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„Rather Be A Pear Than An Apple“ Mac OSX Wallpaper and Login Screen

Dienstag, Februar 7th, 2012

I stumbled over this unhappy Apple logo on yay!everyday yesterday and my immediate reaction was: „Wow, that’s exactly how I feel about Apple nowadays.“*

I’m an Apple-User (’cause there’s no Adobe Creative Suite for Linux, that’s why), I kinda like the product (OSX is an okay OS and the hardware is still nice) but I just loathe what Apple has become. It started of with the shameful Mac Guy/PC Guy-Ads, went downhill with the iPhone and the whole close-system model accompanied by various outrageous Terms of Use-Fails of Apple products and culminates in the ridiculous patent battles with other companies. These patent wars might not (all) be Apples fault but they have the distinct smell of a boy who wants the whole playground for himself. This feeling of Apple being a company I don’t want anything do to with is further deepened by the news-bits I happened to read when the biography (*argh*) of Steve Jobs was released, that he said he wanted to „smash Android“ or whatever it was. I have no idea about running a business that scale and maybe you have to be tough but this just doesn’t sound „nice“ or like a gentleman I want as my role model or look up to at all. Then again I never bought any Apple product that wasn’t second hand anyway, so …

Long story short: When I saw this adorable unhappy apple logo I decided to steal it. I did a login screen (they can be changed with the free maintenance tool Onyx) and a desktop background both 1280 x 800 px (comment if you want another resolution). Here you go:

*Little did I know that this was just another Fanboy being sad about the death of Steve Jobs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tragedy that anyone ever dies of cancer (in Germany every fourth person dies of cancer nowadays) and I have absolutely no idea what Jobs exactly did at Apple – nor am I going to waste time finding out – but the picture drawn in the media that he single-handedly created EVERY FUCKING Apple hardware plus iTunes and wattnot is obviously plain wrong. I don’t know why people like Jobs more than Gates, they are (were?) both bosses of huge (= evil) companies that want your money. Maybe Apple gave you a product that was a little more shiny and easy to use but Microsoft’s product is cheaper (not the OS though …). And with what I’ve seen in sneak peaks of Windows 8 and Apples awful design decisions lately – of which a 3d Dock was only the first – there seems to be little difference between the two at least aesthetic-wise.

So: if you fanboys out there think you have to waste your life adoring someone, adore Arundhati Roy. Wise woman, read what she has to say. But Steve Jobs? Grow up.

Feel free to steal this too, it’s Creative Commons-Non Commercial.

Posted in design, eigene arbeiten, eigene illustrationen, illustration, in english, mac, my stuff | Keine Kommentare »

Prevent Mac OSX Media Keys from opening iTunes

Montag, Februar 6th, 2012

Here’s a fix by NoMitso to disable the annoying „function“ of OSX to open and play iTunes everytime you use Media Keys on a Mac, rendering them useless for every other audio or video player.

There are articles on Lifehacker and Superuser for this but they have outdated links to NoMitsu’s MMFix.app that fixes this problem, so I thought I’d link to NoMitsus new domain. If this becomes unavailable contact me and I’ll send you the fix. Btw, the readme says it works only on Snow Leopard and was tested with 1.6.2-4, I’m running it on 1.6.8 and it works fine.

Download MMFix from NoMitsu.com

Posted in allgemein, in english, links, mac, nerdy nerdbert, open source | Keine Kommentare »

Illustration: »The Book of the Dead«

Samstag, Mai 29th, 2010

Okay, someone calling himself »amotionpicture« (wtf?) posted this entry on ifreelance.com:

ifreelance-bookofthedead

Though that is one of these things you can’t really call »illustration« because you have almost no room for any interpretation I had a vivid image in my mind and though it would be fun to just do it.

I am not going to participate since ifreelance.com is one of those sites that not only fuck up the design-business by making it possible for people to get stuff designed for unbelievable low prices – we have these kind of sites in Germany too, like 12designer or designenlassen – but at least the German sites don’t requiere the designers to pay just for an account* (huh, just saw the guy posted an e-mail-address, maybe I’ll send it to him anyway).

Well, as it has been said on fontblog, people making entries in sites like these deserve to get shit for the no-money they want to spend. Of course there are situations – as maybe the one above – were you just don’t have any money you can give. But especially if you are in the creative industry there should be solutions for that. I think it is quite normal to design t-shirts or booklets for small bands and they give you some merchandise, free entry to a show, a dvd or whatever.

Anyway, I had fun doing this and I am sure that that is completley not what this guy wants since I largely dared to ignore his suggestions (moon, media, insects etc.…):

The Book Of The Dead - Horrormovie Poster

*Coming to think of it: I have no idea if there is a fee on the German sites, I never bothered trying to sign up.

Posted in eigene arbeiten, eigene illustrationen, horror, illustration, in english, my stuff | Keine Kommentare »

Install driver only for USR 5423 USB-Wireless-Stick

Donnerstag, Dezember 10th, 2009

I just spend an hour on finding a way to only install the driver but not the Wireless Manager Tool that comes with the package for the US Robotics Wireless USB-Stick Model 5423 on Windows. I needed to do this because for some reasons the Manager could connect to the router but Windows didn’t get the connection. This happened to me before and in case anybody has the same problem here’s ther workaround:

Download the driver from the US Robotics-homepage. You’ll get an .exe-file which installs the driver and the Wireless Manager. Now, here’s the trick: Open the .exe with 7zip or whatever unzipper you use. You’ll find a folder called Driver inside of the package, extract it and use it to install the driver manually through the Windows Device Manager. That’s that.

Posted in in english, nerdy nerdbert | Keine Kommentare »

Culture-flatrate

Freitag, August 7th, 2009

I just read an article over at ArsGeek where the author was wondering how copyright infringement and illegal filesharing could be legalized. His suggestions where subscription-sites for legal downloading and/or pay-per-view-systems (specifically on the Pirate Bay which was to be legalized just like Napster but from what I heard the deal is a good as cancelled). However that might evolve, I don’t think that one of these two business-moldels will be there on the long run because both systems are limited to what one site can offer (with whom from the industry they made contracts) and no one is going to register on multiple sites just to get everyting they want, because it’s expensive and a pain in the a.s.s. Of course it works a little for music so it will work with movies to a certain degree but most of the people will still download whithout paying anything from illegal sites.

I gave these things some thoughts recently and I think in the end the only solution is to allow people to download whatever they want from whereever they want when they pay a monthly/yearly fee. The collected money than needs to be distributed to the artists (this will cut out most of the music- and movie-distributing and -marketing people, that’s why they are not really happy with this).

The thinking on how this might be organized (how do figure out a more or less cheat-free way which artist is getting how much money etc.) is just starting and it will probably take a long time until we have a system up and running because it has to be legalized by the law all over the world.

This model is called »Kulturflatrate« (»Culture-flatrate) in Germany.

I could not find the English term or any further reading in English, but this (German-subtlitled but English) video-interview with Danny O’Brian, who is activism coordinator at the Electronical Frontier Foundation, is a good start.

Posted in in english, nerdy nerdbert, politik | Keine Kommentare »

Candidate for Worst Movie of all Times: Narnia 1

Dienstag, April 28th, 2009

I watched the first part of the Narnia-chronicles mainly because I heard about the rumours that it is used by fundamental christians as propaganda (Philip Pullman’s ingenious »Dark Materials«-series is viewed as the counterpart to this). So I might have been slightly preoccupied when watching the movie but I just can’t help it: this was one of the worst things I have ever seen. I know it may be a little unfair to compare it with Lord of the Rings because Narnias target audience is much younger, but on the other hand this being a children-movie is no accuse for doing almost everything wrong that you can do wrong in a movie. What that would be can be read after the break.

(weiterlesen…)

Posted in film, in english | Keine Kommentare »

»Ghost in the Shell 2« & Hans Bellmer

Mittwoch, April 8th, 2009

Hans Bellmer — Doll

Hans Bellmer

Coming to think of it, actually did (re-)watch a nice movie in the last time. I am doing a work on Internet/Hypertext as a theoretical background for my recent project and I thought about GitS and the network-theories they talk about there and I decided to watch Innocence again.

It was a real treat as always and just as the other times I watched it I couldn’t decide if I should concentrate on the breathtaking pictures and animation (except for some too much CGI-looking CGI I totally adore this movie’s style) or on the story/subtitles (I got a fansub that has heavy explanation for all the references and quotes, it’s unbelievable what Mamoru Oshii rubbed into that movie).

I learned from wikipedia that the design of the cyborgs is inspired by the German artist/photographer etc. Hanns Bellmer (if you know it the hint with the book is really obvious of course) and his fabulous dolls.

Posted in anime, artsy, film, in english | Keine Kommentare »

*shudder*

Mittwoch, April 8th, 2009

Uuah, I watched two shitty movies in a row recently, the first one was Hellboy 2, the second one Resident Evil (3?): Extinction.

I watched Hellboy for curiosity-reasions, I could not believe that del Toro could make a movie as bad as my friends said it was. But he sure did (wow, and he did this shitty Hellboy-Animated-series too. I really tried to watch that. But it was just too badly drawn and stupid). Hellboy — The Golden Army heavily reminded me of Spiderman 3, both movies left me with this strange feeling that what I just watched was not a movie but some kind of half-baked brainstorm conglomerat for the next few Spiderman/Hellboy movies (which I — for sure in vain — hope they are not going to do). It didn’t feel like a good composed story but rather a crude mix of (bad) ideas. Nevermind, I never cared much for Spiederman and Hellboy can never be as good as a movie as it is as a comic (actually, I think Hellboy works only as a comic, in a movies the ideas and characters just seem too ridiculous).

I knew that Resident Evil would be bad, though. RS2 totally sucked so I didn’t believe it would get any better. It didn’t of course and I only watched it because I am recently doing some research on Apocalypse. But even watching it with that perspective was kind of frustrating, because it was uninspired and unlogical. Nevermind.

Posted in film, in english | Keine Kommentare »

Drawing Day 2008

Dienstag, Juni 10th, 2008

I’ve been drawing on Drawing Day!

Drawing Day 2008
The view out of E.s window.

Drawing Day 2008
A scibble for a poster I might be doing on »Kielholen« (careen, keelhaul)…

Drawing Day 2008
… and another one for the pirates.

Drawing Day 2008
We’ve been at our favourite Dürüm-place in Taksim.

Drawing Day 2008
I have one of these brush pens, I really like it but for some reason I rarely use it. I drawed what I thought that you would typically draw with these kind of pens on one of the papers they serve the food on at that place.

Drawing Day 2008
Of course one of the millions of cats here in Istanbul wanted to have something from our food. She looked so poor that she got a piece or two. ^__^

Drawing Day 2008
E. drew my portrait. I have the pen in the right hand because I am already finished with the drawing, she explained (I draw with my left hand, usually). And I seem to be quite happy about what I drew. ^__^

Drawing Day 2008
We visited friends of E. in Kadiköy, they have a very nice flat. This is the view from their balcony (and some people from the ferry…).

Drawing Day 2008
The ferry back and scribbles at a Pide place in Taksim in the late evening.

Posted in eigene arbeiten, illustration, in english, tagebuch | Keine Kommentare »

»City of Loss«

Mittwoch, Juni 13th, 2007

The downtowntrains full of empty eyes
and I wish I was someone else and far away
with my hand I touch the glass, cold and slick
and crows on their way to nowhere.

No one can save me and I‘m so fucking scared
and I feel like nothing’s ever gonna change
summer‘s last flower wilting on the table
and I got lost in the City of Glass.

Somehow I lost count of the days
and clouds moving rapidly, a moment of loss
afraid of going to sleep not wanting the next day to come
and there is a thunder far and distant.

Posted in eigene gedichte, in english, tagebuch | Keine Kommentare »

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