Published on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 9:57 am .
There is a nice article written by Johnny Haeusler from spreeblick.com about our (Germany’s) government’s plans to filter the internet using the excuse of fighting against child abuse.
Fighting against child abuse… sounds right, doesn’t it? Sure! But just putting stop signs in front of those disgusting webpages (by using DNS redirections) does surely NOT help ANY child. This crime has to be fought against at the roots - the families that abuse their childs. Implementing internet filters by law is a very dangerous plan - and it will (maybe not tomorrow or next year) be used to censor the Internet.
Even if you don’t live in Germany, I think it can’t hurt to see what’s going on right now in the land of poets and “thinkers”.
Johnny’s article is written in english, so please take a few minutes and read it. Thanks!
Published on Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 7:46 pm .
Why aren’t there more days like today? Riding the bike to the family BBQ, eating some yummy bratwurst and steaks and napping in the sun. Ahh… This has been so relaxing.
There also were some geocaches nearby so we decided to do a walk and try to find them. We’ve found the first cache (GCRK8Q) but we didn’t have any luck with the second one (GCNP5J).
Riding back home was easier than expected (with my stomach full of bratwurst) and it only took 4 minutes longer than the ride to the BBQ. My shape is getting better and better. 
Published on Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 8:14 pm .
My hometown Glems doesn’t exist, at least not in OpenStreetMap. An empty spot with a road going through it.
So I decided to take my bike and GPS and create a map of Glems. Although is not a big city it took over two hours to get all the data needed for an almost complete map of the important streets.
Back home the actual work started: Drawing the streets on top of the recorded tracks and adding marked POIs. I was using JOSM, a Java OpenStreetMap editor. I found it pretty convenient and stable to use. The thing which takes a lot of time - especially if you are a newbie like I am - is to look up the available tags for streets and POIs.
One thing I noticed that you can’t get it perfect on the first try. 
There are just too many details you would have to remember (or write down). But fortunately OpenStreetMap is a community project so everybody can add additional information or make changes to the map. There are still a lot of tracks missing around Glems so there is a lot of fun work to do.
Published on Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 11:43 pm .
Yesterday, Frank, Frank Martin and myself went to Linz, Austria to see Parov Stelar and Band live.
After checking in Hotel Lokomotive and having some Wiener Schnitzels we took the cab to the Posthof.
First, a band called Da Cruz played some nice electro acoustic brazilian music. I now am the proud owner of their CD Nova Estação. I really like it.
Manufactur was the second band for that evening. Also very good. Listen to their music on their website to get a taste of their music.
Then we got what we came for: Parov Stelar and Band. Oh my god! Let me say it this way: If you have a list with things you absolutely have to do before you die, going to a gig of Parov and his band should definitely be on that list!
Unfortunately, the show had to come to an end sometime but it was totally worth the long trip to Linz.
But… we also got the chance to get to know Parov and his band members in person in the backstage area. They’re not only great musicians but also very nice and funny people. Thanks for that awesome night!
To get an impression of that night you should watch these two (1,2) videos and have a look at my flickr set.
Published on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 3:21 pm .
CuPP is a C++ framework to easily integrate CUDA into existing C++ applications.
Unfortunately, CuPP doesn’t compile on Mac OS X right out of the box. Here is a patch which modifies the CMakeLists.txt files of the project so that it can be compiled on OS X.
Continue reading ‘Compiling CuPP on Mac OS X’
Published on Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 7:02 pm .
General Electric put out a nice website with an impressive augmented reality demonstration.
The fun part is that you can play around with it yourself - on your computer, within your web browser!
Here is how it works: First, you print out one sheet of paper with a symbol on it. You then start GE’s little Flash application which uses your webcam. All this application does so far is to display your picture in the browser. But if you hold that sheet of paper to the webcam the symbol opens and a nice small 3D animated landscape comes out of your paper. You can change the view by changing the perspective to the paper you’re holding in your hands.
Try it out! It’s awesome!
Warning: Flash 10 is required.
Published on Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 4:40 pm .
Last weekend we had a beautiful weather in south Germany. A good time to jump on the bike and do a small tour around the area for the first time in 2009.
The first destination was Dettingen where I picked up Kangaroo. He was on his way to Stuttgart so I decided to join him until Bempflingen (see evidence photo) where we split up and I headed back home.
The way back was kind of exhausting because the road is constantly going uphill but it was a nice trip and I can’t wait until the snow is gone (yes, we have snow… again).
Find more track details at gpsies.com.
Published on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 8:33 pm .
Apple recently announced that over 15,000 3rd party iPhone applications are now available at the App Store. With 500,000,000 downloaded iPhone apps within half a year this new way of distributing applications is a huge success. Unfortunately, with so many applications available it is sometimes hard to find the real gems.
Here is a list of iPhone apps I’ve installed on my device. Maybe you find something useful or maybe you can recommend an app which definitely should be added to that list (please leave a comment).
Continue reading ‘Cool 3rd party iPhone apps’
Published on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 4:02 pm .
The biggest new feature in OmniFocus 1.5 will be the possibility to synchronize multiple OmniFocus to one single database.
This is very nice as, I suppose, a lot of people have multiple installations of OmniFocus and keeping all of them up to date is a hassle. Especially now, as OmniFocus is also available for the iPhone a synchronization feature is an absolute must to keep doing GTD “stress-free”.
There are several ways to set up the synchronization feature:
* MobileMe This is probably the most convenient way but it requires you to have a MobileMe account.
* Bonjour Synchronizing via Bonjour requires to make one Mac to function as a “database server” (which has to be up and running if you want to sync) and synchronizing is only possible over the local network.
* Disk If you have NAS system or a USB hard drive connected to your AirPort you could use this option. But unfortunately the iPhone does not support this way.
* WebDAV If you have access to a web server you could use that one as an OmniFocus database server. This way you have access to your tasks from all over the world.
In this tutorial I want to show you how you can configure an apache web server to support WebDAV and what you have to do to make OmniFocus use your very own “cloud”.
Continue reading ‘Synchronizing OmniFocus via WebDAV on Gentoo Linux’
Published on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 5:26 pm .
This weekend I finally found some time to watch Bill Dudney’s screencasts about iPhone development.
The screencast series is called ‘Writing your first iPhone Application‘ and it is an ideal way to get started with iPhone application development.
All you need is a recent version of Xcode and some basic knowledge about Objective-C and Cocoa.
In 2,5 hours Bill shows you how to create a simple but nice recipe application where you can store recipes and its ingredients (sure, it is NOT a full-blown recipe database application but it serves its purpose). You learn a lot about table views, view controllers, navigation controllers and how to store your entered data persistently by using SQLite.
I really enjoyed watching it and I’d recommend to write the application in parallel while you are watching it. That way you’ll think more about how all the stuff works.
Every episode (five in total) costs $5 but I think it’s completely worth the money.
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