What happens if you drive over a MacBook Pro

The guy forgot his MacBook Pro on the trunk of his car and drove off. When he realized, it had already fallen off and had been run over a few times by snow trucks and SUVs... So the guy dries it, tries to boot it and guess what: it doesn't start. My favorite: He's on apple care and will call them on monday to see if the can help him. Check out the pictures of the autopsy.

new plazes beta test: first impressions

I had the unparalleled pleasure of meeting (a fraction of) the plazes crew at the designmai on Friday. News: There will be a new plazes soon (yay!) but they will discontinue the mobile plazer app for symbian phones (sob). Stefan told me that only 10 people in berlin are using it - and I am one of them. I was so struck by the bad news that they gave me a beautiful plazes t-shirt (Daniel liked it) and invited me into their new (closed) plazes beta that I just tried out. The new features that struck me first:

1. plaze yourself over the web
2. twitter functionality (tell everyone what you're doing)
   
3. set past and future plazes
4. groups

I think that web-plazing is the most important feature because it will allow people to use plazes who do not carry their laptop with them all the time but use different desktop machines at different places (Hans? you'll have to join now, dammit). I also think that it is really important to have a small dashboard-page that you can run in a small browser window that lets you set plazes and twitter easily. Web-plazing probably makes up for the loss of the mobile plazer, but I don't really see sms-plazing as a full replacement because it is much slower and much more cumbersome. (The increasing popularity of twitter and the inclusion of this functionality into plazes proves my first negative comment on twitter wrong). Setting past and future plazes also adds to the functionality. I have yet to explore the benefits of the group stuff. AFAIK no official release date yet.

How to burn 4 billion dollars with a blog entry

Whoa. My favorite tech blog, engadget.com, reported yesterday that the iPhone will be delayed until October 07 and that Leopard will only ship in January 08. They got this from an internal memo being circulated inside apple's corporate e-mail. That turned out to be a fake, but engadget's report caused the apple stock to drop from $108.83 to $103.42. Within minutes. The power of blogging.

Berlin Mayor 2.0: Klaus Wowereit on plazes.com

Our wonderful, adored and beloved mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, has gone web 2.0: He is now a plazes user! (link to his profile). In case you don't know what plazes is: A web service that tracks your location (via the MAC address of the router your laptop is connected to or via an app on your symbian mobile phone) and shows it on the Internet. Keep track of your hangouts, log the cool plazes you visited, add your flickr pics and geotag them. I am a big fan (see my profile here) and plazes provides the nice little gadget displaying my location on the right side of my blog. And since locations are transmitted via RSS on plazes, I can now keep an eye on Wowi here.

The e-cigarette: smoking without consequences

Kraisch! Quitting smoking was hard enough, but I would still be puffing those things away if I wouldn't be afraid of cancer (and the costs). Looks like these worries will soon be gone with this gizmo. I want one.

It feels like a cigarette, looks like a cigarette but it isn't bad for your health. A Chinese company marketing the world's first "electronic" cigarette hopes to double sales this year as it expands overseas and as some of China's legions of smokers try to quit. Golden Dragon Group Ltd's Ruyan cigarettes are battery-powered, cigarette-shaped devices that deliver nicotine to inhalers in a bid to emulate actual smoking.

If you're living in the EU, smoke without remorse for € 249.
(via endgadget.com)

Your favorite celebrity as web 2.0 doll

Hans is going to love this one. Waste hours by dressing your favorite celebrity doll online. Big fun.

(via pop64.de)

Get a mac ad on the myriad of vista options

I am particularly annoyed by the myriad of different editions of Windows Vista. So is poor PC in Apple's new Get a Mac Ad.

Once you decide to upgrade your PC to Vista, that's when the real fun begins. Because there isn't just one Vista, there are many. Contrast that to MAC OS X - a single, full featured OS that runs on evry Mac.

Statistics as art

Chris Jordan transforms abstract statistical figures into compelling peices of contemporary art:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

(Thanks to Michael Sengpiel)

Pet Shop Boys live in Berlin

I have this fantasy: I am terminally ill and the Make a Wish Foundation grants me one final wish. I ask for a cup of tea with Neil Tennant.
I've been a fan of the Pet Shop Boys since 1993's very. Their albums were the sound track of my adolescence and my first love. I still adore their music, not for sentimental reasons, but because I really like it. Electronic and innovative (I consider Trentemøller's Sodom remix on the Fundamental album one of the best PSB remixes ever). They came to Berlin yesterday and I went so see them with Daniel. Neil was great as always: "We'll play songs from the eighties, the nineties and from however we call this decade". My favorite: "Let me introduce everyone on stage [introduction of dancers and singers follows]. On the keyboards: Chris Lowe! And my Name is Neil Tennant and we are STILL the Pet Shop Boys."

Gregor Schneider cube Hamburg

A family event called me back into my hometown Hamburg over the weekend. The spae between the Galerie der Gegenwart and the Kunsthalle currently hosts Gregor Schneider's "Cube Hamburg, 2007" - a massive black cube that was banned from the biennale in Venice because organizers feared it might provoke islamic extremists responses due to its similarity with the Kaba in Mekka. Although I was told that the artist denied any intentional similarity during the presentation of his work, I consider the resemblance as quite striking. I really liked it.