synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

As my current term at university is crammed with projects, presentations and term papers, it is quite hard to remember every deadline. I was constantly worrying about them and pretty badly needed a way to manage all my tasks. As I mentioned Getthing Things Done on this blog some time ago but hadn’t tried it yet, I decided to give it a chance. I didn’t buy the book by David Allen, but searched for a simple tool to implement GTD in my everyday life. (Rails applications preferred, of course) What I found was Tracks – Doing Things Properly an open source rails app providing everything I needed. Its slick interface makes it easy to manage actions, projects and contexts. Additionally actions can be exported in RSS or iCal format, although I customized the RSS a little to reverse the order and display the due-date.

After using it for about one month now, I really recommend it! No more worrying about forgetting deadlines or entire tasks!

If you want to try Tracks without having to set it up on your own, just contact me and I’ll add an account for you.

I’m currently attending a course called “Animation programming with Processing”. It’s a blended-learning course lectured at my university. I heard about processing before but never looked at it closely. Processing is a simple programming language build on top of Java and comes with its own, simple IDE. It includes some basic functionality and can be extended with a variety of libraries (Audio, Video, 3D, Network, ...).

It’s amazing how easy it is to write stunning animations with very little lines of code. Combined with a simple webcam and a projector you’ll get cool interactive installations:

Presence

I, Ball

Check out the exhibition at processing.org too!

Maybe I’ll upload some of my own sketches during the next weeks.

We’ve just updated nightwish.com’s design to match with the new album “Dark Passion Play”. We also introduced to new languages: swedish and portuguese. Check it out! ;-)

Note the fork! Recognizing someone?

I’ve spent a fuckin’ great weekend in Hamburg … again! I finally met Jarmo and Sushi Patrol Nightwish did an amazing concert in the “Delphi Showpalast”. The venue was quite small but very nice. There were just about 300 people but they rocked they house. It was the first time for me to see Anette performing. They did a couple of songs from the new album, Dark Passion Play, and even some old stuff. The after-show-party didn’t last long so the night ended in a small hotel party. ;-)

On saturday there was a signing session in a Saturn-store. The number of attending fans was amazing (700+), but Nightwish did them all in about 2 hours. I took photos of both the concert and the signing session:

Concert

Signing Session