Some Lichen
No posting for more than one week? Isn’t there anything interesting to write about? There is, but the release of interiorcad keeps me busy.
Due to the lack of daylight in my spare time, I decided for a short hiking trip last sunday, though it was a rather rainy day. I had good luck: The rain stopped as I reached on-site and it began raining again just as I reached the car after the trip.
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I’m just back from a concert at the Tollhaus. There have been three sets. The first one has been performed by Michael Wollny and Tamar Halperin:
Michael Wollny and Tamar Halperin at the Tollhaus
Klangwelten Klangspirale
I just attended a concert of Klangwelten (”sound worlds”) at the Tollhaus. Klangwelten is a world music combo with some long time musicians and some musicians changing every year.
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Fire (pic by wikimedia commons, public domain)
Last night I noticed that the usual phat biannual cold has arrived, so I only had little sleep. As a consequence, I have been in the office a bit earlier today, which immediately led to the »The ones that come earlier are allowed to go a bit later« phenomenon :) .
I usually tend not to save myself in terms of not going to the office just due to a cold. You are just too proud to admit that you have been taken ill, and you don’t want to burden your colleagues with an extra portion of work, especially if it is release time. This regularly results in being ill for several weeks – that’s the price you pay for not taking a couple of days and curing yourself. On the other hand, it just doesn’t matter whether you are sitting in front of your computers at home or in the office. And the plain air on the way to and from the office is just healthy, isn’t it :) ?
Anyway, the summer is finally over. It’s about 10°C on my balcony at 11PM, while the forecast predicts 3-5°C during the night. Being sited on the upper rhine plain, Karlsruhe has a very friendly climate, at least compared to the rest of germany. We rarely see snow, and during the summer, it’s often damn humid.
I have fired up the heating, doing the yearly pressure check and refilling it with some water. The valves of the radiators usually hang a bit, so you need to play with some tools to make them do their job. Not a big deal, it only lasts a couple of minutes. All are up and running now, and I switched the heating off as I will go to bed real soon now™.
ZKM - Media Museum
This weekend, the ZKM (center for arts and media technology) in Karlsruhe celebrated its 20th birthday. Both museums, the media museum and the museum of contemporary art, granted free access to the exhibitions. A great occasion for a cloudy sunday afternoon visit.
ZKM - Museum of contemporary art
One of my all time hobbies (besides computers, software and openstreetmap) is programming and playing synths (»Yes I can«). Today I took some time to hack the Korg Z1. It’s a physical modeling synth which provides models of various instruments, like analogue synthesizers, electric pianos and organs, bowed and plucked strings, or woodwind instruments. I used the latter model to create a sound that sounds like an unknown acoustic instrument, but in fact it’s a newly invented instrument.
One of my favorite musicians is Joe Zawinul, who was one of the rare masters who knew how to program and to play synths. He used similar sounds from a Korg Prophecy, the monophonic predecessor of the Z1. I learned a lot about music by listening to many of his compositions. Additionally they are an excellent source of inspiration and, last but not least, joy. Here’s the sound I programmed in SysEx format:
It’s not finished yet. I still need to program a better vibrato or tremolo for the modulation wheel and some overdrive for the x-y-pad controller. The portamento controller, however, is ready to use as well as the two assignable buttons and, most importantly, the pitch bender (”Jammerhaken”). The pitch bender modulates the reed pressure, resulting in a bend range of about a minor third downwards and two semitones upwards. Due to the pressure reduction, the latter one also result in more noise in the sound and less harmonical tones.
The two buttons will add some hard distortion to the sound, reliably distroying the acoustic feeling of the sound >;-> .
Here’s a simple recording I did in a couple of minutes without any preparation or even mastering, so I apologise for the boring and unstructured playing. But anyway, “a sound says more than thousand words”. The string pad comes from an Acces Virus synth, and all sounds have been played live, without using any MIDI sequencer or multitrack recorder. I hope you like it:
»I like beautiful sounds« (Nasca Octavian Paul)
White Puffball
Under best late summer weather conditions I’ve again visited the black forest to map some ways and paths between Seibelseckle and Hinterlangenbach. That’s today’s route:
A Hoverfly watching me and the bugs
Today I was tricked by my own lazyness. I have two batteries for the N810. Each of them usually lasts for up to 4 hours while being mapping. I am used to charge them immediately when I return from a mapping tour. Seems I messed it up after the last tour. As the first one was drained, I put the second one into the device – and it immediately complained that the battery was low!
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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
At the “Wildsee” (see the topmost image) I found those fungi:
Pilze am Wildsee
Here’s some shot of a woodland strawberry:
Walderdbeere
Besides fungi, I find lichen very interesting. Found on trees, those usually indicate a very good quality of the air:
Flechten
And finally, here’s the absolute highlight of the today’s tour – a viper:
Kreuzotter
The pictures of this posting are not public domain. If you are interested to reuse them, please drop me a line.
Admittedly I’m a bit late, but Nokia yesterday have announced the N900, powered by the Linux based Maemo 5 operating system.
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).
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.
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:
Thanks to HMK for the hint BTW.
Today we’ve been to a concert of Mayra Andrade at this years’s Zeltival. The band consisted of six musicians (Drums, Percussion, Bass, 2 Guitars and Voice), but unfotunately, the Zeltival web presence does not mention the individual musicians.
If you like “world music”, you will like this band. Mayra’s singing is excellent, and the rest of the band features great musicians as well. They played various pieces in several measures, so if you want to learn more about rythmics, this band is an excellent occasion.
I love spending my holidays on greek islands for several reasons. One of them is the excellent traditional food. I appreciate the simplicity and taste of the fresh meat, fish and vegetables. It tastes completely different than the food at greek restaurants in germany. It’s not that the latter ones do a bad job. It’s just the fact that the taste differs.
As tourists, we do wrong anyway. If greek people go to the restaurant, they tend to be a lot of people participating. So a lot of different dishes are put on the table, providing a rich variety of food. As tourists, we often are two people who just order two main dishes and that’s it. So the meals look a bit poor, just providing, for example, some meat and potatoes on the plate. Well, not exactly. If you have good luck, the operator of the restaurant also has a garden where she grows some vegetables. If so, also the main dishes will show some fresh vegetables like tomatoes, paprika, onions and olives.
So here are some pics to wet your appetite. The greeks are masters in preparing very tasty starters. Here’s the “Various Appetizers Plate” of the Mirtos Hotel’s restaurant (which was accompanied by an excellent dark, sweet red wine):
Various Appetizers in Hotel Mirtos
Bull’s eye. I spontaneously visited a concert of Céline Rudolph. Not the worst decision I did today. If you are, like me, a fan of scat singing and Flora Purim, you’ll like Céline as well.
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Subbersach wenn man gerade auf die Pizza wartet :)
I spent easter with friends and the family, doing some mapping but almost no hacking. Fortunately the warm weather now is past and rain is back, so I’m back to bits and bytes :) .
Short notes for today:
_pipeline=gst.parse_launch(’gconfaudiosrc ! capsfilter caps=audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=1,depth=16 ! fakesink name=sink signal-handoffs=true’)
The error message reads as:
gobject.GError: no element “gconfaudiosrc”
I also tried to access the audio drivers directly by replacing gconfaudiosrc by alsasrc and osssrc with no luck. If someone out in the world wild web can share a hint it would be great.
In this floor show, Serdar, a turkish-german cabaret artist, used citations of people like terrorists, politicians and other prominent (or not so prominent) people. The tricky bit was that you didn’t know what was citation or even who was cited.
An excellent show which was well worth the 16€, though it definitely was not for the fainthearted. If you are offended by harsh words, Serdar is not for you. All others might enjoy the show. Tourdates are available via his web presence. If you are unsure, find some samples on Youtube.com.
I’ve just seen Lyambiko at Tollhaus. The current band consists of a classical jazz trio (Marque Lowenthal on piano, Robin Draganic on bass and Heinrich Köbberling on drums) plus Lyambiko as singer.
Photo: Alexander Kowalski, CC-by-SA
