Emoji are among the most controversial characters that get encoded, yet they are rushed through with the minimum of scrutiny and public consultation (…)

Goldgrund Immobilien bewirbt Bebauung der Münchner Freiheit.

Goldgrund ließ die leeren Etagen des Hauses bespielen: Neben dem Kabarettisten Gerhard Polt richteten sich stadtbekannte Adressen wie der Boxclub von 1860 München oder das Atomic Café ein, die ihre angestammten Häuser hatten verlassen müssen. Für Hunderte Besucher und auch die schnell eingetroffene Polizei (schließlich handelte es sich um eine illegale Hausbesetzung) ergab das alles eine prima Stimmung.

That striped sunlight sound from 40 years ago.

The Go-Betweens: Streets of Your Town.

Relevant: Elstow, a recent music group from Down Under, crafting their debut LP “Planets Away”, to be released in December.

Saturday, 4. November 12017

Dogma 2000

.com egal – is internetz #netdyslexia #supatyp #lestweforget

Relevant: Die Wahrheit.

Why is there so much (false) hope on this very country?

Can Germany Fix Facebook?

Friday, 3. November 12017

Yesterday, I installed elementary OS on the 2008(!) MacBook the girl-friend is using.

Before, the machine was a stale piece of work, running an operating system from 2011 (Snow Leopard) and a browser from mid 2016 (Chrome 49) – the OS being the final version Apple supports for the hardware, the browser being the final version Google supports for the OS. (Yes, there were alternative browsers but the situation was not much different with these, either.)

Now she got an up-to-date combo of operating system and browser which will remain current with future updates and probably even will survive until the hardware (or at least a single essential part of it) simply refuses to function at all one fine day.

Not so surprisingly, a lot of the elementary OS configuration is pretty painful to conduct for yours truly, especially when trying to provide a frictionless transition from one OS flavour to another one.

It’s still Linux with all its challenges. However, this distro is already much better than the one I was trying out two or three years ago.

And: it being still Linux also means there is plenty of support out there in the forums and blogs of lovely people who got stuck with similar issues and many times were even able to solve those. They don’t hesitate to publish what they found out so the pain gets diminished and another little configuration step gets done.

All this is priceless, that’s why I decided to give some money in return to this shining project.

Of course, this is not an altruistic act I am performing here. In fact, I am bracing myself for switching from Apple hardware to something else – still plenty of time to decide. But the OS is going to be Linux, there is hardly any doubt. So I am happy to evaluate this distro as a potential candidate for myself. So far it is looking very good.

Relevant: Linux or Death (aka How to install Linux on a Mac).

Wednesday, 1. November 12017

Just discovered Helma and Antville are mentioned in this book: “Wege in die moderne Welt: Globalisierung von Staatlichkeit als Kommunikationsgeschichte” by Gunnar Folke Schuppert, Campus Verlag, 2015.

(For the record: since September 2013 it is in fact possible to create new weblogs at Antville.org again; memberships have never been restricted, anyway.)

Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 65,536 seconds to continue…

‘I Forgot My PIN’: Veteran tech journalist Mark Frauenfelder tries everything, including hypnosis, to recover a small fortune from a locked bitcoin device.