The Court of Justice of the European Union has just allowed to censor the web on copyright claims by requiring providers to block the access to specific Domains.

While the copyright lobby claims it’s just a “handful” of domains that they want to get rid of, it’s just a matter of time when they will loosen their definition of handful. This has happened in the past so many times that I cannot comprehend how any court can not see and anticipate this. Want more examples? Dig through the EFF yourself and you will see what I mean.
Free speech has just been destroyed in Europe. Welcome to Hell.

The song Black Flies by Ben Howard describes his view on a friendship that parted ways. It is a strange coincidence that I stumbled over this song just last Saturday. I usually don’t show the public my very personal writings, most of which is done with ink and paper during late hours all by myself, but this time I feel like I have to.

Last weekend, a good friend of mine moved to Berlin to pursue her studies in biology and get her PhD. I encouraged her to go because she described the whole situation as the perfect fit, in terms of coworkers and studies alike. She would have been a fool to let this pass and I would have tried to force her to go if necessary.

But this does not mean that I am happy with the situation. We had a farewell party on Friday, where I realized, upon leaving the party, how much I will miss her and how much of a good friend she is. We share an awful lot of humor, have been in the same sports club for a long time and did a few crazy things together (Who gets up at 7 am on a free day to wield a wooden sword, seriously?). But you only know what lost after it is gone.

So I finally got it. Ever since seeing the first concept video of Google Glass I wanted one. Badly. I went to great lengths to get one, failed, tried again, failed again, flamed Google on G+ and at the end somehow managed to get one.

It arrived on Thursday and I have been wearing it since. It’s awesome. It really is. And of course it has bugs, but it’s not a finished product yet anyway.

It’s interesting that I did not face more Privacy related discussions, given the fact that I was at 2 Software related events in the last few days: Our overdue X-Mas party and the Austria Game Jam.

My day job is to write software, which is a very precise and complex thing to do. There is a lot of emphasis on reusable components, versioning, storing and a lot of other technical things. I love what I am doing, but it’s nice to get a break from all this stuff. In my spare time I like to do analog things (I consider sports an analog thing too). The nice thing about analog is that there is no save, no undo. You do something, get an immediate result in some form and that’s it. Of course you get better over time, but there is absolutely no way of restoring a previous state - which is the exact reason why I love it. I own an analog synthesizer (Doepfer Dark Energy) some kaoss hardware from Kong which has touch input and recently I bought a DIY kit for an analog camera.
I fell in love with the camera even before I bought it. The idea of assembling it myself and then taking actual pictures of the film was instantly appealing to me. A few days later I was diving head first into the blogsphere and reading up on color film development. Today, the equipment for the whole process shipped and I am eager to get home and start developing.

Google just released the Glass API and I was, like many others, eagerly waiting for just that to happen. But, having learnt my lessons in the past, I did also read the Terms of Service.

Glass ToS Section 3: Fees
No Fees. You may not charge end users any fees or collect any payments in order to download or access your API Client, or in connection with virtual goods or functionality of your API Client.
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What’s the worst troll a tech firm could pull off? Introduce the most amazing - maybe the most revolutionary technology in the century - and immediately spoil it for everyone that might do great stuff with it.