Kikuyumoja – Page 11

Some notes

Somehow odd, and hence qualifying to be published as a blog post (instead of a tweet): pop-culture-wise, some of my offline friends (regardless of their age, btw) seem to be living under a massive rock. A rock so huge that they don’t seem to realize anything happening outside of their world.

Cosplay, src: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/11/just-the-two-of-us-cosplay/ — Cosplay, src: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/11/just-the-two-of-us-cosplay

Am I the only one who experiences this? I mean, I have friends – good and dear friends – who don’t care about any contemporary cultural developments, like good music or other commercial art. You don’t have to be an online geek like me, follow any reddit/imgur posts or need to know any internet meme, you don’t need to follow the news / politics or know anything about the technological changes surrounding us. But something small….something would be most welcome.

When I talk to them, I have to make sure not to mention anything that might have been developed after 1980. Sometimes I need to explain basics like the meaning of “nerd“.

Some of these friends have an e-mail address. An inbox they check out once a month. To reach them, I need to call or send an sms. A short message (yeah!), because they don’t even have a smartphone.

These offline friends – I really like them. But still – they are odd. In a contemporary context, probably as odd to me as these Cosplay geeks may be to my mother.

The worst group out there, however, aren’t these “Offliners”, but instead the group in betweeen: the FB-haters who don’t post anything out of fear a future employer may track something embarassing; the FB-haters who keep on mentioning how their kids keep them busy and away from the keyboard (~ while there are a bunch of other mums and dads online who are oversharing); the social-media-haters who dismiss Twitter as a waste of time BUT at the time publish all their mental sensitivities via the offline backchannel also known as WhatsApp (!). The offliners who will overshare “funny” pics and videos you’ve seen on 9gag three years ago. On WhatsApp.

The same group may btw not even know what a BarCamp is all about.

And then there’s this group:

Another brilliant one via XKCD (src: http://xkcd.com/920/) (thx, Hinek!)

You’re having dinner with a few friends and then someone pulls out his phone and mentions, how he/she has recently seen a nice YouTube video and yaddayaddayadda… what follows is a prolonged YouTube session with uninterested parties sharing “funny” videos online. “Oh, have you seen THIS one….”.

And there you go wondering about Buzzfeed and Mashable sharing yet another “Best of…”, “the best [nominalization]…”, “Top 7 reasons why…” etc. post.

The Threat

A group of peace-loving hackers that manages to log into all news networks and carefully places a fake story of aliens that are about to attack planet earth.

Q: What would happen?

Glycyrrhiza yunnanensis

Bought this packet of “Dried Licorice Slices” from a Chinese shop today. Delicious stuff that I am using for teas and pure chewing pleasures. I also love liquorice (Dutch liquorice, that is), but this certainly is the low carb version and equally sweet :-)

Dried Licorice Slices

Now, as this comes from China, I keep on wondering about the conditions under which this liquorice plant (Glycyrrhiza yunnanensis) is cultivated. Where did it grow? How long has it been transported? How old is it? What kind of water was used to irrigate the plants? Where does the water come from? Is it contaminated in any way? And what about the packaging – what kind of plastic was used and which colours were used for the printing of the packaging?

s/HP/Dell

I have recently upgraded my main computer from an HP EliteBook 6930p to a Dell Latitude E6430. After 7 years of using HP business laptops, the transition to the Dell range is a welcome change. Here’s why:

1. LED screen
Both machines are 14.1″ laptops with a slightly higher screen resolution than the usual (and rather horrible) 1366x768px. While the HP is from 2009 and still came with a 1440x900px screen, this new Dell laptop has 1600×900. A lot of programmers / web workers actually prefer higher screen resolutions, and I meanwhile also, but in the beginning the tiny font was a problem. Since I usually only go for business laptops with docking stations, my main screen is an external 22″ monitor at 1680×1050 – so this screen issue is secondary to me.

What matters though is the illumination technology – which is based on cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) on my old HP. As mentioned in my 2009 review of the HP 6930p vs. the Dell E6400, even the E6400 already had a nice LED screen, just as about half of all Lenovo T400 laptops sold. Of the 6930p sold since 2008/2009, most models only came with the CCFL version – and the few available LEDs only had a WXGA / 12800×800 resolution. It is only recently that someone came up with a hack to install a WXGA+ (1440×900) LED screen from a Lenovo T410 into an HP 6930p. I once thought about doing this hack and already bought the cables, but such 14.1″ LED screens usually sell for ~ 140 EUR alone. These days, second hand 6930p laptops sell for around 200 EUR, so any such investment would be rather stupid.

New laptop, new screen, issue solved.

The bitter truth may be that I should have picked a 14.1″ laptop with a WXGA+ LED screen in 2009 (e.g. the E6400 or the T400). The WXGA++ LED screen on the E6430 is an instant LIKE (even though the CCFL version had better colours).

It seems there are no 14.1″ laptops with really good screens. It’s either 12.5″ (Lenovo), 13.3″ (Apple) or 15.x”/17.x” if you’re interested in something like IPS panels.

Continue reading “s/HP/Dell”

Twitter hilft!

Letztens wollte ich mein über zwei Jahre altes Nokia 1800 Prepaid Handy von seinem O2-Netlock befreien und rief dazu die Hotline von O2 an, wo mir zuerst ein falscher Code genannt und dann vorenthalten wurde, dass man den Freischaltungscode nur maximal 10x eingeben dürfe. Am Ende der ca. 30 Minuten dauernden Prozedur hatte ich dann ein dauerhaft gesperrtes Nokia Handy, das fortan nur noch im O2-Netz verwendet werden kann.

Mobilfunkmast auf dem Puig de Sant Salvador, Mallorca

Continue reading “Twitter hilft!”

100 years later

I understand that many people do not have the luxury of tracking back their ancestors, and it actually doesn’t matter what or who your ancestors did or were many years ago – only the present and future really matters.

From a historical point of view though, looking back in time often delivers some interesting results. One such surprise is the following story on a building that used to be family property.

The other day, my mum had asked me about driving to a very small village about 50 km south of her place where my great-great-grandfather had owned and run a sanatorium as a medical doctor from 1905 to 1915. One my great-aunts used to tell us stories about this place, and I remember going there on a trip with her sometime back in 1986 or so. Back then, we actually never found the premises, so tracking the whereabouts of this building used to be one of those open questions that needed to be solved one day.

My great-great-grandfather apparently was a strange guy, whose family had immigrated from ~~France~~ Alsace in the 19th century and who had volunteered for World War I in 1914 which eventually led to his death in 1915 at the age of 56. Yes, back then, people still volunteered to die for their motherland.

You can see him in the following picture (standing behind the table) where he and some family members are in the garden of their spacious house in ~1912.

garten-840

Continue reading “100 years later”

Die Alternative zum Rauchen

Wenn Dich der Radiologe bei der Röntgenaufnahme Deiner Lunge ernsthaft fragt, wie Du seinerzeit das Rauchen aufgegeben hast – weil er selber es schon fünf Mal versucht hat – dann ist es wohl Zeit für eine öffentliche Stellungnahme zum Thema (und damit auch ein Bruch mit der eigenen Konvention, nicht über Gesundheitsthemen bloggen zu wollen).

Wer also mit dem Rauchen aufhören möchte oder jemanden kennt, der das dringend machen sollte, dem kann ich vor allem folgendes mitteilen:

1. der schnelle Entzug
Der kalte Entzug – einfach von jetzt auf gleich komplett aufhören – ist eine schöne Idee, die aber wohl vor allem von Nichtrauchern überlegt wurde und ganz entscheidend von der eigenen Disziplin abhängt. Diejenigen mit diesbezüglich starker Disziplin hätten aber wohl gar nicht erst angefangen, daher kann das bestenfalls nur temporär gelingen. Ich hatte diese Methode mal drei Monate lang eisern durchgehalten, aber bin danach umso tiefer gefallen.

2. der langsame Entzug
Der langsame Entzug besteht für mich darin, mit dem Rauchen sofort aufzuhören und stattdessen komplett auf elektronische Zigaretten umzusteigen. Ähnlich wie bei einer Diät, die vor allem dann Erfolg verspricht, wenn sich der Körper langsam umgewöhnen kann, sind elektronische Zigaretten aus meiner Sicht eine ganz wunderbare Alternative zu herkömmlichen Zigaretten. Mit oder ohne Nikotin (und auch nur Nikotin – nicht die zig anderen Inhaltsstoffe im Zigarettenrauch, die bei der Verbrennung (statt Verdampfung!) freigesetzt werden) kann man seinen eingebildeten Bedarf so stückchenweise runterschrauben. Continue reading “Die Alternative zum Rauchen”