i can has censorship

Our junta of incompetent politicians have passed the law that will now introduce censorship in Germany. Ignorant assholes.

device-mapper ate my linux installation

Just a quick note about the harm that you can suffer, should you try to install the “dmraid” package in your linux distribution: It’s EVIL! The problem is that for me it installed the dmraid signature in my harddisks last sector, so that Ubuntu’s initrd would automatically create useless mappings from…

• /dev/sda –> /dev/mapper/NVIDIAxyzqwert
• /dev/sda1 –> /dev/mapper/NVIDIAxyzqwer_1
• /dev/sda2 –> /dev/mapper/NVIDIAxyzqwer_2
• …and so on…

Everything completely pointless, and wrecking my distribution’s ability to boot. I usually run my self compiled kernels which exclude the device-mapper for this exact reason, but it’s not possible on my other PC for one reason or the other. And the final and correct cure is to boot with the greatest bootable live-system there is: GRML, and overwrite the harddisk’s last sector (which holds the signature) with zeroes:

# dmsetup remove_all # get rid of the mappings
# cat /proc/partitions
…
8 0 12345678 sda # your harddisk
…
# sdd bs=512 –inull of=/dev/sda oseek=12345677k count=1 # overwrite last block

Reboot and enjoy. Use this recipe at your own risk!

Pointless^∞

There’s a post over at slashdot about the Twitpocalypse… What it’s supposed to mean is that twitter, this stream of useless short-messages you can (or, if you are like me: you don’t) follow to be informed about the social life or bodily functions of your peers now has accumulated over 2³¹ items, a number exceeding the range of a 32bit signed integer. I’ll never understand how anyone can care about such a thing, but it for sure made it’s inventors famous and rich. And there’s one comment about the stupid choice of words and names I think is especially hilarious (see screenshot).

Vintage moving coil meter

I put some of my electronics garbage to good use, this pretty instrument was salvaged from the dumpster a long time ago. It displays Neper with a full range of +0.5Np at 40µA, 0Np at 24µA.

Pirate Bay Anthem

It might not be one with the most highbrow lyrics, but The Pirate Bay now has an anthem! YouTube Video, PirateBay News, mp3 torrent.

New Mascot

I got myself a new mascot. Somehow reminds me of the fabulous Creatures In My Head. Previously.

News! (Olds?)

Ok, so there hasn't been much activity in this blog since... ages. I left the physicist's natural habitat (university) to work in industry. That said, I hope that the frequency of posts will rise now that I got accustomed to doing "real work". As prearrangement I already changed the subtitle of this blog, maybe I should also hold a "Blog Reader Kick-Off Awareness Meeting"?

200000 km

My trusty old Polo had its kmversary...

msdnaa fail

To download a ISO image for Windows XP (as a member of a university, I joined the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance programme) I have to download a special windows-only binary program... Which doesn't work right in WINE (the windows API for Linux). But they didn't even get it right on Windows either, as the screenshot here suggests.

Back from holiday.

Thunderbolt

Finally my nice GPS disciplined clock arrived.

New home-office...

This is what will become my new home-office... as soon as both mould and hole are removed from the wall :-(

Disappointment

I ordered a GPS antenna, checked that the list of "compatible" GPS receivers include +5V types, asked them in a Email about it, to which they replied "3.3V - 5V is ok", and now got the product depicted next to this text.

Office Temperature

Office temperature has reached 28 degrees celsius (upper line).

Accident on the highway...

Keyboard taking a bath

Knight Rider

When I was about 10 years old, we loved to watch this. Yesterday in the evening, I found out that someone analyzed almost all episodes, which are, I have to admit, incredibly bad! But a very entertaining read, unfortunately in german.

Measuring Power

I don't own something like a Kill-A-Watt but was interested in the power-consumption of several computers, so I had to improvise. Upper trace: Voltage, lower trace current. The result is that the fluorescent lamp illuminating the still-life depicted consumes 7.2W. A 1.2 GHz Athlon is 95W when idle, 105W when busy. A Pentium-II needs 45W of juice.

Competition Pro

I repaired my second Competition Pro (german article) joystick from the old Amiga days. It works remarkably well with the linux db9-driver:

$ jstest /dev/input/js0 
Driver version is 2.1.0.
Joystick (Multisystem joystick (2 fire)) has 2 axes (X, Y)
and 2 buttons (Trigger, ThumbBtn).
Testing ... (interrupt to exit)
Axes:  0:     0  1:     0 Buttons:  0:off  1:off

This one now has two buttons: I had to repair the broken cable, removed the auto-fire electronics and then just rewired the small triangle buttons to fire2. (not-so-recently).

Salvaged from the scrap-metal bin...