Tears in my Eyes: Jeff Dunham

Hinweis: Die deutsche Version dieses Postings findet sich in meinem deutschen Blog.

A friend of mine just sent my a link to a YouTube-video called “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” (with German subtitle). It was fun watching it... and it was the starting point of becoming a fan of the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham just within minutes — well, better: hours.

The next hours I spent watching other videos by Jeff Dunham and finally I stumbled across my most favorite one. I got tears in my eyes laughing. The video entitled “Jeff Dunham and Walter 2/3 Arguing With Myself” (again with German subtitle).

Watch the man at time 1:30... he will return at time 4:20. He's Mike. Mike, the medical transportation guy. How do I know? Well, Walter and Jeff take their time just to wait for this guy while he is being at the toilet. It's sooo great! Just watch:

And just in case you became a fan just as I did you might want to watch my Jeff Dunham playlist (well, I collected videos I found with German subtitle):

Flash Game: Grow Island

Hinweis: Die deutsche Version dieses Postings findet sich in meinem deutschen Blog.

If you liked my posting about the solution of Grow Cube you will also like this one: Grow Island. It's from the same author as Grow Cube. It's simply fun and my son even likes Grow Island more than Grow Cube.

To solve the puzzle you just have to take the tools in the correct order. The tools are:

1. a battery, which, well, will give some power


2. a chip, will do some calculations...


3. a pike, human tool-activator embedded


4. a boiling flask, don't let it break!


5. a wheel, to open a secret door...


6. some logs, to build


7. a chimney to burn the waste


8. a screw for some mechanics

It's great fun to see if the selection fails as some things just might go wrong. So try yourself. But just in case you are tired of doing so: I have embedded so solution into the IPTC Data of the image. Have Fun!

Just found today: Found a blog post with two possible solutions. Just visit roque-mirengo.com/.

Flash Game: Grow Cube

Hinweis: Die deutsche Version findet sich in meinem deutschen Blog.

I just stumbled across a posting pointing to a nice Flash Game. It's called Grow Cube. I was curious solving this puzzle. It took me a while to get the rules of growing but finally I got it and won (see screenshot at the top of this posting).

Want to try it yourself? Just play Grow Cube. It's really fun. You just have to use the tools in the right order. They are:

1. Bone, which will grow to a turtle


2. Water, required for ponds, creek and waterfalls


3. Ball, will roll down the tube


4. Dish, will grow to a building


5. Fruits, will grow to trees


6. Pot, will be used to cook something inside


7. Tube, where the ball will roll through


8. Spring, will transport the ball further on


9. Person, will dig, cook and so on


10. Fire, required for cooking and lighting a cave

Tired of trying by yourself? Download the attached Screenshot and look at the EXIF data (or sent a mail to me). Hopefully this is hidden enough. I didn't want to take away the fun.

Matt is back...

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

This is the English version of the Blog Post I wrote June 2008 in German.

Matt is finally back! The dancing wonder who builds bridges among cultures with ease. While I already enjoyed Dancing 2006 and Matt's Outtakes this new video is even more breathtaking: So many people who join dancing. What politicians cannot acchieve: Matt just does it!

folderico - Setting Folder Icons via Batch Script

My script folderico.bat was the topic of my first blog post on my German Blog “Thragors Blog”. And now it's the first blog post which I translate to English.

Put to start right off with the script: My target was to let CD covers of my ripped CDs appear right in the Windows Explorer. Of course you can do so by editing the properties of your folder right in the Windows GUI. But if you have many folders to change this a laborious work.

So I thought of a way to modify the file Desktop.ini which is responsible for changing the icon via a MSDOS-Batch-Script. I wouldn't call myself an expert in writing Bash scripts but thanks to Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages I finally accomplished the mission.

While my first post on this issue was on March 21st, 2007 (wow, nearly two years ago now) there is meanwhile a version 1.1 since December 6th, 2007.

Version 1.1 fixed some problems I detected. I am mentioning them in here just in case you also stumble across them in your own scripts:

• When I called V1.0 of the script without arguments I got an error message. Now it shows the usage guide. Problem was that
  

  
  set IMG=%IMG:"=%
  

  
  worked perfectly well for non-empty IMG: It deleted the quotes. But for an empty value of IMG the new value was “=” and so the check
  

  
  if "%IMG%"=="" goto HELP
  

  
  failed because it got expanded to:
  

  
  if "="=="" goto HELP
  

  
  and raised the error message "="=="" goto HELP" ist syntaktisch an dieser Stelle nicht verarbeitbar. It's a syntax error message (in German). Sorry, I don't know the English error message.
  


• And I added a check that ImageMagick (which is required by this script) is really available. Otherwise the convert command will fail with an obscure error message — just because there is another convert-command in Windows System32 directory.

Reading the script you might also learn:

• how to deal with errorlevels,


• how to write multiline if-then-else clauses,


• how to work with setlocal and endlocal (here: for enabling extensions) and


• how to create a multi-resolution ICO-file with ImageMagick's convert.

Now you may want to download the script... first of all mind that you have to install ImageMagick. And then you can download the batch file from box.net:

• folderico.bat