tail -f ZS64.log

Where’s the doctor now?

stb — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:08:06 +0000

The oldest, still running science fiction TV series, Doctor Who, has the Doctor jumping through time and space. A lot.

Now David McCandless has collected all of them in a huge dataset on his blog, waiting for someone to visualize them. As David writes in the Guardian,

I really wanted to do a mega-visualisation of all of the Time Lord’s journeys. But faced the cosmic task of trawling through well over 200 episodes, logging every time TARDIS was hurled through time and space.

Can’t wait for the results to show up!

London Underground’s “secret” tube station

cat — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:24:07 +0000

“This is in fact a fully fitted out fake tube station built by London Underground on the 3rd floor of an office block in West Kensington and is used to teach new employees what goes where and when.”

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2010/07/09/london-undergrounds-secret-tube-station/

Lazy Coding = Video Game Stalker

cat — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:13:44 +0000

Was passiert, wenn man nicht auf alle Videospiel Details achtet? Statt eines Kumpels ein Stalker! Ich hab mich Tod gelacht — die Horrorfilmmusik bringt es.

http://www.b3ta.com/links/Stalked_by_Dr_Watson

Panorama movie of Texas Stadium demolition

stb — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:50:49 +0000

Texas Stadium, previous home of the Dallas Cowboys, was demolished on April 11th. Immersive Media recorded the demolition of the main structure using a 360° high speed video camera, so you can pan and zoom around while the stadium is collapsing around you. I don’t know if this is the first such recording, but it certainly is a nice application of panoramic photo and video recording, so that you can experience something from a position you would not want to be in personally. Too bad the camera got knocked out about halfway through the sequence.

Screenshot of Immersive Media's flash viewer, displaying the demolition of Texas Stadium

via BoingBoing

Identifying and reparing broken MP3s

stb — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:25:15 +0000

I only recently learned about iTunes being able to transcode music into 128kbit/s AAC on the fly, while syncing to the iPhone. Quite useful, since I’m keeping my music in 256 or 320 kbit/s MP3. Using the lower bitrate AAC on the iPhone still gives me decent quality on the go, while saving space for more music and apps.

Only one annoying problem: over the years and moving the music library from machine to machine, some files got corrupted. When I come across one during playback and I’m sufficiently annoyed by the problem, I’ll simply delete it and re-rip it, or buy a copy from the store. However, when iTunes tries to transcode all the files I want synced to my iPhone, it stumbles over files with encoding problems, and stops syncing. And the error message doesn’t even identify the file it’s having problems with, only the song title. Bummer.

iTunes does not appear to have a way to check and mark files with encoding problems, so you have to rely on identifying problematic files by playing them. Not very convenient. Luckily, I found MP3 Scan+Repair, a Mac program that will check a batch of files, identify broken ones, and even try to repair them.

You can drag files from the Finder or iTunes into MP3sar’s main window, and it will immediately start scanning them. Using the display filter buttons in the toolbar, you can show only the problematics files, select them, and let the program try and repair them. In my limited testing so far, M3SAR does a good job of identifying and repairing the files, even if some problems will only fix the file format, but not remove audible errors. But for being able to quickly see which of the twelve different versions of My Funny Valentine is stopping iTunes from syncing my iPhone is absolutely worth it.

Getting started with IPv6

stb — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:19:36 +0000

Getting started with IPv6 on FreeBSD with Hurricane Electric’s free Tunnelbroker service is really straightforward. Since I’m behind a residential ADSL connection, my IPv4 address changes every 24 hours, so whenever that happens, the Tunnelbroker needs to learn my new address. We’ve put up a quick how-to on the wiki on how to do that.

Probleme der Sanitärtechnik

Andreas — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:51:38 +0000

Es ist doch immer wieder verwunderlich, was für Probleme in der Sanitärtechnik aufzutauchen scheinen und mit welchen phantasievollen Produkten man den Kunden versucht zu erfreuen.

Windows Hasst Langweilige Desktops

cat — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:45:59 +0000

Man musst Microsoft lieben…ein endlose Quelle von technische Humor!

Von Microsoft Knowledge Base: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977346

“The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2″

Wenn Brücken zu klein und Schiffe zu groß werden

Andreas — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:53:06 +0000

Kaum baut man eine Hängebrücke, ist diese auch schon gleich wieder nicht hoch genug – oder zumindest fast. Die Storebælt-Brücke (Große Belt-Brücke) ist noch keine 12 Jahre alt, und schon wird es knapp wenn die Oasis of the Seas darunter durch fährt.

“Oasis of the Sea” unter der Storebælt-Brücke

Feldbahnblog

Andreas — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:29:31 +0000

Für die Feldbahngruppe im Eisenbahnmuseum des VVM in Aumühle habe ich ein Blog gestartet. Dieses ist z.Zt. noch nicht verlinkt da noch an den Grundlegenden Einstellungen gebaut wird.

Dies ist ein Test um mal zu sehen wie viele Nachrichten denn so erzeugt werden würden und ob es sinnvoll sein kann für den Verein ein Blog zu betreiben. Dies kann dann natürlich auch unter der offiziellen Webadresse dann irgendwann mal laufen.

Screenshot des Feldbahnblogs