timestamp

The basic text-editor which comes with Windows sports a, maybe little known, feature which can be put to good use. My daily routine of doing thick participation online involves the creation of a flat text-file for every day’s fieldnotes and -diary. The editor can do a bit of the documentation work for you. Open up “editor” and write “.LOG” as the first line. Now write into your text-file, save and close. If you reopen the file you will find a timestamp in the line beneath what you have written. Now write something more, save, close, reopen, and hey presto, another … Continue reading

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being true to life

Since academics have started to deal with “life online” there is the topos of “On the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog,” meaning that when interacting online it is supposedly perfectly easy to adopt identities completely different from your offline ones. If that would be true, “↑Second Life“ (SL) would be populated with fantasy characters looking like everything, but not like the human beings controlling them. Interestingly enough there is a trend pointing into another direction. Quite a lot of people try to get their avatars looking similar to their physical self, to give them their own faces. … Continue reading

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toasty technology

  Beyond the ↑Gates of ↑Hell you’ll ↑find IE—proof above. Through the depths of a hidden subterranean vault, housing his ↵mad ↑de-integration lab, I entered ↑Nathan’s toasty technology page. Besides a definite ↑opinion on Vista you will find a wealth of interesting hacks and general tech savvy Microsoft-bashing. And there are—maybe by far more important, culturally—loads of ↑Doom alpha versions screenshots.    … Continue reading

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flatland

  That’s the way my graphical user interface (GUI) meanwhile looks. By means of seemingly unending patience I hunted down a plethora of elements and gradually understood how the whole thing gets composed. First I tried to substitute everything I wanted to use by my own elements and just jettison the rest. This works for the standard applications coming with Windows, but seldomly with third party applications. Although the surfaces of lots of those are especially designed to be used with Windows, they do not readily adopt my changes, but stubbornly display elements of their own choice and looks. I … Continue reading

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