Take six minutes of your time and watch Disney’s new animated short film called Paperman. You won’t regret it.
Louie Mantia on App Icons➝
Louie Mantia:
While there is much to be said about designing apps, it can vary wildly between different products, companies, and people. If there is any constant in the process of designing an app, it’s the app icon. Everyone must have one.
Worth a read.
Philipp und ich zeigen unsere unglaublich nichtexistenten Künste in Awesomenauts. Ein Spiel, das man sich übrigens mal angesehen haben sollte. Hervorragend. Wir freuen uns über Abonnements, Likes und Kommentare auf YouTube.
DIY-Wichmann
I promised my landlady that I won’t damage the tiles in the kitchen. Those things are 100 years old and she wants them as they are. Well, they sure look like they’re 100 years old and they sure don’t look a bit beautiful let alone hygienic. Then my father came up with the idea to glue PVC floor coating on the tiles. We used glue that’s absolutely removable and does no harm to the tiles. Problem solved. And it looks beautiful.
Before
After
Aside from fixing those tiles, we’ve moved the furniture around. I’m going to paint those cupboards white some time in the future. I got them from the couple that lived in this flat before I moved in.
Hitman: Absolution is the first Hitman title I’ve played and I enjoyed it through and through. I didn’t know that I am into stealth games until I felt the satisfaction of killing someone without anybody else noticing. I’m so used to killing everything with noisy machine guns that this kind of game was a appreciated variation. I guess I should take a look at Splinter Cell as well. Sjin is doing a very entertaining play-through, if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
Philipp und ich spielen Ace Of Spades drüben bei Saving Princesses. Ihr dürft den Channel gerne abonnieren und die Videos liken, wir würden uns freuen. Jetzt haben wir sogar ein vernünftiges Intro und YouTube hat uns erlaubt custom Thumbnails einzustellen. Der Hammer!
Wenn ihr Vorschläge für Spiele habt, die wir spielen sollen, gerne an @UARRR oder @knuspermagier.
The most interesting podcast you’ll hear all week➝
It’s the first episode with the co-founder and director of video game development at Valve, Gabe Newell! In this episode he sits down with Chris, Chloe, Wil Wheaton and Robin Walker and David Sawyer to talk all things video games!
The folks over at the Nerdist Podcast visited Valve and talked to Gabe Newell. Not once, but twice. The first part is about Valve, Gabe and Games, the second about Valve as a company. Very interesting and definitely worth to hear. Gabe Newell seems like an awesome guy.
Books I read in 2012
I heard of people who read 70-120 books in a year and I’m impressed if somebody read 30. I for my part read nine books in 2012. That’s an increase of 450%. My, my!
The Hunger Games Series
Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins – Catching Fire
They definitely have their passages where not as much is happening as I would have liked but all in all I was very pleased. I’m a big fan of fictional and unusual societies and behaviors, so this was just what I was waiting for. The second book is the weakest of the series and the end is not overly surprising but I had my fun.
11/22/63
I don’t really know if I like Stephen King very much. I loved the “The Dark Tower” books, though. This one is some weird mix of time travel and history novel and it was fun to wrap my had around the time travel part.
The Maze Runner Series
James Dashner — The Maze Runner
James Dashner — The Scorch Trials
James Dashner — The Death Cure
James Dashner — The Kill Order
Another series containing a society that’s not anything like ours. The last book is rubbish the rest not as good as the The Hunger Games series but definitely worth a read if you’re into stories about worlds that possibly could exist but don’t.
Rivers Of London
Ben Aaronovitch — Rivers Of London
Magic, London, but not Harry Potter. I don’t really know what I think about it. I’m currently reading the second part, maybe I’ll have an opinion after that. Could be an amazing series, but somehow it’s not yet growing on me.
My plan is to read considerably more books in 2013 and I’m not off to a good start. We’ll see how that went. See you in twelve months.
The World’s Most Amazing Animals in One App➝
Experience the world’s most amazing animals in one app — together. This interactive experience brings you closer to the stories of elephants, whales, rhinos and other fascinating species. Discover their lives and the work of WWF in a way you’ve never seen before. Try out “tiger vision,” stay as still as the polar bear during a hunt, and chop the panda’s bamboo. New species stories — which you can fold and share with the world — are added regularly.
Beautiful.
On Setups and the perfect working environment➝
Christoph Rauscher:
Every time I want to write something down, I try to sit on my cleaned desk and open up a text editor, but the machine itself (a fairly new, fast MacBook Pro) is so distracting with all it’s power and possibilities. I would rather have a machine that really forces me to focus on what I want to do simply by its technical restrictions. Full-Screen with notifications off is not enough sometimes.
I know that feeling. The iPad for example seems like the perfect machine for concentrating on one task but as soon as you have to look something up, everything falls to pieces and you get distracted by how complicated it is to open up a dict.cc tab in your browser.
I definitely do, and then I dream of buying one of those machines for 30€ on eBay. It wouldn’t be the problem.
The problem would be that I wouldn’t use it. It only makes sense in a warm, cozy, lifestyle kind of way. It wouldn’t speed up the working process, it wouldn’t even help me to be more focussed.
Exactly. It’s just a matter of willpower. If you want to concentrate on writing, shut everything else down and focus. You could very well use the time to find the perfect writing environment but I highly doubt this will bring anything to
paper
.