A blog about personal projects and experiences
-
veteran at last
Today my Jaguar XJS finally gained veteran status. That means it is now officially recognized by the Swiss authorities as an oldtimer car. This in turn means lower taxes and insurance, but comes with the requirement to not drive more than 3’000km per year. Also the rate of technical examinations changes from 2 to 6 […]
-
key signing
I have been using gnupg for a couple of years for digitally signing emails and debian packages and occasionally for encrypting files as well for ssh authentication. I wanted to participate in the web of trust for a while. But so far, all key-signing-parties in my region were on dates, that I couldn’t attend. Then […]
-
Generating flight vouchers with LaTex
Learning LaTex was on my todo list for many years. Like most people of my generation, I learned wysiwyg text programs in school, and used them for a long time for most stuff that ended up on paper. Actually, to be exact, the first text processing program I learned in school didn’t fall into the […]
-
sweet dreams
For my last army service, I was ordered to Eschenbach SG near Rapperswil to help in an arsenal. It’s actually a long story, how it came to that. Compared to a regular service, it was very much relaxed. I could go home every night, which is quite nice, especially if you have a young family. […]
-
celebrating 2’000 flights
Last week, I didn’t even realize that I completed my two thousand’th flight. Only when I updated my flight log book, I found out. I knew that I’m close, but that day I did lots of short speed flights, and one of them was the one. For the first one thousand flights I needed only […]
-
My grandfather
Yesterday, my grandfather passed away, roughly 40 days before his 95th birthday. After he suffered a first light stroke ten years ago, his condition slowly worsened. In the end he was not able to walk or eat on his own, and didn’t recognize anyone. But up to age 85, there was no sign of slowing. […]
-
Smart Radios
For a couple of years I have been running mpd (music player daemon) on an Alix, connected to a stereo in the office. The Alix runs headless, but I have a variety of options to control it: gmpc on the notebook, Droid MPD client on the phone and fookebox in the browser. Over the years […]
-
Mountain Wagas
Every season has its virtues. What I like to do during the winter season is Wagas games, and the Fronalpstock is perfectly suited for that. Wagas are usually performed by flying close to sand dunes in the constant sea breeze, but powder snow is just as soft as sand. Instead of the constant sea breeze […]
-
vim meets VisualStudio
There are two camps of neckbeards: Those who use emacs, and those who use vi or vim. I can’t tell which is better, and most of the arguments seem to be rhetoric. Until about three years ago, I perceived both as insufferable. I was however curious to learn either of them. The question was which […]