The free world has a new leader (elect)

I am glad about the result and this shows that the USA can be a leader in democracy. My guess is that will take a long time until we see a president in a European country who is not white. The news also speak about the amazing high turnout in this election. This might be high for the US, but does not seem so high for the rest of the world. ...

5 November 2008 · 1 min · Christof Damian

La Generalitat estudia obligar a los usuarios del Bicing a llevar casco | El Periódico de Catalunya | Barcelona

La Generalitat estudia obligar a los usuarios del Bicing a llevar casco | El Periódico de Catalunya | Barcelona: “El conseller de Interior, Joan Saura, ha manifestado hoy que en ’estos momentos’ el Govern mantiene conversaciones con el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona para hacer balance del servicio del Bicing, y ‘considerar la posibilidad’ de obligar a los usuarios a llevar casco.” – That should put a stop at the problem of too many users at least.

4 November 2008 · 1 min · Christof Damian

tapetransfer

Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer. I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples. ...

31 October 2008 · 2 min · Christof Damian
Everything breaks

Everything breaks

First my nice 32" LCD TV broke, which is annoying. But the TV is easily replaceable, it just takes some money. At the moment I am just using an old 21" CRT TV monitor instead, because it is no good to work on any more. But now my beloved Sony TC-KA6ES tape deck broke. It was the best tape deck Sony ever produced. A three motor, three head and Dolby B/C/S monster with manual tape calibration and a weight of half a ton. ...

22 October 2008 · 2 min · Christof Damian

eee pc 901

I progressed a step further in my quest to upgrade my computer systems at home from the outdated and unusable ones I am have at the moment. My workstation is way to slow and has a broken CRT and I have nothing portable at all. Thursday before the phpconference I bought a Eee PC 901 (Linux version of course). As I am planning to get a proper desktop computer with a big screen for my home desk, I just needed something to take to conferences, on trips and maybe sometimes into town. I also use it at home to browse the web, when I don’t want to sit on my desk. ...

11 October 2008 · 2 min · Christof Damian