Misc

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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Everyday Life’s Insights I – Cold Blow-Drying

Monday, September 10th, 2012 | Insights, Misc | No Comments


Kommt man verschwitzt nach Hause ist es angenehm den Föhn auf “kalt” zu stellen und auf sich zu richten. Klingt komisch? Ist aber so. Duschen *könnte* man auch, jedoch schwitzt man nach Ausdauersport auch nach, soll heißen direkt Duschen bringt nur bedingt was. Wenn ich nicht mehr transpiriere geh ich duschen … versprochen.

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Goodbye Mint, Hello Fedora

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 | Misc | No Comments

Seems Mint 13 finally finished me. I have to say that Mint 10 was the last “flawless” version of Mint (I’ve been there since Mint 4 “Daryna”). Right now I am still using Mint 12 on my home machine, tried 13 on my business laptop – and decided that I don’t want to take part in the desktop environment wars any more. Again, the multi-monitor setup in Mint was a pain and trying to preserve the Gnome 2 / XP way of working is a huge step back IMHO. I am okay with Gnome 3 (didn’t try Unity yet) and I was looking for a “pure” unfiddled Linux experience. After checking some major distros I decided to give Fedora 17 a more serious go and I have to say I did not regret it. “Mint” Linux, no clutter, bleeding edge (wow, finally including a mulit-monitor setup that seems to work). You could argue that setting up the system takes longer, because Fedora does not ship with things like proper multimedia support or propitiatory software like Flash, VirtualBox or Skype. I think that’s pretty kewl. You should understand why mp3 playback is not available out-of-the-box and that you have to explicitly install it at your own will.

Anyway, right now I am compiling a few Fedora 17 post installation tasks that will show there’s a bit more to do (no Gnome 3 extension installed by default – very pure indeed :) ), stay tuned.

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Five toys I’d like to call my own

Monday, February 27th, 2012 | Gadgets, Misc, Tech-savvy | 5 Comments

“Honey, we pretty much have everything now …”

I just have to share my thoughts on things I’d like to have yet cannot purchase for reasons such as money, time, sanity and the like. › Continue reading

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A Studio Ghibli homage

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Activities, Misc, Movies | 1 Comment

Today I invited Totoro to stay.

Ever since we moved into our “new” flat a few years ago we could not decide what to do with our living room walls. I suggested that we could try to draw the Studio Ghibli logo – namely Totoro – next to the TV. The other side of the telly got decorated with the beautiful postcards that come with the German Blu-ray edition of Arietty and Laputa. Now I feel like a true fanboy :)

And this is how I will enjoy my films from now on:

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Official announcement: midlife crisis

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 | Misc | No Comments

Yesterday I had lunch with my wife and talked to her about how the things I do on a daily basis seem to make (no) sense, and that people should dare to do what they really want more often than what they think other people expect of them. Looked like a bad case of the Mondays, but it felt like my (first) midlife crisis to me! :shock:

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The mind is a miraculous thing indeed

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 | Misc, Tech-savvy | No Comments

Sometimes you wake up from a dream and wonder where the mind is getting all these crazy ideas from. A few days ago I experienced something even more freaky – subconscious ideas surfacing! What? Well, just imagine telling yourself a joke and still laughing at the punch line. Doesn’t make sense, because if you tell the joke you should know the outcome, right? Okay, here is the story:

A colleague of mine brought some Google Android give-away stickers from W-JAX. I took the black one with the woman, man, and Android:

As if dreaming about that sticker is not freaky enough I dreamt that I wanted to present this sticker as a present to a friend of mine, let’s call him Moe:

“Here Moe, I got a sticker for you”
“Oh, that’s nice, but unfortunately the LEDs on my keyboard don’t work”

And I was like “What?” and then I realized, that if applied to a keyboard the LEDs of Num, Caps and Scroll lock are supposed to illuminate the eyes of these little buggers. What a neat idea. Only problem: these stickers are not supposed to work as keyboard LED attire in the real world. My mind made it up without telling my consciousness. This still sounds paradox to me. Anybody reading this experienced in fixing minds?! ;)

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Shrinking a bloated VirtualBox disk image

Sunday, October 9th, 2011 | Misc, Tech-savvy | No Comments

I like to keep my house clean. I was always puzzled by ever growing vdis (VirtualBox disk images). Just today I did a clean install of WinXP Home SP1 and installed SP3 afterwards (a pity the online photo printing software my wife uses is only available for Windoze). After getting rid of everything that bloated my VM in the first place I was still sitting on a 2.6 Gig image. Seemed a tiny bit too much, so I looked for a way to make sure the vdi only holds real data, not “empty” space.

The trick I am about to show you made me decrease the real size of my vdi from 2.6 to 1.5 Gig. That’s pretty neat and you should be able to free up even more space if you already used your VM quite heavily (more fragmented thus more space available to optimize).

It’s simple: first defrag your virtual host’s file system, second make sure the empty space is really empty (I used nullfile 1.2). After that, use VirtualBox‘s command line tool VBoxManage to recompress the image:

VirtualBox 3.x:

VBoxManage modifyvdi WinXP.vdi compact

VirtualBox 4.x:

VBoxManage modifyhd --compact WinXP.vdi

That’s it. This trick may be rather old, yet helped me save some bytes. Not that I actually needed that extra Gig, but hey, why should I waste it? :)

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Thursday, August 18th, 2011 | Misc | 3 Comments

 days,  hours,  minutes (~  years or  months or  weeks)

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OMG! Childhood memory flashback!

Monday, April 11th, 2011 | Activities, Misc, Tech-savvy | No Comments

At work I was about to do a post mortem analysis of a few things that happened in the past. First, I wanted to visualize what happened when. As I wanted to get inspired how to best present a timeline I googled “timeline” and immediate found the Lego Brick 50th Anniversary Timeline. Click! Scanning the timeline I came across the 497 Galaxy Explorer from 1979. Oh how I assembled and disassembled this beauty over and over again when I was a kid. I even remember the bricks and my brain gives me the impression of some vacant Perry Rhodan radio play in the background…

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