Pixelpope

I’m not an anime expert, so I’m sorry (well, I’m not, I’m just pretending) if this is not new for you. But it was for me and I happened to really like it. This one is just great: From the makers of the anime classic »Ghost in the shell« comes Appleseed, something I would call another milestone in anime history.
It was in cinemas last year (depending on where you live), so it should be available on DVD since a couple of months.

!http://media.pixelpope.com/img/appleseed1.jpg!

It looks just awesome. As far as I can tell, the whole movie was built in some 3D app and rendered with filters, reducing the number of colours, which gives the characters a more hand drawn 2D look. The mixture of both looks just great and is what future animes will have to match with.
Also, you can see an unbelievable love for details, just everywhere.

Screen caps can only give you a glimpse, so check out the trailer to see what I’m talking about.

!http://media.pixelpope.com/img/appleseed2.jpg!

Beside the great looks, the action scenes rock and the story is cool.
As far as I can tell from some webpages, this seems to be a remake, based on an anime of the same name from 1988. But again, I’m not the expert. And I guess this doesn’t make the movie any worse.

Screen captures taken from “Moviereporter”:http://www.moviereporter.net/images/97/appleseed.html.

Twenty years ago, the accidents of Chernobyl took place.
In Kiev and other capitals of former Sovjet Union, commemorations are held today.

I believe we should at least take a minute to commemorate the victims of still vague numbers and rethink our dependency and the dangers of a technology that harshly punishes any technical or human failure over generations and borders of countries.

For every fan of nuclear power and weapons, I highly recomment the photo series “nuclear nightmares”:http://www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl/.

Don’t get me wrong: I really like to use Firefox and I think it’s a good piece of software, but I don’t see a point in advertising some free and open source web browser in offline media, especially in print or on TV, where every single appearence costs thousands of $s or €s and the impact is very little to nothing.

To me it seems some people want to play with the “big guys” they hate so much.
After all: The only one that really earns money from the spread, and thus would be interested in it, is Google (they never do evil, remember?), as it is the default search engine in Firefox and only few people will change that.
They even pay money for every new user you refer to Firefox with the “Google toolbar”:http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/.
But running browser ads on TV is just a big waste of money.

Besides that: “Weeee!”:http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/index.php?id=19542&c=false

Firefox is one of the best and most modern browsers out there today. It has a great plug-in / extension interface and is very popular for its extensions.
I’m not going to talk about the advantages or which browser is better right now. This is a decision everyone has to make for themself.

I don’t claim this list to be complete or right or anything. A better name would probably be “my favourite Firefox extensions” but that just doesn’t sound as much as a superlative.

The best Firefox extensions:

* Web developer toolbar The must-have for everyone doing simple to complex web sites.

• CSSViewer New and hot: shows CSS properties live on the page while you hover an element
  
• Google pagerank status – No matter if it’s even right, you want to know: Google Pagerank also for Mozilla and Firefox.
  
• Bookmarks synchronizer – Synchronizing bookmarks between multiple user accounts, Firefox installs, or computers.
  
• Mouse gestures – Idea stolen from Opera. You will miss it once you use a browser without gesture recognition. You will move your mouse up, and up, and up. But no new tab/window will open.
  
• SessionSaver – Keeps record of your open windows and tabs once you close/crash Firefox
  
• Nightly tester tools – Firefox devs like to change the API and make extensions become incompatible. Use this until the extensions have been made compatible.
  
• Fasterfox – Speed up your connection and display page load time. Good to know if a page just “feels” slow/fast or really is.
  

• Auto copy – Copy stuff to the clipboard by simply highlighting, no more ctrl+c required. Just like Trillian or others.

You know any other useful extensions? Let me know.

!/media/img/IE7-logo.png(IE7 Logo)!
On January 31st, Microsoft released the Beta 1 Preview of Internet Explorer 7, the standard browser that’s going to be shipped with future Windows Vista and will become available for Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server. No Windows 2000.

Reason enough to have a first glimpse at what users and web developers are going to have to deal with for the next 5 years – assuming it will be taken care of as much as IE6 ;)
This will be a first look at IE7 in 3 parts, looking at it from point of view in terms of user experience, developer, and security.

... WordPress. Today I tought, I’d go and upgrade to WordPress 2.0. Bad idea.

The Lightbox JS script by Lokesh Dhakar is the way to go when it comes to previews and full size displays of images. No pop-ups, no anti-usability.

I haven’t posted anything here in a while.
Well, it seems I just don’t have much time for writing lately.

As a consequence, this site will change. I will be moving it to a more static type of website. Soon.
And spend more time on creating themes/templates, as it seems people like them and in my oppinion there are not too many good (+ free) themes out there.

The dashboard-like widget software Konfabulator has been aquired by Yahoo! and thus the software was made available for free (formerly US$19.95).

As of July 18th, bBlog 0.7.6 is out. You can download it from either SourceForge or “BerliOS”:https://developer.berlios.de/projects/bblog/.

This is mostly a bug fix release, as it doesn’t have any new features but less bugs.

You should upgrade in any case, as it fixes a security breach all versions before were suffering.