Kloß und Spinne

Absolutely hillarious if you understand German: Kloß und Spinne!

• Episode 1: Computer Kaputt
• Episode 2: Klimakatastrophe

Simple - Advanced

There is a nice driver for Windows, called asio4all that makes normal sound-cards accessible to professional audio software expecting a ASIO driver. Its configuration dialog uses the buttons shown on the left to switch from the advanced to the simple view.

More toys... :-)

Not so Recently.

Hardware

Repairing a headset...

then the baby starts crying...

Shift, what mince?

Yesterday a colleague had her PhD examination. Afterwards a small party was held, the buffet of which had this nice mince-hedgehog. I have been told by gajo-simpatico that this kind of food presentation was hugely pouplar in the 50s.

Mielke 2.0

I added that nice looking Portrait of our minister of the interior to this blog. German readers might want to inform themselves on my motives to do so at the following websites:

• vorratsdatenspeicherung.de, primarily against the storage of communication relevant data without any suspicion of a crime. They have T-Shirts...
• http://bundestrojaner.blogspot.com/, discussing the plans of said minister to let the police break into your computer to plant false evidence create security leaks fight terrorism, of course. (this has been done since 2005, apparently with little to no success, but of course, this does not stop him from demanding more of it, even though the highest german court has ruled the methods unconstitutional)

Now back to the usual programme of posting silli pictures.

Bag of wonders

Free bags with advertising freebies were given out at the university canteen today. Besides other stuff, blue beer and really icky pink antiperspirant...

Nerd Tip of the Day

Mensa TV

A TV team interviewing students in the university's canteen.

two ways to generate polarised light

Name at least two ways of generating polarized light: Laser, Solarium

Deep Shit

I live on a small hill, and aparently on the wrong side of it. So we have a sewage pump in a septic tank below the street to move the soiled water upwards. The pump is connected to a control cabinet with a flashlight on top that is supposed to light up if there are any problems. And it flashes a lot. Figure 1 depicts three gentlemen contemplating the problem of the pump seen near the hole in the ground. That's the septic tank, by the way. Also visible: The door of the control cabinet.

9.63 km/h

3.84km in 23:55. Those are 9.63 km/h! Eat this, Martin! W00t!

Printing Graphics

I wasted some time getting graphics output work reliably on the HP 82240 I wrote about last november. So far the printouts are just beautiful.

Should one? *lol*

Computer Junk

Cleaning out a old server room where people have accumulated various kinds of (mostly broken, but always completely outdated) computer junk.

Nice things in Hamburg

There have been nice moments in Hamburg, too.

End of Run

It's only few minutes to go, then my last shift for the collaboration will be over. I have done these chores for few years now and sitting here never was pleasant. It's a mind numbingly boring work and often I was quite angry about how stupid things were done. But on the other hand, the environment at a big facility like ours here is actually quite fascinating. I always admired the mixture between a industrial plant and a hobbyists lab, combining professionally built high-power machinery with duct-tape and a web of uninsulated cables dangling from racks with measurement electronics. If you walk around, late in the evening, you can see huge halls with impressive construction with single scientists working on their own duct-tape-held experiment, immersed in their research. And sometimes I contemplate that this deeply focused work is what I could have done, and might even have enjoyed had I decided to move here some time ago, and not only do shifts few times a year. But now I realized that I might have built what I critizied when on shift: A faulty device, built under time-pressure by a layman, that no one but him could ever operate. It's probably for the best that it will be shut down in few months, so that everyone can built a new gadget, at a new facility somewhere else.

Last Shifts

I'm on shift, have poor nutrition and watched someone cleaning the glass-ceiling of the Europapassage today.

i2c to 1-wire bridge

I always wanted to play around with 1wire a little, so I spent the afternoon building first a Parport-to-I2C and then a I2C-to-1WIRE adapter part of which you can see in the picture. It works, but it is s....l....o....w.....! So I think I should have spent 35€ on a Professional USB to 1WIRE interface instead.
Update 29-03-2007: I got the DS9409R today, and honestly it sucks, too.