In our first series we started of with Arne Jacobsens Egg Chair and ended up with the Mae west Sofa of Dali.

Today we’ll be starting off with ‘Le banc’ designed by Xavier Lust, a Belgian designer, and manufactuerd by MDF-italia.

A bench made of 6 mm thick aluminum, shaped so that it forms a stable sitting area.

Xavier Lust has also worked together ith another Belgian Designer, Dirk Wynants, who primarily works for Extremis.
Both of them designed the ‘picNik’, a table, bench combo featuring the same material and form of Le Banc, only here a 10 mm thick piece of aluminum is used.

the finishing, using highly durable powder coating, makes this table extremely well suited for outdoor use, as most of Extremis’ products;
The Ice Cube for example, one of my favorite party accessories

The Ice Cube is a lighting object, that also serves as a big ice container. making it great for parties. but it can also be used as a bench.

The concept of lighting combined with ice container brings me to a similar product, the Bloompot, Which is a flower pot, that also serves as a lighting object, and ice container.

I already featured bloompot in a previous post.

While the Bloompot’s shape is aimed primarily for outdoor use, a beautiful indoor alternative exists; the Biosfera lamp from alt lucialternative.

discovered this via Design-milk and it fits perfectly into this episode of RelaZenships.

Rubin Waeles created this as a graduation project.

Dress blox is a series of 4 stacked chairs that together form a wardrobe.
Inspired by the fact that most of us use a chair to throw his/her clothes on.

more info about Rubin on Creativeskills.be

I’m not really into pee, or other human waste products.
But the feeling you get, when your daughter is proudly yelling at you that she peed on her potty and wants you to come and take a look, is invigorating.

You share her happiness, and at that time, the pee, together with her big smile, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

It’s amazing how much crap (pardon the pun) you can take from your own children.

Update jan 22:
after almost giving up during install and giving up entirely after two days, I started over, and it all seems to be a lot smoother, typing this in Ubuntu… and feeling good about it

Perhaps it is because I’m stupid, but I just don’t get how this linux thing works…

I understand that it is a very modular package, and that everything is an application.
What i do not understand is that there is apparently no difference being made between system critical programs and games.

being me, I wanted to try different things in ubuntu, one of those thigs was KDE, KDE is an alternative window manager to Gnome (at least, that’s what i think it is)
I wanted to see what KDE looks like, so I fired up the synaptic program manger (is this equivalent to Add/remove programs? slightly) and selected something that resembled KDE.

Ubuntu started installng stuff and after 5 minutes my entire Applications menu was flooded with utter crap, really, there where spanish dictionaries for KDE, snakes for KDE, an endless list of games ‘for KDE’, mediaplayers, DVD writer software you name it, it was all there…

(why was it again that Microsoft was being sued? for including all these kinds of programs in Windows? )

OK, so removing KDE was going to be the next step. But, surprise! it seemed that each and every one of ths KDE ‘components’ needed to be removed manually.
apparently I selected one component too much and noticed that my network was gone, whoopsie, looks like I uninstalled a piece of critical software…
No network, means no Google for trying to fix this, so I decided to reboot, a reboot has always saved the day before.

But not this time; ‘File Not Found’ when starting Ubuntu..

At this point I pretty much decided to reformat the Ubuntu partition to NTFS and using it as temporary storage for reinstalling XP.

I discovered that you need a lot of free time to get to know ubuntu

Oh, and not being able to use Paint Shop Pro ,AutoCAD, Live Writer was also a deciding factor..

On the Ubuntu CD is a notice that asks you to distribute this CD to as many people you like. I’m not going to do so, Guess who those people will turn too when things go wrong? And I sure can’t help them..

Kundalini is mostly known for it’s original lighting objects but the company has also released some very remarkable furnishings.
the E-turn, for example, is a bench created entirely from fiberglass, and is particulary suited for outdoor use.

It looks nice enough on it’s own, but once you figure out how to sit on it, I’m sure you will find it is comfortable as well…

the Hara seat makes much more sense as a seat, and features the same materials.

make sure to also check out their lighting sculptures, there are some very impressive pieces listed.

http://www.kundalini.it

Well, almost.
but the to-do list is getting shorter

• minor retouching of the paint
• paining and mounting the cabinet doors
• and mounting the radiator

After these three little things, it’s all about decorating.
Gitte is already sleeping here and she’s loving it.

No marimekko bedlinen I’m afraid, the Kid loves K3… what can you say?.
I made a bumper rail from some leftover MDF and painted it in the same yellow as the door. It turned out pretty good I think, looks so much better than those of the shelf units..

I’m not sure that I will be doing stripes like that again, but 50 meters of masking tape, and three days later it all seems to be worth it.

The room needs some more decoration and furniture, but that will have to wait for a week or two, first I’ll be taking some time off.

This post doesn’t really fit in with the purpose or rezenerate.com, but I thought it was worth posting my experience.

Last night I decided to give Ubuntu a try, my windows machine was already running for over a year, and became somewhat sluggish, a typical windows ‘feature’. I was also suspecting some sort of rootkit on my machine, I was always missing 20% cpu time that task manager failed to report.

After reading so much about Ubuntu and how great it is supposed to be, I took the plunge and inserted the LiveCD.

2 minutes later, Ubuntu was there, fantastic, I was impressed and decided to install next to my existing windows OS.

Before embarking on installing a second Operating System, I obviously needed free space on my hard disk, I already used a GParted live CD a few days earlier to resize my Windows Partion, freeing 15GB on my disk. Windows was still working the way it was after that. (Yes, I did make a backup of important stuff, on my server in the basement, before messing with Gparted)

But now things started to go wrong

Below are five reasons that made me wanted to dump Ubuntu, and reinstall Windows:

Reason #1:

Inconsistent Boot CD behaviour

· The first time I booted there was no shortcut to the install routine, I just had a blank desktop. Being a Linux noob, I also did not succeed in finding it somewhere else
· The second time, the shortcut was there (but installation faild for one of the reasons below)
· The third time, instead of booting into the ubuntu environment, a login screen appeared, later I learned that I could use ‘root’ without password to log in, but at the time, I just rebooted using the live cd again)
· The fourth time, was again like the second time, but installation failed again forcing me to boot a fifth time of the live cd
· The fifth time, it booted OK, but the installation program was acting up (more on that later)
· The sixth (and last time) it seemed to be OK

Reason #2

No decent roll-back or undo when something goes wrong during install

OK, Windows does not have this either, BUT, Ubuntu has a great selling point of being able to be installed alongside Windows. In case of a failed installation however, you are pretty much screwed, because Windows is no longer available either. At that point I panicked.

Reason #3

Inconsistent partition management:

Why did the possible options always change in the partition selection every time I ran setup?
Sometimes it only offered using the entire disk, which would most certainly destroy my Windows partition (I didn’t try it) -> reboot using Live CD, the option manual, to create my own partitions, was available again.
(This could turn ugly if you are not paying attention, or if you have no clue about what you are doing.)

Reason #4

Confusing error messages

(this had probably something to do with a bad sector on my disk, I think)
After rebooting with the liveCD, I verified that the windows partition was still there, together with all my data, It was.
I had to retry the installation 4 or 5 times, every time it failed with an I/O error, the CD was checked, the hard disk was checked a few days earlier in Windows. But apparently something was wrong on the hard disk, after playing with the swap partition, installation continued.

More specific: creating a swap partition and THEN creating a root partition worked, the other way around didn’t

Why did I have to discover this the hard way? A message box that is saying “your CD is probably scratched, or your hard disk is old” does not tell a thing about configuring swap partitions.

Reason #5

Setup crashes

This was after the fifth reboot, the setup just kept crashing during language selection. At this point I was beginning to loose motivation
Started the install, using the scrollbar to select ‘Nederlands’ (Dutch) and bam, no more install screen. After booting using the live CD, all was working fine again..

Reason #6

Wait, wasn’t I talking about Five reasons?, The sixth and seventh reason are personal things not worth counting:

I eventually succeeded in Installing Ubuntu.
Motivation was back, a little.
But I was disappointed in some applications (I don’t have a specific example at the moment) using a mix of the language I selected (Dutch) and English, I found this to be confusing.
I know what some of you are going to say here: “Hey it’s open source, you can do the missing translations”.
I can, but I don’t have the time to do so, I would much rather have a finished product on my Computer.

Reason #7

Windows Live Writer does not work in Ubuntu, I have to use a virtual machine

Eventually the installation succeeded, and I could boot both into Windows and ubuntu, this leads me to the three reasons Why I decided against tossing it

Reason #1

Almost everything worked out of the box, on my three years old Dell Inspiron 6000. Network, sound, video, correct resolution, very impressive.

Reason #2

I not a quitter, I may be a whiner, but definitely not a quitter. I am aware that I need to do some reading to get it all together, good thing that recently a course was made available by the Ubuntu dudes.

Reason #3

I’m pretty much fed up with the constant security threats on a windows machine

I’m hoping that the list of not tossing Ubuntu will grow larger. I’m now going to do some studying.

Disclaimer:
I’m a very open minded guy, why would I try to spend more than 4
hours trying to install Ubuntu otherwise? (I know that it takes me 2 – 3 hours
to reinstall Windows, and get my basic stuff back)
I consider myself a highly
skilled computer specialist with more than 15 years of experience (in windows
environments), which is probably why I now have a working Windows AND a working Ubuntu OS

small dragons are emitting their warm glow on your terrace or garden.

this outdoor fireplace from maandagmeubels is cleverly designed from a special steel alloy that obviates the need for a protective coating. the steel forms a protective rust-like coating when exposed to the elements.

the fireplace is delivered in a flat pack, you can easily assemble it yourself.

I’m not a big Mac fan, I think their products are too expensive compared to the competition.
but they do know their product development.

at a max thickness of only 1.9 cm it features:
- a core 2 duo intel CPU
- a 13.3inch widescreen display
- 80 GB harddisk, or a 64GB solid state drive
- DVI-out
and a multi touch trackpad that is also featured on the iPhone and iPod

not exactly impressive specs, and no apparent expandability (apart from the 900$ Solid state upgrade)
but that’s really not what this machine is about, it’s aimed at people that demand portability in style. and most of the time these people have a fat paycheck too. So Apple might be on to something here?

I can’t afford it, but I don’t use my computer on the road either, so I’ll stick with my 3 year old Dell laptop

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

I just ordered these great wall sticker for Gitte’s room, which is just about finished.

as soon as the room is finished, I will post pictures.

I ordered the white version to stick onto a beautiful light blue wall.

www.zuuz.nl