Hass zu Weihnachten

Es ist gut, wenn Journalisten wichtige Themen aufgreifen. Die Zeit tut das hier. Frau von Berg hat hier die richtige Meinung ausgesprochen. Das ist gut so.

Facetime

Bildblog Aktion

Diese Aktion finde ich gut.

I'd also like to post food pictures...

Matjes from Hamburg Fischmarkt

Creativity - How many ... do you need to change a lightbulb?

This video teaches us things to avoid, when trying to get creativity. However, John Cleese is a mighty speaker!

iTunes showing text

Howto home automation Raspberry Pi yet another way (The Pi)

We have our home automation set up our way. Here is how. In this post the configuration on the server side (rasperrypi) is described.

(This Howto only works at the moment with elro switches. The codes used for the switches can be changed in the switch command you find in home/piphie/switch (see *).

We are at our home able to switch on a video screen, Google Chromecast, and our HiFi stereo by the  App FunkySwitch. Then we start the Netflix App on a Phone, connect it with Chromecast and watch whatever we find on Netflix. If we'd like to switch off some light in the room, we turn its current off by using FunkySwitch. To accomplish that one can follow the following howto. We do this on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. However, the steps can be found for Windows and Mac, too.

First hardware needs:

• Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi model A+ here)
• a 433 MHz sender
• e.g. a raspbian image (here I used 2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy)
• a SD-Card (I used for the A+ Pi a micro SDHC card)
• (a SD-Card reader)
• (a wireless USB adapter)
• (an USB Hub with over 2 USB ports)
• some micro USB cable with power adapter
• some HDMI cable

The software we used are

• Raspbian
• wiringpi
• rcswitch-pi

After downloading Raspbian we follow the official documented steps to install the image on the SD-Card. We did this by using (sdb is the sd-card in my case. If unsure, look here for explanations):

unzip 2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.zip

unmount /dev/sdb1 # this was only in our case. Use the sd* that fits your SD-card. 

sudo dd bs=4M if=2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.img of=/dev/sdb 

sync

If the card was remounted, unmount it again. Put it now into the Raspberry Pi, plug in Hub, keyboard, and network. We here use the wireless adapter. Therefore this has to be configured in /etc/network/interfaces. After changing the file, the service is restarted.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

 Change this file to

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0 

allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

wpa-ap-scan 1

wpa-scan-ssid 1

wpa-ssid "WLAN-NAME"

wpa-psk "WLAN-KEY"

And do the restart.

sudo service networking restart

After this we need for ease-of-use and for automation the ssh-server capability.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

However, this was not necessary for us. It seems to be pre-configured in raspbian.

The software

wiringPi

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install git-core # was already newest version...

git clone git://git.drogon.net/wiringPi

cd wiringPi

./build

rcswitch-pi

git clone https://github.com/r10r/rcswitch-pi.git

cd rcswitch-pi

make

piphie commands

These scripts are small and at the moment very easy. However, have a look at it and you can change them to your needs.

git clone https://github.com/Boltzmann/piphie.git  

some minor things...*

cd

mkdir bin

ln -s /home//rcswitch-pi/send .

ln -s /home//piphie/switch . 

To have easy ssh access on the raspberry use authentificaton with keys. In short, you need

 ssh-keygen

ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/.pub @

Now, load FunkySwitch, add your key into "SPECIALS"-"IMPORT RSA KEY", in settings specify and for "User name" and "Server name".

Gespräch mit Versicherungsberater

Gesetzliche versus Private Krankenversicherung

Werde gerade beraten. Ich fühle mich gerade wie bei "Der gute Mensch von Sezuan". Irgendwie.

Nachruf auf Karl Hillenbrand

Zeit meines Lebens habe ich gute und schlechte Erfahrungen mit der katholischen Kirche in meinem Heimatort, den Bischöfen in der größeren Umgebung meiner Heimat und der katholischen Kirche in der Welt gemacht. Letzten Endes haben Sie zum meinem Austritt aus der katholischen Kirche geführt. Dies war nach langem Überlegen und unter einem deutschen Papst. 

In eineinhalb Jahren nach meinem Austritt habe ich noch aktiv bei anderen dafür geworben, dass sie sich diesen Schritt auch überlegen. Dies hat Dr. Karl Hillenbrand gestoppt.

Ich hatte mit ihm ein Gespräch - ich hatte vorher seine Dissertation durchflogen - und er hat mir nach dem Gespräch sein Buch "Herausgeforderter Glaube" geschenkt. Dankbar bin ich dafür, dass jemand auf meine Bitte eingegangen ist, nach meinem Austritt noch ein Gespräch zu führen. In diesem Gespräch habe ich zum ersten Mal gefühlt und erfahren, dass auch innerhalb so einer geschlossen auftretenden Organisation katholische Kirche Inhomogenitäten existieren und um Lösungen gerungen wird. 

Für mich war es auch einmal wichtig zu hören, dass es auch Katholiken im Amt wie Karl Hillenbrand gibt, die sich um Menschen kümmern. Es tat ihm weh, dass junge Menschen auch und gerade in der Kirche misshandelt worden sind und er hat sich darum bemüht, dass dies in Zukunft verhindert wird. Er traf sich dafür mit den Opfern und war da, um Ihnen zuzuhören. Ich bin froh, wenn ich Menschen treffe, die noch zuhören. Menschen, die an Lösungen arbeiten. Karl Hillenbrand war so ein Mensch.

Lieber Karl Hillenbrand, es tut mir leid erst so spät von deinem Tod erfahren zu haben. Du hast mir damals gesagt, ich könne dir "irgendwann" einmal ganz einfach Feedback zu deinem Buch geben. Ich habe die Email erst vor ein paar Wochen beendet. Dann wollte ich noch was dazu nachschauen und habe dabei von deinem Tod erfahren. 

Digital Rights Management

To all those authors out there: sell your books please without any DRM! I did the mistake and bought stroustrups c++ book as epub. I already got it printed, but wanted it on my tovolino for having it with me all the time. However, I will never again buy any book anymore with DRM. There are already 4 books I bought without it. While I struggled now for 30 min to have a look into stroustrup the others where nice to read and I am happy that I bought them. Note: have a look at the pragmatic bookshelf ;)
posted from Bloggeroid

Promotion for a Newspaper

Newspaper are important. They are still today. But they are only important if they do a good job. The german newspaper "Die Zeit" is such a newspaper.

There have been times(!) the German newspaper industry was a place where with news money was printed nearly directly. However, times have changed. Today sales of many newspaper in Germany drop. "Die Zeit" is one of the newspaper in Germany that sells more again after a drop at the end at the year 2000. "Die Zeit" was once known as a newspaper only for academics and such. However, that changed.

I am a more technical guy and love to read the weekly edition. One can get the standard paper edition - I like the digital format more. Since I got a Tolino I read the epub of "Die Zeit". The epub of "Die Zeit" can be downloaded from their homepage at Wednesday. There are 643 pages, the epub is indexed. The last is rather important for me. Even if I'd like to read the whole "book", I do not want to afford so much time. I rather love to learn coding and build apps and such. However, one can get also the newspaper as pdf. This is rather large with about 40 Mb compared to 4 Mb epub, but I managed to read this on my mac.

Reading "Die Zeit" you get German news about the world, written by excellent journalists or other people who have an important topic. And this is what I want: I love to read good journalism.

Email Phishing (Example Amazon)

There are things in business I do not understand. One of them is phishing and identity faking.

Today I had a phone call to my local amazon support. I recently got some phishing emails that I would like to filter. Without filtering I spend usually about a minute checking if this really is an email from amazon. It might be important. However, I always check the given links in the emails and find out that is SPAM & phishing.

So, there are possibilities for amazon to circumvent this. I know that there are several companies that have PGP keys so that one can use encryption with authentication when having email contact. Why do such companies like amazon, ebay etc. do not offer this service of communicating securely with them?

P.S.: After writing this article I found this german blog post. Amazon knows its problem for long.