Frankfurt 101 and the mouse

Bought this mouse for the netbook today – an A4tech X6-60MD in black – which has this retractable USB cord and comes with a somehow smarter “GLASER” diode/sensor which is said to also work on a glass table (most optical mice don’t).

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X6-60MD mouse compared to the wireless desktop mouse

Attaching the mouse to the netbook actually adds a lot of convience to the system – the keyboard and tiny (yet brilliant) screen, however, aren’t that comfortable to work on. The keyboard on this 8,9″ netbook has the same size as the one on 7″ netbooks – next step would have been a 10,2″ netbook though which again adds another 0,3 kg. So this combination will have to do fo the moment. Connecting the netbook to a UMTS phone is a matter of seconds, so it really is a perfect NETbook – even on the road.

I’ve btw stayed with WinXP on this netbook (instead of EasyPeasy 1.0 or eeeUbuntu Standard) because of the special function keys that just work perfectly well with WinXP. Resizing the screen resolution to a compressed 1024×768 (instead of the normal 1024×600) is a matter of one key press. This may of course also be possible with a tuned Ubuntu, but again: not as easy as with XP and I just don’t have the time these days to figure it out. Besides, some of my fav. apps only work with XP and not under (the Windows emulator) Wine.

Sooo….blogging from the netbook (I am currently writing this post on the eee 901) is ok, but due to the keyboard not as convenient as it should be. You’ll quickly end up using 3-4 fingers only. :-(

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Someone from Asia also needs to explain to me one day why there’s so much plastic involved in the packaging of such gadgets. A simple cardboard box would have done as well! At least this one could be opened easily and didnt require the scissors. Stupid.

Another thing to note about A4tech products is that their drivers are much better than the Logitech software package which bricked my desktop system the other day.

Oh, and it’s really amazing how long the battery lasts on this netbook. @E-Nyce: the wear-out level is down to 93% on this used battery/netbook, which is still ok I think.

Once my 15,4″ notebook (= desktop PC with an external 22″ monitor and external keyboard/mouse) retires (hopefully not too soon), I’ll probably go for a 12,2″ or 13″ notebook from either HP, IBM or Samsung and also make sure that it has a bright enough screen (= not as pale as the one on my 15,4″ notebook).

AOB:

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Took this snapshot earlier this week right here in Frankfurt am Main because it reminded me of Taipeh 101.

I am now officially registered as a resident of Frankfurt/M. It may not be the best city to live in, but it has Germany’s biggest airport and is located in the middle of Germany which means I can reach Hamburg or Bremen (in the North) and Munich or Freiburg (in the South) in 3-4h only. Strategically convenient.

What I like about Vienna (part1)

Two and a half days aren’t enough to explore the full potential of a city. That’s why I can only present a few snapshots this time. Besides, I am too tired for a decent post these days.

Have been working on another professional blog for a paid project (no URL, pole) the last couple of weeks and whenever I open my own blog, I think about a relaunch. After all, I am still using the same template since 2006!

I urgently need to get some sleep asap and refocus my agenda on other, much more important matters (like my thesis, for instance).

‘Nways, back to Vienna and some visuals:

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What a roof!

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THE best ticket machine I’ve seen in Europe so far. Took us less than 10 seconds to buy a ticket for the metro. See my ramblings on RMV/Frankfurt am Main to understand why this is so important to me.

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Lovely street-art next to Hotel Orient.

No, don’t ask. Garen showed us that place…

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Best ice-cream and Italian sweets in town. Even at 11 pm and when it’s like -7°C cold outside.

Oh, and they have good coffee.

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Still need to figure out why they’ve put this number on all waste bins.

Interesting to compare German German with Austrian German.

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I will actually go for almost any beer, but – just for the records – they also have Guiness.

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Now this is very impressive. Even have a panorama shot of this somewhere (I still need to go through all of my snapshots and upload them on flickr).

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The obligatory service for tourists. But a nice one indeed!

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Compared to buildings from the past, modern architecture is as uninteresting as most modern cars that will break down after 100.000 kms.

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Modern art + her.

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Vienna Magic

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The globe

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One of those Friedensreich Hundertwasser buildings.

I grew up on his art – maybe everyone in Europe who is somehow interested in art did – and I really, really like it. Hundertwasser also published a manifest on dry toilets in 1975 which is just another cool reason to adore this great visionary artist and intellectual.

You won’t have to visit Vienna to see his work, but since he was born in Vienna, they have the best collection around.

I’d even go as far as saying that Hundertwasser is one of the few visionaries that put my vision of a better world in a clearer picture.

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Foyer @ Wombat’s Base – a great, clean and cheap city hostel. I’d recommend this to anyone who’s still looking for good accomodation in Vienna.

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“We’re sinking, we’re sinking….” – “Wot are you thinking about?”

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Errr….well….

Ok – that’s about it for today. These 2 1/2 days weren’t enough and you can see by the pictures that we even didn’t have enough time to enjoy everything during daylight (due to AfrikaCamp, see previous post). Train ride from Frankfurt to Vienna is quite convenient though. Took us 7h – even the above mentioned hostel is next to the railway station. What a luxury!

liveblogging from AfrikaCamp in Vienna, Austria

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Fellow blogger Mzeecedric and I are today attending AfrikaCamp which just started a few minutes ago.
Please stay tuned for more as I will try to update this post throughout the day (see updates below). Oh and btw, there’s no ustream from the event (no videos). Sorry!

First of all: Africa = continent = many different countries, cultures, etc. (just to be clear on that).

AfrikaCamp is some sort of follow-up to the BarCampAfrica , which recently took place @ Mountain View/Google HQ in the US.

It’s my first ever vísit to Vienna btw and I am already quite surprised how great this city is!

10:00 am:
We arrived at W@lz, the location for the AfrikaCamp.

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The whole of Austria is covered in snow.

11:00 am:
Sessions planning started, Cedric and I will be talking about AfriGadget.com and some blogs we’ve created for dev aid sector / German NGOs.

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There’s free WiFi. Yaay!

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Free chocolate provided by FairTrade. Nice!

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Christoph Chorherr giving an introduction to the different session to some of the ~ 40-50 attendants.

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BarCamp-styled sessions.

11:30 am:
Attending the first session by Helge Fahrnberger of helge.at about laafi.at and OpenStreetMap project they are doing on Ouaggadougou.
Helge is one of the organisers of the AfrikaCamp.

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Helge Fahrnberger talking about laafi.at and OpenSourceMap.

12:00 am
Christoph Chorherr talking about two schooling projects in SouthAfrica: “social sustainable architecture” and “Ithuba Skills College“. Interesting quote from a school headmaster in SA: “We provide schooling but no education”.

[pic to follow asap]

They are also using dry toilets as the sanitation system. GREAT!

12:47 am
Yours truly presenting Erik’s slides on AfriagadgetP1010348
Mwalimu JKE :-)

Had to recharge my netbook after 6hrs in use. Lovely little live-blogging device (despite of its tiny keyboard).

01:20 pm
Having lunch with a guy called Kavindra who works in Vienna as a consultant at a Indo-European Developemnt Agency. Nice vegetarian stew followed by free drinks – thanks to the organisers of this fine event!

02:00 pm
Attending a session on ICT4D.at by Martin Konzett, Karola Riegler, Florian Sturm and Anders Bolin

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Audience clearly dominated by MacBooks. Hmm… ;-)

Martin and Anders showing a preview of their upcoming documentary on mobile phone uses in East Africa. Martin says there’s a 90% penetration of Nokia phones in Africa. Very promising documentary btw which will be released soon. Martin and Florian shot it with a Nikon D90 with different lenses

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Says this guy is a famous athlete who’s constantly on the phone.

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A pouch / CD sleeve made of a Kanga as alternative cover for the upcoming DVD.

Martin also talks about empowerement and mobile financing. Someone from Togo in the audience mentions that we need to have a better infrastructure in many African countries. Debatte started about technology and how it is used in many places.

03:00 pm
Attending a session by Andrea Zefferer & Andrea Ben Lassoued who are presenting their projects @ http://www.clean-it.at and http://www.kinderpate.at

Clean-IT is a project that focusses on an improvement of working conditions among IT-manufacturers (in China) by setting some social standards on the demand side…

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Kinderpate.at focusses on finding sponsors who are willing to support disabled kids.

03:30 pm
coffee break

04:00 pm
Giving a short video interview to Martin Konzett and Anders Bolin, both of ICT4D. Talked about AfriGadget and that we’re are currently looking for a French speaking editor who could cover parts of the francophone Africa on AG. I hate being in front of a camera, my first ever interview/pitch. Camera goes on (fisheye lens) and you’ll have to talk about your agenda for 4 minutes.

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But I wasn’t the only one – seen here: Florian Sturm, Anders Bolin and Martin Konzett playing the same game with Andrea Zefferer.

04:30 pm
AfrikaCamp continues, two or three more sessions – but without us. We had to leave a bit earlier for downtown Vienna. Met an old friend of mine with whom I’d been schooling back in the days in Nbo and whom I hadn’t seen in ages.

Soo….AfrikaCamp imho was a great success, met many interesting people who are doing interesting projects, having the right visions on what works in the African context and what doesnt (NGOs tend to be more realistic then the bigger donor orgs). ICT4D.at guys are quite ambitioned, doing a good job on a tight budget. Make sure to check out their awesome documentary once it’s released on DVD (see comment below)

Else: Vienna is a GREAT city, will def. be back for more. Even my new netbook proved to be portable enough and was a great live-blogging device.

Kudos to Helge, Christoph and Karola who organised this BarCamp + Africa event!

Cheers from Vienna :-)

[UPDATE]
Florian of ICT4D also compiled a very interesting summary of the sessions I couldn’t attend. It’s a pitty that you can’t follow all sessions at once as everyone has interesting ideas to present.

A list of all sessions + list of ICT4D.at interviews are also available.

mobile comfort

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Another sweet reason that justifies the recent purchase of a 2nd hand eee Asus 901 is the compact size and weight of the power supply.

An 8,9″ display at 1024x600px resolution combined with a rather tiny keyboard for sure isn’t as perfect as the ideal combination of these two worlds – which would probably be an advanced 11,1″ notebook @ 1280x800px and full CoreDuo CPU – but any kg I do not have to carry around is very much appreciated.

Netbooks are cool and if Apple and AMD do not agree on this, then it’s just because they haven’t come up with suitable alternatives. With the worldwide increase in netbook sales, it becomes obvious that many consumers actually like these low-cost computers.

My eeePC has a 6-cell battery that lasts for at least 6hrs (tested!) – which provides real mobile comfort so I could even leave this power supply at home.

I think that netbooks – which ideally also come with an internal 3G modem and a basic Linux OS – are the perfect computer for most average households, whether in Europe, the US or Africa.

Sarugakucho 11-19

I’d spent the first eight years of my life growing up in Tokyo, Japan, and since we’ve never been back to Japan since then, I was very pleased today to discover that the house we’d lived in still exists:


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I may not be such a great fan of Google services (even though I have their ads on my blog), but this Google Street view feature just rocks big time. It’s also interesting to see how the city has changed over the last 30 years – at least by judging from what’s visible through Goolge Maps.

From a professional point of view, of course, I am nowadays wondering about the sewage system in use in Tokyo, and how they manage to provide all this high-tech infrastructure in such a densely populated area.

Avigo10

IF you knew what most digital cameras back in 1999 looked like – and how much they would cost back then – you’ll quickly understand that it’s rather astonishing to have these digital images from my beloved TexasInstruments AVIGO10 PDA I’ve just unearthed from a sub-sub-sub-directory on my harddisk.

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It’s a rather childish mod/hack that I had done on this outdated PDA way back in 1999 and of which I was reminded just a few minutes ago while googling for a link to this weekend’s AfrikaCamp in Vienna.

Mzeecedric of m.zung.us and I will attend this event and I’ll also try to cover it on my blog if everything works out as planned. I am not expecting too much though, just an open meeting and exchange with interested and active folks in Europe (or let’s say Austria and Germany) who also have some sort of Mal d’Afrique on their agenda or anything else related to this matter.

Coming back to the mod: while googling for the link, I stumbled upon Robert Lender’s website – a fellow blogger who had contacted me way back in 1999 on this hack and had integrated it on his page dedicated to this PDA. I guess I may even have his e-mail somewhere. Ok, now that’s 10 years ago, and if you ask yourself what you did in 1999, you’ll probably say that you’d been online via CompuServe or AOL and probably also hosted your site on Ethan Zuckerman’s Tripod site. Yup. 1999. Long time ago.

This post is dedicated to Robert and it will be especially interesting to see a face behind this contact whose name has been around for such a long time.

The original page on http://kikuyumoja.de/avigo has been offline for quite some time now, but I just copied everything into a PDF.

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I btw still have this PDA at home. Compared to my friends who owned stupid Palm PDAs, the Avigo10 was a bit cheaper and not as popular as a Palm Pilot PDA, hence less software being available for this product. It also lacked the marketing backup from TI who quickly dropped this product from their product line for unknown reasons. Kinda sad, especially since this PDA came with a serial connector and could be hooked up to a modem which turned it into a great telnet device among other cool hacks.

Actually, it’s kinda worrying to see that even now in 2009, most mobile devices still lack such basic services (telnet, ssh, etc.) and charge you extra for a comfort we already had in 1999. As for the issue of power consumption, I think that we’ll also need to have a revolution on the energy side: something where we will not only see more efficient and energy-saving devices with smaller CPUs, but instead also devices that generate the energy the moment you need it and thus reduce our needs for stronger batteries.

@T.H.User: FFM, 1999, Nordi, MediaMarkt! Erinnerst Du Dich noch? Das Gerät hatten wir damals zusammen gekauft! :-)

l’Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste

(Le compositeur DIANGIENDA WABASOLELE Armand) “DWA, en autodidacte, étudie le solfège jusqu’? maîtriser la composition en musique classique. Il a hissé l’Orchestre au niveau d’une grande formation dont la renommée dépasse largement les frontières d’Afrique. De plus en plus il établit les ponts entre son orchestre et d’autres orchestres du genre ? l’étranger.” (source)

Pretty amazing!

Or as one member of the orchestra says in this short clip: “When I am sick and I listen to the music, it gives me strength.”

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