Modern Experiences at a Concert

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This is a response to a post on Daily Exhaust which itself is inspired by an image from the D11 Conference.

I’ve been to festivals for the past five years and every time I’ve taken lots of photos and even some videos. Especially last year, equipped with the iPhone, I was able to create 1080p video. I have to admit that shooting photos or recording videos takes away part of the experience but, for me at least, it has a big value in retrospect. From all those data I created videos for each of the last three visits to the festival and added some music to it. If available I also chose music of the band that is on the respective photo. Those videos are like a documentary on the whole festival, from getting there, setting up the tent, wandering around, seeing funny things and the actual concerts. I love watching them from time to time and think back at the great time I had. Just last year my sister recorded a “I died for you” from Iced Earth and I used the music from the Alive in Athens live album in the video and it matches so perfectly you could almost think it being the sound of the video (until you realize it’s not Matt Barlow on the stage). Still, a great memory!

I think, as also mentioned in the linked article, that you should be wary of how much you see through your camera and how much you experience by really watching. For me it’s about being there and living it, but also use all that photos and videos as vivid memory to build up a pleasent anticipation for the next gig.

And frankly, who would not want to remember that? (I picked the more catchy ones ;-] )

 

 

Java I/O Performance Iterating Directories

Robert Lohr1 Comment

A while ago at work we were confronted with the task of creating a directory listing in a Grails application. We’ve tried a couple of approaches, one the Groovy way and one the Java way. Both delivered only a poor performance. A short search brought forth a Stackoverflow thread addressing the issue of slow Java i/o performance with only one real solution: switch from Java 6 to 7. That’s no option at work but out of personal interest I gave it a try at home.Read More »

First Attempts at Drawing

Robert Lohr2 Comments

One of the reasons I bought an iPad was to read digital comics. Now, a year later I not only like reading them but appreciate the art of drawing so much that I started drawing myself. To be absolutely clear, other than art classes at school – which were of no interest to me and are long gone now – I have no experience whatsoever. So I started searching on the internet for resources on how to start. I found something on the iBook Store which in turn led me to a series of Youtube videos by Stan Lee and John Buscema on how to draw comics – The Marvel Way! These videos are so unbelievably old, they’re talking about pausing the tape in order to draw what was just discussed and shown! So I did as I was told and here are the results.

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Project HTPC

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Motivation

Not long ago I became quite frustrated with the gaming capabilities of my iMac. It’s not that I didn’t know about the expected performance of the hardware since I bought the cheapest version by design. At that time I did not use the PC I had for what it was built for, which finally led to me selling it. However, recently I felt the urge to play some games other than Diablo 3. For one the iMac just couldn’t deliver the performance to enjoy the visuals of modern games as they were designed to be. Secondly what really frustrated me and this is also the main reason why I never really played anything other than Diablo 3 on the iMac, was the poor cooling management of that machine. I have to crank up the coolers manually (using iStat Menus 3) in order to prevent overheating. Otherwise it’ll just get very hot and reboot eventually. As one can imagine this technique only works reliably on OS X.
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My Preferred Approach to Touch on a Computer

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With Windows 8 now finally released, there comes a new generation of hardware with a strong emphasis on the input device – the fingers. Touch as we know and love today has been around in common perception since the release of the first iPhone which was in 2007. The first smartphone like phone was actually released in 1994 by IBM, the IBM Simon. Based on todays standards you can imagine this wasn’t a device one would call “a beauty”. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists the form factor as “brick”. From a current point of view you probably wouldn’t want to use and play around with such a type of touch interface.

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(Mountain) Lion automatically wakes from sleep

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Since I first got my iMac I always wondered why the machine would suddenly just wake up from Sleep in the middle of the night. I didn’t touch it since at night I prefer to sleep (or else I must be sleepwalking). I initially found a way to fix this but it came up again with the update to Mountain Lion (which just reset the preference).
Go the System Preferences and hit Energy Saver. There you’ll uncheck Wake for Wi-Fi network access (in German: Ruhezustand bei Netzwerkzugriff beenden). I figured that must be the reason because at night my router automatically turns off wireless and just before I get home from work it turns it back on. For me it did the trick.
Here are two images, one from my machine (in German) and one found on Google for an english machine.

Controlling a Mac’s fans (AppleSMC)

Robert Lohr1 Comment

Since the iMac found its way onto my desk I’ve been bothered with the heat generated when playing Diablo 3 (or possibly any other game) – just as with the MacBook Pro. The only difference: The MacBook’s fans were howling to stop the torment, the iMac just swallows the pain it seems. Don’t get me wrong, the system is not overheating and temperature is well within its limits. In fact, the CPU doesn’t even really heat up. It’s more the graphics chip and the power supply. But for me as a former PC user who built all the PCs himself and always had a good (and mostly quiet) cooling this is just a bit unusual.Read More »