Posts on Flo's Thoughts

The Breathing Light

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:56:23 +0100

This was one of the details that made me feel drawn to the platform ever since I first saw it in a 12" PowerBook in the early 2000s. Not only the pulsing, but also the fact that at some point the light disappeared behind the aluminum once it wasn’t needed anymore – only there when it had to indicate something. This was just beautiful.

I had now idea that it also synced between devices:

Why Old Tech Is Making a Comeback

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:56:19 +0100

This resonates strongly with me.

Alfred Who?!

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:14:39 +0100

A few days ago, I got a new computer. I took the chance to evaluate which software I still wanted to use and move over in an effort to reduce my dependencies. One of those programs was Alfred. I used it for many years, mainly to launch apps, open files, do some basic calculations, manage my clipboard, and quickly open Jira tickets. Apple’s Spotlight could do all of those things except for the tiny Jira script.

Note to Self: On Working With Hugo

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:07:22 +0100

In early 2026, I had the urge to start using my website again. I had a few ideas for some blog posts that I want to write about. While checking out the page and updating what’s been here, I had to figure a few things out. This is just for me to remember what I did for the next time I have to do a major jump.

Updating the theme Link to heading

At the time of writing, I’m using the theme hugo-coder. I did not install it as a submodule but as a plain copy. When updating to the newest version, I had to replace a few files.

Book Notes: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:53:27 +0100

A fantastic book that I only finished a few days ago. It’s interesting and somewhat devastating to keep in mind when this was written and how much has changed since then. Bill Gates finished this book during the pandemic and I would be curios to know if he’s still that optimistic. According to his website, he’s still optimistic, but with footnotes.

However, I think this book makes a great cheat-sheet for anyone who regularly finds themselves in discussions about climate change, what we can do about, and what the actual numbers are. I feel like I should always keep a few fresh copies of this book with me to hand out to people who want to start such discussions. It’s refreshing to read some positive notes on these topics. It left me in a similar mood as Hans Rosling’s Factfulness.

Follow-Up on Quadcopters

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 14:22:39 +0200

Though this is almost five years old, it’s still pretty impressive. I you’ve liked “The Astounding Athletic Power of Quadcopters” you might find this one interesting as well.

10 Years Since My First WWDC Scholarship

Fri, 15 May 2020 20:25:49 +0200

Today marks the 10th anniversary of my first invitation to WWDC.

This was the one with the keynote during which Steve asked the audience to turn off all those little WiFi routers as they interfered with his demos. For the record, I did not have such a device with me in that room. I totally forgot that this was the event they introduced FaceTime.

A lot has changed since then. It was an amazing experience. I’m looking forward to see how WWDC will change in the future. And I hope to be able to go again at some point.

The iPad Magic Keyboard

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 20:30:02 +0200

John Gruber:

The Smart Keyboards are iPad covers you can type on. The Magic Keyboard is a portable keyboard stand, not a cover — when you want to use your iPad as a tablet, not a laptop, you must detach it.

It seems obvious, but I didn’t think about it like that yet.

As on Apple’s Smart Keyboards, the iPad Magic Keyboard has no Escape key. If you miss the Escape key, there are a couple workarounds. First, in most situations, ⌘-period works as a synonym for Escape. This is a standard Mac shortcut that dates back to classic Mac OS decades ago. (In my opinion, any context where ⌘-period doesn’t work as a synonym for the Escape key ought to be considered a bug.)

Podcasts Spring 2020

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:27:40 +0200

I’ve been wanting to update this list for quite some time now. It shrunk a fair bit since I’m not driving my car nearly as often as I used to and I rarely find the time to listen to a podcast around the house. But I still enjoy them a lot when I get the chance to. So, here’s what I’m listening to these days:

My preferred way of listening to podcasts is still through Overcast.

My Watch Dilemma

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 19:42:40 +0200

I like my Apple Watch. I really do. It’s fantastic having a tiny computer on my wrist. Especially with all the health utilities and, more recently, the security features that unlock my computer. But that wasn’t always the case.

When the Apple Watch first came out, I didn’t really see the appeal. I’ve always been a watch guy and enjoyed wearing watches. Nothing too special, just some regular quartz watches that I considered nice. I think that started back in high school. I’ve basically worn a watch ever since and, in later years, I always had a few to pick from.

Taking Charge Of Those XIPs

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 22:31:17 +0200

Two great tips in this article. Luckily, at this time of the year waiting for new Xcode builds to unpack isn’t as bad as in the early summer. I’m sure this will save a lot of time after the next WWDC, though. I don’t know if I’ll use those PDF man pages often, but it’s still a neat trick.

NetNewsWire 5

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:02:28 +0200

A great write-up on the release of NetNewsWire 5. I’m happy to see that quality Mac apps and RSS are not dead.

The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple's 'Find My' Feature

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 22:40:35 +0200

An interesting article about how Apple’s new ‘Find My’ feature works and how it compares to the previous iterations of the service. With Apple’s focus on privacy, I was a bit surprised to learn that with the current version they’re able to read the acquired locations:

In fact, Find My’s cryptography goes one step further than that, denying even Apple itself the ability to learn a user’s locations based on their Bluetooth beacons. That would represent a privacy improvement over Apple’s older tools like Find My iPhone and Find Friends, which don’t offer such safeguards against Apple learning your location.

Discontinuing My Personal Apps

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:27:34 +0200

I’ve released Studifutter probably more than ten years ago, and to this day, it is still on the App Store. While I was often pleasantly surprised that it was still working, I didn’t find the time or the will to properly update it to support new cafeterias or the newest phones.

That’s why I have decided to sunset it along with Deadlines, which also hasn’t seen any updates in years. Both apps will soon disappear from the App Store.

Socially Awkward

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 22:44:08 +0200

For my day job, I regularly pass the entrance gate at one of our German car manufacturers. Since I’m there almost every day, most of the plant security staff knows who I am and they usually just let me pass. Most of them. But there are a few who are always up for a quick chat before they open the gates for me to drive through. Nothing important. Small talk. “How is it going?” Just answering this question usually isn’t enough or expected. After answering with a one-worder, this entire conversation comes to an abrupt halt followed by a couple of seconds of awkward silence, that actually feel like minutes. This makes me feel very uneasy.

Podcasts, Summer 2018 Edition

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 19:10:31 +0200

Recently, my friend Agis started getting into podcasts and asked for recommendations. So I opened Overcast and started digging through all my subscriptions. In earlier iterations of this update post, I listed and described every one of my subscriptions. Today I feel like this list has grown far too long and I think it makes more sense to just give you an update on which shows are my favorite ones.

99% Invisible
ATP
Automators
Cortex
Everything is Alive
Hello Internet
Mac Power Users
The Menu Bar
Playing for Fun
Simplify
Stacktrace
Swift by Sundell
Swift Unwrapped
Thoroughly Considered
Under the Radar
Ungeniused

Leaving Facebook

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 07:29:08 +0200

It’s been three months since I left Facebook. Before that, it took me well over two years to finally do this step. I wanted to leave it so badly, but somehow it held it’s grip on me. It was just too convenient to have all your friends in one place and know most of what happens in their lives. The fear of missing out was just too big.

During the same time, the number of hate comments and negativity, in general, took off. It seemed like every time I went on Facebook I saw so many negative, aggressive, vulgar comments that I almost felt depressed afterward. And it got worse over time. This was just something that I didn’t want to identify with. So I finally gave up on my account and closed it.

Re-Evaluating the Kindle Voyage

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 22:50:24 +0200

I’d like to share my thoughts on the Kindle Voyage as someone who barely read until he got his first Kindle a few years ago. The Kindle somehow changed my relationship to the written word. I still don’t read very many books each year, but that’s only because I’m a rather slow reader. Nonetheless, the number of books and the topics that interest me have been growing ever since.

How to Google It

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 19:44:55 +0200

Recently, someone on Twitter (sorry I forgot who it was) posted this picture on how to google stuff. Though I almost exclusively use DuckDuckGo these days, this cheat sheet comes in pretty handy at times. Turns out, it was originally posted as part of a larger info graphic almost 5 years ago on hackcollege.com.

Hey Kirby!

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 19:14:37 +0200

For the last couple of years I have been using Jekyll for this website and I really enjoyed it. It’s nerdy nature spoke to my inner, well, nerd. Unfortunately, this nerdism isn’t always practical. Jekyll requires you to rebuild your website and sync the resulting website files to your host. I know there are solutions to this but they all seemed kinda hacky to me. This was fun for a while but I felt like it got more and more in the way when just wanting to quickly share something. Hey, who would’ve thought a backend can make total sense when you want to manage contents?

Firewatch

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 07:30:37 +0200

A scene from the game

Earlier this week, our favorite software development company and now publisher Panic and Campo Santo, the game studio Panic collaborated with, released their first game, Firewatch. I think it’s been about two years since they first started teasing this project and I’ve been excited about this ever since.

On Tuesday, it was finally released on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux and also on the PS4. So I blocked out the next two evenings to play it through. It was only about four or five hours in total, but boy was it a great story. I enjoyed it very much and will play it again soon. I don’t want to spoil anything, so this is just a recommendation for those among you who have not yet played it and enjoy those interactive stories.

Overwhelming Task Management

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:17:47 +0200

Mr. OmniFocus aka David Sparks started a new series on his blog about the hurdles one might face when dealing with task management systems. I recently switched from Things to OmniFocus and faced some problems as well. After years with the German task management application I had acquired a workflow which did not translate well to OmniFocus.

In Things, everything’s basically always available and you schedule tasks for certain days or hand pick the ones you want to work on on a certain day. In OmniFocus, it makes more sense to defer everything until you realistically think that you’ll get around to working on it. This way, tasks will only be visible to you when you really need to take action. This of course is a setting and can be adjusted as needed.

Brett Terpstra's TitleCase API & Script

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 19:21:26 +0200

I always struggle when it comes to post titles and titles in general, because I’m never sure which words to capitalize and which not. Your friendly next door nerd Brett Terpstra created not only a script but also an API that turns your title into the right TitleCase format used by AP and co.

To make the usage a bit easier, I wrote a short TextExpander snippet that turns any title into the right form for me.

1Password Meta Data Leak

Sun, 18 Oct 2015 11:24:13 +0200

Earlier today I came across this Tweet from Hacker News:

1Password Leaks Your Data http://t.co/3ETH2z6NIV – Hacker News (@newsycombinator) October 18, 2015

tl;dr: They seem to leak some meta data when you’re using the old Agile Keychain format. Though this can be bad enough, Dale Myers found that they’re not leaking any passwords or secure notes. This can be fixed by running a simple command on your Terminal. The command depends on which version of 1Password you’re using and where you acquired it. For version 5, from their website (not from the Mac App Store) it is:

Jekyll Auto-Build With Git Hooks

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:26:26 +0200

tl;dr: Use the full path to your jekyll executable when running it from a git hook.

As much as I love Jekyll for it’s nerdiness and it’s speed, as much can it be annoying at times when you have to “compile” your website and upload it to your server every time you fix a comma. This situation lends itself to get automated.

First things first: I host my website on Uberspace. I mentioned before that they’re just the best, right¹? Anyway, at Uberspace, they don’t have Jekyll pre-installed so you have to install it yourself. And since you can’t just install it for the entire machine, you have to install it on a per-user basis:

John's Back!

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 19:29:48 +0200

Earlier this year, I was very sad to see John Chidgey shut down his amazing podcast Pragmatic. I’m equally happy, that this week he came back with not only Pragmatic, but a whole new network for podcasts that would not find a home on other networks. It’s called The Engineered Network, or short TEN. I’m looking forward to the first episodes of Neutrium and Causality!

Trying Medium

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 19:38:31 +0200

Cat just found my post on Geofencing and the follow-up on my site and suggested that I should cross-post them to Medium, just to reach a wider audience. So I decided to give it a shot. If you prefer reading some of my posts on Medium, you can now do so. As usual, my profile can be found @flohei.

Fixing My Game Boy

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 19:41:41 +0200

When I was 5 or 6 my mom gave me a Game Boy with Tetris and Kid Icarus. I never really got into Tetris, but I really loved Kid Icarus. A while later, someone (probably my mom, too) gave me a copy of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. I didn’t know it back then, but from today’s point of view, I’d count it as one of my all time favorite games (along with Final Fantasy 7, which just came out for iOS and which was announced to get a remake lately.) I have so many great memories about playing it off and on during my childhood.

RTFM, Flo!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:25:51 +0200

For the last couple of days, I was pulling my hair out over an issue with CoreLocation’s geofencing features. As I stated earlier, our new app Iris relies heavily on those geofences. When I first implemented them, everything seemed fine. But when I switched to some closer test cases around my area (in GPX format, because why would I leave the house anyway), the events for when a region was entered or exited did not fire anymore. I changed the tracks a few times and I even created a few different GPX tracks to make sure that I did not somehow screw up those coordinates. All solutions Google brought up were similar to what I was using. So I was pretty sure that my approach was still right. Nothing seemed to work, though. I was already convinced that this was one of the more stupid mistakes on my end, like swapped longitude and latitude values.

Geofencing

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 20:25:26 +0200

Update August 28, 2015: I had some trouble regarding those geofences later down the road. I wrote it down here.

If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed, that lately Cat Noone and I talked about an app we’re developing called Iris. Iris is our new project, based on an idea Cat came up with earlier this year. I don’t want to share too much about the app’s purpose at this point. What I’d rather do, is talk about a few observations I have made so far.

Podcast 2015

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 15:25:05 +0200

Early last year, I put out a list of my top 5 podcasts. Since this list is a living thing and it changes frequently, I thought it would be good idea to update that list. And since the it’s hard to tell which 5 of all the ones I subscribe to are my actual favorites, I’d like to list all. Maybe this will become a recurring thing and I’ll post an update in the future.

Watchmaking Art

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:58:49 +0200

I don’t know if this is just a phase, but recently I found myself intrigued by those little machines we call mechanic watches. Though I don’t own one myself, I really enjoy videos like the ones below. They let you peek into a world so tiny, filled with so much patience, accuracy, and focus, that it almost feels otherworldly nowadays.

Part 1 Link to heading

Part 2 Link to heading

Part 3 Link to heading

Burgerrezept

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 09:00:00 +0200

This is the burger recipe, we use most of the time. Sorry for only having this available in German. If I see any need for an English version, I will update this accordingly.

Zubereitung Link to heading

Zunächst muss das Hackfleisch mit Salz und Pfeffer vermengt und anschließend in gleich große, etwa 200 g schwere Kugeln geformt werden. Diese Kugeln müssen nun mit etwas Wucht zwischen den Händen hin- und hergeworfen werden, um eine gleichmäßige und wieder “verschlossene” Oberfläche zu bekommen. Anschließend werden die Hackfleischbälle am Besten mit einer Burgerpresse zu schönen, gleichmäßigen Patties gepresst. Tipp: Die Patties lösen sich leichter von der Presse, wenn man diese vorher ein wenig nass macht. Die fertiggeformten Patties gehören nun auf einen Teller und noch einmal für eine gute Stunde in den Kühlschrank.

Writing in Markdown

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 15:12:44 +0200

Today, Matt Gemmell released a new ebook on Five Simple Steps. It covers all the basic steps to get you started with Markdown as well as some advanced stuff like tables. As you might have guessed from the choice of my blog software, Jekyll, and my interest in Markdown apps like Whiskey, Markdown is my favorite tool and style for writing these days.

You can find the book here.

Whiskey.app

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:40:12 +0200

Today I listened to the first episode of the newest podcast in my list, Design Details. The guest, Sam Soffes, builds an app called Whiskey. Whiskey is a Markdown editor, but a remarkable one. Its main feature for me is probably the very minimal UI that doesn’t get in the way. I like this a lot.

It’s still under development and in public beta, but it already is in pretty good shape. It has a preview and an outline mode and allows for plain Markdown or one of those advanced flavors. It misses a few features that I’d like to see in a future version like a command line utility or the option to hide stuff like Jekyll’s front matter. Who knows, maybe that’s something he has on his list.

Podcast Backup Script

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 19:35:16 +0200

Now that John Chidgey announced that he is terminating his fabulous Pragmatic podcast and that the site will disappear eventually I thought it might be a good idea to make a backup copy of the episodes outside of my ordinary podcast clients. A quick Google search for this did not bring up a solution.

So, this morning I hacked together a fairly simple, quick and dirty script in Python to download all episodes from a specific podcast. You can find it on GitHub. Just pass the URL to the podcast’s feed and run it. In John’s case, for example:

How Your Camera Works

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 20:23:32 +0200

Daniel Eggert, objc.io issue #21:

Let’s say you’re outside and looking around you. The sun, 150 million kilometers away, is emitting photons. These travel from the sun to our cozy planet in about eight minutes. Some of these photons hit the things around you and get reflected and hit the retina inside your eyes, and this triggers your brain to create an image, a visual representation of your surroundings.

What an amazing article about the basics of digital photography. The author explains basic terms in an easy to understand manner and points out, how all those pieces work together to generate the the images we see on the back of our cameras (or on the front of our phones, nowadays.) I highly recommend checking this out if you want to gain a basic understanding of what’s going on inside these tiny boxes we use every day.

FastMail Configuration Follow-Up

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:05:47 +0200

Just a quick update on my FastMail Configuration post: After I wrote that post I ran into some sync issues. Mail.app on OS X had massive problems listing the contents of my folders (and even listing those folders themselves), especially with folders located directly within INBOX.

I had a lengthy conversation with Yassar from the FastMail support team about this issue. We finally figured out that it seems to a bug in Mail.app and he later told me, that they tried to work around this for quite some time. He showed me some posts (1, 2) on their blog regarding similar issues going back as far as 2008.

Combining Matt Gemmell's Staging Script and Jekyll-Post-Link

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0200

Last week, Matt Gemmell released a pretty handy staging script for Jekyll.¹ This temporarily removes all your posts from your site and copies a draft into _posts. This way, building your Jekyll site with your new draft post is way faster than your regular builds with all your content.

Unfortunately, this does not work when you’re using the jekyll-post-link in one of your pages. (Yes, I mean pages, not posts.) The build process for your staged website will fail with an error like this:

FastMail Configuration

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 18:57:51 +0200

Yesterday I wrote about my move to FastMail and how smooth that went. I mentioned, that the only caveat was the fact that I had to manually configure the clients to work with FastMail’s IMAP and SMTP servers. This is not as simple as for Google Mail or Yahoo and required me some fine-tuning. So I thought it might be a good idea to share my configuration.

Update: Turns out, there was another issue. I wrote about that one in a (link: /blog/fastmail-configuration-follow-up text: separate post).

Two New Jekyll Scripts

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 14:00:00 +0200

Every now and then I try to make the process of writing posts in Jekyll a bit more pleasant. Last time, I shared a script that was supposed to make the post creation process a bit easier. It turned out, though, that I almost never really use this script because of its complexity. There are just too many switches and configuration options. (Of which some don’t even work reliably.)

Though this script did not help me as much as I hoped it would, it led me to two new, extremely simple scripts in my toolchain.¹

Why the iPad Became My Main Computer

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 13:41:20 +0200

Federico Viticci:

Think about the iPad this way: would a college student who needs to download a file from a school’s web server and write an essay in Pages while looking up two PDFs really enjoy an iPad? I don’t think so. Would a chef who wants to compare orders for her kitchen open 5 windows in Preview for OS X or jump back and forth between files on a third-party app for iPad? She’d just sit down at an iMac and use Preview. But would an iPad make sense for some tasks in those two use cases? Would the portability of an iPad be welcome in the student’s backpack or the chef’s countertop? Absolutely.

Leaving Gmail

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 11:38:33 +0200

I’ve been meaning to do this as part of my Personal Security Audit project for quite a while now. It’s not that I don’t like Google at all but the power they gathered over the last couple of years with all their services made me feel quite uncomfortable. The same concerns apply to other services like Facebook as well, but that might be a completely different post.

So, first things first. The email server problem. I’d like to report on my experiences I had during that migration and what I ended up with.

Deadlines 1.2

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 13:04:00 +0200

A few days ago, I submitted a new version of Deadlines to the App Store. Today it has been approved. This small update features a new design to fit the iOS 7 style and fixes a few issues I had with the calendar integration. I wanted to do this ever since iOS 7 was announced. I hope you like it.

How I Rip DVDs and Blu-Rays

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 19:41:49 +0200

Jason Snell:

Is it worth it? Good question, section heading! I don’t know. As I said at the start, a lot of my DVDs have now been released in HD formats. Do I want to bother ripping a standard-definition copy of a movie or TV show that’s now available in HD? Perhaps I should just wait for the next time I want to watch it, and buy it on iTunes, or buy the Blu-ray, or stream it from Netflix or Amazon. I’m not converting a lot of standard-def video these days.

Back To The Roots

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 11:33:26 +0200

tl;dr: I’m looking for a new side project.

Some of you may know that I moved my professional focus to a new field after getting my degree in early 2013. I was offered to join our family business, which has absolutely nothing to do with computer science. Since I thought it might be a great idea to keep learning, I finished a few courses which led to another job title I can add to my résumé. Now I’m also an occupational safety specialist¹ and planning supervisor² and I do this as my day job now.

Playing at Programming

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 18:14:01 +0200

Some of my favorite examples on the Mac have been Keyboard Maestro, Text Expander, Hazel, and Automator, each of which allows you to create what are essentially mini-programs, without knowing a bit of code. The most recent exciting entry in this category is Workflow, which has been called Automator for iOS, and which has gotten some great reviews.

A great example for a great app. Get Workflow on the App Store (de, us; affiliate links).

Password Protected Pages With Jekyll

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:04:06 +0200

When I moved to Jekyll I didn’t have a way to password protect pages. Actually, I didn’t really need it so it wasn’t a real concern to me and I did not yet look into it. Until today. I was contacted by Osama of TimeSvr who asked me about this and so I thought it might be a good idea to share what we came up with.

Since we only needed to protect pages within a certain context we decided that .htaccess protection would be sufficient enough.

Synology Backup Strategies

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 11:20:07 +0200

Yesterday I read Marco Arment’s piece about his attempts to backup his Synology NAS. They all rely on external services like Amazon’s S3 or Backblaze. Since I’m happy about every bit and byte that I can store within my own realm, I don’t feel to comfortable sending literally all my data off to the cloud in some random country with random laws I have no clue about.

Luckily, I have two Synologys that I operate and maintain (one at my apartment and one at my parent’s house). This offers a different approach: I could basically backup my NAS systems to one another. Unfortunately, they are not the same size and the larger one has about four times the capacity of the other one. So this leaves me with a hypothetical one-way backup solution (which is not what I want to achieve). If I upgraded the smaller one I might be able to set up a two-way backup solution.

Cicada 3301 Puzzle

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:17:33 +0200

Tackling the puzzle would lead Eriksson to rely on a host of skills from steganography to cryptography, to an understanding of ancient Mayan numerology and a familiarity with cyberpunk speculative fiction. As he worked his way from solving one piece of the puzzle to the next, the journey would lead him to discover that the answers lay not just in the digital domain, but in the real world: From clues left on the voicemail of a Texas telephone number to flyers taped to telephone poles in 14 cities around the world. The quest would ultimately return to the deepest layers of the digital world: the dark web.

Merging My Two Apple IDs

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 11:29:46 +0200

Last week I finally got rid of my secondary Apple ID. Having two for different tasks bugged me for a while. The first one I used for purchases on the iTunes Store back in the days and the second one was newly created when MobileMe was brand new. Somehow the newer one turned out to be the one I used for contact and calendar syncing, for backups and all the good stuff that iCloud has to offer these days. In an ideal world, I would only have one Apple ID which does all the jobs.

The Terminal

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 11:06:57 +0200

If you ever find yourself inside a Terminal window go ahead and read Craig Hockenberry’s great collection on Terminal tips and tricks.

Jekyll: Script To Easily Create New Posts

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 19:39:12 +0200

Jekyll is amazing for me. It gives me full control over all my content in an easy to maintain way while keeping it in a sustainable format.

Though creating a new post is as simple as creating a new Markdown file and setting some variables within the front matter, this usually takes a few moments and most of these steps are the same over and over again.

To make life a little bit easier (and to just have something to fiddle around with, to be fair) I wrote a small script that helps jump-start on new posts. It creates the file, sets the title and date and tags and categories if I wish to and opens that new file in my favorite text editor.

Pragmatism Wins Over Minor Ethical Debates and Personal Preferences

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:00:00 +0200

Sad but so true.

But in a market where everyone’s terrible, or where the non-terrible alternatives are much worse for customers, pragmatism wins over minor ethical debates and personal preferences.

PGP And S/MIME

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 11:10:07 +0200

I’ve been using S/MIME for quite some time on my university account and on my personal mail account for signing and encryption reasons. I’ve never offered this in public so only few people used this. So, I updated my contact page to include both the information on S/MIME and also my PGP public key. So feel free to encrypt your messages when getting in touch with me.

Searching Jekyll

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 23:39:57 +0200

Using a static site generator like Jekyll for your personal blog brings a few new challenges in some areas. Searching, for example is not possible in pure HTML. There are a few different options to find posts on your website, though.

tl;dr Link to heading

jekyll-lunr-js-search is great, just head over to GitHub and get started.

External Search Engine Link to heading

Both Google and DuckDuckGo offer search engines for your own website which are more or less easy to integrate in your own site. Unfortunately, DDG did not seem to index my site {% post_link 2014-07-02-moving-to-jekyll since I installed Jekyll %} and this plugin a few weeks ago.

I Don't Know Swift

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 19:57:22 +0200

You’re a day-zero Swift expert, and if you’re not, you could be a year-zero Swift expert even if you wait for iOS 8 to ship. The niches are all still open. Read everything. Write something. Get involved. Try out new patterns, see if they work. Tell people what you discover.

This is a nice read about what it’s like for a long-time Objective-C developer (I guess for any developer) when a new language comes around. Last week, Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut talked about that topic, too. Check the latest episode of their podcast Core Intuition.

Migrating from SVN to Git

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:40 +0200

At least since reading the comments on my post about combining Dropbox and SVN suggesting I should move to a decentralized versioning system for my development projects I developed an eager want to do so. To be honest, I was afraid the migration would turn out to be a royal PITA.

Last weekend, investigating this problem again, I found this article by John Albin who wrote a set of scripts to make the entire process fairly simple. The final output of those scripts are the bare Git repos that can be used to serve the projects to your clients. After moving them to your server you should be able to clone that data.

Handwriting

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 08:00:00 +0200

Yet another lovely idea and performance by Mr. Matt Gemmell.

SurveillancePi

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 19:57:22 +0200

Being gone from home for a few days always meant that we’re not able to watch our guinea pigs. Until a few days ago! I set up a Raspberry Pi equipped with a camera board and placed it near their cage. Using this article to setup the streaming from the Pi, it was fairly easy to create a Pi-based surveillance camera.

Common Issue Link to heading

I’m using my camera board in a small housing (Affiliate Link) specifically made for the camera. Unfortunately, the small connector cable (“SUNNY”) is rather loose and disconnects every now and then inside that case.

Re-Routing RSS Feed

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 15:08:30 +0200

Quick follow-up on the Feed Forwarding section from that other post on Jekyll: Turns out, the forwarding in the header of that HTML file did not work as expected. Opening the URL in the browser passed you through to your favorite RSS reader if you have one installed. Feed readers that had already subscribed to the original feed before did not get any updates, though.

So I changed that re-routing to be handled in my .htaccess file.

App: The Human Story

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:54:10 +0200

If you enjoyed Indie Game: The Movie, you might also enjoy this new project. It seems to cover a lot of the most influential persons of our industry. Looking forward to watching it.

Moving to Jekyll

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:48:05 +0200

Listening to Brett Terpstra’s podcast Systematic, I found out about the static website generator Jekyll. After hearing and reading about it for a while I startet wanting to try it for my own website.

There are some great tutorials out there that describe the basic setup of a new Jekyll website, like Jekyll From Scratch by Mike Greiling, so I don’t want to talk about that. What I want to talk about, though, are the bits and pieces that these tutorials were missing for my very own situation. There might be some more people with a similar setup. There were three major questions I still had after reading the different tutorials:

Thinking Slowly by Matt Gemmell

Thu, 15 May 2014 20:00:00 +0200

Matt Gemmell:

Defer starting. Put it off. Do your thinking first, even if you have to tie a hand behind your back. Allow the idea to ripen, and lay out your work – just a bit of it, at least – in front of you to consider.

I love the process of planning out a new project. Scribbling in my notebook, collecting and organizing ideas, playing it through in my head. It is so rewarding when the up-front work gets validated during the actual implementation.

Sharing the Ecosystem

Sat, 10 May 2014 10:00:00 +0200

Robert McGinley Myer:

We all share the same ecosystem. Investing in that ecosystem is investing in the future. It might not look like a profitable investment, but it could yield immeasurable returns.

He writes about the the environmental efforts Apple takes as well as the problems the App Store has. Two ecosystems that need attention.

Scanning Stats

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 22:19:05 +0200

Today I scanned, processed and archived 10 documents with a total of 1,579 pages in under 120 minutes. These documents do now occupy 713.8 MB on my server. This makes an average of ~5.5 seconds per page.

Ghost Messages in Mail

Thu, 20 Mar 2014 20:00:00 +0200

Apple Mail started to indicate that I’ve got a bunch of draft messages in one of my mailboxes lately. (In my case we’re talking about Google and Exchange accounts.) When I opened the drafts section I expected all those messages to show up but the list remained empty. This bothered me a lot.

Now I finally figured out how to get rid of those ghost messages and it’s rather easy: Just delete the corresponding index file.

My Approach to Sync Lightroom Across Multiple Computers

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 10:00:00 +0200

Adobe’s Lightroom is my go-to application when it comes to photo management and manipulation. It’s just great in most regards. Unfortunately, it does not play very well when you want to use it on multiple computers. There is no such thing as a server component nor is there an option to just store everything on your server and open it from your local machine. Lightroom will reject any attempt to open any catalogue from a network location.

My Top 5 Podcasts

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 10:00:00 +0200

After recommending Pragmatic and Systematic I thought I could share my personal list of podcast I listen to regularly. If you have any suggestions based on my list feel free to leave a comment. I’m always looking for new content.

Bits und so Link to heading

Bits und so is the only Germany podcast in this list and at episode 362 the show that runs for the longest time. They cover everything Apple related with a strong personal opinion. Like that.

ReadKit

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 10:00:00 +0200

Since Google Reader shut down I’ve been using Fever°. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. Especially on iOS where Reeder 2 (App Store US, App Store DE) allows me to read all my articles in the app. Unfortunately, Reeder’s desktop version never got updated to support Fever°. (At least not until the last time I checked which has been a while now.)

So, when at the computer, I had to read my feeds using the web interface which kinda sucked because it would reload every now and then and therefore lose my reading position.

Pragmatic Podcast

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 23:43:50 +0200

Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology. Exploring the real world trade-offs we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

There’s a fairly new podcast in town: Pragmatic. It’s about tech and design (mostly as in industrial design) in general and is a great addition to all the Apple tech and Cocoa related podcasts I’ve subscribed to. They released six episodes so far, each running about an hour and a half. I listened to the first and the current one and already learned a lot. Looks like a great show!

Android Phones Are Basically Used as Dumbphones

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 17:00:00 +0200

“Android people just seem to be sitting on their hands. Their phones are just as powerful as iPhones are. They have bigger screens, too. But they don’t do anything with them.”

Though I don’t like the overall negative tone regarding the use Android owners make of their phones they share some interesting numbers.

The Astounding Athletic Power of Quadcopters

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 10:00:00 +0200

This sure is amazing. Computer Science FTW!

Displaying a Caller's Region

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:00:00 +0200

littlebigdetails.com states the Nexus 4 displays the country a caller comes from.

The iPhone sometimes does this, too. I haven’t figured yet, when it actually does it. Looks like, it works for all US numbers. But why not for German ones? How hard can it be to retrieve a region string for an area code upon an incoming call?

4 iOS Games That Will Get Me Through the Holiday Season

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:46:34 +0200

1. The Room Two Link to heading

The second part of this series seems a little bit easier to me than the first one but it’s still a great puzzle game. It will keep you occupied for at least a few hours.

2. Walking Dead: The Game - Season Two Link to heading

Last year around this time of the year I played the first edition. A few days back season two came out. I did not manage to start yet, but from what I heard it’s pretty great, too. If you already played the first episode (and if you still have your save game; that’s why I was not able to start yet) the game picks up on the decisions you made during last year’s game.

Blek

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 07:49:32 +0200

This is the game the iPad was made for. Amazing. Get it on the App Store (de, us; Affiliate links).

Getting Stuck in Oceanhorn and How to Fix It

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 22:00:00 +0200

A few weeks back Oceanhorn (de, us; Affiliate Links) appeared on the App Store and instantly caught my attention. It’s similarities and my love for Zelda made me curious.

Unfortunately, a few hours in I got stuck in a place called the Forest Shrine. I accidentally pushed a stone box a little bit to far so it got stuck at a wall and I wasn’t able to move it back onto the area on the ground where it belonged.

Studifutter 2.2 – iOS 7 Update

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:00:00 +0200

When iOS 7 was announced this summer we planned to support it from day one with Studifutter and Deadlines. As you might have noticed, this did not work out as planned.

A few months later, today Studifutter gets it’s update. We got rid of all the custom textures and try to be more simple and straight forward.

We hope you like it. Get it on the App Store.

builds

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 19:00:00 +0200

I’ve been using a simple script that would increase my app’s build numbers on every build in Xcode for a while now. This worked fine but had a major downside: It did not support working on a team.

So I had the idea to write a script that would talk to a server, store and increase the build number there, pull it back and write it to my project file locally. Tonight a had some time to do this.

Cholesterini ist fertig

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 10:00:00 +0200

Cholesterini is only available in German for now. I’ll let you know when it’s been translated.

Gestern Abend hat Apple die neueste App, an der wir für unseren Kunden neapptrix arbeiten durften, freigegeben. Cholesterini (App Store Affiliate Link, 15,99 €) hilft Schlaganfall- und Herzinfarkt-Patienten und -Risikogruppen ihre Blut- und Nährwerte im Auge zu behalten und stellt diese grafisch dar. Dabei können die Lebensmittel aus einer Datenbank mit ~15.000 Einträgen gewählt werden, wodurch sich der Erfassungsaufwand auf ein Minimum reduziert. Ziel ist es, schnell, einfach und zuverlässig seine Daten im Überblick zu haben und so den Benutzer dabei zu unterstützen, sich gesünder zu ernähren.

Nuance Talking About the History of Speaking Systems

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 21:38:34 +0200

via iPhoneBlog.de:

This makes me want to continue studying so badly. Media Synthesis and Media Analysis were definitely two of my favorite classes.

However, watching TBBT S05E14 did set quite different expectations regarding Siri.

Studifutter and Deadlines on iOS 7

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 18:00:00 +0200

Today, Apple released iOS 7 to the public and the adoption rate might go even crazier than it did with the previous versions due to all the new bits this update brings. It’s the biggest update since the introduction of the iPhone OS back in 2007.

This is a huge opportunity for developers, they say. In an App Store filled to the max with Apps a new chance to separate from the masses came up when the new OS was introduced at WWDC in June.

rtfnt.com Relaunch

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:00:00 +0200

Today, after quite some time, we finally relaunched our company’s website! I’m really happy with the result and want to thank Lars for all the work he put into designing the new theme. I hope you like it as much as we do. :-)

More projects and an English localization will follow as we find time to update the site.

Deadlines 1.1.2

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0200

With Deadlines 1.1.2 we decided to do a major change (though it’s not a major update): Deadlines is free from now on.

This move is a reaction to the experiment we did earlier this year. During the seven months Deadlines was available now only a hand full of people bought it. During the weekend we gave it away for free a few hundred people downloaded it. So it does not make any sense to charge for it if no one is buying it anyway.

Studifutter 2.1

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:00:00 +0200

Studifutter 2.1 is here. We’ve improved the performance again and added social sharing features. You can now share your plans to go to your local cafeteria via Facebook, Twitter or mail.

As with Deadlines 1.1.1, we added Crashlytics. If you want to help send the reports to us whenever the app crashes.

Hope you like it.

Pipetto iPad Case

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:00:00 +0200

After using only the Smart Cover for the last couple of months, a few days back I got a new iPad case in the style of the original case. It’s the Pipetto Leather iPad case in Rocker Black. It’s a lovely and well crafted handmade case which feels pretty great in the hand. The leather is soft but the case itself is rather sturdy.

It offers the same functions in terms of standing as the original iPad case did plus the magnetic put-the-iPad-to-sleep-function. At least it should. Mine actually does not put the device to sleep when I close it. I’m talking to the manufacturer about that.

Displaying Your App Store Downloads on Panic's Status Board

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0200

About a week ago Panic introduced its newest product: Status Board. It’s a widget-based app that displays different kinds of information on your iPad or on your TV.

Since there are already quite a few custom widgets out there I thought it would be nice if you could see your App Store downloads on there. We’re using App Annie and they’re offering a public API. Tim Brückmann implemented a script that creates a data source for a widget that displays the App Store sales.

Neutral: Vomit Ruins Everything

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:57:51 +0200

I did not listen to the Neutral podcast at all. Mainly because I have enough podcasts to listen to every week. Somehow the final episode ‘Vomit Ruins Everything’ caught my attention, anyway. It’s about cars and traveling to Germany. It’s a fun episode that made me see Germany in a different light. Sounds like it’s not too bad here after all.

Bye Bye, Google Reader; Hi There, Fever

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0200

Now that everyone said their goodbyes to our beloved Google Reader, I wanted to join in. Since 2005 Reader (and later the great iOS and Mac apps and front ends named Reeder¹) became my everyday companion and it’s probably among the top three sites I’ve visited over the past couple of years. So I was really disappointed to see it go. But I guess that’s what eventually happens to non-paid services.

Deadlines Free for the Weekend

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0200

As a little experiment we’re giving away Deadlines for free over the weekend. So go get it on the App Store (de, us)! Feel free to email us about any concerns or improvements.

Happy downloading.

Deadlines 1.1.1

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:00:00 +0200

Today Apple published Deadlines 1.1.1, a minor bug fix release. Changelog:

Configure reminder times (per event and globally via settings)
Improving performance and UI of the calendar

Besides that we included the Crashlytics framework. So when the app crashes, you may be asked to let it send a report about what happened to us. If you wan’t to help us improve the app say yes.

We hope you like it.

From the Series 'Addictive iOS Games'

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0200

Bananakong

My GF dug up Banana Kong (App Store: de, us) a few days ago. Damn, what a time sink. If you want to get something done today do not download it.

Studifutter 2.0.3

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0200

As of today, Studifutter 2.0.3 is available. Here are the release notes:

Fixes cosmetic bugs which caused some assets to randomly appear and disappear
Fixes the bug that caused the app to hang on first launch
Fixes the bug which caused the app not to display new data after hitting the re-download button
Downloads only the menu for the restaurant wanted
Notifies the user when there are no meals (during holiday breaks, i.e.) instead of just displaying an empty list

We hope this makes the experience quite a lot better.

Vertical Video Syndrome

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:09:31 +0200

“And George Lucas will re-release Star Wars again!”

Nothing more to say.

Experimenting With Light

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:01:44 +0200

Ever since I heard Boris talk about something called Strobist on the German show Happy Shooting I wanted to try it out myself. It’s basically a method to take photos using untethered flashes. So I started reading David Hobby’s series of articles collected in the Lightning 101.

Drea behind our purple curtains with the light setup in the foreground.

To get started, I got the Yongnuo RF-602 wireless flash trigger, a light stand, a swivel and an umbrella. I was not able to find the equipment suggested by David (back in 2006) in Germany so I got similar, inexpensive stuff.

Deadlines 1.1 Available

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0200

Deadlines 1.1 made it to the App Store last night. It brings a few bug fixes and the options to read from and save to the calendar. That makes adding events even easier. Besides that, I added a settings screen that allows to hide overdue events.

Get Deadlines here.

New Hobby Project: Deadlines

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:00:00 +0200

A few semesters back I wanted to have an app that would allow me to enter a few important dates like the exams and create a basic list of them to keep track of that without the need to look them up on my calendar. While browsing the App Store I found a few that did exactly that — but they all were ugly as hell. All I wanted was a simple list with a title and the remaining time.

Deadlines Availability

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0200

Last night Apple set Deadlines to ready for sale. So I’ve been checking the App Store all day and waited for it to show up. Unfortunately I had to realize that I accidentally set the availability date to December 31, which explains why I couldn’t find it.

You can now finally find it here on the App Store.

I did also submit the first update which brings Calendar.app integration and a few bug fixes. Feel free to follow @DeadlinesApp or @flohei on Twitter for updates.

Follow-Up on Localized MonoMac Applications

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 18:00:00 +0200

Last year I’ve been working on a MonoMac application. While not having too many troubles using C# again (I used to do it almost exclusively a few years back), I had some problems localizing the Interface Builder files properly. Eventually I figured out how to do it. While I did not write it down, Uwe wrote a great article with example code about how to use it.

Studifutter Update

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:00:00 +0200

A few years back, when the App Store just opened we began to develop this little app called Studifutter. We thought it would be a nice project to start with this new platform as it would present information we as students needed every day: the menu of our cafeteria. Back then, it was only the website (which looked terrible on the phones most students had back then) and our own little website, Studifutter’s predecessor, which parsed the original website to present the menu in a more smartphone-friendly manner.

Moving to a New Disk

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:08:40 +0200

After I installed the SSD into my iMac I wanted to restructure all the data I have a bit. The system should go on the SSD while all my data that’s currently stored in my home folder should go on the HDD. Lazy as I am, I did not want to re-install OS X and all the apps I’m using and let Time Machine copy all my data back.

I decided to do a clean OS X install from the Mac App Store and let the Migration Assistant do the rest. Naturally, not all of my data would fit onto the 128 GB SSD. So I decided to just import my settings, user profile and stuff but not the data itself. The plan was to then just move my home directory from the old disk to the root and configure my user account to use that directory as my home. Unfortunately, the 1 TB disc was not able to hold a copy second copy of my home directory. So I changed plans a bit.

Installing a SSD Into a Mid 2010 iMac

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:06:07 +0200

Now that I sold my MacBook Pro I wanted to make my iMac my main machine. So I moved all the data from the laptop to the desktop and–boom–that’s it. Because I was using the other laptop a lot lately, I got adjusted to the speed of that built-in SSD and the iMac started to feel rather slow. Luckily, my iMac is the mid 2010 model, which was the first one that came with an extra slot for an extra HDD or SSD, IIRC.

I <3 iFixit

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:59:09 +0200

If you don’t know iFixit.com you should immediately click the link and check out their website. They do not only offer repair guides for like every single Mac, other computers and other stuff in general, they do also sell hardware parts and tools. Even more importantly: They are usually the first ones to disassemble new products and determine a so called repairability score. They do even ship all their products all the way to Germany. And they care.

Creating a Staging Environment for Your WordPress Installation

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:56:10 +0200

For yesterday’s attempt to cleanup my database and fix the post id > 2³¹-1 issue I did not just want to fire the scripts and tests at my live site. So I quickly set up a WordPress staging environment. In my case, I created a special subdomain on my server, which makes things fairly easy. If you can do that as well: great, read on. If not: go check out Moving WordPress. They described how to move your site for a few more different scenarios.

Fixing the Post Id > 2³¹-1 Issue

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 19:47:03 +0200

Regarding my WordPress issues, which I actually did not want to tackle anymore, I accidentally stumbled upon an interesting post over on StackExchange, when I was looking for another issue. But as it turns out, this does fix the former issues as well. Nice.

The new issue did appear to me when I clicked through the Jetpack stats pages. Top Pages & Posts did only show one entry which looked like this:

Indie Game: Battlepaths

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:14:51 +0200

I’m a casual gamer. I don’t like to waste hours and days in front of my computer or Xbox collecting 20 bear claws to be able to collect another 40 afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, every now and then, like every year around Christmas time, I do try it just to realize that these games were not made for me. Today was another one of those “thens”.

A few days ago a friend of mine told me about a small indie game development project two friends of him are working on: Battlepaths. It’s a turn-based 2D-RPG with lovely graphics and a great guitar soundtrack. It reminds me a little bit of the old SNES Zelda games. It’s available for Xbox 360 (for 80 coins, or whatever the currency is over there) on the marketplace. Looks like there will also be a PC and a Windows Phone 7 version.

The WordPress Issues I Had After Importing My Old Posts

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 20:03:34 +0200

Since I began using WordPress my website had this weird issue where it would show all my blog posts once you add the feed to an RSS reader but would never show new entries. Also, the official iOS app somehow mixed posts and pages and showed some of them multiple times and the newer ones (the ones I wrote after importing everything into WP) did only occasionally show up in there.

My Aunt's Caesar's Salad

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 19:59:09 +0200

I’ve been wanting to make this salad ever since I first got to it try while being my aunt’s place in Canada for the first time in 2009. For me it’s simply the best caesar’s salad I’ve ever got. Unfortunately, I failed on getting all the ingredients. (Turns out, it’s not a problem at all. It was just me being stupid when it came to using supermarkets.) Anyway, people liked it so I thought I should share it. So here it is:

Marco's Fanboy Theory

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 20:02:10 +0200

I just stumbled upon a blog post by Marco Arment called “Fanboy theory”. Since I’m having this talk quite a lot in my personal life I thought it might be a good idea to reference the article here.

Though I’m being called a fanboy quite often and I’d even say myself that I’m one (because I don’t think it’s disrespectful or derogatory, but that’s a whole other story) I try not to force or influence anyone to buy products they might not make reasonable use of. If you don’t want, need, or like what I’m using just get something different. I’m making a lot of jokes about being a fanboy as defined in Marco’s article but I’d suggest that you don’t take that too seriously.

Building a Basic LEGO Robot

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 20:08:19 +0200

When the current semester began, we had the opportunity to choose a few of our courses ourselves. One of those was Self-Localization held by Prof. Dr. Jörg Roth. When I read the description it got me pretty excited about the topic. Not only because we would be using LEGO MINDSTORMS to create a simple robot to apply the newly gained knowledge about how to find out where an object is located. When we’re talking about location here, it means an indoor location which implies that GPS or Galileo are not that suitable. So I was pretty happy I was chosen among about 14 other students to attend this course.

Moving

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:51:04 +0200

Those who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I’m currently in the middle of a move from Nuremberg back to the country side. Which is awesome. :) But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

A few years back, when I was still doing .NET stuff, I registered my name domain florian-heiber.de and a .NET webspace (with centron) to set up a BlogEngine.NET blog on there. A while later I registered my other domain flohei.de just to have a nice and short domain name for my personal email. The A-Record for that domain moved from one hip new service to the next. The last one was Tumblr.

Get a Message's URL to Refer to It Somewhere Else

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:53:24 +0200

I’ve always wanted to write a script to get a message’s link to refer to it easily from my notes in Evernote or basically anywhere else. Things does that when creating a todo directly from within Mail.app and adds the link to the todo’s notes.

As expected, such a script has already been written. By John Gruber, in this case. Works like a charm.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to work on iOS. Pasting such a URL into Safari’s address bar results in an “Cannot Open Page” alert.

Remembering Steve

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:56:49 +0200

Now that most websites switched back to their normal appearance I wanted to share a few of the versions that showed up after Steve’s passing, because their were lovely.

Sites: apple.com, pixar.com, panic.com, wired.com

Easy Versions Syncing Using Dropbox

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:43:03 +0200

For our subversion repositories we’re using Sofa’s awesome app Versions. If you’re working with subversion on a Mac go get it here.

Only downside: No bookmark syncing between computers. Today it bugged me enough to come up with a solution. Okay, fair enough, this is kinda obvious, but maybe you’re at the same point:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Versions/ ~/Library/Application Support/Versions

Just move your Versions directory (which contains your Bookmarks.plist) to your Dropbox (or any other cloud location) and create a symlink to it at the directory’s old location.

Creating Tons of Tasks for Keeping Track of the Series You're Watching

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:38:31 +0200

Since I started watching “How I Met Your Mother” somewhen the last two weeks I was wondering how I should keep track of the episodes I’ve already seen. So I spent a few minutes googling. I assume there are some web services or apps that do that for you. But I neither wanted to sign up for another service nor did I want another app for that.

“Why not add all the episodes to Things?”, I thought. That would make perfect sense for me since Things is the application I’m using for all the tasks one can tick off. Yeah, I love making lists and ticking off things to see the progress I made.

Using AirPrint With Any (?) Printer

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:16:11 +0200

Since Apple announced that we’d be able to print directly from our iOS devices once 4.2 arrives I was pretty excited to get my hands on the new version. Equally disappointed I was when I first saw the list of supported printers.

Today I ran across a German blogpost which describes how to get every printer working with AirPrint by running an Apple Script and re-installing the printer. You can download the script here. Follow these steps once you have downloaded Simone’s script:

What Makes a Good Bug Report?

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:36:27 +0200

A good bug report is one that describes the problem well enough that someone familiar with the project can understand and act on that bug report without talking to the person who wrote it.

That’s the line. Anything less is simply not good enough.

Ant Colony Optimization TSP – OpenProcessing

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:33:38 +0200

We’ve been working on our Swarm Intelligence project lately and found this website which illustrates the travelling salesman problem pretty good, I think. Just check it out and move the little city objects around. That’s very interesting.

ACO vs. PSO – Basics

Mon, 24 May 2010 19:51:26 +0200

Since I’ve been looking for some resources on our Swarm Intelligence project I found this description of PSO and ACO that made me understand it quite a bit better:

ACO is mostly used for discrete optimization problems. PSO is mostly used for continuous optimization problems. Reason behind this is: ACO is driven by two parameters: heuristic value and pheromone value. Mostly these values are derived from parameters having discrete values. PSO is driven by neighbor’s velocity. Velocity is continuous parameter. As one of the parameters used for deriving velocity is time and time iscontinuous.

Magic Triangle

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:52:44 +0200

Wer mich auf Twitter verfolgt hat vielleicht mitbekommen, dass ich mich in letzter Zeit mit der Integration von Macs in eine Active-Directory-Umgebung etwas intensiver befasst habe. Das lag daran, dass ich die Administration der Macs an unserer Fakultät übernommen habe.

Zur effektiven Verwaltung der Rechner wurde ein Xserve angeschafft, der als Open Directory (OD) fungieren sollte. Dieses OD wurde mit dem Active Directory (AD) der Hochschule, in dem alle User vorliegen, verbunden. Grund für den Verbund ist das Fehlen einiger Einstellungen im Schema des AD. Diese können mit dem OD und den sogenannten Augmented Records für die einzelnen Mac-User nachkonfiguriert werden.

Studifutter ist online!

Mon, 18 May 2009 19:28:23 +0200

Seit gestern ist nun endlich unsere erste App im App Store erhältlich: Studifutter. Damit kann man sich momentan die aktuellen Speisepläne für die Mensen in Nürnberg, Erlangen, Ansbach, Eichstätt und Ingolstadt anzeigen und sich auch per Google-Maps-Integration dort hin navigieren lassen.

Wer sich jetzt denkt “Schade, sowas hätte ich auch gerne für meine Mensa oder Kantine.” dem sei gesagt, dass wir im Moment an einer neuen Version mit offener Schnittstelle arbeiten.

Classics in LEGO

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:02:36 +0200

I just came across this Flickr photo set. So great!

Neuauflage des Mensa-Infoprogramms

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:26:14 +0200

Simon hat sich vorige Tage noch mal ein wenig ins Zeug gelegt, und seine Speiseplan-App überarbeitet. Jetzt das Programm vom iPhone aus über futter.florian-heiber.de¹ zu erreichen und erscheint dort in einem schicken, modernem Design. Allerdings lassen sich im Moment keine Termine mehr runterladen. Per PC- oder Mac-Webbrowser wird man auf die eigentliche Mensaseite weitergeleitet.

Danke, Simon! :-)

Der Link wurde mit der Veröffentlichung von Studifutter deaktiviert. ↩︎

Immer wissen, was es in der Mensa gibt

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:24:50 +0200

Simon hat schon vor einiger Zeit ein kleines Tool entwickelt, mit dem er sich die aktuellen Speisen für unsere Mensataria von deren Website zieht und sie dann in iCal bzw. Outlook einfügen lässt, um sie dann so auf sein Handy zu syncen.

Jetzt hat er das Ganze noch webbasiert umgesetzt hostet das Projekt unter www.florian-heiber.de/speiseplan¹. Eine sehr geile Sache, wie ich finde. :-)

Es wird noch weiter daran rumgeschraubt, versteht es also bitte als beta. ;-)

rootof.net geht online

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:40:36 +0200

Seit heute ist unter rootof.net die Webpräsenz eines kleinen Unternehmens, dass sich hauptsächlich mit Webentwicklung beschäftigt, erreichbar.

David Weiss – $30,000 Apple Logo

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:16:06 +0200

Great idea.

Mac Lab @ MS

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 20:15:09 +0200

Sehr beeindruckend. :)