René Rebe

From the Porsche designed VW Beetle to the modern – the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, Germany is definitely worth a look:

… more in the whole gallery

In Stuttgart you will also find the Mercedes museum, too. Unfortunately I did not yet have a free time slot to get there. However, I got some good shoots when they had a special 100 anniversary exhibition in a shopping mall in Berlin:

… more in the whole gallery

I just read that Engadget now has an App for everything. Every crapgadget that is. From the iPhone over WebOS, to Blackberry and now Android.

I wonder why the heck one needs a custom App for a web-site, news-site that is? Do the mobile browser suck that much? Or is HTML no fun? However, they still got to maintain their plain, good, old HTML version (for now) anyway. With all that apps, that certainly is a maintenance nightmare^N.

Strange new world.

Just exported some RAW files (so regular Windows users can view them without the special Vendor’s RAW software):

for f in ../*CR2; do f2=”${f##*/}”; econvert -i “$f” -–gamma 1.1 -–contrast .25 -–colorspace rgb8 -–quality 93 -o “${f2/.CR2/.JPG}”; done

Among other things we ordered six identical shelves for our living room book library from OTTO’s pretty polished yourHome.de online store.

However, Houston, we’ve got a problem: From this six boxes of shelf modules, three sides had misplaced holes. Just look at this:

In contrast, I have not yet experienced something that grave with IKEA.

We even got some more stories to tell just from this single order. However, I first wait how our reclamations are handled. Stay tuned …

I’ve been abroad for the last weeks, so I got to taste some stuff I usually don’t have at home. Somehow Mövenpick marmalade always tastes a little synthetic. Don’t know why hotels and such often serve it. Must be the brand name, …

Heise is running a story, reminding us on the ten years anniversary of the burst of the .com bubble. Where about ten years ago the stock value of overrated, mostly internet related companies became penny stock overnight.

I can not stop, but think we will soon see history repeating itself with all those web 2.0 companies, such as Facebook or Twitter. I mean how many millions, and billions are they pumping into them without any reasonable revenue, or just even revenue model in sight?

Sure, at last they can all go down the advertising road. But is there really enough space for them to grab a multi billion share of the ad-market? And 2020 we will be all living from advertising?

Somehow, I do not really see this adding up.

Five years and the wait is finally over–Poker reduced the price to a tenths :-)

opensnoop didn’t really cut it, so here we go:

syscall::open*:entry
{
printf(”%s %s”, execname, copyinstr(arg0));
}
syscall::stat*:entry
{
printf(”%s %s”, execname, copyinstr(arg0));
}

For years the German flagship IT trade-shows loose visitors. The Systems is now even history. And last year the Embedded World and CeBIT managers were as stupid to use the same date for the shows???

Our company used to visit the Embedded World as guests. We always where considering to exhibit there, as we did on Linux shows, or the CeBIT. For our start-up every year it became more likely to join the Embedded World, however all abruptly stopped last year when (IIRC) the Embedded World for the first time happened to be the same days as the CeBIT.

It is certainly bad enough to loose visitors to competing shows overseas, such as the Computex or CES. But how can those regressing shows steal each other’s exhibitors and visitors? In the same country, week.

I doubt we are a single incident here. Like us certainly many more have partners at the other show or would like, or have to exhibit on both. There should be at least some days gab between the shows, to make it possible for more to attend both shows. This would still allow foreigners to optimize their travel schedule and visit both in one go. Another, I think even better, option would be to have half a year between both shows. For example move the Embedded World to the autumn. To better match product cycle and product placements.

But on exactly the same days?

The Apple Mac OS mouse cursor speed is one of those “love it, or hate it” domains. Personally I find the default speed already way too slow, always falling asleep on a fresh Mac install, or at the login window.

The max used to be barely endurable, so far, e.g. with the Mighty Mouse - until I got the Magic Mouse the other day. Directly compared the Magic Mouse moves way slower with at the same setting. No idea how Apple got this inconsistency in their own, few products. I also have no idea why mouse pointer movements can possibly be that slow. Not only the default, but also the maximal configuration value, …

Fortunately there is no limit behind the back, so you can tune it with:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 8

The 10.6.2 maximal UI value appears to be 3, …

Update: Some more review: The slowness aside, the Magic Mouse is pretty decent. The biggest improvement over the Mighty Mouse is the touch sensitive cover. The former microscopic scroll ball was prone to accumulate dirt inside and near to impossible to clean. (To really clean and remove dust and dirt from the ball axes one hat to cut(!!!) the glued mouse housing and disassemble it fully, …). So from this usability standpoint it’s a great improvement. The major downside is, that only a Bluetooth version is available. I personally find the weight of the two AA batteries too hefty - that was also already a problem with the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. For my excessive workdays I would prefer a lighter, cabled version to reduce the wrist stress, …

However, while the “magic” features do not appear to work (out of the box) under 10.5, the pointer tracking appears to be way faster – 10.6 might artificially slow the magic mouse tracking down, … ?!

Yep, I just downloaded the Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0 for Leopard and the Magic Mouse becomes as slow as under Snow Leopard, 10.6. Expands the Preferences, brings battery level indicator to the menu extra. Actually some 30MB download, unpacks to nearly 100MB. Just for a mouse driver! Well, the useless tutorial videos blow it up significantly, … Wished OS X would stay as lean and clean as it was in the beginning.

Update 2: Under normal, office-use conditions, the battery life with the shipped alkaline battery is just about a month. To safe the environment I always only use rechargeable batteries in any device after the first batch of shipped batteries died out. On an mid-quality (2400mHh NiMh Ansmann “Photo”) batteries I already had in the shelf it lasts way less, 1-2 weeks of busy office use :-( Guess I need to get a pair of higher capacity, quality, more expensive NiMH or even check out those new kinds of NiZN batteries. Hopefully those do not burn out the Magic Mouse :-)

Update 3: As the Ansmann 2400 mAh “Photo” NiMH batteries drained out so quickly, I got a pair of Ansmann 2850 mAh NiMH. However, I was surprised the Magic Mouse did not turn on at all!!! After a quick investigation it turned out that the surrounding plastic of the holder where the batterie +pole goes in is a little fat. The hole is simply too tiny for that pair of batteries!!! Who would have believed that, …

To: Apple Inc.: In the future please but a little more thinking into your basic, plastic structure. This is so unnecessary incompatible, most other equipment has just a rectangular area with a metal latch not posing exactly such problems, …

To compensate I placed a shim into the hole:

Attention: Due to the holes in the plastic foundation the shim can easily slip into the mouse, and you need to be pretty patient to shuffle it out again! My tip: By applying some magic -gravity-, holding the mouse up, into the air, with the bottom to the ground let’s the gravity magically support your shuffle game, …

To avoid exactly this in the future, I simply put adhesive foil (sticky tape) over the holes. In case you need a similar mod, maybe a good idea for you to do upfront to avoid slipping something into the mouse case in the first place.