BBC Listen Again Service as downloadable RealAudio Stream

How to get Real Player URLs for BBC Listen Again programmes. Go to iPlayer Real converter and turn the PID into a URL. This might not work forever as the BBC switched to Flash and wants to offer AAC and Windows Media. But for now the legacy Real Audio streams that can be downloaded and save with mplayer are still available.

Battery BL-4C bulging out in Nokia 6260

My Nokia 6260 battery BL-4C is bulging out. Should I be worried? Others experience the same.

Copy and paste in Inkscape from one window to the next

How to do Copy&Paste? You need the same instance, so open via “Open Recent”. Do copy and paste from one window to the next within the same instance.

Make your own toilet.cam poster as a personal gift

A personalized gift for students: Create your own version of the toilet.cam poster.

Slow scrolling through podcasts on ipod touch with firmware 3.1

Scrolling through podcasts on the iPod Touch with firmware 3.1 is very slow for several users. I have this problem too and I link to some other people who have the same problem. Hopefully there will be a bug fix.

Notation for dance steps?

[this is a stub - please come back - I will update with posting]

I want to notate dance steps so I can present them on a website. I want a great notation for this, so I can persuade people to collaborate on a database of steps. My first goal would be to list as many step sequences from Ballroom dancing (Quickstep, Slow Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Slow Fox, …, Rumba, Cha Cha, Samba, Paso Doble, Jive, ….). Those are much easier to describe than Modern Dance or Hip Hop, as you need to describe the full body for those. At my level of Ballroom you can describe a general technique for how to use the body and than you can mostly describe a step by the location and direction of the feet, when feet are raised or lowered [ball/flat], what direction your upper body has to have and what direction your head should be look at. This information won’t be enough to describe steps like Samba Rolls or the body and arm movements in Samba Promenade 6 Counter Promenade Runs. But it should be sufficient to describe many steps.

There are several sites that list dance moves. But I couldn’t find an extensive list.

I will list some of the sites that Ballroom steps, and try to comment on them.

• Wikipedia: The English Wikipedia lists several Dance steps – see for example V6 Quickstep or Counter promenade position
  • describes the step in general (+)
  • lists the level of the dance pattern (+)
  • says where this can be used (+)
  • There is no precise notation what to do with the feet (-)
  • it’s difficult do get a list of all dance patterns, one can look at the category but that’s not a well-layouted page (-)
• http://www.in-tanz.de [German]
  • It has a list of several figures [I guess about all Gold figures] for Rumba, Slow Waltz and Quick Step.
  • About all information is behind a pay wall.
  • Steps are animated in a flash animation and shown on a video. There is a free example for the Rumba step Spiral. Unfortunately, I can’t see in which format the steps are saved, and how the flash animation is done from that.
• http://1ngo.de/tanz/rotweiss.html [German]
  • Describes 2 to 6 steps per dance
  • step sequences are described in a way that needs some thinking and is only understandable by  a human not by a computer. Different tips are give depending on the figure.
  • More basic steps are describe on http://1ngo.de/tanz/t-quickstep.html. Those basic steps are used to describe the advanced steps linked to above. But I don’t see where this is mentioned on the page.
• Wikibook: Tanzen [German]
  • It lists very few steps at the moment.
  • There are no animations.
  • Steps are listed in tables. Information in the tables differs.
  • For several dances there is not really much information.
  • As it lacks a consistent way to present the steps those can’t be used to exported into an animation program to visualize the steps.
• Technique of Ballroom Dancing by Guy Howard, Alex Brown [book no website]
  • This is a great book
  • But it’s a book
  • so it’s not free
  • there are no animations
  • it can’t be updated by users
• Dance – die Tanzfigurendatenbank [German] – a software for animating steps, some of steps can be watched for free, most have to be bought.
  • The software is WinXP/WinCE/Linux, but not a website
  • It seems on can export the steps as avi and png
  • I don’t know what format the steps are saved
  • It seems there are videos to the steps but I don’t know how well they are.
  • There is no commenting, etc.
  • It says it has 220 steps, 80 of those for free.

… hm, I guess I’ll have to finish this some other day.

I want to have a look at the following sites (and more) for possible incorporation in the list:

http://www.tangolincs.co.uk/TangoLincs-Notation.htm – A book about a notation for Tango Argentino

http://elfirulete.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/tango-notation-for-steps-collectors/ – A blog post about this notation

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ312965&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ312965 – A research text with the name “EJ312965 – Dance in Computer Technology: A Survey of Applications and Capabilities.” – I want to find out what it’s about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis – I want to understand what Laban is capable of, whether it’s a possible candidate for saving dance steps in. But probably it’s too complicated (as it’s for Modern Dance) to describe Ballroom. I guess I will also check http://www.google.de/search?q=Laban+system

There is the website http://www.tutoriallist.com/online_training/dancing_ballroom_dance_notation_for_ballroom_dances_computer_tutorial32266.html which reads: “Dance Notation for Ballroom Dances »Info Last Time Updated on 8/7/2001 7:05:00 PM / Dance Notation for Ballroom Dances / An explanation of the notation system. It was developed as a means of instant recall for all the Ballroom and Latin dance steps that he studies.” But there is no further information. Maybe I can find out what this page refers to.

http://sunburst.lima-city.de/html/rdance.html – I want to have a look at it, as http://sunburst.lima-city.de/html/download/PasoDoble.pdf lists several Paso Doble figures. But I’m not sure whether those are Ballroom steps or Round Dance steps. But it’s also written in a way that only humans can read it.

http://www.tanzsport.de/content/breitensport/disziplinen/tanzschritte_latein.pdf and http://www.tanzsport.de/content/breitensport/disziplinen/tanzschritte_standard.pdf are offered by the DTV but that’s also just 8 pages of information that isn’t computer readable.

http://www.anidance.de/de/hd0.htm I want to find out, what it can do.

http://www.olivergross.de/tanzen/standard.html

Surely I may not forget http://www.martinvogler.de/ta_langwalz.html  – but he has soo few steps!

Okay, I ‘ll have to look at those soon. And I’ll have to search for some international sites. This was just the result from searching for German terms.

Having a machine readable version would make a translation much, much easier.

How to remember dance steps?

How can I remember dance steps? Is there a good notation system to build a website around it? Is a huge video database of annotated clips the better solution?

Needed: a brainstorming website for uniting on ideas

Needed: A website for publishing all kinds of ideas. Voting on them. Chance to offer help. Wiki-like features to evolve the idea together.

Picasa 3.5

Picasa 3.5 has just been released to the public.

Finally we get the image recognition from picasaweb in the offline version. This is great for me as I don’t want to upload my private photos to google. But I really dig face recognition.

I have some hints and some questions about Picasa. I hope I’ll find answers to the questions somewhen.

Hints:
If you tagged a person with the wrong name, you can’t change the name in the column on the right. You can however click on the name below the rectangle within the picture. You can change the name there.

There is an “Accept all suggestions as correct”-button at the top of the person’s section. I didn’t see it for a day, so I wanted to point that out. This makes tagging much faster.

Try to get a feeling what Picasa is capable of. Fuzzy pictures make Picasa group persons together that don’t belong together. In the “unnamed” category I found it useful to open the “people”-sidebar on the right to quickly check whether all pictures within this group are really by the same person. Unfortunately clicking the text field of a person doesn’t select it. This makes selecting it an extra click. That’s annoying. [update]Google released “Version 3.5, Build 79.69 – September 30, 2009″. You can now tab from on group of persons to the next. this will simultaneously mark the person and jump to the name-field. This makes tagging much more convenient.[/update]

Maybe the “expand groups”- feature is even better for those blurry pictures, where you aren’t sure whether Picasa grouped pictures by just _one_ person. You can then select the groups in the sidebar. However, the sidebar will scroll all to often without you initiating it. That’s also annoying.

——
Questions:

Multiuser scenario.
I read that the face information isn’t stored in the IPTC field. I had hoped that this would go in a special google-IPTC field. google has/had(?) those for keywords. Keywords would always be stored in the database, in the IPTC keywords field and in the IPTC google keyword field.
Anyway, I read that face information is stored in the database and in the picasa.ini file. There is a picasa.ini file within every directory.

What happens if I move a folder (together with the picasa.ini file) to a new location? [I want to copy photos older than too years to my external harddrive]

What happens if I copy the folder to a different computer? Can I somehow make this work by copying the contacts.xml which contains the names and the emailaddress for the unique identifier number that is listed in the picasa.ini file? (Picasa 3.0 doesn’t have a subdirectory “contacts” within the Local App Data. Picasa 3.5 has a subdirectory containing the contacts.xml file.)

Can I merge my contacts.xml file with the contacts.xml file of some person I give my photos to?

What happens if I sync my picasa contacts with my gmail contacts (default behaviour) and I merge too contacts within gmail?

Anyone having answers to this questions?

In search for an answer on comes across this information:

• jaysiej, a Google Employee, replys to the question “How to Back up Name Tags” with Google’s standard answer you can find in several threads regarding this topic. One of the ways jaysiej says you can back your name tags up, is by copying the whole folder including the picasa.ini. I’m not sure what happens when you copy this to a computer with a different installation of picasa.
• Some guy proposed: SOLUTION PROPOSAL: People Tag Sharing
• Andreas Vogel wrote a program that copies all information from picasa.ini into the XMP field. I don’t know whether he does this in a private format or whether he tries to emulate Microsofts XMP person format in the best way he can. Further reading suggests, that the program is saving the information using the XMP tag system created by Adobe with the addition of Microsoft XMP namespace Microsoft Photo Region Schema. This should be readable with the Windows Live Photo Gallery. Go to AvPicFaceXmpTagger and read for yourself.

—

When will there be a German version? I want my friends to use it. I guess the German changelog is supposed to be this, but I can’t click the “Änderungen”-link.

The english changelog can be found here.

World War iPhone App – What mission yields what loot

“Bombard Enemy Defenses” needs ”Wiesel 2 Mortar Unit” from ”Infiltrate Western Border”.

“Capture Enemy Fighters” needs “SU-34 Fullback Bomber” from “Air Raid”.

“Reinforce Ally Capital” needs “Patriot Missile System” from “Set up Defensive Network”.

This post is about an iPhone game, I don’t recommend you to play. It consumes all too much time.

For the mission “Bombard Enemy Defenses” (Africa)  (I’m playing as “German”, so Africa tab = Tab #3 = Africa tab for USA players = Balkans tab for UK players = Africa for China players = Europe for Russia players) one needs the unit “Wiesel 2 Mortar Unit”. One can loot this unit by doing the first Africa mission “Infiltrate Western Border”. [Update] The aforementioned information is correct. At first at had mistakenly listed “Fend off Enemy Attack” which is the first mission in the “Europe” tab (I’m playing as “German”, so Europe tab = Tab #1 = Americas tab for USA players = Europe tab for UK players = East Asia for China players = Balkans for Russia players). But that wasn’t correct.[/Update]

Does anyone know a site that lists all missions with the possible loot? [Update]I found a forum post called “Detailed List of all Buildings, Units, & Missions for World War” at Storm8 Community Forums. I got there through this Yahoo Answer. [/Update]

Then I wanted to do the “Americas”-(Tab #5)-mission “Capture Enemy Fighters”. It needs “SU-34 Fullback Bomber” as loot. So I will have to do (Tab #4)-mission “Air Raid”. The name for tab #4 differs depending on your country: Pacific for USA and China, Africa for UK, Atlantic for Germany and Russia

And now I wanted to do the Pacific-Tab #6-mission “Reinforce Ally Capital”. It needs “Patriot Missile System” as loot. So I will have to do Pacific-Tab #6 – “Set up Defensive Network”.