Current

So, what's going on that does not really fit into one of my diary-like posts?

• It has been getting cold and wet during the last weeks. And I missed some ultimate frisbee training sessions because of not having the right clothes. I should really go shopping. Our mixed team from ultimate frisbee is the german champion for the second time in a row. Congratulations to all of them. They are going to some tournament in London on one of the next weekends.


• After trying to learn a lot for my probability theory exam I finally started to get productive. Yay!


• I get two computer magazines sent to my house: IX and Linux Magazin. Usually I have enoughe time to read the most interesting articles before the next edition comes out, but I bought a CT some weeks ago and now I am completely out of schedule.


• My computer starts to do funny things. I get a message about some accessibility feature not being present at every boot. If I am at the computer at around half past 10 (or half past 9?) in the morning, it hangs and I have to reboot it. The clock applet in Gnome does not work anymore. The computer hangs from time to time, but only when doing lots of stuff (compiling, email, webbrowser and probably more, all at the same time). Since some time ago another RAM bar died, I definitely have not enough RAM. Less than a GB at the moment. So I'm thinking about getting rid of this complicated Gentoo stuff and installing Fedora. But my machine is some years old and I want a new one. I only need the core parts, motherboard, CPU, fan, RAM, graphics adapter (if it is not onboard). So I'm thinking about buying some 4-core CPU and 4 GB of RAM and some cheap board with integrated graphics adapter (I can upgrade later). But I'll do at least one exam before.


• I read this news item about a guy (or actually more than one) building a $150 balloon with camera and GPS and taking pictures of space (the area around earth). I want to do that, too.


• I' thinking of getting rid of categories in this blog. They only make sense when they are used consistently, and I don't do that.


• I started using F-Spot for organizing my pictures. I also started hating pictures without embedded timestamps. Scans from old photographes, pictures from mobile phone cameras, pictures edited with a tool that removes that stuff. New tools, new restrictions. That's life.

Todays picture shows a snowman a friend of mine rendered. It is from a Blender tutorial, if I remember correctly.

• Woke up quite early (although I set no alarm clock). Had a nice breakfast with my family.


• Since my mother and sister had to go to the city center to buy some stuff, I prepared lunch. It was quite difficult, french fries and and rissoles (right usage of the word? never heard or used it before) from the freezer, prepared in our brand new Tefal Actifry. It's quite a strange machine, but for making fries and warming stuff up, it's really good. I split the stuff in half because frozen potato sticks need quite a lot of space and there was not enough space for everything. When the fries were warm and soft and there was some room, I added two of the rissoles to try it out. After about 20 minutes the fries were almost done and the rissoles were perfect. I put everything in a big bowl and put in the rest of the fries. Then my mother and sister came back. Then there was enough room for the rest of the rissoles and I added them and suddenly my mother and sister got mad: "What are you doing?" "Why did you do that?" "You can't do it like that!" and stuff like that. Of course, I left everything the way it was. My sister left the kitchen talking about me being so stupid and her eating somewhere else. They were also sure that I made too little fries and were talking about them eating until they were full and me getting the rest, if there was any. So, after 20 minutes the rissoles were perfect, I put them to the first two and put a dish on top of them that they stayed warm. Added the first portion of fries to the Tefal machine thing and voila, 5 minutes later there was tasty lunch. My mother had prepared some salad, too, so it was not only fried and warmed up stuff.


• During lunch my brother mentioned that he would go running in half an hour and my sister said that one shouldn't eat 1 1/2 hours before doing sports. I sometimes have problems with my stomach when doing sport, either because I ate too much and too short before the sports session or because I did not eat during the last few hours. So I try to eat a banana or something about one or a half hour before doing sport. I mentioned that and the discussion started, that I was obviously wrong because what my sister said is scientifically proven. She said that. I answered, that this might not be a good phrasing, because eating a little does no harm. I got the answer, that a full meal is not a little, therefore I explained to them, that I was not talking about my brother but about her sentence in general, stating, that one should not eat anything at all, which was obviously wrong in my eyes. At that point my sister had already stopped talking to me and only informed the others that I was obviously too stupid to listen to her and all that. Well, well, I think I would be pissed if I was not used to this. But since she stated that she hated me and that I should please die as soon as possible and never apologized for it, I don't care. It is true, that she knows more about those things, since she just finished her 3-year training to be a dietician, but always being right, not being creative or flexible anymore, not being able to learn new stuff and, which is the most important, not being able to explain what she just said or why she is true, is definitely bad style. There's also no excuse for behaving like an asshole most of the time.

Todays picture shows Hansi and Klaus standing aroud in a tent. It was taken at last years "Pfingstlager", most likely in may. I decided to show it today, because there are some tools and boxes in teh background, exctly the kind of stuff I was preparing on friday.

• Went to Heumaden before lunch to prepare all the tools and stuff needed for the weekend. Well, not everything needed for the tent, but everything needed from Heumaden. Which was one small trailer full of stuff.


• I've been on the phone most of the day. Well, not exactly. But much more than on other days. Discussung with Lucie and Hansi and Simon how to get to the Schachen.


• Departure with Simon around 9 PM, loading the hanger, driving to Simons place to get his stuff and then to the swabian alps. Not sure, when we arrived, but with 80 km/h as top speed it took ages.


• Found our friends from Cannstatt. Met some people we knew from AK KiSoLa and some we've never seen before from Munich. Returned to Cannstatt. It was quite a strange evening, but both the Cannstatt people and we had fun, I guess.

Did some nice things today. Went playing ultimate with friends. After that some icecream. Got some (non-important) computer stuff done. Mostly on the blog: New template (theme, skin, whatever), imported posts from old blog the wrong way, imported them again the right way, deleted all the wrong entries. Fixed some old posts, pictures, whatever. But there's more to do, just not for today. The old posts are of questionable quality and in german. I also added some "friends" to my blogroll. If they write strange stuff, I don't know them. Anyway, good night.

First a clarification: I wanted to call this blog "plans and memories" and then called it "dreams and memories". So... everything in the category "Dreams" is either a dream or something more like a plan.

Some time ago I bought 100 green LEDs and 2 circuit boards, some resistors and some more stuff. I wanted to build something like the LED cube from mrmcd but that's far too much work for the first time. So i decided to build something easy, something 2-dimensional. Today I had the idea to build a digital clock. I looked up some low resolution bitmap fonts and created my own one:



The yellow dots are not needed LED positions, seperators or how you might call them. The black dots are LEDs or switched on LEDs and the white dots are positions of LEDs I need for other digits. I als have a picture of an example time. You can see it below, the dot colors are the same as in the first picture:



Some "hardware":



As you can see, the circuit boards are too small. I need to buy bigger ones. Also, I don't have enough LEDs. For the black and white dots only I would need 21x4+2=86 LEDs, but to fill the yellow dots, too, I need 27x7=189. I think. So I need to order more parts first.

I want to connect this board to an ATmega microcontroller. If I use it as an interface to the serial port or if it has an internal clock which is easily usable is something, I did not look up yet. First some soldering.

I just have one problem: I want to make it elegant. It shoud be possible to send a binary number on some ATmega pins to the LEDs and then do all the complicated stuff in hardware. This would be great, but using that method I only reach 86 of the189 LEDs I want to have on the circuit board (for other fun stuff). So I need 2 ways to control the LEDs. At least for 86 of them.

But does that mean that I need 86 logical ORs? That would be 22 ICs and about 3,30 Euros more. That's almost no money, but i care about the space I need for 22 ICs (these are "QUAD 2-INPUT OR GATE"s).

And for the pixel-wise control, how do I do it? 1 column at a time? Do I want to use buffers, which would be something like another 29 ICs? Or is it ok to be able to power 1 column (or $n columns) at a time? I'll have to look into that and it would be nice to know some more before ordering this stuff.

BTW, Simon wants to join me. That's great.

If you are interested in some great sport, just drop by on sunday. The finals are at 13:00 and 15:00. More information is available at the official homepage.

I bought my iBook because it was small and silent and had a quite long battery life. I also want those features in my new machine. I have my deskop computer and really like the big screen with 1600x1200 pixels. To have that in a laptop is almost impossible, and i don't want it. I want a small mobile maching combined with a stationary powerfull workstation. Thererfore i've been looking into netbooks and the like, the Eee PC, HP 2133 Mini-note and all those other Eee clones. But they don't seem to be there yet. They all are missing some stuff.

The Eee PC with 7" display has a too small display and too small resolution, I think. The keyboard isn't that good, either. I held it in my hand and was just not satisfied. The 900 seems to be a good start, i have not seen it yet "in person", but the tests I read only criticised the keyboard. It's still a little too small. This is better in the Aspire One by Acer and it should also in the HP 2133, according to tests. The Acer also has the new Intel Atom CPU, which really sounds interesting. The Eee PC 901 will have an Atom CPU, too, but it's not sold, yet, I think. But back to the others. The Acer really sounds good and looks good, I will try to get one in my hand for trying asap.. "Get one in my hand" in that case means go to Saturn or Media Markt or wherever they have it. I'm not one of those big testing websites.

The most interesting laptop before I heared about the Aspire One was the HP. Because it was more professional line. Yesterday I read a test about it and they wrote some ood things and some rather bad things: The case and display and Keyboard are told to be great. But the software on it is not. At least not the linux. I don't remember the details. Also the CPU has not that much power and they wrote about "viewing YouTube in full-screen" as not-working-that-good. That's actually one thing I miss about my desktop pc, too. To be able to watch videos in a really good quality. And I thought VIA CPUs were good for that stuff, because of special media whatever acceleration. Another thing I personally dislike is the ability to combine the components. If you want linux, you have to tae one of the slowest models. If you want bluetooth, you can not. If you want flash memory instead of a conventional disk drive, you need the smallest one and you have only 4 GB. Or was it 2 GB? Well, it's both not enough. Also, if I want the Gig of RAM, i have to take Windows Vista, I think. No thanks. Dell does that better (and I don't really call them good).

So, to conclude: Asus might have created this new kind of laptops, but they focus too muc on the "fucking small" part. I'm more interested in something like a subnotebook or something in between that and a netbook, though. Why do I want something more like a netbook? Because I don't need that much power and I don't have that much money. Acer is going into a good direction, I think. I will have look into that, but i cannot say that Acer has earned any trust from me so far. I'm not sure yet if they can really build good laptops. HP is on a good way, making the Eee PC more bussines-y, but they're only on their way, yet. I'll have to wait.

It isn't that i do nothing all day. Well, at least today i did something.

I have this kind of halogen lamp rope construction in my room and i used it to, well, light the room. Unfortunately i could not do this for teh last few years. The threw away the power supply because parts of the plastic case had melded. That happens when you do not put it into the open with lots of fresh cold air while using it but put it under a heater (there was unused space). Some time ago i had the great idea to replace it without spending money: I just use one of the old unused ATX power supplies i have access to and... voila, after digging up how the pins are used, some cutting here and some screwing there I'm not sitting in the dark anymore.

So, it looks like i have a new blog. This time powered by serendipity. And the only reason is, that some strange guy told me to do so. Almost. Well, i'll see how long i will use it. There were aso some other people involved in this, probably without knowing. Ixs told me about serendipity and Tomcat motivated me to do it in english.

BTW, i moved the old blog to www.stoile.name/old/blog/ and hopefully disabled all exploitable parts of it. We'll see... hopefully not.