tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71079997934083553742011-12-10T18:57:57.017+01:00A personal log of adventures with gadgets, motorcycles, travels and life.Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.comBlogger331100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-55708972004189195152010-09-20T20:16:00.001+02:002010-09-20T20:16:08.370+02:00

No to SD DemostrationOriginally uploaded by Sean LewthwaiteYou may know that the nationalists party in Sweden just managed to enter parliament for the first time. The reaction of the Stockholm people is quick and concise: they're all out on the streets protesting against racism. I found this photo on flickr, my contact Sean was out on the street with his camera and managed to take this fantastic

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-11831832966628809822010-06-25T14:58:00.005+02:002010-06-25T15:10:58.009+02:00

You know, when the new iPhone 4 was shown to the world, The Steve raved about how the sleek design was achieved by totally making the antennas part of frame. I scratched my head and said to myself, wow, if this works it'll be quite an achievement. Antennas don't like touching. Especially not near the ends where the electric field builds up.Now, looks like I was too pessimistic about the matter.

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-34003354238648703802010-05-20T11:27:00.001+02:002010-05-20T11:27:31.395+02:00

Tour EiffelOriginally uploaded by thinkfatOn Sunday evening Eva and I returned from a long weekend in Paris. We went there with our friends Andrea and Sergio to spend some time in Paris for leisure and to take photos, of course. Sergio and I also went on a night tour with a photo guide, Gilles, who showed us around and gave tips for nice motives in the City of Lights.I will be posting some photos

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-64383668260832712312010-02-18T23:39:00.003+01:002010-02-18T23:46:19.796+01:00

P1120749.JPGOriginally uploaded by thinkfatI like carnival parades! There's no other opportunity to take photos of smiling people, enjoying themselves, in colorful costumes, actually wanting to be seen.This was my second year joining the crowd in Mayence during the Carnival Monday parade. I love to go there. It is a relaxed and joyful atmosphere and you can get really close to the people,

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-3432354731792504752010-01-24T13:24:00.002+01:002010-01-24T14:07:27.580+01:00

In a previous post I ranted against a local "Subways" shop as a prime example for bad food in Darmstadt. I want to share an example for good food today.Asian restaurants are often laden with kitschy decoration and the menu is mainstreamed to comfort the local taste. Also you have the same dishes with only small variations everywhere. Traditional style cooking is rarely found anywhere.A very nice

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-38358530805323291322010-01-15T17:11:00.004+01:002010-01-16T13:09:40.879+01:00

Apart from the obvious Pun, this is what unfortunately happened to me a few days ago. I was buying some snack before entering the train back home at Paris Gare de l'Est and was probably spotted tucking my wallet away. I put it in an outside jacket pocket, a circumstance that immediately retaliated itself as I stood waiting by the platform for my colleagues to arrive.I was approached by an Asian

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-13614137950846833952009-12-08T08:47:00.005+01:002009-12-08T14:59:13.827+01:00

Look what the cat just brought in. Holy cow. Only miscreants and evil-doers fear Google tapping their into their privacy, but the Righteous have nothing to worry about. And it's all the governments fault, anyway.But this doesn't come as a surprise, does it? Google is an information broker so how can they share anyones concern about information not being another good to sell. However, it's

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-59050528222888452962009-12-06T19:28:00.003+01:002009-12-06T19:58:03.139+01:00

Google announces their own public DNS now. Some seem to think it's a good move and a fundamental threat to ISPs who are diluting the neutrality of the net. However, I tend to side with the conspirationalists who see it as an attempt of Google to gather even more information about what people do online.Using the Google DNS you basically allow them insight into any connection your PC performs while

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-22640779072456774242009-11-09T11:38:00.007+01:002009-11-09T16:28:57.056+01:00

I only recently found time to process and upload some photos I took during our summer holiday this year. Instead of going abroad we decided to travel Germany, there are quite a few places we've never been. This year we went East, visiting Thuringia and Saxony. I've uploaded a selection to Flickr, with more to come. Enjoy today some impressions collected visiting Dresden, which marked the end

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-32228677938165861112009-07-16T22:33:00.003+02:002009-07-16T23:14:26.517+02:00

In a recent interview with the Digital Photography Review web magazine a Nokia representative talks about convergence devices like the N86 mobile phone incorporating an 8MP digital still camera and aiming to replace digital compact cameras in many peoples' pockets. Read the story here.Seemingly unrelated, The Register has an article about a provider in the United Arab Emirates pushing a trojan

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-70645328617544730462009-07-01T22:07:00.041+02:002009-07-02T09:46:39.485+02:00

A couple of days ago I acquired an old Canon A1 SLR camera. Someone was selling off old photo equipment on Ebay and so with the camera came a small collection of four lenses. One of them is a Tokina 135mm f2.8 telephoto. It's quite an impressive item, looking much sturdier mechanically than its Canon FD counterpart. It's made of all aluminium, even the aperture ring is made of metal. It feels

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-30956020435155093552009-05-07T22:10:00.019+02:002009-05-12T14:34:03.364+02:00

Since a few days I'm officially a contributor to digikam! I even got my old KDE SVN account reactivated and updated and so I can directly contribute code to the project. It started with a bug in the lens correction plug-in I fixed that turned into developing a method to access sub-pixel image data. Currently I'm working on an additional tool for digikam's batch queue manager. This nice feature is

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-66621449285486457842009-04-28T20:54:00.023+02:002009-04-29T14:32:35.479+02:00

I remember I didn't write anything about my Easter holidays yet. I went skiing in the Italian Dolomites, to a nice little town in the province of Trento named Moena. Its in the middle of Fassa Valley, a valley in the region of Trentino-Alto Adige where people speak an ancient Rhaeto-Romance language called Ladin. I know this region since I was a kid, we used to go skiing there with all of our

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-40837119687617042862009-04-26T22:31:00.001+02:002009-04-26T22:31:48.292+02:00

Old Gear, tooOriginally uploaded by thinkfatToday a big jumble sale of photo equipment was held at a university facility, it takes place only once a year and it was the first time I went there. It was quite amazing, the mass of gear for sale was huge. Wide selection of stuff from all old and recent camera makers. The selection of Canon FD lenses was not too rich, though.Still, I was quite

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-56288619544758401512009-03-29T14:28:00.010+02:002009-03-29T19:47:45.760+02:00

Sony Vaio Z21 News:Some good stuff to talk about since the last weekend update. Lots of activity around Z21 support in the sony-laptop platform module, enough to publish an updated 0.8 release, which Eva has done already through the usual channel. A big update patch was posted on the linux-acpi mailing list, I took parts relevant to the sony-laptop platform module, merged them into our code,

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-13744756201533460492009-03-21T16:23:00.004+01:002009-03-21T16:30:45.075+01:00

Looks like there is some movement on the Z21 front again. Matthew Garret posted a patch to the linux-acpi mailing list with an rfkill based implementation of dealing with wireless devices. Interestingly, his patch also enables all the hotkey events so now I even get an ACPI event when I flip the speed/stamina switch. But still no idea about how to enable speed mode safely.Eva made a new release

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-44007617691144260212009-03-12T22:16:00.011+01:002009-03-16T10:12:42.841+01:00

If you're into photography a bit, you probably know the term register distance. It's the distance between the flange of the lens and the sensory plane of the camera body. It's one important factor in lens design and every camera system has its own, a parameter carefully chosen because it has a huge impact on the overall design of all future cameras a maker is creating.It also defines how easy it

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-34787400671064694282009-02-26T22:21:00.007+01:002009-02-26T22:53:59.055+01:00

Recently I became witness to a severe case of food mistreatment. I let my colleagues drag me into one of Darmstadt's fast food "shops", I dare not say "restaurant", Subways. Large international fast food franchise, you'll know them, there's likely one in your town as well. Stood in line, ordered some bread with chicken, salad, sauce. Watched the three stooges behind the counter prepare my meal

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-30141813105364789992009-02-14T00:26:00.009+01:002009-02-14T01:20:47.721+01:00

Good news, I think. We've been able to switch off the Nvidia graphics adapter after booting Linux, which means it's possible now to boot directly into Linux and have X11 working with DRI and compositing enabled without the trip through booting into XP first.It's quite a crude method, though. The hack with acpi_evaluate_object() I mentioned in my previous post worked, I just call the "_DSM" ACPI

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-30720813675084213482009-02-13T08:13:00.006+01:002009-02-13T09:03:37.688+01:00

Just as a quick update, we've tried yesterday to get access to the device specific methods of the both graphics cards through the WMI interface wrapper, but it failed. Some methods of the WMI wrapper work, but there's a stupid bug in the DSDT program that prevents executing the really interesting stuff. For the technically interested ones, this is the head of the 'WMMX' method in device WMI1:

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-37245237859399516442009-02-11T13:05:00.007+01:002009-02-11T22:06:14.135+01:00

I'm making small progress with the graphics card problem. I've looked into the DSDT source code again and I think the key to switching the graphics adapters is a device called "WMI1", which has the PNP id "pnp0c14". I discovered that already a few days ago but when I tried talking to the device I could just not make the acpi driver register to it. Yesterday I was searching around in the acpi

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-12065557018969262022009-02-08T15:03:00.029+01:002009-02-11T21:20:21.177+01:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was intending to go to the bottom of certain rumors about Panasonic including lens defect correction data in the EXIF information of RW2 files. A number of commercial photo software programs are known to manipulate the RAW image data to remove geometry distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting silently, which lead to enthusiastic reviews posted on

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-12731451754282271742009-02-08T09:34:00.008+01:002009-02-08T13:30:54.569+01:00

I'm happy to report that my hack to the sony-laptop kernel module works. We were able yesterday to make the first UMTS data connection with my wifes' Z21, using HSOconnect on openSUSE 11.1. Her detailed description of installing openSUSE 11.1 on the Z21 can be found here, you can also download the source code of the sony-laptop.ko. It's a very rough first version, don't expect packages or

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-466376568796062882009-02-01T23:38:00.005+01:002009-02-07T10:51:36.669+01:00

My wife urged me today to work on her new Sony Vaio Z21, which is, as anyone able to use Google will know, not particularly well supported by any recent Linux distribution. This is not exactly due to the completely fancy hardware components, rather by the completely undocumented methods of how to switch them on and off.As an example, the Z21 has a builtin 3G modem, an Option Globetrotter, which

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-68991265771914970922009-01-26T12:52:00.001+01:002009-01-26T12:52:29.124+01:00

Ready!Originally uploaded by thinkfatSince we got our new digital camera I have been using it quite regularly and I got very much interested again in digital photography and everything around it. I used to shoot lots of photos when I inherited my grandfathers Cosina SLR, despite the tedious act of having the film developed and paying for prints just to throw lots of them away.I don't quite

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-67912470740221187062009-01-25T20:14:00.001+01:002009-01-25T20:14:46.523+01:00

p1020151.jpegOriginally uploaded by thinkfatIf the motorbike virus has you, somehow it's not a question of convenience any more to go for a quick ride or not. So right after lunch today we took out our bikes for the first time this year. It was sure a bit chilly still at 5°C but with the right clothing it was bearable. We drove up to Neunkirchen, had a coffee and apple pie and went back home

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-2949036105535822802008-12-08T10:45:00.011+01:002008-12-09T09:52:09.369+01:00

Of course the weather did not improve over the weekend and there wasn't much point in going outside "hunting". But this night the temperature fell below freezing point and today morning everything outside had a nice glaze of frost. I did a quick walk through the garden to take a few pictures. This rose came out particuarly nice. I didn't play around with the program, probably I could have

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-34022692992941308142008-12-05T15:37:00.005+01:002008-12-05T19:08:03.100+01:00

So eventually, after a one-day intermezzo with the D40 (which is definitely a very nice camera!) we settled on the Panasonic Lumix G1. I didn't have much time to play with it yet, but it's really quite a nice camera. It's tiny, and solidly built. It's a huge difference to the D40, which feels a lot more plastic-y. But that's somewhat expected, after all the D40 costs about half of the G1.I've

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-23567744161749138452008-11-30T11:04:00.010+01:002008-12-10T12:43:57.303+01:00

As Christmas approaches quickly, my wife and I are trying to figure out what presents to give to friends and family, and to ourselves. We figured it'd be time to bite the bullet and get ourselves a new digital camera. We own a rather old Casio 3 MP compact DSC that has served us well for a couple of years but now the case is seriously starting to fall apart. The latch of the battery housing lost

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-87888615136207088632008-11-28T20:06:00.009+01:002008-11-28T22:31:12.721+01:00

Kubuntu just shipped an update to their Linux kernel to 2.6.27-9. It didn't help about the U100 webcam problem but at the same time disabled the driver I had hacked up earlier. To make my life easier I extracted the uvc video driver from the kernel sources into a standalone package. This way I can recompile the driver with a simple make whenever a new update comes along.I figure it could by

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-16848029130364438552008-11-23T15:22:00.013+01:002008-12-05T12:33:12.963+01:00

Since I bought the U100 about one week ago I have been using it in a quite regular fashion. It currently replaces the Archos 5 as the main gadget I spend time with, which was somewhat expected due to a netbook being a much more versatile companion than a portable media player. That doesn't mean I've given up on the "5". It's strong multimedia and internet capabilities (it's even got a decent

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-28802581553918096662008-11-14T19:40:00.006+01:002008-11-22T12:47:48.749+01:00

So, after having made the decision there was not much point in waiting, and so I used my lunch break today to walk over to the local notebook shop. It took about half of an hour to close the deal and I was on my way back carrying a brand new MSI Wind U100, with only a short stop at a Döner shop to grab some food.Coming back to the office my coworkers, nosy as they are, made me unbox it right on

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7107999793408355374.post-88296588791614050502008-11-12T22:05:00.004+01:002008-11-13T14:59:59.247+01:00

Owning a number of electronic toys already, like several Archos' PMP's, a Nokia N810, and a 1st generation EeePc 701 4G I'm now considering buying something new. It's going to be a netbook, since I seriously love the EeePc, but it's just too slow, with too meager battery life, too small screen and a number of other "too" somethings.But, ah, the choice! The EeePc 1000H is obviously desirable, but

Matzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01530395853165001656noreply@blogger.com0