Although I have lived in Kempten my whole life, I had no idea that the small town has a street that displays such beautiful cherry blossoms in spring. I guess I didn't pay much attention to it when I was younger and then just overlooked it. Shame on me, because the cherry trees that bloom there in spring are simply beautiful. You can see the pictures here: Cherry Blossoms 2024

I recently rummaged through my music hard drive and I found 2 albums called "Next Generation" and "Sweet Insanity" which I produced in 1992 and 1994 with my sound generator at the time, the Roland-U220 and the Kawai K1-II synth. I was fascinated by what I had composed and thought to myself, it's actually a shame that it goes dead on the hard drive. So I decided without further ado to publish both albums on my homepage. Let me see that the sound quality is of course not yet up to date, but just from the melodies and the ideas I had there, it is extremely fascinating to listen to. You can find both albums here.

Since the sound quality of the original recording of my piano piece free your mind is not exactly outstanding (who is surprised if you only have the camera microphone and record the sound directly from a real Eterna piano), I re-recorded it with the Yamaha CLP-785 digital piano . These are of course the advantages of a digital piano over a real piano. It may sound a little worse than a real piano, but it has a built-in recording device and you can record piano pieces directly and without annoying noise in excellent quality. The way to the piece is this way.

Lately, when I was trying to play a song from me on my homepage to a friend, I noticed that my music area is hopelessly out of date ... * shame *
The Firefox browser I use has deactivated Flash content on websites for some time due to a high security risk. Where there is flash content, you only see a kind of Lego brick and when you click on it you are kindly informed that you should only allow Adobe Flash on websites that you trust. Okay, you could trust my site, but of course it´s just not up to date anymore. Therefore, I have revised the entire page in the course of internationalization. Audio is now played with an HTML5 audio player that all current browsers should be able to play. And to celebrate the holiday (May 1st), I also uploaded all the songs that were only partially available in full and the songs that previously had a slightly poorer mp3 quality (128-192 Kbps) against CD quality (256 Kbps) exchanged. So if you want to listen to music, here´s how: Music

Internationalization is entering my homepage! For a long time I had the wish to install language support for foreign languages and now the time has finally come. Of course it takes a while to chase all the texts through the translation computer (it can only be months), but the first step in the form of 3 flags is done. The homepage tries to set the correct language based on the country code of the browser. If this fails, you can click on one of the 3 flags and select your national language. The choice is: German, English and Japanese ... Hai!

I was in Tokyo! And I´m more than impressed! Tokyo is an absolutely fascinating city. There are so many things to see and explore, it´s just amazing. And what you hear about the Japanese is true. I have never met a people that is as friendly, polite, helpful, disciplined and efficient as the Japanese. I was just blown away. And of course I took a lot of pictures. And even though I watched a lot in the 2 weeks, I just scratched the surface of what you can see and experience in Tokyo. I think I will have to visit the city more often ...
Click here for the pictures.

As some may have noticed, I shut down my page for a short time, since a new data protection regulation came into force on May 25, 2018 and it has it all. Violations of the new regulation can cost up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of annual sales, whichever is higher! But before some people look a little kinky at their savings stocking, according to a member of the Bundestag, there is first a warning for violations, which can also cost around 10,000 to 20,000 euros. Hence the temporary decommissioning and first read the explanation in peace what they want from you again. And of course they shoot cannons at sparrows again. What is really good for Facebook, Google and other data collectors with first-class spy tools is hopelessly exaggerated for a private person with a private homepage like me. But they didn´t make a difference. All the snoopers and spies now have to put their cards on the table and say exactly, or give information about what data they have and what they want to do with them. And if you refuse the storage of your data, they have immediate to deletion them. All of this serves to protect the private data of every individual who moves on the Internet and is a powerful tool against Google, Facebook and Co. and long overdue to finally stop them.

What is lonely for Facebook, Google and Co is a nuisance for a private person like me with a private homepage without any collection of personal data, because unfortunately they have formulated it so strictly that EVERY homepage actually needs a data protection declaration, even if you don´t save any personal data like me. According to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), even an I.P.address falls under personal data, since you COULD identify a person with it. Little is interested in the fact that something like this is completely impossible for a private individual like me, since only the police can, with a corresponding judicial decision, inquire about the surrender of the owner of an I.P.address from the provider. And since the technology is made by default so that an IP address is transmitted when visiting a website (must also be so, because where else should the web server know where to send the requested page?!?) And this EVERY homepage, whether private or not, actually needs to be saved in log files, where the website operator at least points out this automatic storage circumstance. Of course, you could still discuss whether you still need one if the I.P. It is saved anonymously, which is also the case according to the log files of my provider 1und1, but I did not want to take any risks because my wallet is just too small and therefore my homepage now has a data protection declaration. And as I said, even though I do not save any personal data. I have neither Google Analytics nor other spy tools from Google or Facebook and cookies are only available for me to snack on. I have already considered whether to put a saying directly on the input image: Cookie free since 2002 ....

What is changing on my page now? Unfortunately, I had to take out the guest book, because according to the GDPR websites with form entries must have encryption and since I don´t have such a thing at the moment, I was unlucky. And as so often, one action triggers another action and the rat tail gets longer again. When I took out the guest book, I noticed a few errors in the page in the menu and actually had to revise the whole page. In the course of the revision, I also disposed of the dusty menu item PC Tips, since it mainly contained entries from Win2000 and WinXP, which is absolutely out of date. And above the imprint is now the new menu item called Privacy, which contains my explanation that when you visit a website, the IP address transmitted is saved in log files of the web server, but I do not otherwise collect any personal data, since my page contains one Simple HTML website with a bit of PHP and javascript support, which is only intended for viewing and not for collecting and which does not include any third-party software such as Google, Facebook and Co. There is not a single cookie here! And that since the page exists, which has now been around 16 years. And if you want to have something to laugh at, I recommend reading the section Contact inquiries / Contact option of the data protection declaration, because it even explains that if you send me an e-mail, I have to cache your e-mail address on my computer so that I can write you back again .... hohohoho .....

Click here for the data protection declaration.

I gave my self-written program timecmp an update after I noticed a small error that the program cannot handle files with more than one space in the file name. The bug has been fixed and the version number increases from 2.0 to 2.1. The program goes here.

Apparently there is no reasonable graphical user interface for mkvextract from the mkvtoolnix from bunkus.org and with the included gui (gui = grafphical user interface) from mkvtoolnix called mkvtoolnix-gui there are no extractions Function for individual mkv tracks. An Internet search for a gui for mkvextract under Linux led to a wild construct from a Windows program that is operated using a Windows emulation under Linux. For this reason, I quickly wrote my own graphical user interface for Linux using Qt4.

But folks, honestly, just so that you can easily extract individual tracks from an mkv file with a click of the mouse, should I get a Windows program to run using a Windows emulation similar to wine under Linux? What did you throw in ... * ggg *

No thanks. I prefer to write my own little program, which may not have full support for all possible traces of an mkv file, since it only supports the three main groups of video, audio and subtitles, but who needs more? I think the most important thing about a film is still seeing, hearing and reading German subtitles if the film is in Japanese ... *g*
The program goes here.

Out of the need to not have to keep restarting my Linux system just because you mounted a remote Windows directory, I wrote the program cifs-client. Unfortunately, when I use
mount -t cifs //server/sharename /mnt/sharename
under Linux in the directory tree, it goes into a "sleep mode" after about 15 minutes. Which, however, is more like a Sleeping Beauty sleep without a kiss from true love, because all attempts to access the directory or to hang it up again fail. You can't even use the SIGKILLS signal, which actually kills processes rigorously, to kill the cifs process or an ls command that you've executed on the share. In the worst case even the whole Linux system hangs! Abysses open up that you never thought possible before! A Linux system that no longer reacts and must be terminated using the reset button on the PC. You almost feel like you're on stupid Windows...*ggg*
To counteract this, my program can be used to display shared directories of Windows computers in the in-house network and attach them to the directory tree. The program sends a signal to the remote computer every 5 minutes so that the connection doesn't go dead and never again wakes up. Go to the program here long.

Since Flash is now frowned upon because of the many security gaps, well-known video portals and streaming services such as youtube and Amazon have long since switched to the new HTML5 player. And since it can also play high-quality videos, I also converted my films page to HTML5 and removed all Flash-Movies from my site. Go to the films here long.

There is a new post under Linux about IPsec connections using strongSwan, including a new program that can display the status of an IPsec connection.
To the entry "Psec connection using strongSwan and RSA keys + EAP-MSCHAPv2 authentication" is it here long.
To the program "ipsec-status" is it here long.

It's crazy when you buy a new hard disk and expect a minimum write speed of 80 MB/sec with today's SATA hard disks and you only get 40 MB/sec with Debian lenny and 5! MB/sec on Debian wheezy. Especially if you have treated yourself to expensive harddisks. Everyone immediately notices that something is wrong, or not immediately under Debian lenny, because the old version of fdisk used there doesn't even show an error. It only appears in somewhat inconspicuous letters from Debian wheezy and even more impressively in red letters under the testing distribution of Debian jessie with fdisk version 2.25.2 (see picture). You can read about the problem in detail here. Just a short summary:

So far, hard drives have always been built with 512-byte data blocks. Western Digital is now switching to 4 KB blocks. Conventional partitioning tools in the standard settings do not partition them correctly, or the partitioning is not correctly aligned with the 4k blocks. This leads to the error message displayed in red letters and to a dramatic drop in performance when writing. Just for comparison: With the faulty partitioning, my disk managed 40 MB/sec under Debian lenny and just 5 MB/sec under wheezy! With correct partitioning, the disk achieves peak values of 160 MB/sec! If that doesn't make a difference...

The solution to the problem is to explicitly pay attention to the correct partitioning. For this you have to use fdisk with the options
# fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdb
then it automatically aligns the partitioning to the 4k blocks. As a little help for checking: The start value of the block specification in fdisk must be divisible by 4. As you can see in the picture, it starts there at 63 and is therefore wrong. However, it is also sufficient to check whether a red error message appears. ;-)

I've always known it and now I have definitive proof. Martians are among us! Look here: Okay, to be honest, this is how it looks like when you crash the windows system font...