The name says it: Harbour Cone is a cone-shaped hill on the Otago Peninsula in New Zealand. While most tourists pay for a tour to see penguins and albatroses, I opted for the cheap variant using a regular bus and regular hiking boots.

Just when reaching the summit, a gap in the clouds allowed for a stunning view from Roys Peak in New Zealand: blue lakes, green vegetation, snowy mountains. A report from a moderate hike with an above-the-average return.

This case study shows the effects of acceleration, top speed, deceleration on total travel time on short distances at the example of Transrapid in Shanghai. Bottom line: it is the average speed that matters, not the top speed. Groundbreaking result … no! But it is an illustrative example with concrete numbers that shows why reporting top speeds creates illusions.

Ten lines of PostScript are sufficient to draw a pretty self-similar pattern constructed by packing circles into circles.

The annual racing series on Lidingö is extremely popular and was booked out way in advance this year. Out of curiosity (and because I succumbed to the excellent marketing), I took part amongst thousands of others in the 30km race on Lidingö. Here is a review of the event.

A wonderful journey through Sweden. Great weather conditions. Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain called. A story both with pictures and with words.

Den gibt es nur auf deutsch: meinen Bericht vom ERASMUS-Jahr im Rahmen des neuen Double-Degree-Studiums zwischen den Informatikfakultäten der Technischen Universität München und der Königlich Technischen Hochschule Stockholm.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. Here is a report about the last day – from Torshälla to Stockholm.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. Here is a report about the fourth day – from Mullhyttan to Torshälla.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. Here is a report about the third day – from Mariestad to Mullhyttan.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. Here is a report about the second day – from Vänersborg to Mariestad.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. Here is a report about the first day – from Kungshamn to Vänersborg.

Across Sweden with the bike from the west coast to the east coast? I have tried my luck. In a diary-style series of articles I will describe some of my experiences during the five days of biking In the hope that it might benefit others with similar ideas!

Fantastic view over the Alps from Halserspitze on the border between Austria and Germany. The mountain is only for the experienced and surefooted. Wildbad Kreuth at the foot of the mountain can be comfortably reached from Munich by train and bus.

Roundtrip: Tegernsee – Kreuth – Hirschberg – Bad Wiessee – Tegernsee. This mountainbike trip was different from previous ones. With the weather conditions permitting, we planned our route just in time. The roundtrip went astonishingly well.

A hike with phenomenal company lead from Amden to the top of the Speer mountain in Switzerland. Up there, thick clouds were hanging on one side of the long mountain ridge like an attempt to illustrate the Nothing from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. A bath in Lake Walen topped off the hike.

Interesting weekend trip from Munich to Zurich. Hitchhiked with a bus. And got an unexpected ferry ride over Lake Constance.

Lesson for a TUM student: a good Bavarian bite and drink at Hörsaal 13 on TUM campus Weihenstephan. “Hörsaal 13” translates to “Lecture Hall 13” but is in fact a pub with an attached beer garden – German sense of humor? Anyway, I conclude: definitely one of the better beer gardens.

Recommendable hike close to the German-Austrian border. Starting at Musteralm at Plansee, remembering old times, then hiking up to two summits called Geierköpfe, crossing the rather exposed ridge from the western summit to the eastern summit. Enjoyable view on Zugspitze. Back the same way.

Start small: my first Arch Linux package submitted to the AUR. luksctl manages (portable) LUKS-encrypted devices with a logical volume manager on top of it. Profiles control how the devices are (un)locked, the logical volumes (de)activated, and the filesystems (un)mounted with a single command. Details are found at luksctl on Bitbucket.

Curious: how far can we push Google’s speech recognition web service that is used in Chrome 25+ for speech input? I measured the word accuracy of the service on the TSP speech dataset that consists of recordings of the Harvard sentences in order to get the picture.

It is now a couple of years since affordable depth cameras have entered the market. Out of a developer’s perspective, the Asus Xtion Pro Live seemed to be better suited for development than the XBOX 360 Kinect. I still think so. Here are my first impressions gained when working with the Xtion in a university project.

Das Interview für abi.de ist nun schon ein paar Wochen alt, aber erst jetzt ist mir aufgefallen, wie die Überschrift und der erste Satz im Zusammenhang klingen. Frei nach: in der Welt zuhause, in Bayern daheim.

Google powers a mostly undocumented web service for speech recognition. The web service accepts audio data and returns a transcription. Here is a way to communicate with the web service via HTTPS POST and Python.

When trusting the students is a good idea: a review of the project-based visualization course (DD2257) given by Mario Romero in spring 2013 at KTH. The projects presented by the students exceeded my expectations by far – but why?