The Nerdcave

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn!

2007-03-08T06:09:00.000+01:00

shocking musical findings

2007-03-06T04:16:00.000+01:00

While listening to Led Zeppelin's Somethin' Else for the first time this night, I was feeling as if I've heard that tune before. So I checked my music library and found the song Beinhart from the german comedy rock-band Torfrock. That song was used as theme-song for the first Werner movie and occupied the first place of the german single-charts for 25 weeks in 1991. Since Torfrock wrote their own lyrics in german technically it's not a cover. I couldn't find out if Torfrock mentioned somewhere that they borrowed some tunes, but I found out that Led Zeppelin isn't the original composer either. :)

spot the nerd

2006-12-23T03:56:00.000+01:00

just returned home from a dark electro/gothic party (N8 Flug) where i got some funny ideas upon observing the electro crowd which i found so amusing that i'd like to share them with you. in the electro scene (if you don't know what electro is, just imaging a techno party where everyone wears black and looks down while dancing, that's the impression i got) or general dark wave/gothic there seem to be some people who imaging cockroaches on the floor which must be killed, at least their dancing style looks like that. if you watch these "cockroach-stompers" with their big plateau-shoes "dancing" and you imagine some insects on the floor, you simply can't stop laughing. well, i know it's kinda evil if you don't dance yourself and just make fun of others, but as i am a occasional dancer/headbanger i think i am allowed to put people in boxes, mark them and laugh about it. :P while thinking about the crowds demographic spectrum i had an idea for a little fun party game. there were unusually many males aged 25 and up (just a guess, but they looked kinda old to me) and even some with glasses and a general nerdy look (i know what i am talking about, i am one myself ;)). you know the prejudice about cs-students listening only to electronic music? that's where my game idea starts. :) since nowadays nearly everyone has a mobile with integrated digital camera and sending pictures (mms) isn't that expensive, someone (the gamemaster) could set up a server whereto everyone else sends the taken pictures. the game would be called "spot the nerd" (hence the topic). the goal is to take pictures of as many nerds at the party as possible and the one with the most pictures gets a little prize (e.g. a coupon for a free drink). the flashing wouldn't even disctract anyone, since there's also stroboscobic light. the pictures could be judged by the community, because opions of who's a nerd and who's not could differ largely. you could even make some profit from a game like this if you collect a little membership fee or if you make the mms-service more pricey (like what bild does with their leserreport thing). now one could think that i am discriminating nerds, but how can someone discrimate his own peer group? ;) and besides, the nerds could "beat" this game easily, since they can "smell" each other. ;) you could also extend the game to other subgroups, like for example emo-kids, so that every minority is discrimated equally.
it's past 4am now and i am too lazy to check my spelling, so if you find some errors, please tell my via the usual communication channels available to you.

random thoughts

2006-12-21T01:36:00.000+01:00

so, some friend of mine reminded me that i haven't posted here in some time now and he wants to read something so he won't be bored anymore. as a generous person as i am i could not put down that humble request and am now writing down some slightly interesting stuff i was thinking about some time now.
university is quite tough at the moment, with lots of hours sitting in lecture halls, listening to sleep inducing voices talking about technical topics, which could be quite interesting if presented correctly. the worst thing is, most of our lectures are in the one hall which has no constanst wifi access (depends on the wind and temperature outside it seems...). so, we resort to playing mario kart or mario vs luigi with our dses (is that the correct plural for ds?). then there are two time consuming lab courses.
at home i hang around on 4chan or animexx quite much, watch anime (death note!!!!, kanon) or play some games (frets on fire, dead or alive). unfortunately i had to suspend my dance dance revolution training due to some neighbour below having fear of ceiling parts hitting her head.
enough whining now, i almost sound like piro. ^^
recently i was wondering if i should change this blogs name, because some people told me that i was not a nerd (anymore?), which is quite confusing if you have some "nerd pride". *G* but then again, i'm a nerd at heart and can't think of any better name.

DST

2006-10-30T10:24:00.000+01:00

I hate this stupid Daylight Saving Time stuff. I forgot to adjust my alarm clock yesterday and got up an hour early today. Well, at least I won't be late on the first day of the new semester.

Evil Purchase

2006-10-14T18:26:00.001+02:00

I probably should shop more conscious. Either my eating habits are becoming evil or I am controlled by some evil power that tells me to buy these things. Listening to Eläkeläiset and Children of Bodom while shopping might induce some evilness aswell. ;)

Ikaruga Yer Desktop

2006-10-12T01:01:00.000+02:00

Woohoo... pincermovement of a persuative tactic from
my two buddies here. Yep, it's been a while since I contributed
to this wonderful sensefree thing called blogging.
BTW: should you be a member of the Reformed Church of God,
you shouldn't be reading this too:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/10/god_blog/
Everyone else, enjoy my 'mindless blather' from hereon out.

And today, I gonna talk about a little fashional thingy of mine,
mainly: My two PCs... yep, one is not enough, two are just better.
But... one needs themes to feel at home right? I mean, there's
a reason why Windows gets glossier with every version and
people put more and more effort into getting rid of that gloss.
Now, back to my two PCs... what do we have.. one PC uses a
black mouse and keyboard, one uses a white mouse and
keyboard (Both apple on top of that,nifty hardware, really....).
http://www.nerdcave.de/razor/cam1.jpg
http://www.nerdcave.de/razor/cam2.jpg

Now... black and white, black and white... where do I
remember that from...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikaruga
Yep, that's where I know it from. So we have a
buddhism inspired game that features a ship named
Ikaruga that switches between black and white...
I guess the semantics are pretty clear.

Now... since Windows sux and Linux rules, I needed
GNOME themes. First on the list:

Background images!
http://ikaruga.co.uk/ happily provides those plus
some wicked movies from the

"WOAH-that-surely-requires-japanese-genes-in-your-bloodline"-type

and the soundtrack
(Hossa, love Faith).

Next thing: Windowcontent and Windowborders!
http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/567
Milk 2.0 Popular on Mac, nice on GNOME.
Nice set for the white Ikaruga.

Now to the black.
http://art.gnome.org/themes/metacity/1231
Black, plain and simple.
http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/1163
gm-looks for the windowcontent.

Next thing: ICONS!
Matching the two types of lasers from the
white and black Ikaruga. Blue and Red.
http://art.gnome.org/themes/icon/327
Snow-Apple for the blue.
http://art.gnome.org/themes/icon/353
Cherry-Sod for the red.

And the final thing: Cursors!
There's a beautiful cursor-set and guess what...
it comes in black and white:)
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=38459
Chameleon Xcursors, easily installed with gcursor.

Now we got a black and a white theme. Hossa.
And way less racistic than sony could do with
their PSP too. Oh, whoops, I guess that's one of
those things 'that should only be done in private,
or, frankly, should not be said or done at all'.
Well, I sure feel good:)

http://www.nerdcave.de/razor/whitess.png
http://www.nerdcave.de/razor/blackss.png

New Stuff

2006-08-16T05:17:00.000+02:00

And another month lacking new posts passed in an instant. After maxing out the monthly upload limit with some boring pictures last month, I had to wait till I could post some awesome pictures of my very own EVA-01 figurine from Japan. I even had to pick it up at the local customs office, which is about an hour away if you have to rely on public transportation. For those who have never had anything to do with customs let me describe the procedure. The postman gives you a slip of paper on which you find the address of the customs office where you have to go and some information on what to bring with you (money,invoice). At the office you have to open your parcel and the clerk looks at the contents and wants to know their value. Somehow these people seem to be unaware of the fact, that the value is declared on the outside of the parcel on special sticker. If that value exceeds some limit (I think 20€ or something) you have to pay tax and duty. The clerk takes an awful long time calculating these things, filling out forms and printing them out. After that he takes you to the cashier, because it would be to simple if you could give him the money directly. So you have to give it to a person whose only job is to receive money and hand out change through one of these cashier windows with mic, speaker and drawer. After that you are free to go and have fun with your imported goods.

Skies

2006-07-12T13:16:00.000+02:00

I recently played around with my digital camera and tried to capture some nice photos of a late afternoon sky. You can see the results here. I put them on flickr because I am running out of space here and it's an easy way to share some pictures. But it still bugs me, that I had to create a Yahoo account for this. A friend suggested I should use Bubbleshare instead, but it's so stuffed with amazing web2.0-stuff that even the basic upload feature won't work with Opera. And how come one needs Flash 8 to do some batch uploading?

Dr Kawashima a weatherman?

2006-07-09T21:23:00.000+02:00

Dr Kawashima, of brain training fame, greeted me with this today. I suppose Nintendo added some date-related guessing to select the welcome messages, but usually I get only daytime related stuff like "oh look, it's getting dark already". I would not be surprised if he even remembered my birthday.

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2006-06-21T11:52:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-20T09:08:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-19T20:00:00.000+02:00

allaboutsouthpark

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2006-06-18T11:56:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-17T07:25:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-17T01:55:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-14T13:03:00.000+02:00

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2006-06-13T11:29:00.000+02:00

Unsolved Problems -- from Wolfram MathWorld

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2006-06-12T07:45:00.000+02:00

DCEmulation :: View topic - Hardware Mod Navigation System (and FAQ's, Tutorials, etc)

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2006-06-12T04:33:00.000+02:00

*conspect.de » Japan Rundreise 2005
Artículos de Divulgación :: 100cia.com
liveplasma music, movies, search engine and discovery engine
you get a map of connections to a certain artist/movie/director/actor

my combined anime rss feed

2006-05-28T23:22:00.000+02:00

During the weekend I did some Perl "programming". I'm a lazy guy and I was tired of visiting several anime torrent sites or reading their feeds from day to day. So I created one big rss feed which combines the 3 biggest anime torrent sites and 2 smaller ones. The small ones didn't even have a rss feed, but my Perl skills got rid of this little problem. :) The feed for point-blank.cc can be accessed here, it is updated every two hours. The rss feed for anime-jiyuu is available here and is updated while executing the script.

OMG WTF LOL

2006-05-21T14:53:00.000+02:00

So, last night was the annual Eurovision Song Contest. And Lordi pwnd it! That's the first time for Finland to win the contest, I guess the Finns made the right choice. We can all learn from that. ;)

Eating out in Tokyo

2006-05-17T18:44:00.000+02:00

Last time I informed you where to ease your media addiction. This time I stumbled upon a link to a little overview of odd themed restaurants, so you will be entertained while filling your stomach. My favourite is the Vampire Cafe.

Sam and Max, again

2006-05-17T00:53:00.000+02:00

Update on the recently covered new Sam & Max episodic games:

The trailer is finally available on this site.

infomania overload

2006-05-14T11:49:00.000+02:00

The Japanese really know how to please nerds. As if 24/7 internet cafes weren't enough, they created the "Gran Cyber Cafes", places full of solitary "pods" loaded with everything you need to satisfy your media cravings. Access to a huge manga library is included aswell. You can stay there as long as you can afford it, although the staff will remind you that it's not a hotel. But some places even offer showers and sell fresh underwear.