Running, three times…

Vacation

Currently on vacation.

Copying VHS to DVD...

After fighting with Linux's v4l2, alsa, pulseaudio, mencoder, mjpegfoobarblahblubbtools etc.. I just borrowed one of those. Probably it will just work.

*This* is my ambition.

Three Phase Power

Breadboard

I started playing around with a breadboard. Until now, I never had done this, but I have to say, it’s kind of convenient. The only downside: I don’t have pre-cut cables, so I used the one from a big spool I found, but they are kind of pink-ish ;-).

Gainclone

It hums. And I’m annoyed.

 

What did I do on Saturday? Well, via the wonder of the web, I watched my friend burn both himself and his baby daughter with his home-made amplifier, then rail against excel and python in an attempt to print out some gradesheets. He eventually got so angry he threw himself out the window. He was in the basement, but you have to appreciate the attempt.

Update: I modified the last stage to have less gain (4 instead of 20), so it better matches my source, furthermore I added a 5k resistor at the input to have less input impedance. That helped a lot.

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...

Spam....

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all 4 teh lulz

Scientist - like new!

Ebay #330212923460:

Wissenschaftler, neuwertig
Erstklassiger Wissenschaftler, promoviert, habilitiert, auslandserfahren, belastbar, kreativ, teamfähig, multi-lingual, kommunikativ, Organisationstalent, jung, unverheiratet, kein Kinderwunsch (Arbeit geht vor), erstklassige Publikationsliste, kein Privatleben
Arbeitet mindestens 65-70 Stunden pro Woche, wenn das nicht reicht, gerne auch zusätzlich am Wochenende. Die Nacht ist bis auf Ausnahmen für Literaturarbeit reserviert. Übernimmt sämtliche Lehrverpflichtungen, präsentiert Ergebnisse auf Kongressen und Tagungen. Schreibt Reviews und Publikationen, bereitet Vorträge vor und organisiert Begehungen (Arbeitssicherheit, Gentechnik, Radioaktivität, Tierschutz …). Gerne auch drittmittelfinanzierte Zeitverträge bis zur Rente. Garantiert kein Arbeitsausfall durch Urlaub oder Krankheit. Wer nicht zu Hause schläft, hat auch keinen Unfall.
Gehaltsvorstellung BAT 2a oder weniger (auch mal Hartz IV wenn es sein darf), gerne auch in Hessen (kein Tarifvertrag). Geld ist eh nur schnöder Mammon.
Sucht perspektivlose, frustrierende Routinearbeiten in der akademischen Forschung mit Giftstoffen, Radioaktivität und Tierversuchen, alles was andere liegenlassen. Wo andere ins Ausland abwandern, steht ein echter Wissenschaftler seinen Mann. Frust ist ein Fremdwort.

(Scientist, like new. First class scientist, graduated, lecture qualification, able to work under pressure, creative, can work in a team, multilingual, communicative, talent for organizing, young, not married, not planning to have children (work first!), good publications, no private life, works 65-70 hours/week, possibly also on weekends. Nights are reserved for researching literature. Will also do lecture-work, will present results on conferences, writes review and publications, prepares results and does misc inspections, like work-security, biohazard, radiation and animal-rights. Does short-term contracts until retirements, will not take holidays or sick-days... (...) Looking for repetitive, boring work without perspective in academic resarch with poisonous, radioactive substances or animal experiments. Everything that others won't touch. When all others are fleeing in foreign countries, a real scientist will take the burdon, frustration is a word he does not know.)

CCD camera

The bright LEDs are completely dark to the human eye, it's a camera for near infrared..

Small pages... (2)

Recently.

Valve thing

Things I did not want to end in the dumpster, Part 123512.

Running JACK with realtime priorities

I spent *HOURS* trying to figure out how to use POSIX capabilities unter Linux to run the jack soundserver with realtime priorities. The simple answer to this “how-to” question is: YOU DON'T!. There are many pages describing the various merits of SYS_CAP_NICE and all, a buggy kernel-module that does no longer work on a recent kernel, and even more junk. But the real solution is to just use rlimits. Had I only used GENTOO, most likely, I would have found out earlier. I only found out what to really search for, after stumbling over this page on linuxaudio.org.

Happy New Year

At least where I live the end of the year 2007 is near, and we'll never be able to go back (see photo ;-) ). I wish everyone a happy new year 2008 and much fun with their new-years celebrations.

ICQ Exploit

Is this some kind of ICQ exploit or just the usual GAIM breakage?

New Skype Setup

I improved my computer telephony setup a little...

Traffic Jam

Small pages...

The day the routers died...

The day the routers died, performed at at the RIPE 55 conference: Video, Lyrics. Update: You can even find the lyrics in WHOIS.

56 pages

Now that Gajo Simpatico is bragging about his imminent departure from the wonderful world of physics, I have to blog that I reached the number of 56 crappy pages in my thesis. I'll not add a live-counter, though.... So it's only a matter of few more years until I'll finish...

new airport power supply

Recently. The new and improved power supply, getting about 8V from a wall-wart. Using a LM2575 for 3.3V@1A and the venerable 78L05 for 5V at some insignificant current.