MICHA.ELMUELLER

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.

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.

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.

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.