Alpha Core

Every weekday 5-Second Films publishes a new (very) short film: 2 seconds of beginning titles, 5 seconds of film, 1 second of end titles. A great way to start your day with! Here’s my favorite, called “Late For Work”:

Ever since Last.fm made the unfortunate decision to become a paid subscription service for all countries except in the US, UK and Germany, I’ve been on the lookout for a good alternative to get to some tunes from somewhere else and I’ve finally found exactly that!

CitySounds.fm lets you listen to the latest music from cities around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list constantly changes as new music is being created. The music is being fetched from SoundCloud and the city photos are fetched from Flickr.

The music available through CitySounds.fm seems to be primarily dance music until now and I’m quite happy about that actually. Enjoy listening to the music!

Update (August, 22nd): There’s a new and improved version of CitySounds.fm online in which all cities now have their own page as well, you can register as a listener by tweeting a link to the city page and and cities within the same country are suggested to listen to. CitySounds.fm was already great and it just got better!

This article is part of a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

In this article I’d like to list some network and internet tools that deserve some attention. Anything from general every-day-use tools to more advanced analysis software goes in here. Here’s some of the better software out there: Read more

Although the basic idea to offer people a choice what software to use for browsing the internet is not bad at all, forcing Microsoft to bundle Mozilla Firefox (as well as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera) with their operating system Windows, which gets shipped with Internet Explorer (IE) right now, is completely over the top. The situation was revealed in Microsoft’s quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Read more

Scala is a youth choir from Aarschot, Belgium, roughly sixty teenage girls, directed by two talented brothers, and enjoying national and international recognition.

From today on, their new album Paper Plane is entirely available to download for free (in MP3 format) from the official website. This is the first time a Belgian band releases a new album online for free. The lyrics to all songs can be found on the Kolacny website.

To give you an idea of what they are like: below is the video clip from Raintears, which is also on the album. The song is about holding on to memories of a lost loved one. Read more

While Doro is more into escape games, I prefer tower defense games. Here’s a nice addition to the collection I already posted before. It’s called Ultimate Defense 2.

Refreshing in this game is the ability to dig around in the landscape and find some bonus items or treasures, which help you getting more money for the next level.

At first the game might seem pretty difficult, but keep trying and you’ll be able to get to the end easily! Money is hard to come by in this game, so spend it wisely! Enjoy the game!

Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! Do you like Tamale? Hot Hot Tamale? I like Tamale Hot Hot! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! You like Tamale? Warm Tamale? No! I like Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! You like Tamale? Tepid Tamale? No! I like Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! What kind of Tamale do you like? Read more

Vanaf april 2008 tot juli 2008 nam ik deel aan een gevorderdencursus Nederlands aan de universiteit van Hamburg. In juli hebben we daar een examen geschreven, om ons voor de volgende cursus te kwalificeren. Op de dag voor het examen, heeft een van de andere cursusten aan iedereen deze link gestuurd, zodat we allen nog vlug ons ‘innerlijk midden’ kunnen vinden, voordat we het examen schrijven. Op die pagina kan je grappige filmpjes bekijken over het klussen en verder informatie krijgen over de veiligheid bij het klussen. Mijn favoriete film is die over ‘de kunst van het hout bewerken’.

Het blijkt alsof ik mijn innerlijk midden nog juist op tijd gevonden heb, want ik ben geslaagd!

On July 22 a new feature got added to Google Maps, making it even better: walking directions. This was announced on the Google Earth and Maps team blog. Here are two pictures showing the difference between driving and walking from the city center of Leuven to the train station.

For those who don’t know Leuven really well: it’s a maze of one-way streets and as a visitor, you’re probably better off just taking the outer ring around the city if you’re by car. But fortunately, if you feel like walking around, you can ignore all these one-way streets and find the best route thanks to this new feature. It only works for routes under 10 km though.

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) program that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. You can talk to your friends using your Live Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, IRC and other accounts without the need to have lots of individual clients installed.

Today I also uninstalled mIRC (an IRC client) because I have no need for it anymore. Thanks to Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), I can now hang around on my favorite chat channels and get popup notifications when my nickname gets mentioned without needing an extra program to clutter up my system.

Pidgin is free software (GPL). For more information, visit the official website.