Usingnamespace – Blog

Haha haha, la vache qui lit

One of the most « underground » place in Berlin, Teufelsberg is a former NSA listening station.

From Wikipedia :
Teufelsberg’s origin does not in itself make Teufelsberg unique, as there are many similar man-made rubble mounds in Germany (see Schuttberg) and other war-torn cities of Europe. The curiousness begins with what is buried underneath the hill: a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so sturdy that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.
…
The US National Security Agency (NSA) built one of its largest listening stations on top of the hill.

Let’s go straight to the point :

1. How to access Teufelberg’s NSA base ?
With the train (S-Bahn) go to the station « Heerstrasse », or drive to the street « Teufelsseestrasse » by car. Once there, walk/drive along one of the accesses shown on the map :

The parking lot 2 is closer to the base by foot, but it’s definitely too far if you came with the train (then take the yellow path). If you take the green path, with the car or with bicycle, you might see savage pigs

There is a hole located on the south part of the fence. It’s your best chance to enter. The main gate is quite dangerous to climb. If this hole does not exist anymore, take a walk along the fence, there are always new ones


There has been some people working on the most South-West building, and sometimes you might see this guy : —>

Don’t worry about them, these guys are just assholes and can not do anything against you. The workers will let you go without taking real care, but the bum-guard will take a picture of you, will not leave you alone until he sees you leaving the area and will claim that he is going to call the police.

To avoid those parasites, instead of taking the red path on the above map, take the blue one and go straight to the main building. Try to be as quiet as possible until you reached the main building. You should also be in peace if you go there late in the afternoon or on Sunday : avoid Saturday afternoon, cause in addition, it will be crowded.

2. Main spots

To me the most important thing to see is the main building, with the 3 listening balls on it’s top. To get in, first go on the West side of the building and climb the stairs till the 2nd floor (the 3rd one has been recently sealed), open the door and go to the center of the building. You’ll find there dark stairs, go up 2 levels, you will be on the roof of the building. Enjoy the view :

It’s now time to get up there in the big listening ball. Just go back to the stairs and be courageous ! You can stop by on the levels to have a nice view on Berlin. Be careful though, this place is quite dangerous. You also might need to have some flashlight because the stairs are really dark at this moment. After the last level, go on with the stairs, you will reach a door. Enter, you will now be in the ball. Make some noise ! And again, enjoy the (small) view :

Go back to third floor of the main building, go on the left, you’ll see some former living quarter and also a cartoon-like door :

You can now go back on the « ground », and if you think the boring guard/workers are not there head to the reception desk (top South building). You’ll find there the prison and the headquarters :

3. Explore
Paintings, offices, roofs, basements, … if you feel like adventurous (and most important if you have light), just go around, you will always find cool stuffs to do/see

I have a 20% discount code for Guitar Pro 6 valid until tomorrow, if somebody is interested leave a comment here.
(if several people are interested I’ll randomly choose one)

Make sure that your email address is correct !

Be quick !

If some of you have encountered a weird behavior when using Firefox since yesterday, let’s say something like Firefox playing a strange music and some kind of alarm sound, don’t worry, you are not infected by any virus ….

The bug occurred whatever which website I was on.

After some investigation I found out that this problem was coming from one of my Firefox plugin : Coolpreviews
Then I also realized that this music was the same as the one on Google’s Pacman game : yesterday was Pacman 30th birthday and google created a game for it accessible from the main page.

So I wrote an email to the guys from Cooliris (developing CoolPreviews) to know whether it was a bug or a (bad) joke … Here is there answer :

We apologize for the bug and any inconvenience it has caused on your Firefox browser. Most certainly not intentional.

To resolve the issue, please kindly download our fixed CoolPreviews v3.1.0521 from http://www.coolpreviews.com. Make sure to clear your browser cache first (Tools > Clear Recent History > cache) to ensure you end up loading v.3.1.0521 and not our previous version. Also close any tabs with the Google homepage, as the folks at Google have it set up to play Pac-man automatically.

The bug was caused by Google’s homepage, which features the Pac Man game today. We had an accidental line of code that would load up the Google homepage in the background. We have now removed that code. Previously, Google did not have any music on their page. So, obviously, today’s debut of Google music and games caught us with our pants down.

We just pushed the fix to Mozilla moments ago at 2PM Pacific Time. It may take a couple of hours for the Mozilla servers to display the new version on the Mozilla Addons Page. If you can’t, the same fix is now available on our website noted above.

This is by far the weirdest bug we’ve ever encountered! The mighty ghosts of Pac-man from Google surely gobbled us up on this one! Phew!

Please feel free to tell your friends the solution this bug!
Best regards,
Alec & The CoolPreviews Team

Those people really sound friendly and I was surprised to see how fast they fixed the bug

PS : deactivating the plugin does not seem to be enough to get rid of the bug

Rosenthaler platz 3 weeks ago :

I don’t know what this is, but the police looked pretty pissed ^^
I really like the idea, and it was very surprising to see all this paint on the road and to see the cars’ wheels completely pink or yellow.

Here is a video of the « event » :

Rosenthaler Platz under art attack… from BERLINISTA on Vimeo.

Obviously, nobody knows if this paint attack on Rosenthaler platz was a marketing or an art event.

More infos here : http://www.urbanartcore.eu/massive-paint-attack-berlin/

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