Posts by: Tim

Torn Worn Oppressed I mourn B a d S a d Three-quarters mad Money gone Credit none Duns at door Half a score Wife in lain Twins again Others ailing Nurse a railing Billy hooping Betsy crouping Besides poor Joe With fester’d toe. Come, then, my Fiddle, Come, my time-worn friend, With gay and brilliant…

So true. Philip Roberts uses a very good analogy to explain why we are afraid to fail: http://blog.latentflip.com/post/29820876915/rejection

I took this slightly surreal shot at the green fields where the river Elbe opens out into the North Sea. There’s a very long strip of coast, where only sheep and cows graze. On that particular day it felt a bit like summer (you know that time when it’s warmer outside than inside). Although the…

Looks like he actually sensed I photographed him.

I was playing around with the controls in Lightroom, when it occurred to me that I could make this picture tell a story. I’ve darkened the sky a bit and now the communist grimaces on account of the bad weather .

This road through the middle of the forest with its old cobble stones made a lasting impression on me. Left and right there were hundreds of meters of deep forest and these really high trees. I tried to reproduce the atmosphere a bit with subdued colors, a retro style effect and some vignetting.

I took this picture at the “strandleben” bar opposite of “faust”. Due to its simplicity this shot is very “orderly” and serene. I like it a lot.

To keep the salty sea at bay. No, it’s actually to prevent the grazing sheep from drowning in the sea. This is the beach east of Cuxhaven. This stretch of the coast technically still belongs to river Elbe, but it sure has some salty water…

Found this beautiful guy in the middle of a field. A stork is a really big bird and it’s amazing to see how he lifts himself up:

This guy gave the already colorful street another nice accent. Fun fact: Originally there was an ugly car at the end of the road and I removed it using the heal-”stamp” tool. Although it’s quite visible, “healing” it really saved this shot…

Actually from the city of Osten. They built this interesting contraption to allow people to get to the other side of the river: It just happens that there’s a bridge over the same river less than 200 meters further. I guess they still keep it for the tourists…

This house stands on the dike in the small village Osten, which funnily enough means East in German. It’s also really close to Norden. Those Frisian (dt.: Friesen) are not very imaginative. On top of that Norden is actually east of of Osten . In this picture I used one of the coolest new Lightroom…

Shot near the Airbus plant in Hamburg.

Found near a group of old fishermen in the outer parts of Hamburg. For comparison, this is the original (yes, I know it’s a rat):

This was a simple experiment with an external flash. When taking the picture the flash was fired in the same instance and we got this great freezed impact in water.

Hannover city hall on a sunny day.

Last Thursday there were some great concerts at city hall. The legendary Maceo Parker had to be replaced in just two weeks but the organizers from Hannover’s famous Jazzclub managed to find a great replacement: Incognito. After that the gifted Lutz Krajenski Big Band grooved the stage. Click on the image for some more shots.

In the lower levels of Wohnheim D.

Matthew Baldwin has written a great article on how cyclists and motorists can coexist on the road.

Shot at the city hall in Hannover.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos try to capture a higher contrast between the lightest and the darkest parts of a picture (see wikipedia). You would normally need a special camera for taking HDR pictures, but you can imitate the effect by taking multiple pictures (>=3) with different exposures. Typical consumer cameras have only very recently…

When working with lots of remote machines it’s sometimes necessary to reboot them. Then it’s always a pain to wait for them booting up. If the machines have extra interface cards, e.g. RAID, you have to sit there for a while until the machine becomes usable. So being a geek, I made a (Windows) script:…

Caught this at my old student dormitory. It is apparently “unsafe” now and will be destroyed. That’s too bad, because I had planned to visit it in 30 years as an old geezer…

I haven’t been to my old university’s campus for a long time and it seems a lot of new buildings have sprouted. Some more beautiful than others, but the nicest things is still the forest around it .

Found at Faust.

It’s nice to see when people work hand in hand.

Isn’t it funny how old ads seem so nice and candid and harmless in comparison to today’s annoying ads? Also who would really like to drink beer from fishermen. Would they make it with sea water? That’s not such a great idea…

This is from the forest called “Schwattet Gatt” which means black hole.

In the cabaret Marlene they have a magnificient collection of old advertisement signs. There’s tabacco from Mekka right beside beer from Bavaria.

Took this shot in Hanover at a scaffold for the renovation of a church.

Programming has been a very elitist and oblique field to beginners. Many programmers take great pride in the fact that their language is not easy to learn and that it needs a serious investment to understand. Often they do this secretly while outwardly claiming that they prefer easy to understand and simple code. Bjarne Stroustrup…

Yesterday the city put up walls to begin the contruction of the “Callenberger Loch” (=Callenberg hole).

Here’s a great short story by hugo-award-winning fantasy author neil gaiman titles I Cthulhu referring to a fictional creature created by H. P. Lovecraft. The story is great, but read for yourself: Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu. Nobody can pronounce it right. Are you writing this down? Every word? Good. Where shall I start…

C++ was my first real “production” language and my first encounters were really ghastly. Why would anybody use sth. this hard to use with such useless error messages? It just seemed so pointless to write a program that would need a lot of explanation to make itself understood to the user. The video is about…

Something come’ll out of these soon.

Design Patterns are design solutions to recurring problems. The architect Christopher Alexander introduced this notion in his book “A Pattern Language”. He introduces patterns that range from the design of whole cities to the organization of single rooms. Here’s how he defines the pattern of a “street cafe” (taken from Wikipedia): “The street cafe provides…

This is the street right next to the Reichstag in Berlin.

“Looking At the World Thru Rose Colored Glasses” is not necessary there:

Beautiful arcs in the courtyard of Castell de Montjuïc.

Instead of scrapping their old world war 2 weapons the Barcelonians decided to use them for picnicking.

At the top of Park Güell, we met this awesome guy.

I saw this in a weird second-hand shop, full of weird pretty things.

We had some great tapas at a restaurant in Barcelona (the Flauta) and this was our approach with coping with the loss .

After the “finals” at the Cebit show in Hannover.

Bridge at the city hall. What will they do, when they want to remove that bridge? There will be a masses of protesters! Hmm, maybe they’ll just get one of these lock picking champions from the CCC.

I’ve read a few books recently, that deal with novelization of the beginnings of natural science and of mathematics and computers in particular. There’s a host of material available to the interested reader, that manages to bring some life into the rigid underpinnings of theoretical computer science and the Internet with the stories of the…

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and science advocate and communicator in many public discussions and tv shows, was asked about “the most astounding fact about the universe”. His answer is both insightful and very inspiring. This completely convinced me that he is the perfect successor as host of Cosmos, which was previously hosted by the…

Is a great book by psychologist and nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann. If you read one book this year, it should be this. The main theme of the book is the process of thought. Kahnemann very convincingly describes that thinking happens in two distinct ways. There’s a fast and intuitive way to think and a slower…

Please sit down (when standing up in the shower is too hard).

I recently learned that DSLR sensors do not not measure the same number of light levels for different levels of brightness. In fact they work “linearly”, which means that they reserve half their sensitivity for the first f-stop in your image. This means that for a camera which captures 12 bits of raw image data…

Inside the city hall of Hannover, there are four insanely well-done models of the city when it was founded in 1939 before the bombings, after the bombs in 1945 and today. It’s incredible how much work these must have been. The 3 models are each approximately 3m by 3m and show the city centre and…

We had wonderful hosts at Barcelona. In their apartment they had two terraces, one of which was bathed in sun every morning. We profited very much from this and I made panorama of the view (click on the image or a larger version):

Great view from the Columbus tower at the end of the main street Ramblas on the port:

Note how the poor camera also falls

I’ve found this very well made page with tutorials on all aspects of photography. It’s very well designed and the explanations are to the point and complete. Especially the article on sensor size was an eye-opener for me.

Rootation (facebook) played an awesome gig this weekend at the opera. They played at the premiere party of the ballet’s newest piece “Tango!“. It was a big success and Rootation heated up the time-honored walls of the opera with their reggae tracks. You can imagine the surprise of the mostly grey- and white-haired audience when…

While researching the open-source firmware for canon compact cameras, I found out that there similar projects for some of the recent new DSLRs from Canon. There’s 400plus for the EOS 400D/XTi, which features scripting support and a whole lot more control on the exposure and ISO. And there’s Magic Lantern which supports the 550D/T2i/Kiss X4,…

There’s one thing that still stands out in these times of impersonal internet shopping; great customer service. One prime example of greate customer service was CDBaby. Instead of only sending out boring notification emails for sent orders CDBaby had this (I am not sure if they still use it): Customer name- Thanks for your order…

Artsy senseless violence:

Around 400 protesters gathered in Hannover to protest against ACTA last Saturday. When everybody else shopped eagerly in the city center of Hannover the protesters were mostly met with incomprehension by older people that also shouted “Stop this” — maybe referring to the shouts “Stop ACTA” — or amusement and curiosity by younger people “What…

When you watch films like Star Wars or Star Trek you usually just marvel at the imagination of the creators, but if start thinking about it you realize that it has a couple of weird properties. The one that one strikes me every time I see a SciFi movie is the sounds space crafts make….

After this big discussion around SOPA happened around the world, sneaky lobbyists managed to convince enough politicians in the european parliament to vote ACTA. It’s supposed to increase legal means and penalties against copying and use of digital media and will severely damage our daily use of the Internet. Apart from fair use it will…

Dropbox is testing its camera upload feature right now and you get up to 5GB of storage for testing it. All you have to do is install their latest beta software connect a camera with up to 4.5 GB of photos and you gain as much storage as you upload plus 0.5 GB just for…

Just last weekend I went into the city hall for the first time and now I’ve seen it on TV. At 1:01:54 you can see it in this video stream. It’s always interesting to see places you know on TV. They always look different through the lens of a TV camera than in reality.

Yesterday I woke up to the infernal roar of a loud machine. Wondering what happened, I stumbled out of bed and looked out of the window. There were a dozen men in orange coats swinging their chain saws against the trees in the nearby park. With heavy machinery they first cut the small branches higher…

This extension is really useful, when you’re watching a Youtube video and browsing through the list of videos to watch. “YtShowRating” allows you to see the ratings of other videos in the list. That way you do not end up with these videos, that do not have anything to do with what you’re looking at,…

I’ve been the “band photograph” for my girlfriend’s bands and her Reggae combo “Rootation” (facebook) had their first concert in Hannover in a small bar called “Kulturpalast“. It was well received by the crowd and you can see some picture from it here. Here’s the recording from the gig.

Last time I wrote about another Google Chrome extensions, that makes the Wikipedia readable. Another great extension I found is Google Quickscroll. It allows you to directly jump to the search result on a web page. It’s extremely useful if you happen to search for technical details that can be found somewhere on a web…

Most web sites use a very small font by default. For actual reading I tend to increase the font size to make it a little bit more bearable. Unfortunately the trend towards widescreen displays works against readability too. There’s a certain number of words you can read comfortably and it’s about 20 or so. On…

I’ve done some basic tinkering with Arduino. This is a simple scaled down computer, that allows you to quickly build prototypes of small devices. It’s quite hard to define the kind of devices you can build, because you can connect any external sensor or actuator, you can imagine. I’ve heard of a guy that attached…

Caffeine is a wondrous substance. Some consider it a basic necessity, like breathing air, others consider it a vice or a powerful drug to be avoided. There’s a saying that programmers/scientists are machines to turn coffee into code/knowledge. Coffee is certainly essential to the functioning of half the planet in the hours when humans are…

When working with XML it’s so very important to have support for the whole specification. Otherwise you end up with “sort-of” supporting XML, which kills you in when dealing with other partners. Unfortunately XML support in Qt seems to be an example of this. At least in the version 4.6.2, we are using at our…

The Singapore national public library offers free accounts to foreigners if they provide their passport number. Their collection of ebooks is very large, although I found it to be lacking many SciFi classics. There’s a lot of bestseller stuff though, like Stephen King, John Grisham and also a large collection of non-fiction books: library catalogue…

Kathereine von Jan wrote about how their Montessori schooling influenced them to allow every Google employee to work on their own projects 20% of their time: Google’s “20% Time”, inspired by Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s Montessori School experience, is a philosophy and policy that every Google employee spend 20% of their time (the equivalent…

The apps included in the rooting package for the sony reader include the reader app “FBReader”, that can access dictionaries in the popular stardict format. You can upload any stardict dictionary file to your reader and use in the FBReader. Here’s a list of sources for stardict files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedict/files/ http://goldendict.org/dictionaries.php http://xdxf.revdanica.com/down/index.php http://temp.lta.tw/stardict-dic/de/index.html If someone finds…

I couldn’t resist from unlocking, aka rooting, my ebook reader. Rooting means that you have full access to your device and you can install any software you want. Whereas iPhones have “jailbreak” you have “rooting” for Android devices, because it is actually running a flavor of Linux and the administrator user on a Linux box…

I’ve begun writing short stories and it has been a great experience. I’ve always read a lot and I’ve started a lot of stories, but until recently I’ve never really finished anything. Then I started a course for creative writing at the local Volkshochschule (“university for the people”, which is not really a university, but…

I personally prefer the bash even in cygwin over the dos shell many times, but it’s often the only shell available and has more features on windows. An example would be of course system administration stuff, like starting services — the windows equivalent of UNIX daemons: net start/stop *service-name* or killing processes by pid: taskkill…

At the university you learn a lot of stuff about computers but nothing about programming. That old saying is very true and stems from the fact that you don’t really have to know the absolute details if you got the concept all right. When you evaluate an approach, what counts are the relative numbers and…

I recently changed jobs from working on a project with code-generation and modeling component to a job without this. In my old job I have learned to value the importance of modeling future designs and documenting your architecture using UML-models. We had the good fortune than to need a specific commercial editor called MagicDraw for…

The thing I always miss most on Windows is the command line — well and Spotlight, but that’s for another post. And if you look at the cmd.exe, its just extremely badly done. It’s a fixed font, fixed width window with way too small font. I don’t want to go too much into detail, but…

I’ve enjoyed the luxury of full-time employment over the last month and I’ve enjoyed the fruits of my work aka cash in the form of shiny new things. One of these is the book “Beautiful code”. In this book a range of well-known and not so well-known computer experts describe what they perceive as beautiful…

There’s something very appealing about widescreen displays and TVs, the wide ratio just seems more natural to the human eye my father always told me. Maybe it has something to do with our past, in which the prehistorical hunter scanned the savanne for game. Who knows.. The trend in recent years goes more and more…

If you have a simple previous-generation MP3 player there’s a chance that you can vastly improve its functionality by running open-source firmware. An excellent team of independent open-source developers has created an amazing firmware for the following MP3 players: Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd/4th…

Since about a year IMAP has become widely available with free email providers. See GMX and gmail. That’s why I decided to abandon my old payed email account at fusemail. Now to backup your emails there a couple of open-source projects that store your emails (archivemail, imapbackup.py and offlineIMAP). I finally settled for offlineIMAP because…

This is howto shows how you can install newsbeuter 2.1 on Mac OS X. First you have install some required libraries using MacPorts, a packet-manager on the Mac. MacPorts is very similar to FreeBSD’s ports system. The curses-based widget set Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library (STFL) delivers the graphical frontend for newsbeuter.

The GNU readline…

Studies have shown that theachers in the US did not increase their efficiency with the help of of computers: in the double-blind experiments (I ask myself how they did that) the effects were negliegible or evene negative. The bottom line seems to be that a teacher can achieve the same efficiency without any technology. The…

In this how-to I describe how I installed Windows 7 64bit without a DVD drive on my mac. My SuperDrive stopped working nearly a year ago and I haven’t really missed it that much to pay Apple’s huge repair costs or order a replacement drive and install it myself. Anyways; installing without a DVD drive…