Gsallbahdr Zwei - English Posts

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:54:00 +0100

»Everyone's sitting in their little well, looking out and seeing their tiny circle of sky, and they think that's all out there that's relevant.«
Shravan Vasishth

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:25:00 +0100

»Even though his best days were gone, some of the girls in my class at school still liked Elvis. He would have asked their dads' permission for a date; The Beatles would be content to hold their hands, but Mick would have shared them with Keith. The Stones were what rock music was all about.«
From: Graham Forbes – Rock and Roll Mountains

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:03:00 +0100

»Lack of success at research is accompanied by the same feelings of inadequacy as sexual impotence and, like it, can be a self fulfilling prophecy.«
The Researcher's Bible, version of November 2004

Freesound 2

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:04:01 +0200

(Listen to this sound on Freesound.org)

Freesound.org finally made it to a major relaunch of their web page. They have a new flashy flash player that can even display spectrograms and everything became even more community-based. There is a feature for f-liking stuff and sounds can even be embedded elsewhere. A major improvement for sound lovers are also the new licensing options. Cheers to the new Freesound!

Take your Time

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:10:00 +0200

This is a talk by Philip Zimbardo (from Standford) that is really worth listening to. Plus, it comes with some great drawing action. Time, and how we deal with it. Did you know that there are six different ways how people perceive events in time and that you are one of those types? Actually I got two books about time on my to-read list, but of course I do not have time for reading at the moment. Or never, perhaps. Sometimes we are all too busy to be busy. Take your time:

Directly on YouTube

We are all cyborgs now

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:38:00 +0200

Only occasionally I re-post stuff here that I found elsewhere, but in this video Amber Case rushes through some eight minutes of wise thoughts on how our lives have changed with technology:

(Go directly to TED Blog)
Some of this goes on line with an idea that Marshall McLuhan had in his 1968 book War and Peace in the Global Village, in which he states the opinion that the computer is an extension of the human nervous system.

Via Lehrerzimmer.

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:40:00 +0200

»As much as the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer is an extension of our nervous system, which exists by virtue of feedback or circuitry.«
From: Marshall McLuhan (1968) – War and Peace in the Global Village

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sun, 29 May 2011 12:10:00 +0200

»I've been injecting my little girl. ›What a lovely way to take drugs,‹ she says sweetly. She wants to try everything. I don't argue and I won't patronise her. Anyhow, she's a determined little blonde thing, and for her friends it's fashionably exciting. I can tell she's made up her mind to become an addict.«
From: Hanif Kureishi – The Tale of the Turd

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:27:00 +0100

»The liar knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead; the truth-speaker knows the truth and is trying to give it to us; the bullshitter, meanwhile, does not care about the truth, and is simply trying to impress us.«
From: Ben Goldacre – Bad Science

Zitat

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:05:00 +0200

»You can't find unconditional love in human beings. But with music, it's unconditional. It loves you back.«
Joss Stone in an interview in Performing Songwriter, volume 14, 100st issue

Back and Forth

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:25:11 +0200

I'm looking forward to finding the way back to my way of looking forward to things in life.

1920x1080 with elderly Nvidia Cards on Linux

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:56:00 +0200

My elderly MSI video card with an Nvidia FX-5500 chipset refused to set the screen resolution to those 1920x1080 of my new LG Flatron W2353V flat screen. It simply removed 1920x1080 from the list of valid modes and I ended up with VESAish 1280x1024. It took me quite some time to figure out what to do, so I'm dropping this note, perhaps it will be usefull for others. Things to do:

Ensure you got X.org running in some way, e.g. with the VESA driver or in the wrong resolution.
Backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Install the Nvidia binary driver (use the jockey-gtk tool on Ubuntu, it will do it for you)
Run nvidia-xconfig as root, this will overwrite your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If this goes wrong you can use your previous backup.
Open xorg.conf in an editor and put this line in the "Device" section:
Option "ModeValidation" "DFP-0: AllowNon60HzDFPModes, NoMaxPClkCheck, NoMaxSizeCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoVirtualSizeCheck, NoVesaModes"
(Ensure that X is using the nvidia driver, otherwise this is guaranteed to fail.)

This basically switches of all sanity that could cause X to remove the desired modeline from its list in the pipeline. Unfortunately, it also bears the risk of screwing your TTYs. With more recent systems such as the Nvidia Quadro and the BenQ 24" display at my office, everything works automagically. But with the old crap at home it doesn't…

Additional hint: use nvidia-settings in X to save the EDID data of your panel and check with parse-edid on the command line what the panel told your video card about its valid modes.

Finding of the Day

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:51:05 +0200

I'm a monkey yelling into the void. I'm a blogger.

Bash Xmas

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 18:19:24 +0100

mklove && ! mkwar

Bruises That Won't Heal / After All Those Years

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:21:00 +0200

We met at the breakfast table of an upper class hotel. An inexpensive accommodation for us westerners down there in Czechia. The coffee was acceptable and so was the food. Soon we found ourselves in a conversation about the corpora business and the job. But quite naturally you can't talk about this all the time and every time. The waiters were a bit lazy. Waiting for a refill of the liquid brown jump start we switched to politics and society. The war. What about the war?

Apparently none of the educated people seem to like it. Not surprisingly, you may find. Topic number one of course: Iraq and the Bush administration. The people surrounding the table were two Britons, one guy from Romania and me, from Germany. Common agreement: Mr. President has gone nuts, could somebody please stop him. We exchanged opinions and stories. I told that my father was a six-year-old boy when World War 2 came to his home town. Some British folks still believe that all Germans were evildoers in WW2. Some Europeans still believe that all US Americans are standing behind their Mr. President. I hope that's not true.

»Children fight and woman cry«, Kieran Halpin sings in his song Senzenina (What have we done?), published on the album Glory Dayz featuring the late Chris Jones on guitar. While Senzenina is a song about apartheid in Africa, the line is still true for every war. In the end, children fight and woman cry. In WW2 there was this particular night when my father and grandmother didn't make it to the shelter. The alarms were wailing. They hid in their own basement. The next day, they found that the shelter was no more there. Only a large hole in the ground... my father's school mates had been in there.

That's what war turns out to be. I told them. I thought maybe the British folks sitting at the table could consider that, after all those years of peace and communication. After all those years of becoming one Europe. Perhaps they could start considering that some of the non-evildoers back then suffered badly.

»Actually my father is an Auschwitz survivor«, the British woman said. »He never got over it.«

I had no more words to say in that particular moment.

To London by Bus

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 12:49:47 +0200

»Please, Lord, grant me patience. But I need it right now!« said the sign I spotted this morning in the dining room of the bed & breakfast hotel. And that's what I need now, a little patience. Traffic is stuck, I managed to catch a bus earlier than planned and booked but still it is quite uncertain that I'll be at Stansted Airport in time.

Full English breakfast as a start in the day might not necessarily be what Germans are used to but the notice on the meeting agenda advised to enjoy it: »A working lunch is provided.« Not that those sandwiches would confirm to the quality standards of the pastries I am used from home. And not that they would be enough for a man like me. Apart from that, you can't eat and talk too much at the same time. And as most meetings are rather about talking than about meeting...

On the motorway now, M40, Oxford to London. He must have heard my moaning. I'm relaxing and the driver kicks the pedal to the metal. Around eight hours of travelling ahead. Now that I have the patience, what about some sleep? The heat was hot and the ancient architecture of the city almost knocked me out. Watching fields floating by asides the motorway, much less of an impact to the brain!