René Rebe

Since the beginning of this year I use the “Flinkster” car sharing of the German Railway company (Deutsche Bahn, DB Rent). So far this worked out pretty well, and the pilot run of all-electric vehicles in the region Berlin / Potsdam is a welcome bonus. If one happens to have to fuel, the cars come with a DKV petrol card, so one does not have to directly pay the gas, which is already accounted for by a per kilometer (think mile) charge.

So far this was not a problem, until yesterday. I did not even had to gas up. But as there was a gas station on the way, I thought it is nice for the next customer not to need to detour just to find a station in the middle of Berlin. Although it was a “big” Aral station I better asked if they take the DKV card, and was surprised to find they do not. Puzzled and thinking whether I ever refilled a Flinkster car at Aral, I continued my way, and there was a Shell station just on the next corner anyway. As I knew Shell worked earlier this year I just filled up the car, and was likewise surprised to find that this Shell station did not take DKV cards either, … Ieeek!

The employee told me every leaseholder of each individual station can decide whether they take those DKV cards, or not! And usually only the very big ones do, … While I find this pretty irritating, and annoying, the lesson learned is that one really has to check on each and every gas station if a DKV sign is in sight, and if in doubt: better ask. Thinking that the market dominating oligopolies accept the DKV or other petrol cards is unfortunately not enough, …

As I already fueled I had to pay myself, and and sent in the receipt to the car sharer. Hopefully paying back works out as smooth as they promise, …

We finally got another App for iOS. Actually I had this speedometer around with me for two years or so already for my own use. However, ad-hoc provisioned App certificates expire faster than you can watch after them, so often when I wanted to run it for my own use the provisioning profile was already expired. So I finally polished it for global distribution for all of you, and here are some free promo codes, enjoy:

LH3EKYM7JPXW
YLY7AW3PPJNE
HRAARNM7PMRX
WTNH3FF77E3N
YJLRA9JHLK7P
L49JW3NFHRX4
4JN3MWJMYE4E
7Y34J349PFLE
YMKYM9REKMR9
YKYT49RXKX9L
LM9YP4WEX6FR
NXL7MXNF7PPK
WHRJJXWTRXXK
93E63TFKPYF3
RE7H4APMLXH9
XTALKFX6PMN3

Just gave it a quick spin at a local store. quite nice so far, know and worked with QNX since the mid 1990s. But how the heck to you get out of an App, e.g. back to the home screen? Tried all kind of gestures, touched everywhere - nothing intuitiv worked :-(

Update: Aha - touch sensitive bezel: swipe on the border, …

ioreg -lw0 | grep EDID | sed s/.*=\ .// | xxd -p -r | strings -6

B… = AU Optronics
LT… = Samsung
LP… = LG / Philips
N… = ChiMei

Update: Can be used to check if a Retina MacBook Pro contains an LG display, apparently at times showing image retention / ghosting effects when the same pixel pattern is shown for some time, such as Safari website text, Apple Mail, or Xcode source code or word processing and similar high contrast patterns, …

BREAKING, WARNING:

This year the Filmpark Babelsberg hosted a Star Trek exhibition, that was advertised to run until the 31st of October. Since my last and only visit to the Babelsberg studios was in 1995 we decided to use the sunny yesterday to finally visit the exhibition. Unfortunately, and to our biggest disappointment we had to find the exhibition cancelled way before the official end.

And this despite we even looked up the opening hours on their website in the morning. I can absolute not understand how a major organization can fail to publish breaking developments such as canceling the show on their website, or local news(paper). Yet, they can even print a plate as shown above!

I can imagine they like to still get the some extra visitors that arrive just for the Star Trek exhibition to find the event cancelled and yet visit the park nonetheless, though, …

Left disappointed at the entrance, we decided to rather leave for an ice cream in the sun at the nearby lake Griebnitz.

So for some time now I’m searching for the perfect ultraportable (laptop). Tables do not really cut it, even got an iPad to test things, but productivity wise they are not too great to get things done. As I need to get things done, I require some kind of grown up notebook. All the latest Apple machines are not too pleasing either, either cold (on power-up) and too hot during use hard edged aluminum case, and glossy window glass mirror displays, … not to mention the ridiculously huge and space wasting MacBook Air screen bezel, …

The Lenovo X220 is not all that perfect either, same lagging Intel graphics (among others no OpenCL, …) and additionally I just noticed a setback in their display configuration:

The former X200/X201 spotted a 12.1″ 1280×800 display, and it’s ultra-portable cousin X200s/X201s even featured a: 12.1″ 1440×900 (PDF) - now with the “all new” X220 even the Premium HD display only features a mere: 12.5″ 1366×768 pixels, … (PDF)!

This is not only a lower dpi resolution (pixels per inch), it also cuts away enough vertical pixels to make it seriously less useful for professionals with remote screen sessions, and virtual machines. More than the last millennium’s 786 vertical pixels (remember when 1024×768 became standard?) really are a blessing when you want to have your operating-system’s menu bar, and window deco around your windows and generally avoid scrolling in your VNC, RTP, X11 session or virtual machines.

Doing some research on this topic I also spotted that the X220 IPS screen appear to have some ghosting issues, …

Dear manufactures: I do not need a professional computer (display) optimized for consuming cheap Hollywood (or Bollywood) movies. If the mankind is supposed to live on some more centuries, we certainly also have to get some work done, not just hang on to consume other’s stupid videos all days. And even for consuming a decent movie every now and then, I’d get myself a decent TV for that. And with 16:9 LCD TV’s I noticed most high quality movies, on BluRay and such, are not even 16:9, but more like 21:9, …

So, can we please get professional grade, matte, 16:10 display, with at least 800 vertical pixels back to get some serious work done?

So you got an “older” (pre 2011) MacBook Air with read-only USB recovery thumb-drive (stick)? Well, turns out it is only read-only by some firmware lock bit. Just run:

sm32Xtest.exe

On your favorite Windows (virtual-) machine to toggle the read-only bit. You now can use it for your personal data, or writing the Lion installer disk image to it to gain a Lion Recovery USB key, just as you like.

Yesterday, my father and I have been to the vintage car gathering (Oldtimer-Treffen) at the HefeHof, Hameln (Germany). Starting with nice sunshine I got some great shoots to share:

… more in the whole gallery

Since the 1st generation iPhone I enjoyed using some V-moda Vibe in-ear headset. At the time the V-moda Vibe was one of the first iPhone compatible headsets with microphone and good sound quality.

Unfortunately, as usual, the cable started to break just over the TRS plug’s bend protection. Attempts to save the headset by soldering a new 4 pin TRS plug proved a little difficult: soldering the tiny 4 pin ⅛ inch TRS connector is possible, but the fibre enforced wires make it pretty difficult. One has to carefully separate the fibre out of the copper, and even then getting solder onto the paint isolated copper wires is a tedious task. And all too often have signal crosstalk problems in the end, due to the now heated and dissolved isolating wire coat, … especially interfering the (i)Phone’s microphone ring detection, often leaving the microphone and remote button controls unfunctional. Often it even works at first, until the cables are cramped into the connector when the plug is screwed together.

In the end I decided to better just get new set and started an endless Google search and local shop listening test. I found most offered headsets either plain ugly (sorry folks!), or excessively overcharged, especially when lacking in sound quality. Some models from the German company Sennheiser would have been a nice choice - if just their cable control with microphone plastic enclosure would be more visually appealing.

Especially lacking where the excessively overpriced Shure SE535 and friends. For over 300 bucks the advertised musical professional headphones can not please my musical amateur sense of hearing: For one in a local shop listening test they failed to deliver any bass (low frequencies) to speak of at all, … and thus an extremly unbalanced frequency range overall.

In the end of the lengthy selection process (why can manufactures not just design, build, and sell the one perfect headset?) I ended up with a Denon AH-C560R. They do not only look very good, with their minimal, no-frills design (that could be out of Cupertino), for just about hundred bucks they deliver an well balanced frequency range, with definitely more bass compared to the expensive Shure series.

Of course the Denon also sounds way more balanced than the over 3 year old V-mode Vibe - maybe due to Denon having more audio design experience being a well known audio brand for many centuries. The V-mode had more bass, though - but overall the Denon sound more balanced, with clearer mids and highs. (Other reviewer would now go all lengths over starting to hear all sort of details, percussions, accents not being possible to hear with another headphone before, …)

Oh, by-the-way, I also found the Nox Audio Scout headset’s design VERY appealing, I even delayed the purchase some months to wait for their release, … However reviews, such as the one from Engadget where not too keen about their audio quality, and given that they are (still not) yet sold in Germany the shipping costs from the US where just too heigh to rectify trying them out myself, … Maybe I grab them for cheap when I am in the US the next time.

It will also be interesting to get a ear on the Bowers & Wilkins C5 - though I am not too sure if I will find such a huge & heavy tube comfortable.

Since Apple migrated to the energy-hungry Intel x86 CPUs some years ago Macs got quite some overheating, thermal throttling issues. For example you will find many compact aluminum Macs to become so hot, that you would barely want to touch, or use on your lap, with the miniature fans spinning at full pace.

The bad is that Mac users typical will not even notice that the (Intel) silicon will even start to emergency throttle down. They will only notice the machine becomes less “snappy”. Linux on the other hand will happily log the MCE to your syslog instead:

CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 794)
CPU0: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)

If my aging, non-unibody, MacBook Pro would not throttle that much it would still be a perfectly reasonably powerful machine to use - even as professional. But as it became so annoying I decided to write a little benchmark too that logs the performance over time. When freshly booted this MacBookPro3,1 will start to throttle down after just a minute! And you will notice another spike of throttling where I started another benchmark instance on the second core, …

However, I think when I purchased the machine back in 2007 it was not that bad, I have the feeling it became worse when Apple exchanged the logic board due to the faulty, and failing NVidia chip, … maybe something (fan, heat-sink or -pipe) was not re-aligned perfectly, or too much thermal paste applied, …

I experienced this throttling with all MacBooks and iMacs in the last years. I just tested the latest (mid-2011) MacBook Air at a local shop which thanks to the Sandy Bridge Core CPU does finally not show this symptom that badly. They intentionally choose the lowest performance Ultra-Low-Voltage CPU for a reason, … Though thanks to the advent of Intel’s Turbo Boost it shows fluctuating performance levels, too. One could argue it is an publicly advertised thermal throttling feature :-)

Whether due classic thermal throttling, or TDP (Thermal Design Power) based Turbo Boost: for researchers this means any such CPU is out of question for scientific performance measurements. A fixed-frequency CPU without funky throttling and boosting as well as a BIOS’ SMM (System Management Mode) not interfering (too much) is a must. Unfortunately, the later is hard to prove and avoid, though.