Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. In a diary-style series of articles I will describe some of my experiences during the five days of biking In the hope that it might benefit others with similar ideas!
Fantastic view over the Alps from Halserspitze on the border between Austria and Germany. The mountain is only for the experienced and surefooted. Wildbad Kreuth at the foot of the mountain can be comfortably reached from Munich by train and bus.
Roundtrip: Tegernsee - Kreuth - Hirschberg - Bad Wiessee - Tegernsee. This mountainbike trip was different from previous ones. With the weather conditions permitting, we planned our route just in time. The roundtrip went astonishingly well.
A hike with phenomenal company lead from Amden to the top of the Speer mountain in Switzerland. Up there, thick clouds were hanging on one side of the long mountain ridge like an attempt to illustrate the Nothing from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. A bath in Lake Walen topped off the hike.
Interesting weekend trip from Munich to Zurich. Hitchhiked with a bus. And got an unexpected ferry ride over Lake Constance.
Lesson for a TUM student: a good Bavarian bite and drink at Hörsaal 13 on TUM campus Weihenstephan. “Hörsaal 13” translates to “Lecture Hall 13” but is in fact a pub with an attached beer garden – German sense of humor? Anyway, I conclude: definitely one of the better beer gardens.
Recommendable hike close to the German-Austrian border. Starting at Musteralm at Plansee, remembering old times, then hiking up to two summits called Geierköpfe, crossing the rather exposed ridge from the western summit to the eastern summit. Enjoyable view on Zugspitze. Back the same way.
Start small: my first Arch Linux package submitted to the AUR. luksctl manages (portable) LUKS-encrypted devices with a logical volume manager on top of it. Profiles control how the devices are (un)locked, the logical volumes (de)activated, and the filesystems (un)mounted with a single command. Details are found at luksctl on Bitbucket.
Curious: how far can we push Google’s speech recognition web service that is used in Chrome 25+ for speech input? I measured the word accuracy of the service on the TSP speech dataset that consists of recordings of the Harvard sentences in order to get the picture.
It is now a couple of years since affordable depth cameras have entered the market. Out of a developer’s perspective, the Asus Xtion Pro Live seemed to be better suited for development than the XBOX 360 Kinect. I still think so. Here are my first impressions gained when working with the Xtion in a university project.
Google powers a mostly undocumented web service for speech recognition. The web service accepts audio data and returns a transcription. Here is a way to communicate with the web service via HTTPS POST and Python.
When trusting the students is a good idea: a review of the project-based visualization course (DD2257) given by Mario Romero in spring 2013 at KTH. The projects presented by the students exceeded my expectations by far – but why?
Stockholm shows its finest side whenever it is sunny. By coincidence, a particular Saturday in spring this year was a lot about ships — ships and their stories.
Google Chrome 25+ features a nice extension for speech input, which is enabled by adding the x-webkit-speech to text input fields. I put it into action. How well speech input actually works depends heavily on what kind of words you use, though.
Four longitudinal chassis beams of a Chevrolet pickup truck. The nodes of their corresponding finite element model shall be partitioned into clusters such that the nodes within one cluster show similar behaviour in a row of car crash simulations. The question: is the local clustering approach (LLCA) applicable? A summary of a research project.
For those like me who cannot switch easily between different keyboard layouts: How to use the German PC keyboard layout in Mac OS? This recipe worked for me: www.nullpointer.de/stuff/keylayout
Thirteen years passed before I returned to Denmark for a couple of days. In short: good friends, interesting history, and delicious food.
A weekday in April in Sandhamn: no people, no sound, almost no coffee. But plenty of water, plenty of sun, and still plenty of ice. Here are some impressions. And a riddle: what is 北京八?
Wandern in den Bergen ist in Deutschland ein beliebter und allseits bekannter Freizeitsport. Wandern auf dem Eis mit Schlittschuhen hingegen ist hier größtenteils unbekannt. Eissorten abseits der Eisdiele? Abschnallbare Kufen? Isdubbar? Fahren auf Eisschollen? Mehrere dutzend Kilometer? Gefährlich? Eine Geschichte eines deutschen Anfängers über den ersten und intensiven Kontakt mit dem Langstreckeneislaufen in Schweden.
Newly frozen black ice in Stockholm’s Archipelago on March 16. Alone the tour I went with populated the ice with 250 people, which is four buses worth. The frozen sea was beautiful but sometimes treacherous – as ever, carefulness is your best buddy.
What is more to say after more than 200 kilometers on the ice? That it looks differently every month. And in March, I got the opportunity to see an amazing mixture of old thick ice, new thin ice, and sea water.
After many days of adverse weather conditions, an ice-skating tour brings me to the second-largest lake in Sweden – which is three times larger than Bodensee (Lake Constance). Parts of the lake were covered with transparent ice with a hard and level surface.
Successful life-hacker experiment: Removed all the keys from the keyboard, washed both keys and chassis, and almost as good as new. A Swiss knife is useful, but not absolutely necessary.
Time to play search engine and experiment with PageRank. How much time does it take to page-rank a network with a million pages? I got curious during working on a university exercise and tested two power iteration variants and one Monte-Carlo method.
