Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • Harley Davidson gathering in Brunnen

    This weekend was Harley Davidson gathering here in Brunnen. I’m not so much into motorcycles, but I saw some incredibly cool looking bikes. There were a lot of bikes from all over Switzerland, as well as lots from the surrounding countries, and I even saw a bike with a Russian number plate. Saturday they had […]

  • Raspberry Pi – at last

    The raspberry pi, for those living under a rock, is the $25 linux pc that was announced big almost a year ago. It has a 700Mhz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM and an OpenGL ES capable GPU. To enable hardware hacking it comes with lots of GPIO pins. All in all about the performance of a […]

  • Correcting the date in the EXIF meta data of a jpeg image

    Lots of cameras have a wrong date configured. Mine is even worse: It has a dead internal battery, so it looses the date and time every time I turn it off. When you take a picture, the wrong date is saved to the meta data tags of the resulting photographs. Afterwards, you import them with […]

  • installing ros on a bifferboard

    I wanted the robot arm to be a bit autonomous from the computer, and I thought the bifferboard should be powerful enough to drive it. So I wanted to install ROS onto it. My bifferboard runs debian squeeze, and that means it’s not just a matter of installing the packages as with ubuntu. There is […]

  • recovering files from a repurposed harddrive

    Recently, I was searching for a bunch of photographs on all of my harddisks, and couldn’t find them. I know they had been there on the old notebook and on the old computer, and I thought I had copied them over. I could also not find them on any of my backup harddisks. Neither could […]

  • Roomba vacuum cleaner hacking

    Late last year I got a Roomba vacuum cleaner from a friend. My wife and I wanted to evaluate such a device for a while. The battery was completely dead, and before spending lots of money on a  new battery, for a device that I didn’t know if it still worked, I tried to hook […]

  • Pilot 4 a day with a Jaguar driver

    Every once in a while I get to do a pilot for a day. That’s our premium offer at paraeasy.ch, and admittedly the most fun to do. Depending on the weather we either do a cross country flight or multiple flights from various mountains. This time, the weather looked promising, but not good enough for […]

  • Full disk encryption with the crypto stick

    Last week I finished the udacity applied cryptography course. I did not as well as in the other courses, nonetheless I learned a lot and it was (as always) really interesting. We learned about symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashes as well as key exchange and management. Each week in addition to the regular homework, we […]

  • Driving assistant

    Recently I completed the udacity class “programming a robotic car”, where Sebastian Thrun thought us what makes the self driving cars tick. He drew from his experience of winning the DARPA grand challenge in 2005. Now he’s leading the Google self driving car project. It was a very interesting course. Some stuff was already covered […]

  • Jaguar drivers club excursion

    It’s almost ten years ago, when I bought my vintage Jaguar XJS. And in two years time it will turn 30, thus gain official classic status. That means a huge drop in insurance and tax fees. It’s a grand tourer coupe with an incredibly smooth running V12 engine, sporting 294 horsepower. Because it shares the […]