http://www.hesspoint.com

Recently I came across an add for computer equipment. I thought I’d seen it all but this one hit my laughing muscles hard. A UBS light. OK generally nothing special and quite useful (I own one myself) but with a lampshade? A company called Boynq produces these amongst all kinds of other stylish computer equipment. Check it out.

In the past I’ve tried to open the GPX Files from Geocaching.com in Google Earth. That works so far but for some reason all the coordinates were out of whack. Caches where off their real position by 10 to 20 km. Therefore GE was useless for that part. Yesterday I opened my GC.com account page and noticed that they made some changes. The information on the right is now more structured and divided into areas. Then my eye caught "Google Earth Mapping Feature". Curiosity won and I clicked on the Link "Google Cache Browser". GE opened and little icons appeared showing where caches are and even showing the type of the cache. How cool is that! Even more the coordinates fit and if you click on the icons, you get the cache’s short description and a link.

I have been not to happy about what GC.com did over the last few weeks, but that makes up for everything. Awesome job guys!!

Normally the German TV station RTL2 is known for serving the dim but tonight I discoverd a very fun show called Mythbusters. It is like the Knoff-Hoff-Show taken on a new level. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman test urban legends with spleeny and funny experiments.
Tonight the tested the urban legend that if you throw a penny of the Empire State building it will blow someones head down in the street. They constructed penny gun out of a stapler and shot the penny on their own hands to test it. And they did some crazy stuff with microwaves.
If you like wacky experiments and tinker with stuff you will enjoy this show. The only downer is that RTL2 shows a dubbed version as always on German TV. In the US it runs on the Discovery Channel.

A colleague just sent me a mail with an interesting link to a German speaking Lotus Notes and Domino forum site called DominoForum.de. Looks quite nice I will check it out more in the next couple of days.
Also a neat site is Dominozone.net that features articles, book reviews and such.
If you are looking for Script Libraries, Icons or Templates, Notes-Links.de might be the place for you.

I just found I cool site that is something for all you GPS users. It is called Geogames.org and offers several GPS games like Geocaching, Capture the flag, Geo Golf, etc. Ok for geocaching itself I would rather check geocaching.com but the other games sound like fun to. I might try some of them when I get bored by geocaching (yeah right, and hell freezes over ;-)) or just in between. I like the Geo Golf. Anyone wanna play?

As most of you probably know, in my free time I indulge in geocaching, a nice sport/hobby where you seek hidden "treasures" in the wild or in urban areas with GPS and lots of other techno gadgets. In a nutshell: The perfect hobby for me Normally you simply log on to Geocaching.com, you pick a cache to go after and print out the description with the coordinates. But if you do it with style, you plan you trips on the computer, automatically upload all waypoints to your GPS and take all the info and pictures with you on a PDA or Smartphone. There are a couple of gadgets and software tools I use, which I want to share with you today.

Well first of you need a GPS receiver. Preferably a Garmin (OK some people prefer Magellan, but I prefer Garmin). I use a GPSMap 60 which is very nice. There are hundreds of guides and forums out there about what GPS to buy. An example is here. But that is not the issue here. I assume you already have a GPS. Now you need to get the waypoints on it. If you are a basic member, you can download LOC Files from Geocaching.com. These files simply store the coordinates of one cache. If you are premium member  (which I strongly advise if you want to take full advantage of the software tools) you can get GPX files which also contain all the info, logs and hints of the cache. You even can generate pocket queries that automatically send you GPX waypoints in a specified area by email. Read here on how that works. Now you got a bunch of GPX waypoints. What to do with them? I use a tool called Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (or short GSAK). That tool can import these GPX Files and manage them in a database. The advantage is that you can sort and filter the caches in every possible way and you can use them offline. That comes in handy when you have your laptop with you but no internet available. GSAK can also manage the above mentioned LOC files but without all the extra information (because the only contain the coordinates). GSAK also has tons of ways to export your waypoints. You can convert them into Mapsource, Ozi Explorer, Fugawi, Microsoft Streets or Magellan files. If you have a TomTom car navi, you can even create overlays. To get the waypoints onto your GPS you can use a upload feature that uploads all waypoints in one go. So you always have all your waypoints with you.

But it does not end here. Unfortuantely the GPS cannot save much more info then the coordinates and a one-liner with condensed info. So I rediscovered my old Palm IIIe which was actually already stored in my scrap box. It turned out to be quite perfect for geocaching. It only has 2 MB (ROFL) but enough for a nice little tool called Cachemate. Besides if it happens to drop its not a great loss since its value is probably less the 10€. Cachemate is the perfect Palm PDA tool for taking all the cache descriptions with you. You can export the waypoints via GSAK and upload them via the Palm Sync software.

The last tool for this post is Spoiler Sync. What it does is downloading all spoiler pictures from caches you specify and storing them on your harddrive. To push the envelope, there is even a macro for GSAK that lets you select the folder with all the spoiler photos you retrieved with Spoiler Sync and add them automatically to the cache descriptions in GSAK. If you have a better PDA then me that has a color display (OK mine sucks, I admit it ;-)) you can also upload the spoiler pics onto the PDA.

I hope you got some ideas about paperless caching. However this is only a very brief overview over the tools I use. I like this combination, because all the tools work hand in hand quite beautifully. There are many more tools out there. Just try Google.

Woot! I finally got my Buffalo Linkstation yesterday. After giving it a test drive, I can tell that thing rocks! In a nutshell: 250 Gig independent Linux network file-server with low power usage and the size of a cigar box. I already got one of the new series which now uses a MIPS instead of a PowerPC CPU. The cool thing is that it is double the speed (400 MHz instead of 200), the downside is that it is far from being quiet as advertised. Well it is not exactly loud but the fan is constantly spinning which is quite noticeably.
The main advantage though over other NAS solutions is that it runs on Linux. Thus, in terms of modding and hacking, sky’s the limit. If you are interested, the site LinkstationWiki.org is THE resource. It has tutorials on how to put a full blown Debian Linux on it. You can even have your iTunes streaming server, which is really worth playing around with. I can’t wait to get into that kinda stuff, but first I am going to check out how it works. I don’t want to fry the box, which can happen if you do it wrong. So be careful.

Sorry for not posting for a while. I was gone to Munich to pick up my girlfriend who returned from China and visit my grandparents and an old buddy who now works for KPMG in Munich.
Anyway, this post is about a thread in a forum about some dork who apparently wiped his dad’s hard drive with all his work on it, thinking he was enhancing the drive’s speed with a tool called "Kill Disk". But read for yourself, it is hilarious, though I am not sure if it isn’t a fake.
Click here for the thread. Sorry only in German.

I just read an article in the c’t about the newest craze of Google Earth add-ons. After some search I found a list of nice looking add-ons at Chip Online with download links. You can overlay weather and traffic data on the Google earth maps. Also cool is an extension that adds 3D models of landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge.