BPI inside

I don't exactly know why but in the past month I somehow did not find the time and motivation to create a proper post but several things have happened and this is just a quick summary over them all.

This may or may not be followed by individual posts on each single subject. I hope that I get around to that but no guarantees. So lets get it on.

On the LED Cube front I hinted on a "recent technical acquisition" in my last post on that subject. Well, this acquisition is nothing less than a full blown digital oscilloscope. YAY. It took a few weeks to decide and also a few days to find a suitable distributor but now I'm a proud owner of an Owon SDS7102V 100MHz digital scope.

The next notable gadget I (finally) received is the long-awaited Pebble watch. Within two days this little gem became the most notable thing which I didn't know I have been missing as companion for my phone for a long time. Despite some bad reviews on other places, I've been expecting an "extension" to my phone's display and that's exactly what I got. No need to long for the phone in my pocket anymore when there's something up. Within a second I know what's up and can still decide if I should take out the phone or just ignore a received spam mail until later. Furthermore much less distraction for other participants in case of meetings. Currently I'm mainly using this Star Trek inspired watchface for displaying the time and I also have installed Pebble Notifier on my phone to forward notifications of some selected applications to the watch, even if these aren't natively supported by the Pebble app itself. Great tool. And it's quite exceeding the expected runtime, my current record is set at 10 days without recharge (and that's before I discovered the option to not turn on the backlight when there's enough ambient light).

I also attended several events. The first one was the Grazer Linuxtage which is a mixture of project exhibition and series of lectures all centered around Linux. Like two years ago, where I also attended, the lectures were quite interesting and I hope that I find some time to try out or have a deeper look at some things I noted down during the lectures. The only negative point of the event is that the place is getting much too small for this event. Many of the lectures I attended that day were so crowded that late-comers could not even enter the lecture hall anymore. I hope that this changes in the future.

One followup-event which I got notice of on the Linuxtage was a (Linux) Show and Tell at the realraum Graz. At this event people showcased their favourite or special Linux tools, i.e. special use cases and capabilities of SSH. Before that event I thought that I'm not that bad with the Linux console, but I've been pretty much floored by the experts there. Which is not necessarily as bad as it sounds because at least I understood everything the guys were talking about :)

The barcamp Graz was the next event which I visited. That time this was a three-day long event and luckily I could be there all days. A barcamp is like a conference just with the difference that every attendand is a participant and presenter. The detail topics of the sessions are not planned before but are decided on and ordered by all participants at the start of each day by themselves. It was a very interesting experience and made it possible to have a look at many different topics from many different points of view.

One special thing I took away from the barcamp was the idea of a Repair Cafe. This is a privately organized meetup of people to just repair broken everyday stuff and get some more lifetime out of it. It is some sort of counteraction against the creeping planned obsolescence of things. We were several people who were interested in that idea and it seems that Brigitte and I are currently the ones who are further driving the idea. Maybe there is the chance of a permanent recurring event where everyone helps everybody :)

Since Google Reader is discontinued by July 1st I've been looking for alternatives for some time now. I had a long look at Feedly but in the end didn't decide on it because it does not have a clean web interface but only works through native apps or browser plugins. So I chose to install Tiny Tiny RSS on my own. During installation I just hit a roadblock or two. In fact, my problems were that the minimum requirements for TT-RSS were PHP 5.3 and special server modes (e.g. no php_basedir/open_basedir restriction) while my hosting provider only offered PHP 5.2 with active open_basedir restriction. After trying to find an alternative to that (which wasn't successful) I decided to go the hard way and back-port and refactor Tiny Tiny RSS to work with my hosters restrictions. It took a few hours but finally I had a flawlessly running TT-RSS despite the settings of my hosting. I will post the changes here as soon as I come around to create a proper patchfile (maybe that will happen in the nearer future).

And finally last weekend I had the honor to be invited to my cousins wedding. It was a very nice and private wedding with (almost) only the closest relatives invited. Thanks for that and best wishes!