The idea is to write about the ways (I currently picked 5, but you could pick less or more) you think you purposely handle things “the green way”, and then write about the things you know you should handle better. Then after than we can tag others to do the same and that way we can get a nice idea of how green we all are. In the process we might even learn some small tips and tricks on how to improve ourselves.

So here it goes. My good points:

1. I don’t have a car - I think this is probably my major green point. I used to have a student travel card in The Netherlands, so I never felt the need to get a drivers license. Now that I live in London, having a car is plain idiotic with the congestion charge and heavy traffic and all. I sometimes drive along as a passenger with others, but I don’t think that that’s a real issue as I think it might count as carpooling.
   
2. I carbon offset my flights - As I don’t have a car, the only way to get from London to The Netherlands is by plane or bus. Starting this year I’ve decided to carbon offset my flights, which I think will help the environment in it’s own special way.
3. I buy long-lasting milk - I believe London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingston had the idea to subsidize long-lasting milk because of it’s low impact on the environment. Long-lasting milk doesn’t have to be constantly cooled before it ends up in your fridge, and these days it doesn’t even taste much different than normal milk. Secretly though, I actually just buy it because the milk at the CostCutter downstairs goes bad way to quick.
4. All the lights in my home are energy saving lights - except for a few of the ones my housemates use. When we moved in here all lights were energy devouring 60Watt lights. I replaced almost all with 8 and 11Watt lights. Saved us about 6x the energy costs on lighting.
5. I bought an environmentally friendly toothbrush - This is probably the oddest thing, but a few weeks ago I was looking for a new toothbrush when I found the Recycline toothbrush. I’m not sure these days how good recycling exactly is (with recycling often also using energy) but it seems like a great initiative. The Recycline guys sell even more stuff besides toothbrushes so be sure to take a look at their site.

And now for my bad points:

1. I quite regularly leave equipment on while I’m away - And I’m not just talking about my Mac Mini which is always on (I should put it in sleep mode more often) but also the TV, TFT, and lights in general. It is such a bad habit and I hate it. I think I should get one of those car-alarm-devices that start beeping when you leave the lights on, but then for my house.
   
2. I leave chargers in the wall while they are trickle charging - Trickle charging can use shitloads of energy, but still we almost all leave our mobile phones charging at 100%. I actually don’t blame myself but think that we need to push the mobile phone companies to make better, auto-off-switching, chargers. I actually read an article a few days ago about initiatives to make the electrical wiring in a house more “intelligent” to solve these issues.
3. I sometimes watch TV while working on my workstation at the same time - As a 21st century media junkie I tend to do too much things at the same time. Mainly watching something I’ve already seen on TV while working on my Macbook. Damn you Five and your Scrubs reruns!
4. I don’t use solar panels - Although probably none of you do, I think most of us should use them. I think that for example especially my mobile phone, and my camera batteries could be well charged by solar energy. Does anyone know what the current state is in energy efficiency of mobile solar panels? It would be a waste to buy a solar panel that used more energy to produce than it will ever generate.
5. I throw batteries in the normal trash - Another bad habit. I don’t know why I do it, but every time I have a dead AAA, I realize I still don’t have a bin for chemical waste, so “this time” I allow myself to throw it with the normal trash. Obviously I still don’t have a decent chemical waste bin.

So those are my good and bad points. Now I want to see yours. I am tagging Melinda, Simon, Alper, Ian, and Martijn to do their version. Good luck.

Iron Man is a funny, well thought out movie, which happens to stay way clear of many of the common comic book interpretation mistakes that Hollywood has made in the past. Most of all they made sure that stuff doesn’t like too much like it was all done in CGI, which for me made the movie so much more believable

The actors were very well picked (Robert Downey Junior as Tony Stark/Iron Man and Jeff Bridges as his mentor) but I don’t think they will stand up against Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as The Joker in the upcoming The Dark Knight movie.

Iron Man wasn’t the best movie though that I’d ever seen, but looking back at movies like Spiderman 2 and 3 this is just so much in a different league, so go and watch it!.

TIP: Make sure to stay seated until past the credits for a little but very important extra.

Oh, yeah, and they are fast (see video below)!

All of this feels a lot like what OpenID providers like to solve, and I honestly still love OpenID when possible, but for me the reason to use 1Password comes from a totally different direction: the iPhone. Entering login forms with your extra secure password on the iPhone can be an pain in the ass, so in comes 1Password that allows you to securely sync your login forms to a bookmarklet on your iPhone. Then, on the iPhone you simply go to a login form, run the bookmarklet, enter your PIN and login with the account you select.

1Password is only $34.95 and definitely worth the money for people who have either an iPhone, or any other reason why they can’t remember their passwords.

1. I have had three consecutive Guinea Pigs who all died tragically before their time. The first one died because of the fumes that came from the new vinyl carpet that my parent’s got, the second because of the fumes coming from the new paint from our neighbour’s fence, and the third died because I gave it Guinea Pig food without vitamin C (Guinea Pigs have a natural vitamin C deficiency and therefore need to get extra vitamin C in their food. Any food that calls themselves “for Guinea Pigs” that doesn’t have this is clearly a scam!).
2. I have a case of Pectus Excavatum which is a harmless genetic deformity in the chest. It is nothing serious but it does lead to some cool facts like: my heart is actually on the left, not left of the middle.
3. Even though I am Dutch, the only drugs I ever used were some very weak hash brownies. I also tend to tell people that in contrary to believe, people in Amsterdam don’t do that much drugs, it is mainly the tourists that do.
4. I never had a true Dutch girlfriend until Melinda got her Dutch nationality last year. I leave it up to your imagination if this is because I had many foreign girlfriends or none before Melinda.
5. Although most of you know me with my glasses, I have only had them since I moved to the UK. I had been complaining about my eye sight for a while and Melinda kept saying “all was perfectly fine”. In the end I ended up having a cylindrical correction of -1.5 and -2.
6. I have flown an airplane when I was 18. This is because I used to study Aerospace Engineering before realizing I was a major geek. It was a Cessna 150 and it was the best flight I ever had. It was also the second flight I then ever had, which brings us to…
7. The first flight I ever made was a parabolic flight. For this who don’t know what this is, this is when an airplane makes a quick ascend and descend leading into a free fall, creating weightlessness for the passengers. It was done in a Fokker 50 and gave us a total of about 3×10 seconds of near-astronaut experience.
8. I once built a bedroom media centre in a desktop drawer cabinet by screwing the main board upside down against the top of the inside of the cabinet. The HDDs and dvd player were glued against the back of the cabinet, and fans were hanging from the side to keep things extra cool. It was a bliss to clean as almost no dust fell on any of the parts.

Now that I have given my list, I would like to tag Alper and Martijn to give us their list.

The Premise

Now what happened was that EventWax (the system used for signup) is a stupid-ass system that’s unable to “open” at a certain time. It can only open on a certain date. So by going to the right URL a few people managed to get their tickets before the official opening and spread the word to a few others. 

To solve the issue, the organizers released the 2nd batch of tickets at the official time, giving all the others including me the chance to fairly signup. So, when the 4th and final batch was released yesterday at 11am, I had set my timer to register a ticket for a good friend of me who I finally convinced to also come to his first Barcamp. I typed the URL I remembered in my browser and Safari autocompleted it for me as it remembered it from the history.

Safari didn’t send me to the official site though, but to the not-so-secret URL that allowed anyone to sign up before 11am. As the first batch of tickets quickly sold out to people who figured this out I quickly did the same and signed my friend up on his email address. 

Now comes the bad thing: I later found out that the Barcamp organizers had send an email to my friend’s email address stating:

Heya there,

I see that you’ve already booked a ticket to londonBarCamp4.

While (as you have seen) eventWax is allowing you to book we are only honouring registrations from 11am onwards when we post a link from the barCamp homepage to the registration page - it’s only fair.

I’m afraid I am going to have to cancel you ticket but please try to register again at 11am.

Follow the link from
http://barcampgcap.eventwax.com/barcamplondon4

Obviously I never got that email as it was send to my friend’s email address and I send a disgruntled email to the organizers afterwords. They send me an email back that they wanted to do things fair this time and that it wasn’t really their fault but the fact that EventWax had quite a whole in their signup.

Conclusion

The conclusions that I could take from this are numerous. First off EventWax is a shitty system that I will NEVER use as it is flawed. Secondly I learned that next time I sign up for someone else I should do it on a *@cristianobetta.com email address so that I get the confirmation and cancellation emails.

The GCap crew that is organizing the Barcamp though could have done their stuff better too. First of there was the problem which lead to me having to sign up for a friend: all the signups were at 11am. Not just he but quite a few others too had this issue. Take a look at the upcoming page and twitter (yes we are alowed to complain on twitter) for more details.

Secondly the organizers should have realized after the first fiasco that EventWax sucked and moved signup times to 12am as that would have solved all their issues and automated the process for them.

Let’s hope the rest of the organisation of the Barcamp will be much better and we’ll have a magnificent two days in central London. I haven’t given up yet.

Today’s pick is called NicePlayer and it is as they say themselves “Quite simply, the nicest media player for Mac”. In the backend NicePlayer uses Quicktime and all available components to playback media, but in the frontend there is a major difference.

The frontend look is very fresh and exactly what I needed. First of, the entire app can be made to “float on top” which is a major issue if you like to watch video on your 13-inch MacBook while doing some other work. Quicktime doesn’t support this and that has bugged the hell out of me for years.

But even then, if you manage to get Quicktime to float on top with some third party plugin, you’re still stuck with that bulky Quicktime interface. The NicePlayer interface though, is border-less, buttonless, and therefore only uses the minimal screen estate needed for playback. The look is a lot like those embedabble flash players you find on video sites like Vimeo, but instead it is an actual desktop app.

NicePlayer is open source, free as in beer, and only 2.8mb to download. And with joy I can say that it is my new default media player.

After some fun during the “Over The Air” conference (some people were playing keynote-bingo) we decided to launch our own IRC channel. Why? Because we can. Plus, it keeps those lengthy discussions between Geek Dinner attendees away from your Twitter feeds.

Where? irc.freenode.net, channel #geekdinner. Everyone is welcome and you are allowed to talk about anything! If you’ve never used IRC before (which means you were probably born after the introduction of the World Wide Web) feel free to ask us over Twitter/MSN/email for instructions.

[Screencast] “Flickr Set Photos for Vimeo”-bookmarklet from Cristiano Betta on Vimeo.

The problem was that when you want to add photos to a Vimeo video all it accepts is a comma separated list of either URLs or Flickr Photo IDs. I already had made a set on Flickr of the photos I wanted to add and adding all those 18 URLs by hand was just too much work

So I got thinking: why not make a bookmarklet that gets all the links of the images in the set from the page, and outputs them to the user as a comma separated list? Although I have never done something like this before, it only took me a few minutes to build this and the result is the following link.

Flickr Set Photos for Vimeo

Using it is very easy. Just drag the bookmarklet into your bookmarks-bar. Now when you want to add all the photos from a set to your Vimeo photo, go to the phoo set on Flickr and click on the bookmarklet. This will give youa popup with a long code of text. Copy and paste that text into your Vimeo text boxx for photos and submit.

The code has a few small issues. First of it returns URLs, not Flickr Photo IDs. This doesn’t really matter but it would be more human-readable maybe. Secondly it doesn’t catch if it is on a Flickr site at all. I might change that in the future but probably won’t. If you want to make your own edit, you can download the source from here.

To make this bookmarklet I used some code from this site, and this little tool helped me out to compress the code.

The “Over The Air” conference was a 2 day conference very much like Hackday, organised at Imperial College, on the topic of “everything mobile”. One of the elements of the conference is a 24 hour hackathon where people hack something together and compete for prices.

In the evening though, the BBC had arranged for us to be able to view the season finale of Torchwood, a BBC spinoff of Doctor Who, on the big screen. There were quite a few fans in the crowd so this was very well appreciated. Melinda, Emma, Ewan and a few more people though, the came up with the idea of making a “Swede” of that night’s unseen Torchwood episode and have that shown as a surprise before the actual episode.

The term “Swede” comes from the movie “Be Kind, Rewind” and refers to people making a version of a movie from scratch with anything you can find around you.  We recently saw “Be Kind, Rewind” as well as the movie “Son of Rambow”, which both included people making “Swedes”.

Eventually I ended up editing the video in just 4 hours, using the limited skills I have of Final Cut Express. I managed to add some stunning special effects and was proud with the result. After the conference I did a proper final cut and even managed to create a movie of the outtakes. All can be seen on the new Sweded-channel on Vimeo.

To end this story, here are the outtakes.

We haven’t found a venue yet, as our previous home for the Geek Dinners has been letting us down lately, but we will announce it shortly.

When: Monday, April 7, 2008, 7:00 PM - 11:00 PM
Where: TBA
Special Guests: David Terrar
Cost: attending is free, cost for food will be announced soon
Upcoming: 465933

Please use the upcoming link or comment below to indicate your interest