Happy New Year!

This Year I’ve had the pleasure to celebrate New Year in Rome. What a city, I was really impressed by the number of historic buildings squeezed into a city that you can cross by foot in less than an hour. I went there with Jan and we’ve met some nice people – I definitely have to visit Rome again during summer season.

All in all the trip was a great way to relax after 5 days of action and excitement at the 25c3. After I’ve missed some good lectures there, I decided to build a podcast from the available recordings. Somehow this year nobody managed to create one, so I went ahead and wrote a Python Script to parse through the files and mirror servers listed in the 25c3 Wiki, get available files, catch the meta information from the Schedule and finally output a valid iTunes compatible RSS Feed.



The Feeds are available via FeedBurner in H.264 at 720×576 px, iPod Compatible MPEG4 Video, MP3 Audio and OGG Vorbis Audio Format. Feedback regarding the Script is always welcome.

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Hi there – long time no blogging. There is so much to tell; for now I’ll just put some things in here that are really important to me.

First of all I thank Lia for crafting the best bag I’ve ever had. The handmade Linatic II is a special Laptop-Version of Linatic, which she made for Lina (aka ettercat) earlier.

As you can see in the second picture Linatic II is specially fitted for my Laptop, I don’t know how Lia did it, but it fits by the millimeter.

I’ve got my bag at ICMP4 in Münchsteinach, where we spend a wonderful weekend. I went to the place in the sun, with Peer from the oBiCo project who was talked into holding a presentation about the open Bicycle Computer and its progress. The talk inspired a stimulating discussion with lots of ideas and positive feedback. Peer brought a prototype and we’ve even had a chance to mount it to a recumbent bike which someone had used to ride to the small village in the southern German Steigerwald.

Only a few weeks later I’ve had a great time visiting my first FrOSCon. Again I could help the oBiCo Team to answer all those curious Open Source enthusiasts questions on the technical details and the practical relevance of an open Bicycle Computer (Thanks to Sascha who took some professional photos of the booth). Finally I’ve also had a chance to meet some friends from our time at Hochschule Aalen again. I especially liked Bernds talk on PostgreSQL Troubleshooting, which opened my eyes to the challenges of database administration – a topic I mostly managed to stay away from, until now. Good to know someone to call when one of my databases will ever be really big.

That’s it for now. I still have a blog post about the master thesis work on the ToDo list, so stay tuned… ;-)

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Since Monday I’m back from a fishing trip to Southern Norway. A few days there can be so relaxing. The landscape in Norway is just stunning.

In the picture you can see the Lista Fjord on a foggy morning.

On arrival in Berlin I found my server being down for several days. As it turned out the housing provider somehow disconnected it from the Internet. An hour after calling them, it was reachable again and I found the machine running the way I left it. (no reboot at all…, I wonder how that could happen.)

After documenting some code for my Master Thesis during the Trip, I am now finally taking the time to finish SettingsGUI Verion 0.8, so stay tuned. ;-)

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During the last week I had the privilege to help a good friend to build the project homepage for oBiCo. The open Bicycle Computer project aims to build nothing less then an open source autonomous embedded system for your bike.

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Peer with whom I shared a flat while studying at Aalen University and his girlfriend Ramona are planing to release the open source project at LinuxTag 2008, May 28 – 31, here in Berlin.

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Have a look at the projects homepage – which is still being developed – and notice the features. Just imagine what can be done with a dynamo-charged open source media device during bike trips.

Also I find it really astonishing that Peer could develop the prototype from scratch (hardware and software) in just a couple of months during his spare time, while being really busy at his day job.

I was excited to do the artwork of oBiCo.de and to finally spend some time using Blender again, which really grew in the years.

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In this spirit – keep developing, see you at LinuxTag 2008.

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In the recent weeks I have been quite busy. After finally finishing my degree at the TFH-Berlin I decided to continue studying to upgrade the Dipl.-Ing.(FH) to a Master Degree.

As for new Projects I’ve got plenty finished and nearly finished to document now. Most projects I choose for University courses like a little library for basic picture modification, a small Atmel program to pilot a C’t-Bot , a Search Engine Web-Bot , or an FPGA program to access a OLED-RGB-Display. At work I am now close to finish the Software of a PPC-based embedded industrial mini PC using Linux and CoDeSys . And in the time left I managed to build myself some tools like an RSS converter and a Character Display driver for the Etherrape project.

The most complex project from the recent months is the program I’ve developed in my diploma thesis. As there is already some documentation in the Thesis itself I plan to publish the PDF on my site. 

After rearanging my apartment last week I figure it’s also time to update the blog and the projects section of my homepage. At least after finishing the final tests of the current semester in two weeks you can read more about every single project on this page.

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Using iChat on a new MacBook Pro (a worthy replacement for my Pismo) to see some friends, we found out that the built in mic of the Laptop isn’t usable if you intent to move your mouth more then 10 cm away from the screen. So I remembered an old mono headset somewhere in the gizmo collection. I found it and found out – it wouldn’t work. After opening the mic cover and replacing it with one from a broken camera it was still not working – but as I was soldering it myself I thought that I may have destroyed it.

Today I bought myself a brand new headset attached it to the mic port and – guess what – found out it wouldn’t work. I tryed connecting the microphone directly to my stereo and it stayed quiet. Eventually I ended up opening the volume control of the headset and measured that everything was connected nicely (though stereo channel where interchanged). I could even measure a short-time connection between ground and signal of the microphone to disclose a condenser microphone there (what explains why it wouldn’t work with my stereo).

Now I got curious. Could it be that the MacBook Pro does not have a build in mic amp? And as it turned out the headset would work fine with the on board sound card of my workstation. After reading some forum posts and asking a friend I found out that there really is no such amp in newer Powerbooks. As Pismo had the option to  enable the amp even from Linux I didn’t even think of the possibility. 

Since I couldn’t return the headset to the store after opening it up I could ether buy a USB sound stick or try to get an external mic pre amp. Sven pointed me to a site (german) with an easy to build amplifier for condenser microphones and so I had to power up my soldering iron. 

Here are some pictures (Picture quality will get better again when I have a new camera ;-) ) of the working device. I used a 1.5 µF electrolytic capacitor as it was the nearest I found to 4.7 µF and it just worked fine.

As you can see the circuit is not bigger then the connector itself.

The only parts needed apart from the jack and some wires are a  2.2 kOhm resistor an the above mentioned condenser. I am also using one AA battery whilch will hopefully hold quiet some time.

You could say the MacBook Pro was giving me some geeky fun time. I guess that was what Apples engineers had in mind when they decided to delegate the selcetion of a mic pre amp to the user.

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As Poeloq points out in the Th!nkNerd Blog (german) to learn the chinese language seems to be more easy for geeks then some of our western languages. I think he has a good point and regret not to have lerned more about this language when I was there.

He also did mention Chinese Pod which is great for learning chinese while listening to the Podcast. For instance – as I do – in the Berlin subway.

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Okay, so I found it out again – I’m such a lazy blogger. So to post something from time to time I’ll start blogging just to blog from here on… ;)

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After more than 4 months of work (which included one day off) I am going to be on holiday by tomorrow. I plan to go to Hainan Island for a 9 days trip.
At 16:45 my flight to Sanya will leave at the Pudong Airport in the south east of Shanghai. To go there I’ll need one hour and 15 minutes where the 15 minutes will be the time the Maglev (well known Transrapid for germans) needs from a subwaystation to the airport.
After bargaining with some local travel agencies I decided to buy the tickets at ctrip.com where the round trip ticket is 1880 RMB (Tax included).

Asking our secretary for help ordering the tickets she contacted a friend in a travel agency who could offer me the flight for 1700 RMB. Without negotiation I agreed. So now the imprint on the ticket says 1500 RMB what makes them earn 200 RMB. And I am okay with that since it still saves 180 RMB for me.

So what is planed in Sanya? Since I was for a long time in Shanghai now – beside 3 one day trips to smaller (2 – 6 mill. inhabitants – that is what shanghaineese people call “smaller”) citys – basically I want to relax there.

Including beach chillout, cocktails, maybe diving and exploring the rainforests in Hainan. I am looking forward leaving the really cold ~10 °C place to go for > 25 °C.

My plan is to finally watch the recordings of the 22C3. Therefore I bought an mp4 player and converted the 51 congress recordings that are allready available in the net to MPEG4.

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Hi everybody. This will be my Weblog. So what am I going to publish here and who am I anyway? Well, as a student of Computer Engineering I will most likely write about my job and that means mostly technical issues. Beside that I am currently in Shanghai for an 5 months Internship – what makes me writing about what I experience here. My work in a small IT company was an interesting experience, that I could share with others – showing how this kind of companies runs in China. The next point is life in Shanghai in general. – As my internship is nearly over by the time of writing this (2 weeks left) I’ll have to write most of my postings in retrospective. So lets hope I won’t be to lazy to create some content and please send loots of fedback.

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