ankewehner.de

Another year’s over. I don’t feel like writing up a detailed look back on my year. I feel like I’m growing, but slowly. I think during the last month I did a lot to get out of my chronic habit of putting things off, at least as far as housework is concerned, but I need to get that to grow and include all aspects of my life. One other thing I need to work on is deciding what to pursue and what to let drop.

Right now I feel more focused ont he future than the past, and I think that’d be a good thing to keep up.

Have some links instead:
Celebrate what’s right with the world, a video that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. I loved the last story.

Some images found on deviantart:

Incidentally, this is the 100th post published on this blog. Nice timing, entirely unplanned.

Octopus wants to be a clam. Tool use hasn’t been an exclusively human thing for a while.

There’s a new Simon’s Cat video up at youtube. It has a birdee. ^_^

There had been a great version of Bohemian Rhapsody on the Muppets Studio youtube channel, but now it’s gone due to copyright kerfuffle. Ehwell, it still has The Blue Danube (performed by chickens), Ode to Joy (performed by Beaker), and Ringing of the Bells (featuring Animal, see post title)

That there on the right is Jayne from Firefly, here in a screenshot from The Train Job.

The badge on his sleeve shows the parka belonged to a police uniform of Rhineland-Palatinate, the German “state” I live in. I wonder why and/or how that happened.

Jayne of all that crew… XD

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Female police officers in Paris are not women. Logic says so! Otherwise their being required to wear trousers would be against the law.

Some things police deal with are… somewhat weird (old stuff I saved on my delicious account):

• Naked swimmer evades police in Tokyo
• Drunk badger disrupts traffic
• Drunken tractor driver leads police on slow chase
• Bride spends first night with crate of vodka
• Speeding player thought police were fans chasing him
• Handcuffs, Taser used to catch emu
• Crocodile thrown in jail cell for loitering
• German police investigate kebab sauce after attack

Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Once upon a time in Gürbetal, Switzerland, there was a car parts dealer who after finishing cannibalising old cars parked them on his property. This happened from the 1930s to the 1970. A lot of the cars are still there.

Official website (German)
Forest of Sleeping Cars flickr sets by elessar_ch
Album on mth-fotografie.ch

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Steampunk webcomic find: 2D Goggles – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Some rule of cool and/or funny revisionist history in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace didn’t only design a working computer in theory, but it actually got built.
Updating schedule is “a batch of pages whenever I have them”; so far there are the “origin” chapter plus two episodes, and a bit of smallstuff. Lots of links to the creator’s research material in the author’s notes, just the right thing for some types of geeks.

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Deep Sky Colors
Astronomical photography.
Wired.com had a step-by-step example of the photo postwork which I found very interesting.

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Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris
A study of different versions of letters in graffiti tags.

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Villafane Studion pumpkin carvings
Pretty impressive, particularly the Predator.

Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

Because some people take drink recipes including kerosene and battery acid far too seriously

In other “news”, I really regret leaving my camera at home today. I could have taken a nice one of a power pole and titled it “everything is full of starlings”.

Thought I’d share/make note of a few (Windows [Vista]) tools I use for my image files.

Bulk Rename Utility
Exactly what it says on the box: It lets you rename files in bulk. It doesn’t look particularly pretty, and the load of form fields/options at the bottom may be intimidating at first glance, but I found them pretty self-explanatory when reading them one by one.
I use the “File” field on “fixed” setting together with Numbering to change the filenames of photos I take from IMGXXXXXXXXX.jpg to 2009-07-21_XXX.jpg, which helps a lot with sorting them.

iTag
With this program I can add titles, descriptions and keywords to jpg files. This is not only useful because the Windows Explorer can search these fields, but also because various websites and scripts pull that information out when you upload them, including Flickr, Picasa, and Menalto Gallery2. Saves some work if you upload your images to several places.
iTag is my favourite among the tools I tried so far because it lets you include linebreaks in the description (unlike Picasa or the function built into Windows Explorer), and ladjust the size of the form where you enter things – particularly the fact that the latter enables you to view all keywords you entered on an image.

SyncToy
…is not only useful for images, but all kinds of documents, but here goes: A very basic program to synch up different folders. I’m sure there are better ones, but this works for me.

In case you didn’t know yet, I like insects, spiders and the like. So, bit of a themed post.

A short video I captured of an ant dragging a rather hefty lunch home:

Bits of my stuff:

Links:
Moths Use Sonar-Jamming Defense to Fend Off Hunting Bats
Dancing caterpillars put off predators (cute photo, found via neatorama)
a bug sculptures photoset on flickr

Origami arthropods found on deviantart, different creators:

That artist of the last one has a lot of other great models in his gallery, only with the thumbnail links disabled.

Just some stuff I thought was interesting.

Amazing Earth Photos: Solar Eclipses from Space – The “Field of Science” site linked from that page has bigger photos, but not all, in particular the one of Central America is missing.

The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee – The greenest architecture I have seen yet. (Link via Neatorama)

Giant Pterosaurs and how they lift off – I may have linked that before, but in case I haven’t, well, I just think everybody should see the image of a pterosaur the size of a giraffe at least once.

Ninja-Pirate-Zombie Cupcakes Flickr set. Braaainssss!

Dark Roasted Blend: Jet Engines on Trucks (For Fun and Profit) – Blog entry with quite a few photos. I particularly like the fire-engine on steroids built from military leftovers.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity – 20 minute video speech on creativity, how people think about it/creators, and how said creators might deal with problems brought by those attitudes. Gets a bit very spiritual at the end, but all in all interesting and funny. She gets plus points for not using any slides. (Link via Jessica Douglas’ DA gallery)