Witness of time: versus – Past, Forgotten

Monday, May 27th, 2013 | Activities, Music | No Comments

versusThis is as far as I will ever get to a stage (and you’re most welcome to prove me wrong).

I still reminiscence about the time when I was part of a band, because I really had a breeze rehearsing. It was the late 90s and I managed to get my best friends together to become ‘versus’.

It’s such a pity we had a major dispute at the brink of stage time and the band fell apart (respectively continued without me as “Psaar”, surname of the last member to join the band). ‘Fun’ fact: nobody knew anybody before I introduced them to each other. Yeah, life’s a bitch :) Today it seems to me that these guys where just not the friends I expected them to be. What a pity.

Son: Yeah, my dad’s weird he gets like that when he’s writing.

Writer: I'll miss him forever. I never had any friends later on like the ones
I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?

Anyway, the fact that I was weeks apart from my first ‘real’ gig will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. This is still a major task on my bucket list.

A few recordings of that time got saved … they are simple tape recordings, yet still absolutely original and a witness of of a very influential time period.

This is a song I wrote back in 1998 performed by the original ‘versus’:

Past Forgotten

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Donnie Darko. A tiny declaration of love.

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 | Movies, Reviews | 1 Comment

Donnie Darko PosterI just listened to Gary Jules’s “Mad World” and it made me realize how much I adore “Donnie Darko“. It’s one of my perfect 10 ratings on IMDb and its in IMDB’s Top 250.

You can go suck a fuck!

I first saw it attending the Fantasy Filmfest of 2001 in Cologne. It was one of the rare moments when cinema just delivered. The curtains opened and from the opening scene on I was hooked and taken on a strange yet beautiful trip.

28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. That is when the world will end.

We follow Donnie, a troubled teenager, that embarks on a journey of imagination, love, fear and -last but not least- time travel and a monstrous rabbit. The atmosphere changes from dreamy to disturbing at will and for some reason yet unknown to me I could relate to it a lot.

I promise that one day, everything’s gonna be better for you.

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Ein Brötchen in Zons. Lecker.

Friday, May 3rd, 2013 | Activities, Photography | No Comments

So, das schöne Wetter Anfang Mai musste ich ausnutzen – und welchen schöneren Grund gibt es nach Zons zu fahren, als sich ein deftiges Wurstbrötchen am Rhein zu snacken? :P

Track@RunKeeper (Post in German, because “Wurstbrötchen” is such a nice word)

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May Day 2013 – biking Schöller / Sambatrasse

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 | Activities, Photography | No Comments

Just a random trip, this time off my beaten tracks. Wanted to check out the lime works and see for myself that this is hardly a place to fancy a swim – unfortunately. I also wanted to check out Schöller because I’ve been to Kindergarten there. No recollections though.

For the complete route and stats visit my RunKeeper profile.

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Drumming like Animal!!
(This time multiple exclamation marks are just fine)

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 | Activities, Misc, Music | No Comments

Tonight, my drum-kit got the worst beating so far. Animal would have approved.

I broke a stick on my mesh head snare for heaven’s sake! It was worth it though. (Guess I hit the rim at some point?!)

Props go to The Machine’s “Caterpillar’s Mushroom“. Dim the light, lean back and enjoy a pretty intense roller-coaster ride.

The take-off at 13:00 just blows my mind!

If you need a lift home after that I suggest you try Hills’ Master Sleeps. Farewell!

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Automatically create genre playlists of your music collection

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments

This script will create playlists based on the tags of your mp3 and flac files. Prerequisites: id3v2/metaflac command line tool (sudo apt-get install id3v2 metaflac) and tagged mp3/flac files.

Note: The id3v2 command only works up to version 2.3 of the id3v2 spec (which is pretty much the default), so this script will not work on v2.4 files. It seems a lot of people still use 2.3 as 2.4 does not give a lot of advantages and 2.3 is way more compliant with mp3 playback devices. I just came across this issue because I use EasyTag for tagging and this tool writes v2.4 by default. After setting EasyTag’s prefs to v2.3 I was good to go :) 

#!/bin/bash
 
# set extraction command chain for each file type
EXTMP3="id3v2 -l \"_FILE\" | sed -n \"s/TCON (Content type): \(.*\) (.*)/\1/p\""
EXTFLAC="metaflac --show-tag=GENRE \"_FILE\" | sed -n \"s/GENRE=\(.*\)/\1/p\""
 
# delete old playlists
rm *.m3u
 
function createPlaylist {
  while IFS= read -r -d '' FILE; do
    echo Processing \"$FILE\"
    GENRE=`eval ${2/_FILE/$FILE}`
    if [ "$GENRE" ]
      then
        echo "$FILE" >> "$GENRE.m3u"
    fi
    echo "$FILE" >> "All.m3u"
  done < <(find . -name "*.$1" -print0 | sort -z)
}
 
createPlaylist mp3 "$EXTMP3"
createPlaylist flac "$EXTFLAC"

Basically we loop over all files and extract the genre’s nice name using a file type specific chain of commands. If a genre is found the file name is appended to the playlist that is named like the genre itself. Additionally an “All” playlist is created that holds every file found, even the ones that have no genre set.

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A weekend in Brighton and London

Sunday, February 24th, 2013 | Activities, Sites | No Comments

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“fast” JIRA and Confluence setup on a small VPS

Sunday, January 6th, 2013 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments

I recently stumbled upon my old “fast firewalling for developers with iptables” blog and also read the comment (yeah, one!) asking how to go on from here, maybe set up JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian really fast. So here we go. We will install JIRA and Confluence using MySQL as the database, allowing only HTTPS connections. Bear in mind that this is not an enterprise setup, it’s again targeted at individuals who want to run these tools in a non-critical private small VPS environment maybe to evaluate the tools or collaborate with a friend. This is going to be easy and straightforward, no fancy admin stuff, no over the top security, simply getting the stuff up and running.
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Setting up my electric guitar (the fast way)

Sunday, December 30th, 2012 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment

My e-drum set-up took me a day (@see previous post). The (preliminary) guitar set-up less than 5 minutes. I simply had to whrock fast.

Guitar setup

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Building a “silent” e-drum platform

Friday, December 28th, 2012 | Gadgets, Photography, Tech-savvy | No Comments

When I am not busy working my immaterial day-job I like to fiddle with handicrafts. This time I wanted to build a platform that decouples my new e-drum set from the concrete floor for reasons of noise reduction and neighbour amity. First, it was just plywood elevated by layers of bubble wrap, but then I fancied some power outlets and light. I am pretty happy with the looks of the outcome, even though I guess it’s not significantly less noisy :cool:

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