liksom info

Found this little movie over at archive.org:

An einem Wochenende wie diesem schau ich eine Reihe Filme, aber nur selten sind sie alle so gut, dass ich der Welt davon erzaehlen moechte. Diesmal war es aber so und daher platz frei fuer snauth's quadrupel-feature of January.

Ever heard of nslu2 (aka the slug)? Fist of all it's a fabulous way to waste time. Technically speaking it is a NAS, a network attached storage. Doesn't sound time-wasting, does it? Well, the good folks from nslu2-linux.org have found ways to make this NAS, which is basically a hard disk with a network address, a full fletched pc running som sorts of linux among others also my favourite distribution debian. And here it gets interesting (for those of us who feel the need to waste time). The point is to get by with a computer which is severly lagging behind in terms of performance. About one year ago I was working with an early pentium as my main server (standing in the kitchen of my flatshare). The feeling was about the same. But: The slug, as it is called affectionately, is a tiny piece of hard-ware, no cooling needed, the only thing which makes noise is its external usb2-disk. So there is progress after all. The result is that one is working with self-imposed restrictions, why shouldn't I leave my mighty Goliath (vulgo: the Dell PC with about 15 times the memory) running instead of this puny David? Lars von Trier, the Danish director has a similar strategy: Invent restrictions where there are none to create art. His dogma95, was discussed up and down, and it was a formidable business strategy indeed, but it also is about these restrictions which are unnecessary in the strict sense. Or to quote Schiller (Fv): "Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom." Maybe the slug is not grace but art is a waste of time anyway.

While waiting for the brand new Serenity movie: watching hbo/abc series. What have Rome and Lost in common? They make some efforts to seem realistic. Why is this worth noticing? Because so much of movie/tv-production of the last millenium did not - because it was just too fascinated with the ability to create reality through cameras and such (and the audience was, too, obviously). But now, "plausible" explanations are given why things are visible or not, why people are at the center of attention, or not, why things go that way or another.