MICHA.ELMUELLER

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Simplicity is beautiful. Simplicity is pure. Simplicity is what we should aim for. Instead modern user interfaces, modern design, is overloaded. Creeping featurism: constantly adding features as a way to satisfy the need of any possible, thinkable customer that one might ever encounter. While searching for the perfect solution we eventually end up with a mess. We no longer have an interface that aims to solve a specific problem, but instead an interface that aims to solve everybody’s problems.

In a lot of ways this reminds me of the Unix philosophy, where basically the exact same problem is found within software engineering.

As an effort to improve the usability of some websites, which I often use, I started to build a loose collection of templates for the Privoxy web proxy. Basically the templates simplify the layout of the websites. I never add stuff. All I do is throw elements away.

To me, the interfaces look much more aesthetically pleasing and the websites are a lot easier to use. Unnecessary elements don’t take up all the space, don’t aim to catch the attention, don’t distract from what’s important. But make up your own opinion. On the left you see the unfiltered websites, on the right you see the websites after filtered through an AdBlock browser addon and the template collection.

I have published the project under a free license (MIT) to GitHub. Follow the Readme there to get stuff up and running. Please note: the project is in an early stage and each CSS change on the websites might affect the templates, thus you should not be surprised if some things might not look as expected. I plan to add various other sites to the project over time.

Modern user interfaces oftentimes are overloaded. This is a template collection to simplify the layout of various websites.

I spent the last few days in Bonn at the Informatiktage 2013. The event was quite nice and I got the opportunity to meet some interesting people. I attended a two-day workshop by a big tool manufacturers IT manager. The workshop was about scalability and shifting some non-crititcal components into “the cloud”. Though I am quite sceptical about the cloud-thingy, the workshop held quite some insights for me. The thing that stuck most with me was their strict implementation of the design principle “design for failure and nothing will fail“.

As part of the event a three-page paper/summarization of my bachelor thesis was published within the proceedings (first time something of me got published — yay!) and I held a poster session (the poster is linked below). For me, the exchange with other students/activists/hackers is very important. Often just simple thoughts or hints on technologies I didn’t know about, inspire new ideas and projects. During the last 2-3 year I have attended a lot of meetups, BarCamps and other events and I took something from each of them.

I spent the last few days in Bonn at the Informatiktage 2013. The event was quite nice and I got the opportunity to meet some interesting people. I attended a two-day workshop by a big tool manufacturers IT manager. The workshop was about scalability and shifting some non-crititcal components into \"the cloud\". Though I ...

January and February have been very productive. I am having a good run right now. My sewing skills are getting better: though I am still struggling with sewing exact linear lines, I can definitely see my own progress. So far I have sewed various things: pouches with zippers/clips, a camera lense bag, a shopping bag, a bag for lock-picking tools etc.. I needed about seven pouch iterations before I finally got it right. I actually think I made every possible mistake you can make, from making the pouch way to small to forgetting to insert the zipper, to sewing the wrong pieces together, etc.. Also I took part in a very basic course on sewing a T-Shirt. I am very satisfied with the result and also very shocked by the amount of work it takes to produce a tee (~7 hours in my case). Even if you factor in automizing a large part of the process and a very skilled sewer — how much wage is there possible for people producing a 5,99 € tee?

Further stuff I have done in the DIY direction include building terrariums. For terrariums the idea is very simple and you can find a lot of different tutorials and ideas online (here or here for example). Basically you take a glass, put some stones in them (you need those so the water does not collect and foul at the bottom). Then you put a small layer of active chalk on top of the stones. This layer is used to prevent fouling etc.. On top you put a layer of soil, then some plants, then more soil and then e.g. some moss. Et voilà!

In February matou and I spent another day at a school as part of the “Chaos macht Schule” program. We adapted our presentation to include more practical tips on how to use the so called “new medias” (who are not really new). It is quite astonishing that kids within the age 14-15 use the Internet/Smartphones/PCs practically every day but know very little about what they are actually using. As a consequence there is an extreme lack in competence of using those technologies in the way they intend to do. Each time we visit a school we are told about cyber-mobbing incidents were the bullies were basically completely unaware of the publicity of their posts. The teachers reported that when they explain this to the kids they often times regret their actions heavily.
On the technological site, the lacking technical education shows for example when we demonstrate how easy it is to fake a mail. We have done this several times by now and the effect is always the same: enormous surprise followed by questions. This was not at all what I had anticipated! I thought this demonstration was already old like 25 years ago! The same goes for showing the Google reverse image search or internet archives like e.g. the waybackmachine. Often times the pupils have heard the phrase “The Internet never forgets.”, but from my impression this is only a phrase until we demonstrate how easy it is to get the state of e.g. a public forum from two months ago, with all the “deleted” posts. Even though we are usually invited to speak on the media-competence/privacy topic, we try to not only warn about technologies but rather also motivate to use technologies in a creative way.

On another note, I have participated in some contests. I got the second place at a logo contest of an institute at university, as a prize I have been getting some money on my studentcard from which I have been feeding off for a week or so .

Also I have contributed to a local T-shirt contest by a clothing store. You can see my submission below. I was given the second place here as well, which in this case meant a nice package of clothing stuff. I love participating in contests and challenges. Most of the times I don’t really care about the prizes and am much rather interested in the challenge.

January and February have been very productive. I am having a good run right now. My sewing skills are getting better: though I am still struggling with sewing exact linear lines, I can definitely see my own progress. So far I have sewed various things: pouches with zippers/clips, a camera lense bag, a shopping ...

On February the 23rd the datalove university group participated in a global Hackathon centered around Open Data. We gathered within a room at the university and worked on different projects all day. At peak level we were around 17 people: university students and personnel, students by the university of applied sciences and local politicians. We organized enough food, coffee and stuff for everyone and spent a nice day working on many different projects. Mainly to highlight:

• Falco worked on updating the LiveMap, which we have created about two years ago in an 48hr hackathon. For most of us this had been the first bigger node.js project and so it was time to correct some faulties. To paraphrase Stefan: “While looking for better ways on how to do such a project, I only found other people who forked our stuff.” Well, we are not entirely certain, if that is a good thing .

  Some Open Data activists from Cologne are currently adapting the project to their city: schienenliebe.de. It is always very nice to see other people being able to build upon your work!

• Benjamin took use of the shape files (= geodata of local city districts) for Ulm. We gathered this data under a free license about two years ago, but never had any use for them — until now!
  Check out Click that ‘hood!
• I took the time to work on an idea which I had in mind for a long time: visualizing different facilities within Ulm which are currently open, on a web based map. This can be used to e.g. find out which bakeries in the inner city are still open on a Saturday evening. The application is online via oeffnungszeiten.ulmapi.de.

  The opening hours data is gathered from the Open Street Map project. I plan to regularly export it from there, although I first have to manually correct some of the entries, since not all of them are valid. I also plan to add new opening hour entries to the map, though I am not yet entirely sure about how to approach that.

• Stefan is working on visualizing the household budget of Ulm. The respective data has been made available to the public under CC-BY in the meantime. If you have any knowledge on Doppik calculations, I am sure he would appreciate help!
• Some friends were brainstorming about network visualizations considering the university. When I heard of the idea I was quite enthusiastic and went to talk to the local network administrators. As a result we got a nice data treasure: sanitized log data of all (~360) access points on the university terrain over the duration of one week. Under ODbL v1.0. _This_ is quite nice. The data is available here. I spent nearly all of the Hackathon writing a parser for the data. When you have 76 MB ASCII stuff (> 500 000 entries) a database is worth it. In the meantime the parser is finished but we are still missing geolocations for the access points. For this purpose I wrote a very simple web application to crowd-source the process of collecting geolocations for all access points. But this (and the resulting visualizations) are material enough for one separate blog post, once the project is finished!

The sourcecode for most of the projects described is available online via GitHub, either on github.com/UlmApi or on github.com/cmichi.

On February the 23rd the datalove group at the University of Ulm participated in a global Hackathon centered around Open Data.

As every year, here comes my retrospect for the last year. I haven’t written much lately. This is mainly due to a big load of stuff I had to do, but also to a lack of enthusiasm that I have been experiencing since some months. Didn’t get around to get involved in as much stuff, as I normally do. I am still not back on track but really hope that this will come back. I think the reason for this is mainly the Bachelor thesis, which I wrote in the second half of this year. I normally work on lots of different things, but my bachelor thesis (which is finished by now) forced me to put all focus on it and discard everything else. I am really not made to force myself into doing something and thus the greatest challenge was not a technical, but mere a personal one. But as I learned from Dexter: it’s all about getting back to your routines if you lost track of yourself .

The first half of the year though was absolutely amazing. I traveled a lot, got to know many many different people, started to get more spiritual and collected a lot of new experiences which have deeply influenced me.

Most interesting art project wich I discovered
youarelistening.to is a website that creates the “sound of a city” using ambient music and online available police and fire rescue radio streams. Together with a nice night photo of the city this makes an incredibly cool working environment. Especially when projected on a wall via a beamer. This reminds me of a quote from Cory Doctorow’s book “Makers”, that stuck with me: “[...] This thing wasn’t invented. All the parts necessary to make this go were just lying around. It was assembled.”. I think much more cool stuff can be built from the stuff that is already existing out there.

Blog post
The blog post I enjoyed reading most was “I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad. They’re DELIGHTED!“. A father has started to introduce his sons from an early age on to Unix. The whole series is worth reading, but in this entry he describes how he introduces a graphical environment. Since he has just told them the basic commandline stuff, they have never even seen a graphical environment up to this point, .

Video
If I had decide for one it would be Where is your Wilderness. Even though, I have a different view on religion, I still can relate to the passion of this filmmaker to create an awesome piece of art.

The music video I liked best was Audioslave – Doesn’t Remind Me, a true piece of art.

Best Experience
I was living in one of the dorms before I started moving in with friends. Once I quit my contract there I had one month to bridge between the two flats. Several people offered me to stay at their flat for the month, but I decided to take this as an opportunity and live one month without a flat. Jumping from couch to couch, sleeping around at different homes.

I ended up spending most of the nights at totally different places of various friends, at one point I literally lived within the university for some days. This works really well by the way — you have everything there, showers, breakfast, meals, sleeping possibilities, etc. .
However, the best place I stayed at was at meillo’s. He lives in a rural region outside of Ulm. A relative of his owns a milk farm, which resulted in fresh milk each morning and nightly tractor rides. Nice memories.

Best Decisions
Starting to live together with friends. The last months living with them has been A+. I can’t imagine anything, that would make my living situation better. Everything is 100%.

Kate got me into attending a Creative Writing course at university. This has proven to be a very good decision and I have done a lot of creative writing in the past months, even compiled a small shortstory collection with friends. Though, I am not yet (mentally) ready to publish anything here.

Lessons learned
It got clear to me that at one point the question with which technologies I want to work, shifts from a technical to an ethical question. For me this resulted in replacing my work environment with mostly free software and discard the MacBook. Also I replaced DeviantArt with my own MediaGoblin instance and replaced last.fm with libre.fm.

Also I can not emphasize enough how important it is (at least for me) not to wait for other people. If you have a project idea or want to start something, just do it. Don’t constrain yourself with other people lack of time/motivation/flow.

From a technical point I learned that a dedicated root server is really worth it. Together with friends I rented a server. At first I was not sure, if I was going to take a lot of use from it, but now I connect to it daily. I use the server mainly to sync repositories on different machines, share files, for usenet stuff, to host a jabber server, to host web stuff and to have a machine which regularly performs maintenance tasks such as cleaning my mail.

Thing that stuck with me most

The definition of hell: the last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.

Best advice
Since I am always torn between decisions, Elena told me to just imagine myself in a month, a year or five years from now. What would I then (in retrospect) consider the best decision? I have found this to be quite helpful.

Book I enjoyed the most
I really enjoyed reading the “autobiograhpy” of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson. Although I have a different view on the politics Apple represents today, I can definitely identify with the original goals of the company. Even though I have been very interested in the Apple history and a big enthusiast for the last years, the book still was very interesting and offered many insights which other biographies were missing.

Coolest project
When we moved in together I thought it might be cool to have something that encourages innovation, encourages people to constantly bring new cool stuff to the flat. So for this purpose I have built a prize, from wood and plastic. A cup actually: the golden pineapple!
Each week we consult on the best innovation for the last week and the respective person gets the golden pineapple for one week. The prize doesn’t necessarily have to be given to people living in the flat, but can also be given to external people (which it has been).

Even though we can’t keep up with giving the prize to a different person each week, the rate of innovation is still constant.

Best photo I shot
The photo I am most proud of is this shot of Kate which I took on a trip through Scotland. The lightning has not been altered, this was all “natural” light by the environment. Also I am really satisfied with the photos I took for various insititute websites at university (see here).

Interesting articles
From a technical point of view I liked the article “Looks Like It!“, a great explanation of perceptual hashes, a way to determine how similar two pictures are.

From an emotional point of view the anger in meillo’s article “der taegliche kampf” (german) on the “modern” university education system is something I can greatly identify with.

From a curious point of view I loved the article and video “Getting high on Krystle” from the Vice magazine.

Podcast
I love the Pentacast, most notably I liked the Responsible drug usage podcast (language: english). Also I like the Soziopod (language: german), most notably the one on Karl Popper.

Best learning resource
The VI manual offered quite some insights for me. I feel as if I have a much more basic understanding of the tool, now that I have read through it.

Project I donated most to
Torservers.net is an organization with the balls to run Tor exit nodes. Awesome!

Most helpful tool
youtube-dl is a python script to comfortably download stuff from youtube, vimeo, soundcloud, etc.. Pass an URI to the script, get a video/audio file.

Photo
I found this photo a while ago and the shere intensity blows me away everytime I look at it. It shows an explicit birth scene and should be considered NSFW: A star is born, http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisvdv/5894742041/.

Music
I have started to get into music from the sixties and seventies a lot. It is incredible how much creative work has been done in those two decades! I have started to heavily listen to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Alan Parsons Project. All bands that I have known for a long time, but the music just didn’t work for me — until now. For the first time I have found an access.

Another progressive rock band which is more up-to-date and which I have become to like over the course of this year is Tool. The self understanding of the band speaks to me: “[...] we are … your tool; use us as a catalyst in your process of finding out whatever it is you need to find out, or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.” (Keenan)

Other albums which stand out: Fever Ray. The hours I have listened to this album: countlesss. Also my bachelor thesis probably could not have been written without Eminem’s album Recovery. An electronic band that I have come to like very much is M83.

The score I liked most was the Blood Diamond Score by James Newton Howard.

And at least I just have to mention Prinz Pi, whose music I have come to adore very much.

From last year
I had planned to change my setup to a much more Unix-like setup. I can report, that I have succesfully achieved this ! I now use a heavily commandline oriented workflow. Tools that I most often work with include tmux, ksh, nvi, mcabber, vimpc (as a mpd client) and git (which I want to replace with hg).

The rough plan for 2013
I plan to stay within Bachelor for one more semester, earn some money, already earn some credit points for the Master, maybe get a scholarship. In the later half I plan to start the Master’s program here in Ulm.

Creatively, I want to get into sewing and music. Already picked up a sewing machine and am starting out with the basics. My big goal is to sew a (very simple) jacket in 2013. For the music part my goal is to finally get something started. On the creative writing part I would like to write a bigger piece, a book, basically. Have some ideas, fictional and non-fictional, will see. Another thing that has been bothering me for a long time is that I really want need to write a decent music visualizer.

As every year, here comes my retrospect for the last year. I haven\'t written much lately. This is mainly due to a big load of stuff I had to do, but also to a lack of enthusiasm that I have been experiencing since some months. Didn\'t get around to get involved in as much ...

For three weeks in August I have been traveling through Scotland with five friends, though not all could stay until the end. For the first week we stayed in Edinburgh to visit the Fringe Festival — a broad cultural event where the whole city gets occupied by artists, bands and comedians. Every last room is used to run shows and you see awesome costumes on the street each day. The event was very nice and the city is quite awesome.

Universities: We have been to the university in Edinburgh quite a few times and we have spent some days in Glasgow. I really like the look of the universities in those two cities, they totally remind me of the Harry Potter movies (see for yourself). Also I found Eduroam to be quite a valuable technology! Opposed to Ulm, the university in Edinburgh is distributed over the whole city — which also means as a student you have internet access via Eduroam in a lot of places.

After the week in Edinburgh we rented a small car and went on a roadtrip through Scotland. This turned out to be a really good decision. We would never ever have seen such a large part of the country without a car. So for two weeks we traveled through Scotland, visiting different isles and distilleries, doing a lot of wild camping and sometimes staying at various hostels. As we have neatly evaluated the perfect score for driving through the highlands is the Game of Thrones Theme.

At one point we left the car, took our tents and stuff with us and wandered into the nature. The nature! Beautiful, stunning nature! The law in Scotland in case of wild camping differs very much from Germany, in general you are allowed to camp wherever you want as long as you leave no trash, disturb nobody, don’t stay for months and don’t camp directly near a house.

Whisky. I already liked Whisky before travelling Scotland, but man, after those three weeks I am _so_ into Whisky. For me the best Whisky this year was the Lagavulin, 16 year old, Single Malt from the beautiful Isle of Islay. During our Scotland trip we have been to different distilleries, Lagavulin and Laphroaig amongst others.

The three weeks are filled with nice memories and the photos above only give a small glimpse on this time.

        For three weeks in August I have been traveling through Scotland with five friends, though not all could stay until the end. For the first week we stayed in Edinburgh to visit the Fringe Festival -- a broad cultural event where the whole city gets occupied by artists, bands and comedians. Every last room ...

Chaos macht Schule is a project by the german Chaos Computer Club, in which hackers with a technical credibility go into schools to hold presentations or conduct workshops.

This year the local Chaos Computer Club group has been invited two times to a school to give talks on privacy awareness and participate in a parents evening on the topic of data privacy related topics. Matou, Nico and I went there for the first event. We gave a presentation to two groups of about 50 pupils each, and one talk at the parents evening. Later this year, matou and I went back to the school to do the same event again. I am very satisfied with the whole event and before describing too much here: In February, straight after we were finished, we set up a voice recorder to capture our enthusiasm and remindings while driving home through the nightly, heavy snowfall.

We published this recording as part of the /dev/radio unstable program, which we have started a while ago. Unplanned, experimental podcasts, with completely different lengths and questionable quality, explicitly marked as unstable.

The events had a heavy focus on (data) privacy and we were (specifically) invited to shine some light on this topic. However, I would like to get more into inspiring people to do creative stuff, opposed to describing issues and problems. Just some ideas: The Little Bits project is a great project, which makes it easily possible to build interesting stuff without having to get too technical. Also, if someone would have showed me the endless possibilities of free operating systems when I was 14, I would probably have locked myself in forever. The fact that you can build your complete own system, replace each part of it, modify anything, would have just blown me away. The whole Creative Coding movement with projects like (fluxus) where you build a music visualization just-in-time, Context Free as an easy way to create amazing art, 3D printers and of course Arduinos.

Chaos macht Schule is a project by the german Chaos Computer Club, in which hackers with a technical credibility go into schools to hold presentations or conduct workshops. This year the local Chaos Computer Club group has been invited two times to a school to give talks on privacy awareness and participate in a parents ...

The last two photos were shot by stk, who also wrote an article on the event.

To quote phil: “Isn’t it a little bit late to write about this?”. Yeah I know it is, I am just catching up with some stuff which I didn’t get around to write down so far.

About 1.5 years ago we founded the datalove group at university. In the meantime members of the group have met up with people from the city, created some projects and even participated in consultations with government representatives. datalove fellow stk has even participated in the writing of a book. The LiveMap, which we did create last year, has been shown at the CeBIT ’12 as part of OpenData initiatives within Germany.

In May our efforts culminated in the organization of a BarCamp around Open Data. One week before the BarCamp Benjamin and I were guests in the local radio program “Plattform” at Radio Free FM. We talked about Open Data in general, Open Data within Ulm and about the OpenCityCamp. The recording of the show is online and can be found here (in German).

The BarCamp itself was pretty interesting. We managed to get a pretty decent sponsoring which resulted in awesome Catering and a really nice event. We didn’t really know if people would show up to give a presentation, but in the end everything went fine. We were able to have two parallel sessions most of the time. The whole event had about 50-60 participants.

There were several things we did, which I haven’t seen on other BarCamps. Most notably: Etherpads for each session. Nowadays you can most certainly say that within each session of a BarCamp there is probably at least one person with a laptop. People attending the sessions started to note opinions, interesting stuff, links and questions there. This worked pretty good! Even now you can look the pads up (here).

Second most notably: Hanging a huge plain sheet of paper at the wall, so that people could note their thoughts there.

The whole event took place in the university. This enabled us to use the equipment there (to spontaneously bake apple pie for example ).

The BarCamp was also a good opportunity for some people to push the development of a local Freifunk community. Visit http://ulm.freifunk.net for more information on that.

    The last two photos were shot by stk, who also wrote an article on the event.   To quote phil: \"Isn\'t it a little bit late to write about this?\". Yeah I know it is, I am just catching up with some stuff which I didn\'t get around to write down so far. About 1.5 years ago ...

From April to June I have been occupied as a student assistant at an institute at university. My task was to help in moving the old website to the universities Typo3 instance (new website). While doing so I replaced the header photos with new ones. I took this as a chance and asked the administrators of the universities computing centre to take me with them to the local bwGrid node, a computing grid for scientific calculations. The photos came out pretty good and in the meantime have been reused by other people for all kinds of things.

I was also asked to take some photos for the website of another institute. I am quite satisfied with the photos, though they have been shot in a way that they look good as a small picture slice on those websites. So intentionally some of them won’t make good fullscreen photos.

To make those and the other photos I took/take online accessible I decided to set up a MediaGoblin instance. MediaGoblin is a GNU project that aims to build a flickr/deviantart/etc. alternative (see Wikipedia or the official website for a more detailed description). I have been sitting on the dev mailinglist since two or three months and silently been experimenting with the software. So time to publicly link it now: http://media.micha.elmueller.net/.

For now the instance has registration disabled, since I want to be able to adapt the installation to my own needs. I hope to be able to find some time in contributing something to the project.

From April to June I have been occupied as a student assistant at an institute at university. My task was to help in moving the old website to the universities Typo3 instance (new website). While doing so I replaced the header photos with new ones. I took this as a chance and asked the ...

Photo was shot on a more or less related occasion.
Fits this post surprisingly well.

Three years ago we started together. It has been an amazing time. We have created amazing things together, you helped me realize a lot of ideas. I have learned a lot of new stuff and I have been extremely satisfied by the way things are done here. Today I heavily wonder how I could have ever worked with anything else than Unix in those Windows days back then. I didn’t even know about Unix back then. I remember asking an advanced student in my first days at university “What is Unix?”. And now? I have much more knowledge about Unix. Discovered a whole philosophy, a whole new world which has been evolving out there since the seventies.

But now it is time to move on. Again. This is just the next logical step for me. There are a lot of reasons. For me to grow, for my skills to get better, I need to move on, need to move on to a system where I am God, where I can change everything, where I can look under the hood of anything. A system where I am completely unconstrained, where I am completely free to build my own working environment, fitting exactly to my needs. Where I can try completely new things and don’t have to go with the way millions of customers have to.

Additionally I am very unsatisfied with the politics of Apple. I dislike the extreme patent politic as enforced by Apple. I do not want to live in a future where the world, the innovation, is controlled by Mega-Corporations. Things like the censorship within the AppStore [1], due to American prudency and archaic concepts of morality, are steps in a direction towards a world where accessible content is no longer controlled by the governments but by corporations. Paranoid? I don’t think so [1] [2].

Instead I want to move to a working environment which is based upon free software. I believe in the idea that the goal of software should be to make the best solution possible and not the most profitable possible.
State today is that there are still many commercial products which are better than their free alternatives. Better in User Interfaces, comfortability and performance. This is due to, well, people like me. If I would only invest a little bit of time in making the free software products better this situation would change.

So what is the setup I am starting with? Well first: I got myself a new notebook, a Thinkpad, an X220. Due to some work I did for people who got notice of me because of the time lapse, I was able to invest some €s. As a main operating system I am running OpenBSD (following /current) on an i7 with an SSD. So far I didn’t really have any problems with drivers, a little issue with the backlight, but nothing serious. Especially the SSD is an amazing benefit. “Why OpenBSD?” you may ask. Well, I like the *BSD approach better than the Linux approach. I like the uncompromising, idealistic view towards software. I like the fact, that they don’t view security as an add-on which can be installed later, but rather as a fundamental issue.

As a second os I run an Ubuntu installation for hardware accelerated graphics stuff. At the moment the only thing I need this for is GLSL shading stuff and live coding environments.

Tools: I start on the bottom. I want to keep stuff simple, want to understand my tools and the reasons for using them. Hence vi, ksh and dwm. No vim, no zsh, no Gnome. So let’s see how this works out! Below are some screenshots of my current setup.

Login screen + window manager.

Photo was shot on a more or less related occasion.Fits this post surprisingly well. Three years ago we started together. It has been an amazing time. We have created amazing things together, you helped me realize a lot of ideas. I have learned a lot of new stuff and I have been extremely satisfied by ...

All Colors Are Beautiful installation at the SIGINT. Cologne.

For five or six weeks in May/June I have been visiting several people and various events around the country. I have been travelling quite a lot. Earlier this year I wrote in a blog post “Damn, I really want to travel more“. Well it seems that I am getting into traveling more and more. If I would not be writing a bachelor thesis at the moment I would probably be in Berlin all the time right now. There is just too much interesting stuff happening in the world right now.

In late May I spent some days in Cologne, mainly because of the SIGINT. Amazing city, I really like the fact that you can easily walk anywhere. The SIGINT was interesting, the event has a bigger focus on the political aspects of hacker culture, than on the technical side. The sessions I liked the most were “Feminismus für Nerds” and “Geeks und Depressionen”. The recordings are not yet available. As Denis noted in the comments the recordings are available here.

Ehrenhof at the KIT. Karslruhe.

In the beginning of June I went to the GPN in Karlsruhe. A much more technical focus than the SIGINT. Spent some days at a friends place, whom I got to know at the SIGINT. Visited the university there and took the chance to meet some people in person with whom I just had contact by mail so far. Interesting talks here where “Hacking Heterosexismus”. I also met up with meillo in Karlsruhe. He spent two days there and finally gave a talk on his Masterthesis and Mailproject mmh, a mail client following the Unix philosophy.

I really enjoyed his talk. A large part consisted of just showing how things are done on the Shell. This is why I go to such hardcore techy events! To see stuff like this! Stuff that you normally won’t encounter at a regular Barcamp for example! I have missed the technical stuff at the SIGINT a bit. What I am also missing in the hacker scene in Germany today is controversy, the missing spirit of revolution, of changing society big way. Where are all the Cypherpunks?! There are extremely interesting projects, like Bitcoin or Flattr, with a potential of changing things big time happening right now! But instead I haven’t attended a single talk which raised controversies! In my opinion, the scene currently is a little bit too “well-behaved”.

After Karlsruhe I went to Friedrichshafen at the lake of Constance (Bodensee). Benjamin has been talking enthusiastically about this Barcamp and how we should definitely attend it since quite a while. Well we did and it turned out to be quite good! From all the Barcamps I have been to, I liked this one probably the most, since it gave me exactly what I want from a Barcamp: inspiration and getting to know interesting people and projects.

There was Michael for example, a fellow who introduced his silent.li project: in the early morning he gets up, gets out and places a microphone in free nature. He then records the sound of a day in free nature. Animals waking up, etc.. The sounds are then streamed as an online radio program. Interestingly the average duration of people listening in was at about 15 hours, if I remember correctly!

I was at a session where we discussed “Digital Legacy”. What happens to your digital identity once you die? One guy proposed to delete all online content once one dies. I told him he should consider how interesting it could be for his grand-children to discover his blog in several decades. Just imagine how cool it would be to discover a blog which your grandmother/grandfather wrote in between 1930-1960! We discussed the topic for an hour and many interesting aspects came up. Just imagine what happens if your inheritance some day will be in a digital currency .

Then there was Wischi from Munich. In the late evening I talked to his girlfriend about how I would like to try teaching live coding of music visuals to kids. He got interested in live coding and we decided to install (fluxus) on his laptop, attach it to a beamer and I made a walkthrough of some basic examples with him. He didn’t have that much experience with programming itself but became pretty comfortable with the syntax surprisingly fast. He asked if I would like to do a session on live coding the next day and offered his laptop. I eventually did the session. Hmm live coding is just too much fun, I would love to do more in this direction. But I have to cut stuff short at the moment to concentrate on the thesis. Damn, it is really hard for me to keep back from all those interesting things out there.

However, I just couldn’t keep back from some stuff. With matou I filmed a flashmob by the local Amnensty group. The video is online here. I also stayed in Tübingen for two days. Some friends, who are apprentices at the SWR, were shooting a short film there. Quite interesting to see such a project. Took two lessons from this: 1) Get an external LCD for the 5D as soon as possible. 2) A good storyboard is incredibly helpful. They had a detailed storyboard with the duration of each scene, camera angles, field of view, etc.. This made things *a lot* easier. We also did some filming in the university of Tübingen and used the studios there to dub the voices. Damn, the dubbing really gives the whole thing a much more professional touch. Once you see the difference afterwards, you realize that the audio of a film is at least as important as the images themselves.

All Colors Are Beautiful installation at the SIGINT. Cologne.   For five or six weeks in May/June I have been visiting several people and various events around the country. I have been travelling quite a lot. Earlier this year I wrote in a blog post \"Damn, I really want to travel more\". Well it seems that ...