While I'm usually not into Hip-hop much, browsing MTV Unplugged audio CDs made me bump into Jay Z's take on this, backed by The Roots. The album is great fun, highly recommended. There seem to be versions including video on YouTube but my impression is that it's a cleaned version: there's no "shit" or even "shhhhhhh" on Takeover (track 2) unlike the CD has, for instance.

I haven't been watching TED talks for a while. No idea how that happened! I enjoyed a few shorter ones earlier today. Of those, I would like to share How to learn any language in six months by Chris Lonsdale. In addition, you can find a transcript of the 5 principles and 7 actions that he presents below.

5 principles

1. Focus on language content that is relevant to you
2. Use your new language as a tool to communicate from day 1
3. When you first understand the message you will unconsciously acquire the language
4. Physiological training
5. Psychological state matters

7 actions

1. Listen a lot
2. Focus on getting the meaning first (before the words)
3. Start mixing
4. Focus on the core
5. Get a language parent
6. Copy the face
7. "Direct connect" to mental images

I just got the confirmation from Sharp Corporation that cleaning robot Cocorobo RX-V200-N is using software of mine, precisely: uriparser. Here's a video of a robot of the same family:

"Menschenrechte sind nicht universell"

WTF? Scheint er — aber kann er eigentlich nicht — ernst meinen (wenn er das mal zu Ende denken würde): Helmut Schmidt: Menschenrechte sind nicht universiell, der Westen instrumentalisiert sie zur Waffe

In der aktuellen Ausgabe der ZEIT finden Leserberichte über Momente, die ein leben lang in Errinnerung bleiben werden und die einen Anfang von etwas Neuem bedeutet haben. Das ganze ist geteilt in zwei Teile. Ich fand diese Berichte bewegend und spannend genug, dass ich hier darauf hinweisen möchte:

• Teil 1: Lesergeschichten: Als das Leben sich drehte
• Teil 2: Aus dem Blog "ZEIT der Leser": Anfänge

Dumm gelaufen: Ich frühstücke im Café und stelle noch beim Essen fest: Ich habe nur 3 Euro Bardgeld bei mir, mit EC-Karte kann ich wie erwartet nicht bezahlen. Wo finde ich also unterwegs den nächsten Geld-Automaten der Cash Group, wenn ich der Sparkasse nicht unnötig Geld in den Rachen werfen will? Meine Suche im App-Store führt mich zu Apps wie

• Cash Group Finder
• Cash Group Automaten Lite

die wenig Spaß machen und keine sehr vertrauenswürdigen Eindruck machen. Später kam ich dann auf die Idee, nach einer Postbank-App zu suchen; die gibt es tatsächlich:

• Postbank App

Von der Postbank hab ich zwar die Nase voll (und bin auf dem Weg von denen weg), weil ihre eigenen Automaten absurd oft außer Betrieb sind, aber die App hat genau, was ich haben will: Unter "Bargeld Suche" (ohne Bindestrich?!) werden unkompliziert alle Cash Group-Automaten in der Umgebung angezeigt. Das ist doch mal was.

For those interested, here is the set list of Traded Pilots' performance at WABE Berlin 2013-11-14:

1. 00:00 Swallow your tears (@Bandcamp, @YouTube, @YouTube)
2. 05:27 Winds (@YouTube, @YouTube)
3. 11:12 The garden (@Bandcamp)
4. 14:37 Follow your own toes
5. 18:30 Bucket
6. 21:13 Penny for the conjuror (@Bandcamp)
7. 24:24 Songs for the dead (@YouTube, @YouTube)
8. 27:08 Mouse
9. 30:23 So long
10. 33:42 Never alone
11. 35:19 A Proposal
12. 38:52 The rock (@Bandcamp, @YouTube, @YouTube)
13. 43:57 Took Away My Life (@YouTube)
14. 46:55 Bye bye baby (@YouTube)

For some pictures, you could check out those by Sulamith Sallmann. There was a dedicated event page on Facebook and Traded Pilots have a website of their own too, of course.

This is my first take at recording a concert... at all and with a Samsung Galaxy SII GT-I9100 Android cell phone in particular. The quality is rather poor but better than expected. To my understanding, sharing live recordings is considered fair use and legal. Track list:

1. Happiness
2. Slide
3. Walking in the Clouds
4. Blue Eyes(?)
5. Birds of a Feather
6. Handy Man
7. Family Tree
8. We Could Be
9. (Cover) Gotye — Eyes Wide Open
10. Baby Voice
11. The Beginning

The only processing was:

1. Decode AAC
2. Crop to relevant part
3. Encode as MP3 192 kbps

Download: teresa-bergman-2013-11-14-wabe.mp3

For some pictures, you could check out those by Sulamith Sallmann. There was a dedicated event page on Facebook, too. Teresa Bergman has a website too, of course.

I ran into the 2013 album "Head Up High" by Morcheeba a few days ago. Highly recommended, spinning in loop over here. Two tracks to get a taste:

2. Face of Danger

6. Make believer

I have just released uriparser 0.8.0.

What is uriparser?

uriparser is a strictly RFC 3986 compliant URI parsing and handling library written in C. uriparser is cross-platform, fast, supports Unicode and is licensed under the New BSD license.

This is what changed since the previous release (i.e. since version 0.7.9):

2013-12-20 -- 0.8.0

  * Fixed: Resolution of relative URI "/" broken
      Thanks to Mo McRoberts for the patch!
  * Fixed: uriAddBaseUri produced uriUri objects with both host
      and the absolutePath flag set (while the absolutePath flag
      should only be true for URI objects without a host) when
      resolving absolute URIs like "/" or "/foo/bar".
      Now the absolutePath flag is set to URI_FALSE and an empty
      segment is added as necessary
  * Fixed: .errorCode could end up unset, previously
      Thanks to Radu Hociung for the patch!  (bug #16)
  * Fixed: Resolve use of non-POSIX "sed -r" used when building
     documentation  (bug #18)
     Thanks to Ryan Schmidt for reporting!
  * Fixed: Build DLL with -no-undefined on Windows
      Thanks to Michel Zou for the patch!  (bug #19)
  * Added: Command line tool "uriparse"
      Thanks to Radu Hociung for coding!  (feature request #3)
  * Soname: 1:15:0