strange blog

Biking the Fuldabrücker Runde

Till — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:05:28 +0000

The other day I was taking my mountain bike for a spin. I wanted to check out the “Fuldabrücker Runde”, a course around a municipality here in northern Hesse. I learned from a previous mistake and pre-loaded the track onto my Edge. There is a website on which you can look at routes within Hesse, create tracks, and then download a gps file of the tracks. Nice feature!

Well, arriving in the town of Dittershausen the overwhelming amount of biking guide posts was astonishing. But shortly after, still following my the track on my Edge, nothing… not a single guide.

On the whole round course there where no sign for it. Actually, there were only signs on the far edges of the municipality on its borders to others and along the D9 and R1 route. This was a huge downer for this bike trip. Additionally, the course is pretty.. I just don’t understand why there were no signs.

Here is the course btw.:

Formulor / Ponoko

Till — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:03:18 +0000

So, I decided to order a small size prototype for my LED-Clock project from Formulor, the german partner of Ponoko. Small because it’s pretty expensive. My design on a 18x18cm and 3mm thick sheet of acrylic glass with shipping and tax costs about 52 Euro. The shipping alone makes a whopping 6.70 Euro… for a plastic sheet a little bigger than a CD case…

Nevertheless, I sent in my design… and got an answer from the service that some things are wrong or not well designed. The mail was pretty informative and also a boost in confidence. They won’t just produce your design even tho there could be errors – nice! Fixing the errors was quick, but I had to increase some sizes for the “not well designed” part… this took quite some time. The idea is to engrave a shape into a front- and backplane and create inlays for those engravings so that it becomes 3-layered. For the (cut-)sizes I used some kerf-tables from ponoko and applied the sizes to the engraving sizes.

As it turns out the engravings came out smaller than designed (inlay thickness: 4.8mm designed, ~4.7mm as measured). Which is strange because the kerf for the cuttings was pretty exact (inlay thickness: 5.0mm designed, 4.83 to 4.88 measured). Even with some scratching of the residue at the edges of the engravings the inlays barely fit. This was a little disappointing because I thought if it turns out not to be precise the inlays will still fit as I adjusted the measurements a little in “my favour”.

Beside this, the outcome of the plates is pretty awesome. I would never come close to such a result crafting it by hand.

Formulor LED Clock - After unpacking

Formulor LED Clock - Washed plates

What I did after unpacking was cleaning it from the dusty residue that stuck to it by washing it in warm water – I used a toothbrush for this task .

Looks great, even with the protecting sheet still stuck on one side.

Projects Update

Till — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:04:58 +0000

I am currently tinkering around with my LCD-Clock project.

New is: I’m trying to make a prototype design using ponoko. But its pretty expensive, phew. My option is to make it on my own… which would, most definitely, lack any nicely looking outcome. Working with acrylic glass is just awful! Well my opinion…

Oh, by the way… I made a page for the project here:

http://www.tillamma.de/lcd-clock/

Thats it for now.

RoboCup WM in Istanbul – The Roundup

Till — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:36:03 +0000

For those who don’t know it yet: One of my hobbies is RoboCup – robots that play football (Why not soccer? It is FOOTball, dammit!).

Between the 3rd and 12th July was the RoboCup World Championship in Istanbul, Turkey. Well it was a crazy tournament, to say the least. Our equipment, including our robots, arrived waaaaaaay to late. And we were not kicked out of the tournament just by good will of the other teams. A big “Thank you” to them. Anyway, we finished on rank seven… with some preparation time earlier we could have easily competed with the first four teams. The RoboCup god is a sadistic one! Some more information can be obtained from the Carpe Noctem team’s blog

For the city: Well… I did expect more! Some spots we wandered through reminded my of scenes from the movie “Robot Holocaust”, just awful. The inner city, with all the big sights was kind of like I hoped it to be. But being frequently bothered to buy something or to eat something when walking down a street is really wearing down after some hours. The bad thing: I had no opportunity to visit the inside of the Hagia Sophia. Apparently it is closed on Mondays and our only two days of sightseeing where the two Mondays. Also, the Blue Mosque and the Tokapi Palace where closed when we wanted to take a closer look. Anyways… impressive architecture to say the least!

Ok, thats about it for this short wrap-up.

Blog name change

Till — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:17:39 +0000

As much as I liked the old Blog name I nevertheless decided to change it.
Why? – ’cause “strange” is one of my life’s frequently occurring adjectives.

Technical stuff always behaves in a matter it was never intended to or no-one else would ever encounter. I tend to get the most exotic errors when handling a computer. And… well… you must have encountered one of my moments of rage to really know why everything seems strange around me…

It is 09. June 2011 now… well… long break, again.

Till — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:33:23 +0000

Title says it all… But, now that I finished my diploma thesis I have some more spare time and what else but picking up old projects comes into my mind?

I grabbed the box where I stored my stuff and… it was dusty… sign of a neglected project! Anyway, I could pretty much start from where I stopped. As a subproject of my “Wall covering” project I wanted to create my own LED-Clock. I’m done with the first prototype… well… it’s not a clock entirely but only one digit. But it is always clever to make small scale testing before creating the real deal. Really! Ask the Mythbusters! I’ve learned some things on the way towards this prototype that I will change for the actual clock. I will create another page for this project where I go more into detail.

Ok, enough teasing already… here’s a picture (yes, it’s a little blurry… so what?):

Wow… over two years of… nothing

Till — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:22:15 +0000

Yeah, I know. I’m not good at keeping track of stuff in my blog.

What was the last thing… ah, yes… HBCI. Never got it working well. I think there is something wrong with the chip card.

Ok, actually I wanted to say that there is a new page logging a project of mine:

http://www.tillamma.de/project-wall-covering/

It’s about an alternative way to cover walls with something that isn’t paint or wallpapers. I’d like to span sheets of cloth and illuminate them with some back lights.

Also, I started to write drafts for other projects I carry around in the back of my mind for quite some time now. I will publish those once I’m pleased with the progress.

HBCI and Linux using the Kobil TriB@nk card reader

Till — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:58:59 +0000

Here in Germany we can use FinTS(HBCI) doing online banking. This method is theoretically safer then the most commonly used method using PIN/TAN. PIN/TAN is vulnerable to phishing or attacks by trojans logging key strokes. That, and the fact that I wanted to test the FinTS(HBCI) service forced me to do switch.

The other day I ordered a card reader, namely the Kobil TriB@nk. There are other vendors, for example Reiner SCT, who produce card readers. I searched the web for Linux support of Kobil card readers and found some forum sites discussing the object. Anyhow, after downloading the driers of the card reader from the Kobil website and using “apt-get” (I’m currently using kubuntu) to install the missing libraries (pcsc-lite and ccid) I got stuck with the card reader not working at all.

I used hours in searching the web fore more information. And as time went by I started being frustrated, as the Linux support from Kobil seems to be half-assed. The Reiner SCT card readers seem to have a very good Linux support… *sigh*.

At one point (I wanted to go to bed about one hour before) I made a final attempt. I purged the “libccid” from my system, downloaded the latest source from the developers website, compiled and installed it. Now starting the pcscd and plugging in the card reader finally gave me some usable output. *cheer*

I went to bed with a relief.

To be continued…

OpenStreetMap on the Mac

Till — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:52:43 +0000

I use my powerbook for almost all the work on OSM using the JOSM tool. But starting the Terminal.app, cd’ing into the right directory, typing the command,… is actually a pain in the ass (at least for me . Mac OS X is a nice operating system and therefore there should be a nice starter . So, i fired up Jar Bundler and IconCompser to build a .app.

I want to verify on the developer list if I’m allowed to bring it online.

Edit: here it is.

Edit2: as this is veeeery outdated, i pulled it. I’m not even using the powerbook anymore…

OpenStreetMap02

Till — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:50:06 +0000

I already posted something about the openstreetmap project before. Now some pictures to illustrate the progress:

It shows my work (Elgershausen and some parts of Großenritte) and the work of T2000 and another guy we dont know yet . Oh, before i start explaining all over… follow this link.