The Ruhestein hill, used for skiing during the winter months
In the late morning hours the temperature in Karlsruhe was about 18°C. Usually the Ruhestein is about 6°C less, but surprisingly its webcam displayed 18° as well, so I immediately grabbed the bike and went to the station, heading towards Baiersbronn, Black Forest (about 500m).
Gudereit LCR Trekking Series bicyle
During the last four years my biking trips almost completely took place in the upper Rhine plane, occasionally touching the borders of the Vosges Mountains or the Palatinate Forest. I tried to avoid inclines, as my bike with an 8 gear Shimano hub was not the best companion for such trips.
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Landscape near Baiersbronn, Black Forest
The »Tour de Murg« is a biking trip from Freudenstadt, Black Forest, to Rastatt. It’s about 70km downhill – a great trip for lazy bikers like me :) . I did this trip four years ago including a lot of initial mapping. What surprised me most was the fact that lots of mapping details still are missing, are not up-to-date or are even totally wrong (see Gausbach).
Heavy Weather brewing near Wissembourg
Since it was obvious that I need a more reliable bike, I’m looking for the right device. A friend once sent me a PDF of a very attractive gadget. I also considered other options, but the more I was looking for alternatives, the more I wanted exactly this one.
Bergamont Satelite
Back in 2006, I bought a Bergamont Satelite 8 bike (about 600€), mainly to get to work. Shortly after that, I detected that biking is fun and bought a Garmin eTrex Venture Cx (about 300€), together with routable City Navigator Europe map data (about 200€). It just took a couple of days until I understood that the map material was made for car routing, not for outdoor activities. A lot of minor roads for biking were missing, and setting the device to do bike routing just did car routing, except that it omitted highway types like motorways. But heck, I wanted to know the shortest possible biking trail from my home to France.
Incognito@Zeltival
In the evening hours of a warm and sunny sunday, a concert of Incognito took place at the Zeltival (which now more or less is a Hallival, as the Tollhaus built a new large hall during the last year). I’m not exactly a fan of funk, but as I’ve never seen Jean-Paul Maunick and his group live, there was no excuse not to attend.
Many Jazz masters forgot that music was invented to entertain people in the first place. Thus Jazz often is music from musicians – written and played for musicians. I guess all those weird chords, scales and rhythms might have less meaning to the average listener.
Incognito’s funk compacts Jazz into a mass compatible form. They use weird chords and scales as well, but they are not changing them every two beats. This essence gets served in a grooving container, enriched by three black singers (two female, one male) and spiced by a section of three brass instruments. A quite interesting mixture indeed.
The sound in the hall was not the best, except near the mixing desk – my preferred location when attending concerts. Some songs have been built from simple chords (hello II – V), but some even used really weird harmonics. Jean-Paul played the guitar (which I seldom could hear) plus some MIDI controller triggering drum and percussion sounds. He left the solos to the other musicians. Mike Cooper was mainly addicted to an electric piano sound (Yamaha Motif) and some occasional organ (Roland Phantom) and clavinet (Korg Triton) sounds. He used his Roland JP 8000 mainly for some synth effects.
The concert was not exactly cheap, but well worth the bucks. Dividing the 28€ by 120 minutes results in about 25¢ per minute. That’s comparable to the price of an audio CD. OTOH you can listen to the CD more than one time :) .
A very nice concert. I enjoyed every minute. Thanks girls and guys.
Lœwenstein Castle
As the weather is fine at the moment (and my bike is broken again), it is hiking time. Slowly it becomes difficult to find unmapped terrain, as openstreetmap.org meanwhile does not only attract car drivers but also hikers and (mountain) bikers. In the region where I grew up a lot of medieval castles can be found, and I visited them all. Time to resurrect the hobby of my youth as long there are still trails missing in the woods.
Quelques Guis
Aujourd’hui j’ai éte en Alsace, pour cartographier quelques chemins au bord du Rhin.
Nokia N900, Smartphone with Maemo 5 operating system
I did it. SCNR.
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This winter was a cold one, and there was enough (though not much) snow for winter sport activities at the black forest. Currently it’s melting, which is due to spring, not global warming :) .
Daylight saving time starts next sunday, so I hope I can reopen the biking season. There are two obstacles, though: the weather forecast and the fact that my office hours tend to regularly extend beyond 7PM.
Surely not. Since my last post, a lot of interesting things happened. It was intentional that I reduced the frequency of postings. Firstly, I never did post about anything I did. I mainly posted about openstreetmap, mapping, gadgets and hacking. Secondly, posting takes time which I wanted to spend for, well, other things (yes, I have a private life, too :) . Thirdly, I thought it was not that interesting to read about the 4857th mapping tour and to see the 95836th fungi pic.
More postings will follow. But the frequency will surely be less than before.
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.
