Now that the holidays are almost here… I wish you all a joyful and peaceful time. Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy time with your family, rest, relax, take some time off and recharge. All the best for the new year. See you in 2012!

I finally got around to downloading the raw image data from a webcam that I installed in the backyard. My original plan was that I could assemble them into a time-lapse video all the way through the snowstorm. As it turned out, we lost power for two days and – for two more days – [...]

The recent snowstorm was not just about downed trees, power outages and other minor or major inconveniences. It also created quite beautiful landscapes. Here’s my selection of some of my images/paintings showing local scenes. If you want any of these as prints, feel free to go to my gallery on Imagekind.

Although the year is by no means over at the time of this posting (November 1st), I am sincerely hoping that this is the extent of tree damage that we’ll see around here (in Western Massachusetts) in 2011. Compared to past years, it surely has been a bad year for (particularly urban) trees. This post [...]

A good friend of ours, Jim Taggart from Vancouver, BC, just completed a beautiful new book on wood architecture with the visionary title ”Towards a Culture of Wood Architecture”. It features various modern examples of enlightening architecture in wood but also presents traditional buildings that illustrate the foundations of this culture. All are elaborately illustrating a recent trend [...]

While I am semi-comfortably seated on my United Airlines flight and traversing all three North-American time zones on my way back to Massachusetts, it’s time to recap what happened at the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States over the last two and a half days*. Overall summary: Wow, was that ever great fun!!! If [...]

On a recent visit to Whistler, BC (yep, the place where the 2010 Winter Olympics were held), I had the fortune to be given an impromptu tour of the Austria Passive House, a building constructed for the Olympics and used as “home base” for Austrian media during the events. This 2700 s.f., two-story building is [...]

Today we drove a bit around our area. As you can see it’s fall in New England…

Now that’s a very interesting surprise! After releasing a rather useless “Fluid” application (actually a technology preview) on the iPhone a while ago, Autodesk this time released a winner. SketchBook mobile is a nice sketching application. Other than most similarly-minded iPhone software, it has nice brushes and even boasts a layer system. Here is a [...]

Oh, dear – maybe the title goes a bit too far. It’s not about what you may think this is about… This really is about combining temperature and virtual 3D models of buildings. Click on the image below to get an idea of what I mean. Please upgrade your browser For this project I took [...]