Archive for the “Home and Living” Category

My flat and city

2010 … that still sounds like science-fiction to me, guess I’ll have to get used to living in the future.
Well, I guess you wonder what I have been doing since August. I’ll recap the last few months in a few words and photos:

October 2009

My grandma turned 90 this year and as the years before we celebrated at my parents place in Spain. We went out for a very yummy lunch. Because I saw some Indian dishes on the menu, I asked the waiter about it and it turned out, that the chef is actually from india. So my grandma and I ordered curry dishes, while my parents went for Mediterranean fish.
The afternoon we spent together. I had prepared a little speech, recapitulating the years of her life. In order to prepare myself, I created a over 2 meters long time line, with all major events from our lifes and history. It is quite amazing how much can be packed into a single lifespan! In the evening we surprised her a little more by lighting a
Grandma turning 90 Birthday Lunch Even Fireworks!

December 2009

Towards the end of the year, there was the Christmas party of our institute. Every year the whole scientific staff spends a whole day together, visiting an interesting industry partner or some other entertaining venue. This year the organisers chose the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe which showed a very interesting exhibition, mixing technology of the past century with artistic aspects.
After the exhibition and a brief visit at the Christmas Market in Karlsruhe (where we had some local food and mulled wine), we went back to Darmstadt. At a local restaurant (3klang) we met with former colleagues and enjoyed a very tasty dinner while our professor recapitulated the past year, highlighting the achievements.
Writing Industry Robot The Museums interactive Timeline The Colleagues at the Christmas Market

The holidays around Christmas I spent back at my home town Filderstadt with my family. I always enjoy seeing them, as we usually don’t meet too often over the year. The days were filled with tasty meals and nice talks in front of the fireplace (which we didn’t light, as it was warm enough and the fire light usually gets everyone tired :-D ).
After the holidays I returned back to Darmstadt. The next day I picked up two friends and we drove to Berlin where we met up with some more friends to stay at a flat which yet another friend had left to us for the days around new years eve. In the capital, we went to a very interesting photo exhibition about the work of Don McCullin at the C/O Berlin, ate at a sweet little Italian place in Berlin Mitte and celebrated new years eve with a big crowd of CouchSurfers at Hostel/Bar/Club Belushi’s.
Don McCullin Exhibition NYE in Berlin ChouchSurfers from all over the World

So far for 2009 … have a nice year 2010!
Tim

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Check out the final result of the Home Media Server project:

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So far I have been using my big quadcore machine as a desktop and as a server at the same time. With the Q6600 processor with four cores, it was hardly doing anything for the vast majority of the time. As I also use it as my digital video recorder (thanks to MythTV) it has been running 24/7 using quite a bit of power. The latest energy bill and a recent discussion in my group of friends on how to reduce consumption of resources led me to change this setup.
Out of curiosity I had been looking into the Mini-ITX formfactor before and thought it would be the right way to go. After a few evenings of research I found the perfect mainboard for my needs. An Intel Atom based Mini-ITX board with integrated powersupply and completely passive cooling (Intel D945GSEJT). Combined with a slow spinning 1GB harddrive (Samsung EcoGreen HD103UI) this server would hardly emit any noise.


I ordered all components online and when I got the last part (the mainboard of course ;-) ) putting everything together was just a thing of minutes. Installing a console Ubuntu system is quite a routine for me and only took a few moments. Of course installing all the services that had previously been running on my desktop took some more time:

So far everything proved to run reliable and best of all: The whole shebang only uses about 20W compared to 160W the desktop is using. The next thing I’ll have to do is to create a simple enclosure as I am not convinced by the Mini-ITX cases you can buy off the shelf.

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© Jan Tim Jagenberg