Archive for the 'trips' Category

Border Control

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013


The Berlin wall somewhere in the eighties.

Somewhere in the sixties my grandfather was searched in East Berlin.

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Have an exclusive look!

Monday, July 29th, 2013

Here you get an exclusive look behind the randform (iron ;)) curtain:

Tim’s latest free time projects were heavily located in music electronics. His last weekend project was to use a socalled x-OSC chip (which he is currently beta testing) by the british company x-io technologies (see blue blinking board in the video) as a wireless remote control for a socalled ladder filter (unfortunately a bit hard to see in the wirings on a kitchen table…).

American monster Euro tour

Sunday, July 14th, 2013

Reader Sibille had asked in a comment to a post about “some music in Marzahn“:

Isn’t that Parkbühne located witin a residential area? Aren’t the inhabitants of that area disturbed by the noise which is caused by such a band?

My answer after the click
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how to sew the vmeter sleeve

Monday, April 1st, 2013

Tim’s midi-osc article has now an explanation on How to sew the vmeter sleeve and a video which shows the wireless vmeter in action:


critter under the couch

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

A sort of brief follow-up to the last two posts about simulations. Here a link to Tim’s simulation of a critter under the couch.

german taxlaws

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

I am currently spending too much time with trying to get informations about
german tax laws. If you speak german you can read the discussions at
fragdenstaat.de, which sofar ended up with me writing an Income-tax calculator for 2012 (see image), which you can use at mathics.org without any guarantee of wether the calculations are correct.

copyright parties

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

The last blog post received quite some comments which I would like to answer. So reader Jared Khithim asked about the use of my proposals for a pre-preprint achive:

..this seems to be a quite clear violation of your copyrights! Are you going to sue Holtzbrinck?

Reader M. Boulangel saw this similarily and wondered wether I wouldn’t like to set up my own preprint archive and last but not least reader Mandy asked about the CC-10 birthday party:

…is boring talks the new berlin party scoop?

So regarding the copyright issue: No – I don’t want to sue Holtzbrinck. In fact it’s not only that I find my suggestions not overly original and rather intuitive but also that I think that it’s good that at least some people care about the issue. Moreover I don’t want to set up a preprint archive – I actually had already set up** and maintained a preprint archive for almost ten years at the former sfb288 which starts with lecture notes* by Ludvig Faddeev from autumn 1991.

I could also imagine that eventually some kind of pre-preprint archive may exist already at some institution, as there are meanwhile many institutional repositories. Or there may be related projects. Like for the Mimirix project we used trac for (amongst others) reading the students works and who knows wether there aren’t universities who already set up their own online dissertation pre-print archive. I still think it would be good to have something like this with a long term support offered by a global public institution like the arxiv.org. A company like Holtzbrinck has to keep its own business interest in focus and this may unfortunately turn out to be eventually at some point against the original idea of science.

Concluding – I eventually would use my “copyrights” passively, that is in case someone would e.g. try to forbid the arxiv.org to set up such a thing, because of copyright issues (there are still software patents in the US) then I could eventually try to help the arxiv with my timestamped proposals, which are distributed over the internet. But I don’t think that this is going to happen.

*the preprints have no licence, since back then a kind of creative commons share-a-like licence was sort of self-understood for preprints, I actually don’t know how the arxiv handles these new laws.
**with technical help from colleagues

Regarding the party… the party of course started after the talks, images after the click.
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CC-by at Holtzbrinck’s figshare

Friday, December 14th, 2012


Leonard Dobusch and John Weitzmann at the CC-10-birthday party

randform hasn’t yet reported on a rather new online tool in scientific publishing which is called figshare. The german reader may have already read about it in an article by Aleks Scholz at the blog Riesenmaschine, the scientific minded reader may have used it already.
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A digital agenda for Europe

Thursday, December 6th, 2012


information fair for start-ups in Berlin

This is in part a little follow-up post to the last one concerning the WCIT conference.

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Tanz im Aufbauhaus

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

Tanz im Aufbauhaus inspired by 90’s hip hop music, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and the Megaphoneannouncements at S-Bahnhof Friedrichsfelde-Ost.

The song is about humans and machinization. Translation eventually later.