A while ago, I wrote a short blog post on white noise and binaural beats over at my New Urban Music Blog (German). This peculiar aspect of psychoacoustics is pretty fascinating. Some people use techniques like this to better meditate or concentrate. There is an online white noise generation tool called Simply Noise, so you can get a basic idea of what it's all about.
There are many controversial, alleged uses for binaural beats. Some researchers report that they can influence brain waves and thus help to reduce anxiety. For an introduction on the topic, please read the Wikipedia entry. Binarual beats are also part of a presentation Mitch Altman gave at the 24C3 in Berlin three years ago.
The reason I'm telling all this is that I just found out about the existance of Gnaural, an open source binaural beat sound generator for Linux (and other OSs). Here is a tutorial on how to install it on 32bit Ubuntu systems. If you, like me, have a 64bit system, you might want to follow these instructions. Gnaural offers many options to tweak the generated sound to your preferences, making it easy to experiment with a wide range of differenct noises. Personally, I'm not convinced yet of the method's beneficial aspects, but it's an interesting field if you want to try out some lifehacking 
It's been a while since I tinkered with this little blog of mine. Today, I finally managed to update Serendipity to the most current version. And while waiting for the files to upload, I checked for new templates because a fresh look might do no harm. That's when I found out about Sagittarius-A, a very clean template that was ported to Serendipity not long ago. I fell in love (well, almost) with it instantly. And as usual, switching themes was hassle-free!
I will try to pay a little more attention to this blog in the future, blogging about a more diverse range of topics again, covering not only BarCamps and web stuff, but maybe something more personal, too. The World Cup 2010 will start in a couple of days, so why not share my thoughts on it here? I will keep up the peculiar German-English dichotomy, though, blogging about the more personal stuff in German and reserving English for web and technology related posts.
One more word to my readers: Don't expect everything to work perfect for the next couple of days. There seem to be some issues concerning some heavy modifications and the new layout. But it will smooth out soon over the next iterations. I will also try to implement a couple of new features if I find the time to. In the long run, I even plan to move this whole blog to a different server and even a different or second URL. I still own sperrobjekt.de (without the hyphen, that is) back from the old days. But I have to figure out how to publish that to Google first. Stay tuned!
It's time for another post about a tool that is related to the Openstreemap (OSM) project. Yesterday, golem.de published a post about Maperitive, a cross-platform real-time OSM renderer that runs on .NET/Mono written by Igor Brejc. Maperitive is expected to become the successor of the Kosmos OSM rendering application. Instantly I felt the urge to give it a try, so I downloaded the latest release from here.
Because I never installed the mono development libraries, I had to take care of that: sudo aptitude install libgluezilla libmono-accessibility2.0-cil libmono-cecil-private-cil libmono-corlib1.0-cil libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-dev libmono-i18n-west1.0-cil libmono-management2.0-cil libmono-peapi2.0-cil libmono-relaxng1.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-runtime1.0-cil libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil libmono-webbrowser0.5-cil libmono-winforms2.0-cil mono-2.0-devel mono-csharp-shell mono-devel mono-gmcs I'm listing all the dependencies here, actually it should suffice to add mono-devel and libmono-winforms2.0-cil, I guess. After that and doing a chmod +x Maperitive.sh, I could start the application.
After feeding the OSM data for Berlin to Maperitive with load-source /home/mattsches/temp/berlin.osm.bz2 it took a couple of seconds to render the actual map, but it worked! Keep in mind, however, that Maperitive is still under heavy development, so don't expect any comfortable GUI yet. All you have is a command line and a long list of text commands. But that's ok for me right now Here's two screenshots:
I'm looking forward to future developments of Maperitive. If you want to check it out, too, make sure you're willing to report any bugs you encounter. Igor also set up a Google Group where you can share your thoughts and experiences.
Two days ago, Benjamin Nowack announced the re-release of Knowee, a distributed social web address book. Knowee started out as a project supported by the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group and will also available for download soon. This means you can install it on your own server, if you like.
Knowee is somewhat similar to NoseRub as it aggregates many of your profiles from popular social networks and applications like Twitter, Identi.ca, or Delicious. But Knowee adds a lot of semantic wizardry to all the data its bots collect over time. Among the technologies employed are FOAF, RDF, Microformats, OpenID, Google's Social Graph API, and SPARQL. The latter makes it easy to re-use the aggregated information in other applications. Without digging too deep into all these formats and APIs, let me say this seems to evolve into a very powerful tool, far more than a simple address book. For more info, read the introductory blog post, or simply take a shot at it.
That being said, I'm a little irritated about how little buzz Knowee has created so far (only 4[!] hits on Technorati?). Is everyone simply fed up with yet another social network aggregator? Or am I just a little bit too impatient? I don't know, but I know that Knowee deserves more attention even if it's still in an early stage. Especially since I'm sure that Benjamin will add more useful features soon, e.g. the integration of MyBlogLog.
My public Knowee profile can be found here.
So, it's been ages since I blogged something here. I won't promise it'll be any better next year, but I will at least try to update my blog more frequently. My other blog requires a lot of attention most of the time, and time is what it's all about, right? The year 2008 is almost over now, and I've been spending some time with my family - well, my parents, that is. My sister is currently working in development collaboration in Sudan, and I am there right now to pay her a visit and see and learn more about this country that has been put on the so-called "axis of evil" by the Bush administration.
I've spent a couple of days in Khartoum now and I am really enjoying it. Not only are the weather conditions so much more comfortable than in Germany, but people are friendly and helpful, too. Some even speak German and are happy to have conversations with us. Of course, the political situation is very tense with the conflicts in western and southern Sudan, the looming decision of the ICC, and the US boycott of the country (for the US attitude towards Sudan please check yesterday's article in the NYT). But, as a visitor and tourist, it's quite an experience to be here.
We already drove over the Nile to Khartoum's twin town Omdurman where we admired the Mahdi's tomb, some of the last traditional boat builders, and some other sights. In Khartoum, we also visited some interesting places and enjoyed the hospitality of the very good cafes and restaurants that can be found in the capital. I'm not going into more details here and now, but I promise to post at least a wrap-up of my week in Sudan. And I wish I had brought a GPS device to be able to contribute more data to the OpenStreetMap project - which already covers large parts of the city in great detail.
For further information I recommend the blogs of Bake Evans-Pritchard and, in case you understand Italian, Violetta Polese, who also wrote the most up-to-date guide book to Khartoum and Sudan. So much for now, I'm going to crawl under my mosquito net and try to find some sleep. Salaam!
