Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
RoboCup 2004 is getting closer
Got up way to early today :-) Hurried up to work and picked up a couple of notebooks we will take with us to Lisbon to RoboCup 2004. We decided to have a dual install on the machines (we use Linux for development and the Robots, but Windoze for a game of Quake ;-) so we couldn't use the default setup. After getting a partition tool for resizing the preinstalled Windoze I installed Fedora Core 2. So far so good. Then I booted from Knoppix and created an image of this machine - so I did. This took ages! Knoppix for some reason didn't enable DMA transfer for the hard drive... Of course I didn't look for that. At least now I know a bit about Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In the movies the kids always play those roles and I only had vague information in mind. I'm a little bit confused about that "democratic republican" thing. Have to read more about that.
On the tech side the backup went fine. But when I tried to restore the image onto another laptop dd stopped due to a broken sector. So I stopped, hurried down, did some physics and went back uphill again. The other two notebooks restored just fine. Reinstalled the broken one from scratch.
Was nice in the office. Quiet, only a small bulb of light, thunderstorm outside :-) Left the building, going through dark halls, went downhill in the rain by bike. That's university life I guess :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Good day, bad day
Found out today that the Lehmann's book store will close at the end of the month. This is pretty sad. I liked to go there and look through all that IT books (Lehmann's is a special book store for IT and medicine books). Since the shop was on the street with most of the student restaurants I was there pretty often. Too bad. They told that they where finally bashed by the new super huge book store that opened a few years ago :-/ Fortunately Lehmanns will still deliver online orders without a postal fee.
Played around with my new mobile. Compared to my old one it's pretty impressive what you can do with that little thing! Have played a bit with recoding movies to an appropriate size. See my wiki entry about converting videos to 3GPP format. Have yet to play with MIDP 2.0 though but too much work to do for my job at university and WebWide...
Will leave to Portugal for RoboCup 2004 friday next week. Got a new sleeping bag and backcountry matress today for our camping action over there :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
First SIP phone call
Last week I got my hardware SIP phone (a Grandstream BT-100 via sipgate). So my sweetheart and me had the first call over the internet - remarkable day :-) Quality is not yet as good as ISDN but there is potential. The voice is as clear as on the ISDN phone, but it still has some kind of jitter... Have to play with some network options I think :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Gardening work
Yesterday I decided to help my father in the garden as there was a bigger task waiting: cutting the hedge. We have a pretty big garden (garden, not field though!) and this takes some time. To get rid of the crap right away we decided put it through the shredder - this was my job. When collecting the trim I used a rake. This rake is part of the Gardena combi system. For this system you have one handle and several tools you can attach to this handle. Although it is pretty simple I'm quite impressed. I did already use it several times but I didn't see the practical impact this has on the storage capacity in our hovel in the backyard. I don't know how long you can already buy this system, probably pretty long, but this was the first time for me to notice this. The Unix philosophy reaches gardening work! ;-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Tents and more
Anne and me had some great days in Bloemendaal at Duincamping de Lakens. The weather was pretty good and we rent bikes and explored the countryside around. Finally we reached the beach and behind some dunes it was warm enough to sleep an hour :-)
We had classical dinners with a camping stove on the one day and a grill the other one. Great! You should try if you didn't already.
