Archive for August, 2009

Fauna and Flora pics collected while mapping the Black Forest

Monday, August 31st, 2009
Pic of the Wildsee as seen from the hill above it

Pic of the Wildsee as seen from the hill above it

On my last holiday I mapped some missing trails and paths in the Black Forest, between Seibelseckle and Ruhestein:

Three times I have been asked by other tourists how to get to destination X. Three times I could answer the questions using openstreetmaps on the Nokia N810, and three times I gave away the german language flyers.

I’m still disappointed by the tracks that the WBT-201 records. The accuracy is horrible, and the bluetooth connection goes down frequently, though the devices are just a couple of millimeters apart.

Besides that, I took some pictures.

Here’s some dead wood, which was perforated by some “furniture beetles”:

Totholz

Totholz

At the “Wildsee” (see the topmost image) I found those fungi:

Pilze am Wildsee

Pilze am Wildsee

Here’s some shot of a woodland strawberry:

Walderdbeere

Walderdbeere

Besides fungi, I find lichen very interesting. Found on trees, those usually indicate a very good quality of the air:

Flechten

Flechten

And finally, here’s the absolute highlight of the today’s tour – a viper:

Kreuzotter

Kreuzotter

The pictures of this posting are not public domain. If you are interested to reuse them, please drop me a line.

Mapping the woods in northern Hesse

Sunday, August 30th, 2009
Michelskopfsee

Michelskopfsee

I’m just back from a small holiday trip. I had the occasion to try out a some mountain bikes for the very first time in my life. The bikes have been very good, so climbing some hills was just plain fun.
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N900 and Maemo 5 officially announced by Nokia

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Admittedly I’m a bit late, but Nokia yesterday have announced the N900, powered by the Linux based Maemo 5 operating system.

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Freifahrt auf Kosten des KVV – wie man Kunden bei der Stange hält

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Sorry to my international readers, this post is in german language. It is about the user friendlyness of the local public transport provider, KVV.

Gestern Abend stand ich nach einer Radtour mit meinem Rad an einer KVV-Haltestelle und wollte mit der S-Bahn zurück nach Karlsruhe fahren. Zwar gab es am Bahnsteig keinen Fahrkartenautomaten, aber einerseits finden sich üblicherweise in den Bahnen welche, und die Zugführer verkaufen notfalls ebenfalls Karten.

Leider war der Automat in der Bahn außer Betrieb und der Zugführer hatte auch keine Fahrkarten mehr. Er beschied mir daher kurzerhand, dass ich vom KVV eingeladen sei und nichts zu zahlen bräuchte. Ich hätte eher erwartet, dass er mich wieder aussteigen lässt. Der KVV aber nahm das fehlende Ticketangebot auf seine eigene Kappe. Das ist zumindest bemerkenswert.

Zuerst war ich verblüfft ob der Großzügigkeit. Unter dem Strich aber denke ich, dass der KVV so das bessere Geschäft macht. Gewiss, ihm entgeht die Einnahme einer Einzelfahrt. Aber künftig weiß ich als Kunde, dass der KVV mich notfalls auch dann transportiert, wenn es mir nicht gelingen sollte, ein Ticket aufzutreiben.

Hätte ich die Bahn wieder verlassen müssen, wäre ich wohl oder übel mit dem Rad zurück nach Baden gefahren. Künftig hätte ich den KVV dann gar nicht mehr in Betracht gezogen. So aber werde ich auch das nächste Mal gerne den KVV in Anspruch nehmen.

Fazit: Gestern Abend haben alle Beteiligten gewonnen (und ich meine damit nicht, dass ich umsonst fahren durfte).

106 Kilometers mapping tour crossing three provinces

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

On a wonderful sunny and warm late summer day (it still is about 22°C in the middle of the night) I did a 106km mapping tour by bike:

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Switching stops via MIDI in Aeolus 0.8.2

Monday, August 24th, 2009
Aeolus

Aeolus

In my youth, I used to play the pipe organ in the village where I grew up. Nowadays I have less time to play my instruments, and if I have, I’m most often playing synthesizers (or even guitars) instead of walking to a church and get access to a real pipe organ.

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Qtractor and instrument definition files

Monday, August 24th, 2009
Qtractor Main Window

Qtractor Main Window

After Simple Sysexxer is finally available for testing, I found some time to play with my instruments and Qtractor, an audio and MIDI sequencer.

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Mapping Hiking Trails of the Black Forest

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
Black Forest Hiking Trail

Black Forest Hiking Trail

Under perfect late-summer weather conditions it was a joy to track some hiking trails of the black forest. The API has been down for maintenance this weekend, so I could not use osm2go for live editing. Instead I used some home-grown software to record (annotated) waypoints while being out. The API meanwhile is up and running again, so bringing the stuff into the database was done in a couple of minutes back home.

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Simple Sysexxer 0.2 beta released

Friday, August 21st, 2009
Simple Sysexxer 0.2

Simple Sysexxer 0.2

I have just released Simple Sysexxer 0.2 beta. See its dedicated page on this blog for details about download and usage.

I need feedback how it works with various flavours of MIDI instruments. If you can share success stories, bug reports or even feature requests, please let me know.

Mapping hiking trails in Rhineland-Palatinate

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Today we have been hiking in the woods of Rhineland-Palatinate. The weather was just right for this purpose – a warm and sunny afternoon in shady and cool forests.

We have chosen the forest near Bruchweiler-Bärenbach, where a lot of trails are still missing:

The recent version of osm2go has no explicit save function anymore. Instead, it only saves your edits at application’s quit. This is a bit dangerous. If you are mapping during a three hour hiking tour, it can happen that osm2go crashes or the system shuts down due to a drained battery. In both cases, it is likely that you will lose your edits.

I guess there will be some autosave feature soon, so this issue will be obsolete soon. All in all it’s a good thing to get rid of the explicit save feature and do it “transparantly” in the background. It was always a pain to fiddle in the menus to get some stuff saved.

Simple Sysexxer Source added to Sourceforge SVN

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

I have just imported the current source code of Simple Sysexxer into Sourceforge‘s SVN server. To grab your copy, just use the following command:
svn co https://sysexxer.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sysexxer/

Additionally, sysexxer.sf.net now redirects to the Simple Sysexxer page on this blog.

Issues mapping with a Nokia N810 and a Wintec WBT-201 (aka G-Rays 2)

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Two days ago I did some mapping in the Bienwald again, from Neuburg up to Schaidt:

I used the recently purchased Wintec logger. The tracklogs of the Wintec seem to be not as accurate as the ones I got from my previous GPSr. Furthermore the Nokia N810 loses the bluetooth connection to the logger every now and then, without any obvious reason. In the worst case, you need to reboot the tablet to reestablish a connection.
Anyway, if you can cope with the aforementioned issues, you will get a good mapping combo, especially if you use osm2go for mapping.

Biréli Lagrène live in Herxheim

Sunday, August 16th, 2009
Biréli Lagrène live in Herxheim

Biréli Lagrène live in Herxheim

I’ve just been at a open air concert of Biréli Lagrène in Herxheim. It was a perfect warm summer evening at a perfect location. They locked the main street and put the stage directly on the street:

The first set was merely like a traditional jam session. The second set, however, was exactly my taste. Biréli playing the guitar is pure fun to listen, and the rest of the band also did a very good job. My only complaint is that the keyboards have been a bit too low, so it was difficult to follow the playing of Michael Lecoq. He played a Nord Stage, a Nord Lead 2 and a Korg Triton Extreme. I’ve played the Nord Stage every now and then at the local trumpet store. It sounds marvellous, but I’m not comfortable yet with its user interface.

The band:

  • Guitar: Bireli Lagrene
  • Bass: Hadrien Feraud
  • Drums: Nicolas Viccaro
  • Keyboards: Michael Lecoq
  • Saxophone: Franck Wolf
  • DJ: Frederic Angarny

Thanks to HMK for the hint BTW.

New toy: The WBT-201 aka G-Rays 2 GPS receiver and logger

Friday, August 14th, 2009
WBT-201/G-Rays 2

WBT-201/G-Rays 2

As my previous GPSr surprisingly died, I needed a replacement. As I lost a track on my N810 every now and then, I decided to go for a receiver which also can do logging. Less surprisingly I bought a WBT-201 aka G-Rays 2 GPS receiver. Some other mappers use it, and I had the occasion to use and test it about one year ago. The size of the device is just the size of a match box, so it fits easily into any of your pockets.

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How to successfully repel a content customer

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Two years ago I did a contract with a telco. For 30€ I got a flatrate for both wired telephony and a 2mbit DSL line. The contract included a duration of at least 24 months, which prolongs automatically for 12 further months if none of the partners cancelled it three months before the renewal.

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Simple Sysexxer 0.2 Beta available

Monday, August 10th, 2009
Simple Sysexxer 0.2 Beta

Simple Sysexxer 0.2 Beta

I just sent out an electronic message to various people who hopefully won’t be able to detect any bugs :) . If you like to help with testing, please do not hesitate to drop me a line. If no major issues occur, I’m inclined to release it before the end of this week.

Details about it can be found at it’s dedicated page of this blog.

Black Forest Mapping baffled

Monday, August 10th, 2009
Blumax

Blumax

For some time now, I used this Blumax GPSr and I was very pleased with it. It is a bluetooth GPS mouse without any logging capabilities, but it always got a fix very quickly and always gave a good position, even under aggravating circumstances. A nice and small device which just does its job, nothing else.

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Adding Drag’n'Drop-Support to a QT4 application

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

While working on Simple Sysexxer, I wished to add drag’n'drop support to open files. Thanks to QT4 it was quite simple. The following code has basically been derived from the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 and slightly modified to fit into the existing code.
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SimpleSysexxer Resurrection

Monday, August 3rd, 2009
SimpleSysexxer Resurrected

SimpleSysexxer Resurrected

There are various tools for Windows and Mac OS available to backup and restore the memory contents of MIDI devices. For Linux there’s none except for amidi (a command line tool which does a great job BTW) and Jsynthlib. The latter one does not contain drivers for all of my devices and does not act as an ALSA sequencer client as I’d need it. So I was looking for a simple, generic tool with a graphical user interface, but to no avail.

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Running a Firewire Audio Device on Linux

Saturday, August 1st, 2009
QJackControl Firewire Settings

QJackControl Firewire Settings

Meanwhile I got the Phonic Helixboard Universal PHHB24U mixer connected to my Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope powered Dell Precision M 4300 notebook via IEEE 1394 (aka firewire). The basic setup is simple for an experienced Linux user, but not straightforward for an average computer user. So here are some hints what to do to get such a device up and running.

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