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).