS feed as i did. let the original service serve its RSS feed. this way people have the choice to follow your contributions on another platform if they wish. post a message on twitter that you offer a RSS feed about a specific topic and people can get it from there.
to sum it up: follow my daily image here if you like. subscribe to my blog via RSS or Atom feed. i even have a youtube feed.
let me know what you think, post in the comments or send a trackback.
if you don’t know what RSS is read on on wikipedia about RSS and Atom feeds.
a few weeks ago i got my hands on a motorcylce camera stand (thx Patrick). one that was actually made for a motorbike and not a modified tankbag with rubber wraps. please don’t ever use those and please do never put a camera into your helmet as some youtube idiots present.
the camera i used is my canon ixus 750. since the lense on this camera is rather low i had to improve the camera stand. i added some aluminum ducts to make it higher and to make the camera see the street. about 7 centimeters were enough.
since i was not able to get the CHDK timelapse to work i shot video. to generate a timelapse i used ffmpeg to extract images out of the video and to unite them to a timelapse video.
using this tutorial and the man pages i was able to come up with this:
note that it is important for ffmpeg to have the images you use to generate the timelapse video in order and sequenced. if you decide to delete some images you have to rename them and must not leave gaps.
also you may have to vary the rate (i used: 1.4) acording to the speed of your input video and the speed of the output video you want to have.
one step i did between extracting and generating the timelapse was sending it through imagemagick to blend the speedometer. using info from this mailing list:
Oben Wetter widgets (1x2), Mitte Uhr Widget (4x4), Rest Applikations Shortcuts
seit einem monat habe ich nun mein htc hero. mein erstes ‘smart-phone’. ich muss sagen bis jetzt bin ich wirklich begeistert. die htc sense oberfläche ist gut gelungen. die 7 desktops geben einem genügend platz seine anwendungen zu verlinken, fotos auf dem desktop zu platzieren oder auch sogenannte widgets laufen zu lassen. diese widgets sind kleine programme die direkt auf dem desktop laufen und kein eigenes fenster benötigen. hier liefert htc einige mit, wie zb: wetter, uhren, twitter, suche, personen, sms (nachrichten), musik, lesezeichen, fotoalbum und mehr. je nach funktionsumfang und design benötigen diese widgets zwischen 2 und 16 feldern auf des 4×4 felder grossen desktops.
als betriebssystem kommt android zum einsatz. ähnlich wie am iphone (und ipod touch) kommt eine art app store zum einsatz, der market. hier kann man sich applikationen herunterladen. diese können gratis sein
my apple remote seemed a little flavorless and i kept confusing it with the one of my girlfriend or my sister’s. so i decided to paint it a little. (yes i know a sticker would have done the trick too)
there has been somediscussion (via @mstrohm) on the security of urlshorteners and i have been thinking about this the past days.
putting the problem of the bottle neck aside it leaves us with the possibility of spamming and/or loops and missing transparency when looking at urlshortening services. let’s say the advantage of shortening urls has to compensate one of the disadvantages; let’s take the bottle neck. it’s clear that one cannot shorten a url and expect the link to be independent or maybe distributed like DNS at the same time.
still there are 3 problems which have to be solved:
spamming: there are concepts which we know from mail services that can narrow this issue down. is.gd uses the surbl blacklisting service to check for spams. with a little fine tuning this is manageable.
loops: similar to the spamming problem, there must be a blocklist of sites that are not accepted for shortening. qr.cx already implements a list of about 200 services that are blocked from shortening. is.gd is saying so too, although they accepted qr.cx links and others at the time of writing. this is really easy to implement and should be done by every shortening service.
transparency: the problem here is that users cannot see where they are going when clicking a shortlink. the solution is again very easy to implement. tinyurl implements it by putting ‘preview’ as subdomain http://preview.tinyurl.com/m5l96j and qr.cx by putting ‘/get’ behind the shortlink: http://qr.cx/1r8/get.
mein kleiner url shortener aus diesem beitrag hat sich jetzt zu einem richtig grossen kleinen url shortener ausgewachsen. qr.cx. zur zeit bietet er urls mit einer länge von 16 zeichen.
weiters habe ich eine kleine api aufgesetzt die euch helfen soll dieses service in andere applikationen zu integrieren. gerne nehme ich anregungnen und wünsche unter shorty [AT] qr [dot] cx entgegen.
als spezielles gimmick liefert das service QR-codes zu jedem gekürzten link.
recently there has been a boost with chai in different coffee houses. they use a cinnamon syrup to give it a special flavor. this is always a little sweet for me. so i tried to make chai myself.
