Tag: me

OpenSAGA

January 12, 2010 / / 0 Comments

OpenSAGA Logo

As you may have noticed, I often have very long phases where I don’t really blog about anything tech. This is most often caused by me not really having to write anything about that is not too connected to my day job. While the technical contents of this blog connect to a lot of topics at my day job, I usually avoid writing about stuff directed related to my work, partly because of business discretion, partly because of this being my private blog.

Now it occurs that my current project is about to become a whole less secret, that is, it is going to be GPLed. The first official release will be on May, the 1st 2010 (we might do preview releases).

There already is a pretty rudimentary OpenSAGA website, but the English speaking audience has to wait a little until we have a first technological overview in English.

Installing Ubuntu Karmic Koala

October 31, 2009 / / 4 Comments

I have been looking forward to Thursday’s release of Ubuntu 9.10, code name Karmic Koala, for some time now. CouchDB integrated into the desktop — sweet!

The actual install overall went really smooth. Installer got streamlined a bit more and now carries over the initial language selection to defaults for time zone and keyboard settings. Most complicated about it was my chaotic partition layout on my dev machine. Installation went all fine, all devices recognized. At first I had problems with my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet because copying over the old config created double entries for all devices, making X choke and kill my USB mouse. Just commenting out the entries in my X config solved that problem. I just had to redo the basic configuration from Gimp by invoking the Gimp Preferences Dialog under Edit -> Preferences, select input devices in the tree, then “Configure Extended Input Devices”. There I just set the mode of all auto-discovered wacom devices to “Screen”. (not “Window” or “Disabled”).

Things turned out to be a bit more work than initially planned when I discovered that the MythTV frontend from karmic wouldn’t connect to my mediahub computer, a Eee Box B202 with dual DVB-T tuner ( TerraTec Cinergy DT USB XS Diversity , newer hardware-rev). After the initial troubles I had first getting the DVB-T to work perfectly, I was really not eager to change anything about that system.. In fact it was still running an updated EasyPeasy 1.0.

But my fears were totally unfounded. The DVB-T stick was now auto-discovered and there just needed one module option to be added in a newly created /etc/modprobe.d/options :

options dvb_usb_dib0700 dvb_usb_dib0700_ir_proto=0

This sets the remote control protocol to NEC, which is something my remote control needs. Everything else basically worked out of the box. I just had to configure MythTV and tell it the two DVB front end devices and EIT create video sources and connect those two. After copying over the randomly generated mySQL password to the laptop, I was back at my old setup.

What changed is that both computers now boot a lot faster and look a lot prettier, even using only graphics that come with Karmic Koala

Congratulations to the ubuntu team for producing such a fine new ubuntu version, better than ever.

Links:

update: added more details for the wacom configuration process.

Things from my hard drive: Afra Idofabe

September 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments
Afra Idofabe
More than two years ago, for some reason I don’t really recall, there were free .be domains to be had. I think it was some kind of marketing for —  a new hosting service? — can’t remember. So we toyed around with funny domain names idea. Registering obiwankeno.be was almost naturally.. and then there was afraidofa.be, potential bee-allergic-central, or like I mentioned in an alternative interpretation a guy named Afra Idofabe. Starting from that name I imagined a bee with an afro hairdo, looking kind of threatening, but fun.. and in contrast to all those other ideas like this, this one actually ended pretty well.

The initial sketch did not bring over the my idea very well, so it was received with very little enthusiam. The version you see was made in Inkscape, which I can’t recommend often enough as excellent free (as in freedom) vector graphics tool. I just imported a scan of my initial sketch and handtraced it with splines and stuff..

I still like the result..

Wahl-o-mat 2009

September 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments
Just found out that the new Wahl-o-mat for the upcoming federal elections in Germany. The Wahl-o-mat asks you a couple of questions and tells you how similar your political views are compared to a number of political parties. The result was not really a surprise for me:

wahl-o-mat

Interesting is the even higher match with “the Left” party than with the pirate party. Principially I would not mind a left alternative in the elections, but “THE LEFT” isn’t going to be it. I don’t trust them.

My media hub

February 22, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a small, low-power media pc for the living room for quite some time now. when I saw the eee box, I knew that I would like to try to build a system based on it.

My plans are now entering the final stages after a long and diffcult journey. Both delivery problems (the eee took about 3 months to be actually delivered) and an unusual amount of linux driver problems were the main causes of this.

The components I got in the end were:

  • Asus Eee Box B202
  • One “Terratec Cynergy DT USB XS Diversity”, a dual DVB-T tuner USB stick
  • an external DVD rewriter

Continue reading

Demo Video Archive

July 13, 2006 / / 1 Comment

Back in the day when I was involved in the demo scene, I was a coder for Haujobb and did some demos / intros for the Amiga1200. Demos are realtime rendered multimedia art. Today most demos are coded in C or even C with some scripting engine, but back in the days it was pure 680×0 assembler. The development took ages — Burning Chrome for example took me about 9 months of work which did not include the development of all effects included. All that work culminated in releasing the demo, usually at a demo party (My trusty old A1200 and me traveled quite some way across europe). If you were lucky, your demo really got one of the first places and you could return home with some fame *cough* and a bit of prize money.

Some time ago I started to capture some of my favourite works as videos to preserve them and finally got around to set them up here in my blog. Continue reading

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