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Recently, I’ve noticed that my excitement about social media is declining sharply. I don’t think this is just due to autumn. I’ve never been a trend setter, but certainly a dedicated follower of trends. Whatever is new, hip, trendy, I’m with it. Naturally, I’ve seen trends I follow longer term become mainstream, while trends I eventually lost interest in went away. Anyway, here are some thoughts on the last 20 and guesses about the next 20 years.

Internet? I had no idea of it, but I was on CompuServe in 1992, enjoying to be able to chat with people on the other side of the planet. I had started using computers at 28, and networking, across continents, seemed to me like exactly what those machines had been invented for. World Wide Web? Like Bill Gates, I discovered it in 1995, diving straight into it without a second thought, even trying to make a living out of it (like so many others, and just like them I ended up in what’s known today as the dotcom bubble burst). Mailing lists, forums, wikis? I’m all for these things. Google? I was so happy when it launched – there were too many Internet specialists around before it did. One year later, everyone had become a Web specialist in a way, even venture capitalists, and I think Google contributed significantly to making the dotcom bubble burst.

Next century, next millennium. Wikipedia? I had the same idea in the year 2000, only that I would have based its economics on something similar to Google Ads. MySpace? Kind of boring to me, I had been on Geocities before. There was Facebook, the „MySpace for academics“. I underestimated it, deeming it as boring as MySpace. (And I still do, but I don’t think I still underestimate it. Kind of hard to do so, when 10% of the world population are there.) Blogs? I was a reader, and didn’t see much reason to become a writer. Eventually, I did, but don’t ask me why. Probably because everyone else did. And/or maybe because WordPress is such a brilliant piece of software. I love great software.

Facebook? I eventually gave in and joined, although I consider it an Orwellian machine invented by the CIA. I’ve been on Facebook for a while, obediently sharing stuff from Amnesty International, Avaaz, Greenpeace, Foodwatch, and other NGOs on that platform. And saying thanks to people who wish me a happy birthday. Twitter? I became a big fan of that platform because of the aspect of immediate, unfiltered news. By now, I’ve sent 782 tweets, I’m following 33 people, and 87 people are following me. And even with those small numbers, the signal to noise ratio has become what I consider unreasonable. There are tools like Summify or Twitterfall, but to me it feels like they gloss over the problem, rather than solve it. I still follow Twitter, but with reduced enthusiasm.

To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, „think for yourself“. Gathering more and more information from outside (which is becoming ever easier to do) doesn’t help you think for yourself. After so many years being into it myself, I’d even say it hinders me from doing so. Or, as George Harrison put it, „the farther one travels, the less one knows, the less one really knows“. He wrote that almost 30 years before the WWW took off. For me, the formula of „data -> knowledge -> wisdom“ is starting to become obsolete. I guess that’s because it was never true.

Am I saying the Internet is, at the end of the day, a bad thing, or that the information flow/overflow caused by it has more bad than good aspects? Certainly not. I’ve merely started a process of reconsidering what’s in it for me, for the people around me, for my kids, and so on. I’m delighted to see that the Internet brought the Arab Spring, and I congratulate the brave people in Northern Africa who’ve made use of the Internet to shake off decades of oppression, and finally start establishing freedom and humanity instead. They were able to do so, however, because their oppressors were old and Internet-agnostic. The Internet was the right tool at the right time – from now on, oppressors will know what to do about it. There won’t be a Chinese Spring with the help of the Internet, for example. This is over.

What’s coming up? In 2015, Facebook will be alive and kicking. I guess at least 1.5 billion people will have a Facebook account by then, tripling the 2011 figure. Likewise, Twitter. In 2020, however, Facebook, Twitter, and similar social networks will be nothing but a memory, albeit a strong memory, because so many participated „back then“. In 2030, you’ll have to google for the Wikipedia entry for Facebook to be able to explain it to your children (or grandchildren). By that time, people would simply call you crazy, and probably call the ambulance, if you even considered publishing as many personal data on the Internet as it seems reasonable to do in 2011. That will be a no-no in 20 years.

So what will remain, grow, flourish? Google will. Wikipedia will. New things will come up that I can’t even think of at this point. The Internet in general will be around, dominating every aspect of life, although at reduced speed, so to speak. Long-term aspects will become much more relevant and dominant, short-term things like Facebook comments or Twitter tweets will be more or less on the ban list. Why? Because the Internet will get more and more under the influence of entities such as governments, authorities, intelligence agencies, corporations, et cetera – certainly not a good thing. This will be seconded by a general conception of being eager to regain the ability to „think for yourself“, though, which certainly is a good thing. On balance, will there be more good, or rather more evil?

Rest assured, there will be more good than evil. 200 years ago, people were hanged for theft. (This still happens today, but not in most parts of the world.) Torture was regarded as a regular and justified way to get confessions – why else would criminals admit a crime? (Torture is still everywhere, but it’s regarded as a crime in most places now.) Mankind is moving ahead, never back (at least long term). That’s why the Internet won’t turn into a medium of brain control. Rather than that, it will become increasingly what it started out as – a medium of/for innovation. (If you’re saying it started out as a military network, then you’re probably also saying you need to guard against the surveillance Americans do from their moon bases.)

I’m a musician. In 1980, record companies would not care about my music because they were more interested in marketing mainstream crap. For that reason, I’d not be able to make a living from music at that time. In 2011, you can produce mainstream crap music, and still not be able to make a living out of it, because people will simply steal your music, rather than paying for it. Is that any better than record companies ignoring you? I don’t know, but it shows that, while the Internet has changed (and still changes) everything, lots of things stay the same, although often enough for different reasons.

I’ve been so silent for two reasons mainly:

1. Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle on January 26.
2. I bought an apartment on January 25.

Getting acquired is always stressful. I know what I’m talking about because MySQL, the company I had been working for for five years, got acquired by Sun in 2008. Now Oracle purchased Sun, but this time it was much more painful because the acquisition was announced in April 2009, but we had to wait nine months before it actually went through. For us MySQLers at Sun, this meant working under extreme uncertainty (like for everyone else at Sun), and it didn’t make it easier to know that MySQL was the very reason why it took the EU commission so long to approve the deal. Well, we’ve started joining Oracle now (Germany will do so only in July, from what we know today), but those first couple of weeks are challenging. So, it was „waiting stress“ first, followed by „integration stress“, which has had an impact on my immune system. I can’t remember having had so many colds in so few months like this winter. And it was a long and hard winter … Anyways, I’m happy to know that the MySQL Documentation Team (which I’m leading) is still relevant at/for Oracle, and that we’ll likely remain part of the MySQL engineering department, as we’ve always been. So, for us, change means things will go on the same crazy way as before. People still jump on us for this and that reason, which I consider a good sign, since it means they actually care about the stuff we’re doing. This means we’re relevant, and so is the work I’m doing.

Now we all know that life is a bitch. Rather than letting me take care of one big thing at a time, two big things happened at the same time. The other big thing here was that, after one year and four months of looking for a new home, we finally found one almost exactly at the same time when the Oracle acquisition happened. I’m certainly not the happy-go-lucky kind of guy who can make a fortune out of virtually nothing, nor have I been the lucky heir of a fortune. So I had to find a place inexpensive enough to afford it. The place we found is an apartment in an urban villa in Lichterfelde West in the south-western part of Berlin. I’d definitely love to own the whole house on the picture above, but in reality we purchased one of six apartments there, which is located on the ground floor and the basement on the left side of the main entrance. Well, I won’t complain – my home recording studio will be in the basement, much better than having neighbors above and below. We bought the apartment at a ridiculously low price, but, of course, that came at a price. The house is in good shape, but the apartment itself was a ruin. To turn it into something we can live in, we’re investing a few ten thousand Euros. Normally, in this part of town, you’d pay 2.5 times more than we did, and when we’re done with the restoration, it would still be 1.5 times more. So it’s a good deal, but at the cost of a lot of hours spent to plan and coordinate the works. If you’re interested in the gory details (and many colorful pictures of dust and debris, to whet/spoil your appetite), look here. Anyways, moving there (in April, hopefully) will be very relevant for my family and me: It’s closer to school (Finn has just been accepted at Lennart’s school, so both boys will go there) – when they’re older, they’ll be able to go there with an 8-minute bus ride and another 8 minutes of walking through a park. My home office will be in the apartment, rather than just very close to it, which both has disadvantages and advantages, but I consider the pros more significant than the cons. We won’t have more space than we currently have, but it will be distributed in a better way. And I’ll have a dedicated space for my home recording studio, which will be a five meters walk away from my office. (I currently have no home recording studio at all, in case you were wondering.) The house is located next to a busy main street, but it has a backyard which is fairly quiet. The boys already love it, and I’m confident we’ll have a lot of fun there, turning the garage into a workshop for setting up and inventing all kinds of things. Finn (almost 6) would like to invent a machine that can take us to the frontiers of spacetime, so we can create a black hole there that evolves into a big bang that creates a new universe. This sounds ambitious, but we’ll try, anyway. (Not sure what the neighbors will say, though.) Lennart (8) is a bit more realistic regarding short-term plans: He’d like us to rebuild the ebb-and-flow installation that we saw at the Waloseum in 2008. It will take some time, but we certainly can do that. So our new home is relevant in many aspects, and will become even more so once we’ve moved there.

Now for the music. This keeps driving me crazy. In my last blog post long ago, I’ve outlined the main ideas about what I’m planning to do. In the meantime, I’ve done quite some research on technical things, mostly regarding the home recording studio equipment needed. I’ve discussed various aspects in forums, via phone talks with vendors, and so forth. I think I have a pretty good idea now what to buy first to get started – if I have any money left after the restoration of our new home, that is. I also have Luminita’s mail address now, but prior to asking her for permission to use her lyrics for my songs, I’d like to be able to point her to something I’ve recorded. Maybe I should just buy a video camera and record some of my stuff just like Katie did, but then again the songs I’m writing are meant to be performed by a rock band (uhm, I think I meant to say chamber orchestra rather than rock band), and also I don’t look half a cute as Katie does. In any case, YouTube has just started featuring a channel four „house music“, so it looks like the time is right to start something here. In spite of turning 52  soon, I think my music is relevant today. I’ve been performing music since 1965, which is not an argument but a statement that there’s more behind it than just me practicing 250 years of Johann Sebastian Bach’s pieces on the piano: Whenever I play an A major chord an the guitar (which any guitar player would agree is the most basic thing you can do) it’s like 45 years of active music history popping up in my mind and my ears. Maybe that’s relevant, maybe it’s not. I’d really love Katie to sing some of my songs, because some of them are meant to be sung by a good looking female vocalist, rather than a not so good looking male one. And, of course, I need Luminita’s permission to use her lyrics. I think I can write good tunes, and I also think that some of my poems are quite good, but I’ve never been able to combine my poems and my tunes into something I liked. Using Luminita’s poems and Katie’s voice seems like exactly the right thing to do. But Luminita is in Romania, and Katie is in the U.S., so this doesn’t seem to be particularly easy to accomplish. But, as always, I’ll keep trying by implementing and improving things steps by step.

I can always fail, but so what? Building that machine that can take us to the frontiers of spacetime seems much more challenging to me than making my music successful out in the wild, and, with both projects, I think I have many alternatives at hand that might not be half as exciting or ambitious, but might still yield results that I (or Finn and Lennart, for that matter) can live with. – Lennart prefers me to perform hard rock music, for example. Lately, I’ve created music that’s slightly jazzy (although I hate Jazz music), but he makes me realize I should try harder to create rock tunes. I’ve been playing music to him since he was a baby, and have developed a habit to go by his judgement. Lennart has a good musical instinct I think, so if things fail regarding Luminita and Katie, I can stick to his judgement to help me get over that.

Anyway, slowly but steadily I’ve started preparing and  implementing a few things that will help me get there, and I’m planning to post a series of articles on this blog on what I’m doing as I move ahead. In this article, let me start with the core basics, that is, the underlying ideas and reasoning of why I’m doing all the stuff I’ll be doing.

When I was seven, I started playing the violin. I practiced for more than six years, but when I became a teenager I happened to be in the middle of the glitter years, and those years were much more about electric guitars than about violins. So, to the deep disappointment of my parents, I let go of the violin and bought an electric guitar. Years later, I dreamed of becoming a sound technician, and started studying that subject at university. For the entrance exam, I was required to play the piano, so I took piano lessons for about one year. At some point, I realized that I wasn’t particularly good at any of the instruments I (had) played: On the piano, I had barely started playing Bach’s inventions, I hadn’t touched the violin for over five years, and I had never become good at playing the electric guitar. So I gave up my dream, and went to roam the world.

Wherever I went, physically or mentally, there was always a guitar with me, though. For mere practical reasons, I had switched to playing acoustic guitars, however, since it was too challenging to carry amplifiers and stuff in a rucksack. Thinking back, a violin might have been a better choice for traveling, but a steel string acoustic guitar was still easier to carry than an electric guitar with all necessary equipment, or even a piano. So, in the end, I’ve been playing steel string guitars for thirty years. In 1993, I bought a black Fender acoustic guitar, which I’ve been playing until today.

In 2008, just before I turned 50, a neighbor gave me a piano as a present, and I’ve been practicing the piano ever since, focusing on my favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. The Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach (his wife) is great for practicing as a beginner, but from experience my advice to anyone would be this: Start playing the piano well before you turn 50. It’s not impossible to learn mastering it at that age, but it’s by factors easier when you’re young.

Playing the piano has given me lots of ideas, though, both about sound and music in general as well as about composing songs for voice and guitar. I bought myself a Christmas present in 2008, Oliver Sacks’s wonderful book on music and the brain, which reaffirmed me that music isn’t a question of age. Granted, most of the famous musicians of our days are in their twenties, but there are people out there publishing their first record after they’ve turned 60. So there’s hope.

During the course of my musical „career“, I’ve written many songs for vocals and guitar, starting with pre-punk hippie songs, punk songs, post-punk songs, folk songs, any-kind-of songs. Some of them I still consider quite good, or even outstanding, compared to the popular and successful songs of the respective era, but I’ve never felt like I should preserve them for biographical or future-reference reasons. They were the songs of the eras they were written in. Those eras are gone, and those songs are gone. I’ve never shed tears about the fact that they were never recorded, and have thus gone away forever. Some of the material is still in my head: This may be a guitar chord, a snippet from a melody, or simply a „feeling“ about sound. So the songs are gone, yes, but they’re not gone entirely.

Regarding music composed by others, I have a rather extremist view: I love rock music and Baroque music. Any other musical flavor I view with skepticism, or even straightforward disappreciation. So, for me, it’s all about Vivaldi, Corelli, Telemann, and Bach, and the Beatles, the (early) Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and REM, although I make exceptions: I really enjoy some works of Dvorák, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Mozart, and of course Beethoven. Also, I like Turkish music. Stuff I don’t like includes Jazz and most of Blues, and Wagner scares the hell out of me. But, although I’m a musical extremist, I’m not determined to any particular style of music: I listen to any sound that comes around, and if I like it, I like it. An example is that I normally detest music by Verdi, but I absolutely love the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from the opera Nabucco. I just realize that I could go on and on with a list of examples and counter-examples, so I’ll stop here.

So why am I telling this? Right, it’s about the reasons and the ideas I have about the music I will record, and eventually publish. While I’m writing this, I’m being distracted by music playing in my head (read Oliver Sacks’s book referred to above to understand what this is about). It’s my music that’s playing in my head, music that is deeply influenced by more than four decades of listening to and producing music. Sometimes it’s getting somewhat scary, when the music is there all the time, steadily refusing to go away, or at least withdrawing a bit, so I can do my daily work. I guess it’s trying to tell me to record it on hard disk, and then share it with others. When done, it will be out in the world, and likely out of my head to some extent. And, yes, that’s what I’m going to do.

What will this music be like? Well, that’s hard to describe, and probably somewhat pointless, particularly considering that it will be out there at some point, and, as the saying goes, a (musical) picture tells more than a thousand words. Stay tuned, so to speak. It will be acoustic music, although for a „preview“ version I’ll also use electronic instruments, since I can’t afford to buy a complete set of the instruments that the sound will consist of, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be capable of even vaguely mastering all of them. Even worse, I can’t tell exactly which instruments I’ll be using. Here’s a tentative list:

• Vocals
• Guitar (acoustic steel string guitar)
• Piano
• Drums (current plans are for a regular set of rock music drums)
• Bass (I’d like to keep that one acoustic, too, so that would be double bass)
• Cello, viola, violin
• Recorded „real life“ sounds

As you might guess from „vocals“ (and what I said above), I’m thinking of classical rock song arrangements, although the instrument set will be much different from a classical rock music setup. Naturally, that different instrument set will also influence the songs, so they likely won’t sound like classical rock songs. But still, the intention is to play (mostly) rock music, albeit heavily influenced by Baroque elements (not just because of the instrument set, which isn’t particularly Baroque, anyway, but bears some analogies). I can’t wait to see if the music in my head will, from a standpoint of ideas, survive contact with (instrumental) reality.

Vocals need lyrics. In November 2008, while I was driving home from a business meeting, I listened to DLF, a German radio station, covering a story about gypsies in Europe, and particularly in Romania. They were heavily citing from a book published by a Romanian gypsy author, Luminiţa Cioabă. I had a hard time purchasing that book, but finally succeeded around Easter 2009. It’s called Poems of Yesterday and Today, and has become one of my favorite books of all times. The original poems are in Romani, and the book includes translations to Romanian, German, and English. Unfortunately, the English translation is the worst (from what I can tell; I can’t understand Romanian, but I can at least guess because it’s so close to Latin). I’ve spent many hours trying to deduce the true meaning of the Romani poems from the Romanian and the German translations, and turn that into something I’d consider proper English. (I’ll ask a friend who’s a native speaker to perform a sanity check.)

While reading Luminiţa’s poems, I’ve cried a river. She’s from the same generation as I am, but has of course grown up and lived in a completely different society and environment (Romania, socialism). Still, her poems strike a chord with me, and I’d say they strike that chord with a sledgehammer. As family tale goes, one of my ancestors was a gipsy, and judging from my sister, my cousins, and myself, that’s a pretty good explanation for much of the weird stuff we’ve been doing in our lives. But that’s an aside – even if Luminiţa’s poems have nothing to do with my family history, they’re far above anything I’ve seen in contemporary poetry. From a quality standpoint, I’d compare them with Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, a poem for which I started to learn French long ago, for the sole reason of being able to grasp the meaning without having to rely on the German translation. Because of Luminiţa’s poems, I’ve started to look at Romanian and even Romani, to be able to at least partially understand what her poems are about. Plans are to use her poems, and nothing but her poems, for the lyrics of the songs I’m going to compose.

So far, I have three and a half song ready. Here are the titles, without further explanation (which I hope to convey in a future article, though):

• Suicide
• Sibiu and I
• The root of the Earth
• Trees, flowers, grass, a source

This concludes today’s article. As said, stay tuned.

Some applications have built-in PDF capabilities, for example OpenOffice.org does, but others like Firefox or Thunderbird don’t. Recently I needed to create a PDF printout from a Wiki page, to send it to people who didn’t have access to an internal Wiki I’m using. On Windows, I would have installed a software like PDF Creator which installs a system printer that creates PDF files from any application. When I looked around for something comparable for Linux I wondered why it seemed hard to find anything. Eventually, I ended up installing the printpdf extension, which does exactly what its name implies.

I’ve uninstalled that extension, forever, when I found out that Linux has a PDF system printer already. At least, that’s the case if you’re using CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), which is the de facto standard on Linux. (Disclaimer: I’m using openSuse Linux 11.1, so I can’t tell for sure if the PDF capability is built in on other flavors of Linux, too.)

Using it is simple. In any application, just select „Print“. In the dialog that pops up, select „Print to file“, and select the „PDF“ radio button. Under Firefox, the dialog suggests to create a PDF file named „mozilla.pdf“ in the the „Documents“ folder of your home directory.

In other applications such as the kate editor, the dialog looks different. Here, you can simply select a system printer named „Print to File (PDF)“, which suggests to create the PDF file in your home directory, and name it „print.pdf“.

The difference between those print dialogs: The one described first is the Gnome print front-end, which my system uses for applications that were written for the Gnome window manager (like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Gimp). The latter dialog appears for KDE applications. The KDE dialog is a bit more straightforward I think – it’s not perfectly obvious that you’d have to select „Print to file“ to create a PDF printout. The Gnome front-end with its tabs looks more modern, though. I believe Linux should aim for unifying things like these, because using different dialogs for the same functionality has the potential to confuse users.

I’m using a lot of browser add-ons/extensions (see my article on Firefox extensions), so I was somewhat afraid that many of them would stop working in Firefox 3.5. (This had happened to me when upgrading from Firefox 1 to version 2, and to a lesser extent when upgrading to version 3.0.) My worries were unjustified, though. Only two extensions gave problems, but I could easily fix those by switching to alternative add-ons with the same functionality:

• TinyURL Creator had to be replaced by TinyURL Generator.
• Tab Mix Plus had to be replaced with Tab Mix Plus. (No joke; Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.1 was reported as incompatible after the upgrade, so I used the built-in add-ons search and found – Tab Mix Plus 0.3.81, which installed just fine. After restarting Firefox it worked flawlessly, with all settings restored.)

On my 32-bit box, I had a problem with sound under Flash. YouTube videos would play fine, but without sound. I poked around and searched the web, only to find that Flash sound didn’t work in other applications like Opera, either. The solution was to deinstall libflashsupport and restart the applications that use Flash. Now sound in videos is back again.

Speaking of Flash, for some reason videos on the most popular German news site, Spiegel Online, never worked with Firefox 3.0. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they work with no problem in Firefox 3.5.

I highly recommend upgrading to Firefox 3.5, at least when you’re on Linux. Just from „clicking experience“ loading pages is at least two times faster in Firefox 3.5, as compared to Firefox 3.0. The browser starts up a bit faster, too. I haven’t found the time to explore all the HTML 5 goodies that Firefox 3.5 provides, but will certainly give this a try soon.

• photos.2001
• videos.2001
• photos.2002
• videos.2002
• etc.

The folders vary greatly in size. Many of them exceed 4.3 gigabytes which is what you can store on a standard DVD. (Otherwise I would have just copied those folders to individual DVDs, forgetting about the wasted storage space left on many of the DVDs.)

I’ve done backups on DVD before, the layman’s way: Drag over files to k3b, KDE’s burning program, until there’s no space left, burn the DVD, remember the last file stored on DVD, then start over with the next file to be burnt on a new DVD, and so forth. But that’s tedious and error-prone. What I wanted was to simply drag all photo and video folders into some application, and then let the application slice them so that they would fit on regular DVDs. I was sure that other people had had the same problem before, so there had to be an application that does just that. But there isn’t, at least to my knowledge, although I’ve asked many people and googled many forums. The best advice I found was „do this manually“ (d’uh) or „use a hard disk“ (double d’uh). I just want to back up my photos and videos on DVD, come on. And I believe in read-only media when it comes to backing up historical stuff that will never change, like photos and videos.

I haven’t found a solution that slices my files so that they fit on DVD, and saves them on DVD as files, uncompressed. There’s not much point in compressing JPEG or MPEG files, anyway, and this would give me the additional advantage of being able to view them directly from DVD (for example on my mother’s TV set which can display JPEG slide shows and play MPEG movies).

I said I haven’t found a solution, but that’s not entirely true. I’ve found a Python script that’s pretty short and fairly easy to read, but it’s the opposite of fault-tolerant, and it’s also pretty buggy. One tiny user mistake is enough to stop the process, rendering the last inserted DVD a case for the trash can. Using that script comes close to doing things manually. If I could write Python I’d probably hack that script and make it available publicly. But I can’t.

So I reverted to the next best solution, which is just slicing my files into 4.3 gigabyte pieces, with no way of looking at the individual files straight from DVD. Yes, I could use tar for this, but tar stands for Tape Archiver, and was originally meant for backing up files to tape. What tar does is create one big file, „tarring“ all the individual files into that monolith file, while optionally compressing them. That’s great for „full“ backups, for example snapshot backups of home directories or log files that you only need to restore fully (in case of disaster, or if you’re transferring files to another disk or computer). But you cannot retrieve individual files or folders from a tar archive file. Also, there’s no built-in slicing in tar, so tar’s archive files might become bigger than 4.3 gigabytes, thus not fitting on DVD.

Enter dar. Dar stands for Disk Archiver, which sounds a bit more modern to me than Tape Archiver. Dar basically does the same as tar, that is, „tarring“ files into one big file, optionally compressing them, but it has two advantages over tar:

1. Dar can be configured to store that one big file in slices, that is, in a set of files not exceeding a particular file size each.
2. You can retrieve individual files from a dar archive easily.

So what I did was create sliced dar files, which I decided to call darslices, each 4.3 gigabytes in size, and burn those files onto DVD using k3b. Dar seems to be less performant than tar, so it took a whole working day to create a dar archive of my 40 gigabytes. I ended up with 16 darslices, which I then burned onto DVD.

Now I said it before that I’m originally a Windows guy, and while I’m running lots of self-coded shell scripts to do repeated tasks, I still prefer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) when it comes to performing tasks that I do only rarely, like once per year. DarGUI comes to the rescue. As you can imagine, it’s a graphical front-end to dar. DarGUI is no more than that, but it’s decently coded, and, unlike so many open source applications, it has great documentation. So here’s a mini-tutorial on getting started with DarGUI, and thus with dar.

First of all, make sure dar is installed. As the name implies, DarGUI is just a graphical front-end, it doesn’t include dar. Then start DarGUI. In KDE, you’ll likely find it in the K menu under System, Backup.

To create a new archive, follow these steps:

1. Select File, New (or click the Create a new archive icon).
   
   This opens a new window with six tabs.
   In the Archive tab, fill in a name for the archive file (or files, see later on). If you do regular backups (you do, don’t you?) the Add timestamp to name checkbox comes handy.
   Saves archive in can be an arbitrary location for storing the dar files (or dar slices).
   The Base directory field is the directory which contains all the files and directories that you want to archive. The directories that you enter on the Directories tab must be in this directory! I got this wrong the first time, although that’s exactly how it’s documented. Getting it wrong (by setting the Base directory to some other path) later on resulted in this error:
   
   You can leave the value of Batch file value as is. Check Differential backup if you’re not doing a full or initial backup, but rather follow-up backups that just back up the files that have changed since the last full backup.
2. In the Directories tab, add the directories you want to back up. For me, this was just the fotovideo folder on my massive storage device.
   
3. I didn’t use the Files tab at all, because I was interested in backing up complete directories, rather than individual files.
   
4. Likewise, I didn’t use the Compression tab, because compressing photo or video files normally doesn’t make much sense.
   
5. In the Options tab, I checked the Use slices checkbox, setting the value to 4500 Mb (megabytes), since this is what fits on a 4.3 gigabyte DVD.
   
   The Test run only is handy to just try out if your setup will work. It simulates dar processing, but without actually writing files.
6. I wanted to run the process immediately, so I didn’t fill in anything in the Scheduling tab.
   

That’s it. Now it’s time to press OK to start the process. This will open a console window which looks like this:

As said, for my 40 gigabytes of photos and videos, this ran all day. For the initial test run, I stopped it by pressing CTRL+C, then restarted the process after unchecking the Test run only checkbox in the Options tab.

Once the darslices are created and the process has ended, you can browse through the directories and files by selecting File, Open in the main window, or by pressing the Open an archive icon. Select the dar file, or the first dar file of your darslices. The interface will look like this:

Note that it can take some time until the file(s) are loaded and ready to be browsed, if you have a huge dar file or file set. While loading, DarGUI will display BUSY in the status bar.

To restore a file, apply a right click on it and select Restore selected. Then select a location to store your file to. You can do likewise for directories, or even for all directories or files in the dar archive.

Having talked about how great dar and DarGUI are, here’s a caveat that might make my whole effort look somewhat pointless. Dar relies on its darslices to be present on one physical medium. That is, you cannot retrieve individual files from a dar archive that’s stored on a multitude of media, like a set of DVDs. In other words, if I’d plan to restore my photos.2001 folder from my 16 darslices, I’d first have to copy all my 16 DVDs back onto disk. That’s not what I was aiming for in the first place, so I’ll continue looking for alternative solutions. (If you can point out a working solution I’d be more than grateful.) Still I think dar (and DarGUI) can be used for other scenarios, so I don’t regret having spent time on learning how to handle these programs.

Before I forget, I’d like to say thank you to Malcolm Poole, the author of DarGUI, for promptly replying to some questions that I had about DarGUI, and for pointing out to me that what I was looking for was actually documented. (In case you don’t know, I lead the MySQL Documentation Team, so being politely told that there’s an RTFM option always gives me a special feeling, if you know what I mean.)

So what Suse Linux 11.1 suggested was to create a home partition of 7 GB, and a root partition of 5 GB. I don’t know about you, but to me, this is just ridiculous. After sizing down the Windows partition to 30 GB, I had 120 GB left on my hard drive. So what’s the point of using 12 GB for Linux? I can’t help to think that there’s a Suse bug that forgets about the trailing zero, so that 120 GB left becomes 12 GB left. Anyway, I talked to some friends on IRC who recommended to partition my drive manually, and since I was feeling brave I did.

Why did I want to use LVM over traditional partitioning, however? Suse Yast’s suggestions for traditional partitioning were reasonable, and I could have easily changed the original suggestion to fit my needs. But I wanted LVM. LVM stands for Logical Volume Management. As Wikipedia says, LVM „is a method of allocating space on mass storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions into larger virtual ones that can be resized or moved, possibly while it is being used.“ I don’t (yet) care about all the magic you can do with LVM, I care about the flexibility.

To give an example: With traditional partitioning, and a 150 GB hard drive, you might assign 50 GB to the operating system and applications, and 100 GB to your working data (like documents, images, etc.). Then, at some point, you might find out that you need 70 GB for your OS and applications, but you’re only using 30 GB for your working data, or you’d like to have an extra partition for your web or log files. With traditional partitioning, you’re stuck, because there’s no easy and reliable way to change partition sizes. With LVM, you just assign as much space as you need initially, and then expand that as your needs grow.

You can do all sorts of magic with LVM, like backing up MySQL using file system snapshots, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. This is just about setting up a working LVM environment.

First thing I did in Suse Yast, when it came to preparing the hard drive, was to switch to „LVM partitioning“ (which resulted in the ridiculous suggestion mentioned above), then to „expert mode“ (creating the hard drive setup, instead of changing Suse’s suggestion).

Partitioning the hard drive

I sized down the Windows NTFS partition to 30 GB. Before, I had checked the disk usage under Windows, which reported that about 10 GB out of 150 GB available were currently used. To make sure, I looked at the Windows system settings and ran the defrag tool to analyze the hard disk. As expected on a newly installed Windows system, there was no defragmentation. Better safe than sorry, I ran chkdsk. Then I made sure that Windows had been shut down properly, and booted from the Suse DVD. (It’s a good idea to make sure Windows hasn’t even started booting. I ran into problems when Windows had started booting for like two seconds before killing it with CTRL+ALT+DEL, but that short period was enough to initialize the NTFS file system, which then refused to be sized down by Suse Yast, claiming Windows hadn’t been shut down properly.)

In case you don’t know, Linux calls modern SATA disk drives /dev/sda (older IDE drives are called /dev/hda), where the „a“ stands for the first disk. If you have more than one disk, they’d be called /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc.; your DVD drive will probably be /dev/sdc. Partitions are named by appending a number to the disk drive name, for example /dev/sda1 for the first partition on the first hard drive, or /dev/sdb3 for the third partition on the second hard drive.

Once the intial 150 GB Windows partition had been resized by clicking „change size“ in Yast and pulling the slider to 30 GB, I added a new partition. I made it a primary partition with 100 MB, which Suse converted to 94.13 MB. Suse was smart enough to assume that this would be my boot partition, and thus suggested that it should be mounted on /boot. I had to type in „100 MB“, because otherwise Suse would have assumed that I mean GB. 100 MB is enough for all the stuff under /boot, because it will never host data, but just meta-information.

Creating the LVM volumes

So this leaves all the rest for LVM. LVM is where your data will live, no matter what those data are. It could be the operating system, the web server, the database server, the applications you’re using, the documents you’re working with, your photos and videos, and so forth. What I did was assign the rest of the hard drive to dev/sda3, Linux LVM.

Basically, there are three „areas“ that you need:

1. A swap partition.
2. A root partition.
3. A home partition.

In LVM, all those partitions are „logical volumes“. I created a „master volume“, calling it „system“, and assigning it to use all the space left on the /dev/sda3 drive.

Under that volume, I created three logical volumes, labeled:

1. home: 30 GB (file system: ext3, mounted on /home)
2. root: 20 GB (file system: ext3, mounted on /)
3. swap: 10 GB („file sytem“: swap, mounted on „swap“)

Resizing LVM volumes

When copying over data from another computer, I found that /home should be bigger, 50 GB. You can do this by running Yast > System > Partitioning. If you get an error saying the partition/volume you’re trying to resize is already mounted, exit the window manager you’re running (e.g. KDE), then issue „init 1″ on the command line. If the partition/volume you’re about to resize is still mounted (check with „mount“ on the command line), unmount it (e.g. „umount /dev/system/home“). Then you should be able to change the size by running Yast in text GUI mode (the same Yast interface, just less colorful, and you’ll have to use the keyboard instead of the mouse). When done, issue „init 5″ to return to KDE or whatever window manager you’re using.

By the way: Why do I want a swap file that’s significantly bigger than my physical memory (in case of my new laptop, 3 GB RAM)? It’s because I’ve been hit by Linux not being able to suspend to disk because of insufficient disk space in the swap partition. I’d assume that if you have 3 GB RAM then 3 GB disk space should be sufficient to store everything in RAM to disk when suspending to disk, but I’ve seen operations fail because of that assumption, and because disk space is cheap I prefer to be on the safe side. Maybe the extra disk space is needed because Linux can’t clean up and reclaim the disk space quickly enough when it suspends a box to disk.

Epilogue:  As you can see, I took some screen shots with my camera, wrongfully assuming that you can’t take screen shots from installation screens. (As said above, I’m originally a Windows guy.) But you can. As Lenz pointed out, there’s a way for Yast to take screen shots, although most people don’t know it. Well, at least I will know, next time.

Stefan's Firefox extensions

Now here comes another „my favorite Firefox extensions“ article. Hopefully it’s helpful for someone. (It will be helpful for myself when setting up a new computer soon.)

I’ve tested many more extensions than described here, but have removed a lot because they were either buggy, hampering performance significantly (I’ve still to find an add-on that improves performance), too intrusive with the way I work with my browser, not working together with other extensions smoothly, or simply redundant (other extensions doing very much the same thing).

I’m following some Mozilla feeds, looking for other useful extensions (officially called Add-ons in Firefox), so this article will most likely need an update pretty soon. The (German) RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to are:

• Recommended Add-ons
• Latest Add-ons
• Updated Add-ons

So here’s a short description of each add-on I use, in lexical order (as Firefox displays them):

• Adblock: This was probably the first extension I’ve installed when I started using Firefox years ago. As the name indicates, it sits in the status bar, ready to block advertisements. I’ve disabled all the browser’s context menu entries it adds at installation time, because I’m happy to click on the status bar and choose either „List All Blockable Elements“ or „Overlay Flash“ whenever I want to get rid of ads on pages.
• Beagle Indexer: This extension is installed by SuSE Yast when installing Firefox, so it was done by the root user, and I’m too lazy to start Firefox as root in order to remove it. Maybe some day I’ll develop dementia, and will find that file system indexers such as Beagle or Google Desktop are more than just a bunch of crap that slows down the computer. If that happens I can simply re-enable Beagle Indexer to index all the web pages I’m visiting.
• clicks4: This extension adds a tool bar that enables you to go shopping while donating to charities, NGOs, etc. at the same time. I have it enabled most of the time because I don’t go shopping on the Web so often, and the extra tool bar is something I don’t want to have around all the time.
• ColorfulTabs: I have about a dozen tabs open most of the time. This extension helps me grouping them by color (for example, all documentation-related tabs are in yellow), thus making it quicker to spot the tabs I’m looking for.
• Deutsches Wörterbuch: Just a German dictionary, nothing spectacular. I wish I could have a) one dictionary for all applications I’m using, b) one dictionary for all computers I’m using, c) one dictionary for all languages I’m using (mostly just German and English, but anyway). Instead, I’m using at least 3 different dictionaries (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice), times 2 (for English and for German), times 4 (on the four computers I’m switching between). That’s 24 dictionaries which all need to be updated separately. What a waste of time!
• Dictionary Switcher: Sits in the status bar and lets you switch between the installed dictionaries (English and German in my case). It discovers which language is used automatically, and switches the dictionary used accordingly. It works flawlessly and reliably. (While I’m writing this, it says „auto: en-US“ in the status bar.)
  Update regarding Thunderbird: The same extension can be used for Thunderbird and Sunbird. In Thunderbird, the extension never worked flawlessly for me, though. When switching between German and English mails (like I frequently do), I had to click the status bar entry twice in order for Dictionary Switcher to switch to the correct dictionary (e.g. it displayed „de-DE“ but used the English dictionary instead, so I had to switch to „en-US“ and then back to „de-DE“). This is fixed, though, by setting the configuration value of  „extensions.dictionary-switcher.autodetect“ to „true“. After restart, Dictionary Switcher auto-detects the language, and does this properly at least for German and English. (The auto-detection jumps in when you press the Return key.)
• Dictionary Search: Adds 4 configurable menu entries to the browser’s context menu. The ones I use are for looking up marked words on 1) dict.cc, 2) dict.leo.org, 3) German Wikipedia, 4) English Wikipedia. I’ve used this extension for years, but I’ll probably get rid of it soon because the Research Word add-on does pretty much the same thing, and it takes only one menu entry to do this. (I truly hate context menus that are huge.)
  
• DownThemAll!: I use this one very rarely, for example for downloading a bunch of PDF files from a web page. I wouldn’t want to miss it for this purpose, though. This extension is very easy to use and provides all the settings I’m looking for to download exactly what I want.
• Easy Youtube Video Downloader: I’m using this one rarely, too. It allows you to download YouTube videos not just in Flash format but also in MP4 (and other formats, but I haven’t tried any other than MP4). It’s easy to use and works as advertised.
• FoxClocks: I couldn’t live without this one, and have it installed in all Firefox and Thunderbird instances I’m using. I’ve configured it to take as little real estate as possible, just displaying UTC time in the status bar. („Do, 10:24″ is German for „Thursday, 10:24 UTC“.) Hovering the mouse over the status bar entry pops up the other time zones I’ve configured, and the flags let me quickly identify the time zone I’m looking for. Another feature I really like about FoxClocks is that you’re able to export its settings, because setting it up to look and work just the way you want it to can take some time. So whenever I make changes, I export the settings to a file in an SVN repository, and import from that file on another computer (or in another application, Thunderbird or Sunbird).
• Google Gears: I’ve installed this one proactively because you need it to work in off-line mode with Google web applications. But I’m not using Google-anything except the Google search engine, because I still think that, 5 years after it was released, that the story of EPIC is a very real future threat.
• Interclue: This is one of the most useful extensions when viewing web sites with many links, such as newspapers. Interclue displays a little icon (usually a favicon) when hovering over a link. When moving the mouse onto that icon, it pops up an area that displays the link target. When clicking outside that area the window disappears. That saves me from opening many tabs or windows, or from going back and forth when reading news. Interclue can be disabled for particular domains.
• Menu Editor: My most recently installed extension. As said above, I truly despise long context menus. Menu editor comes to the rescue here. It allows to either disable (make invisible) or completely remove menu items from any Firefox menus, including the context menu.
• Neo Diggler: It’s probably overkill to have this extension installed. It does a few things I don’t need, plus one thing that I like, mostly because it looks so KDE-ish: It places a tiny icon next to the address bar that clears the bar, or gives a context menu with a few basic things like displaying a domain-specific history and a few search options.
• NoScript: I’d probably use lynx to browse the ‘net if this extension wouldn’t exist. It disallows all kinds of „active“ contents by default: Flash files, iFrames, etc. With just a click on the status bar icon, you can allow particular sites (configurable for whole domains or just subdomains) to use active contents, though. NoScript has built-in anti-phishing and anti-XSS abilities, and particularly if you don’t know what these things mean you should better install NoScript right away.
• Open With Konqueror: This extension is useful only in KDE, and from the name it’s pretty clear what it does. On a few web sites, video files aren’t displayed properly in Firefox, so I click on the little Konqueror icon to close the tab in Firefox and open a Konqueror window instead.
• Read it Later: A highly useful extension to prevent you from keeping open too many tabs. This extension adds a little „check“ icon to the address bar which is used to add or remove pages from the Read-it-Later list. I use the list in condensed format and as a rollable list, which saves me from clicking „next“ when the list gets long. I also like the filter which works like the bookmarks filter. You can store the Read-it-Later list on-line, but I’ve decided not to do so for confidentiality reasons (I have company pages on that list, t00) and also because it might conflict with the online synchronization that Xmark does.
• ReminderFox: Another one of the add-ons I’ve been using for ages. ReminderFox is a calendar and a to-do list; I just use the to-do list feature. ReminderFox runs in every instance of Firefox and Thunderbird I’m using, on every computer I’m using, so my to-do list is always just one click away. This, of course, means that the to-do list needs to be synchronized across machines. You can either do that by using a free ReminderFox web space, or by using a WebDAV server of your own (like I do). The to-do list is still local, which is advantegeous for example when you’re airborne.  The list itself is very easy and quick to handle.
• Research Word: Adds one (1) context menu entry for looking up marked words in a variety of web services, such as Dictionary.com or Wikipedia. It’s also customizable which I consider a Good Thing.
• Sun Cult: Adds an icon where you want it (e.g. in the status bar) that displays sunrise and sundown times, moon phases, and more, when hovering the mouse over its icon.
• Tab Mix Plus: I’ve probably installed this extension on the first day of using Firefox. It adds what I’d consider the Firefox killing feature of the early millenium – tabs. I also use the TMP session manager which is much better than the one built into Firefox.
• TinyUrl Creator: This extension probably makes me look old. I’ve been using it for so long that I’m using it over all the other URL-shortening services that have popped up since. I’m even using it for Twitter.
• United States English Dictionary: The other dictionary I’m using.
• Web Developer: There’s no way to even shortly describe what this extension does. It does all kinds of good things for web developers, including sizing the browser window to 800 x 600 or online editing of CSS files. I use it rarely these days, but I wouldn’t want to miss it.
• Xmarks: Formerly called Foxmarks, Xmarks synchronizes bookmarks and passwords stored in the browser so that they become available in all my Firefox instances. By default, Xmarks stores files in a free web space, but I prefer to use my own WebDAV server for this.
• Yoono: Can you avoid Web 2.0 altogether? I thought I could but found that was an illusion when you’re working in IT space. I use Yoono for displaying Facebook and Twitter feeds, and NoScript takes care of keeping most of the ads that Yoono displays in the sidebar away from me. I like Yoono’s little button in the upper left corner that makes it fast to expand or collapse the extra sidebar it adds to the browser window. When collapsed, it takes just like 30 pixels which is tolerable for me.

Update

I got good comments from Giuseppe, Serg, and Lenz on extensions I’ve been missing. Needless to say, I’ve installed the extensions they’ve recommended, except for those that I had already installed before but decided not to keep them. I’ll comment on all of these add-ons in any case.

• [INSTALLED] CoLT: Useful extension if you’re often copying links for re-use, e.g. for writing forum posts. I find it particularly useful for creating Wikimedia-compliant links such as [http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?confKey=mysqluniversity to this address] (I „copied“ the stuff in square brackets by copying a link, using CoLT’s „copy as Wikipedia“ option).
• Cooliris: This extension doesn’t seem to work on 64-bit Linux. After installation and browser re-start, Cooliris complained that Flash wasn’t installed (but it is, version 10.0 r22). Trying to use Cooliris, anyway, for displaying images in breathtaking new ways resulted in a browser standstill and lots of CPU used, until finally I had to kill Firefox. If I get better results on 32-bit Linux I’ll update this note. In any case, Cooliris is quite the opposite of lightweight: The download size of the version I installed was 10.8 MB!
• [INSTALLED] Linkification: Sometimes text that could be a link is just displayed like this: http://example.com, which means you cannot click it, but rather have to copy and paste it to the address bar. If you have Linkification installed, though, you’ll see this text as a clickable link. You can specify which protocols should be auto-linked, and which domains should be excluded from auto-linking (google.com is excluded by default). Also, I’ve configured Linkification to display „artificial“ links in a specific color to make them distinct from „regular“ links.
• Tree Style Tab: I’ve decided not to try this one, because I already have too much „vertical“ stuff in my browser. Tree Style Tabs adds a sidebar where you can group tabs. Grouping tabs can be useful if you normally have a lot of open tabs, but as I said above, I try not to have more than a dozen tabs open at a time, and I „group“ them by using Colorful Tabs, and Read it Later helps me reduce the number of tabs I need to keep open.
• User Agent Switcher: There are a few web sites that don’t like Firefox for some reason (and either display fancy warnings or errors, or display contents in a messed-up manner). It may be nice to be able to trick those web sites into thinking I’m using a different browser, but often enough I’ve found that this doesn’t really work when I’m browsing sites with Opera (which has this feature built in). So what I do is use a variety of browsers to make those web sites do what I want. On my Linux boxes I have Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Microsoft Internet Explorer (through Wine) installed, and as a last resort, I can always fire up a Windows virtual machine (through VirtualBox) that has a „real“ Internet Explorer.
• Greasemonkey is certainly helpful if you want to run one of the hundreds of scripts you can find for Firefox, or write a script yourself that does some particular job. I had installed it before, but couldn’t find a use case that couldn’t be satisfied by installing some other extension.
• Inspect This: Admittedly, I haven’t even looked at this extension, because it seems to do the same things I can accomplish by using a combination of NoScript and Adblock.
• [INSTALLED] It’s All Text: This is a useful extension if you’re often editing textarea elements (like I do). Some web applications (like WordPress) provide a neat editing environment that’s so good that I wouldn’t consider trading it for an external editor, but others don’t (including many installations of Wikimedia). Being able to use a plain-text editor of my choice (like Kate) is a great advantage in those cases. It’s All Text places a tiny button at the lower right corner of any textarea element (this is configurable, so you can have that button in other corners). The biggest disadvantage is that you can’t pass an argument for the editor to be launched. I use Kate for most plain-text edits, and I prefer to run only one instance of Kate, so normally I start Kate with „kate %U <filename>“ when editing new files. With It’s All Text, I can’t pass the „%U“ argument, so the extension opens a new Kate window for each textarea I’m editing.
• Mozilla Archive Format: yet to be explored
• Session Manager: yet to be explored
• Source Tools: yet to be explored
• Vimperator: Andrew suggested to install Vimperator, an extension which will make Firefox look and behave much like the Vim editor. I’m afraid I’m missing the point of making a browser behave like a text editor – if I really preferred using a text editor as a browser I’d probably use Emacs, or maybe lynx (which can be regarded a text manipulation tool, too). That said, I do like vi and Vim, but that affection is sort of one-sided. I guess I’m not modal enough for Vim.
• [INSTALLED] Extension List Dumper: This is a great extension, actually one I should have had installed prior to writing this article! It adds a button labeled „List“ to the Add-ons window, which pops up a window with a list of all (or all activated) extensions. The best thing is that you can configure the output on-demand, that is, configuring the list contents instantly updates the list displayed. See below for the list created by that extension (if you have the Linkification extension installed, the links below will be clickable).

Anwendung: Firefox 3.0.11 (2009060200)
Betriebssystem: Linux (x86_64-gcc3)
- Adblock
http://adblock.mozdev.org
- ColorfulTabs
http://binaryturf.com/
- CoLT
http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt/
- Deutsches Wörterbuch
- Dictionary Switcher
http://design-noir.de/mozilla/dictionary-switcher/
- DictionarySearch
http://dictionarysearch.mozdev.org/
- Extension List Dumper
http://sogame.awardspace.com/
- FoxClocks
http://www.stemhaus.com/firefox/foxclocks/
- Interclue
http://interclue.com/
- It’s All Text!
http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4125
- Linkification
http://yellow5.us/firefox/linkification/
- Menu Editor
http://menueditor.mozdev.org/
- Neo Diggler
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3763/
- NoScript
http://noscript.net
- Open With Konqueror
http://www.tolaris.com/firefox/
- Read it Later
http://readitlaterlist.com
- ReminderFox
http://reminderfox.mozdev.org
- Research Word
http://scott001.googlepages.com/researchword.html
- Sun Cult
http://suncult.sourceforge.net
- Tab Mix Plus
http://tmp.garyr.net
- TinyUrl Creator
http://mozmonkey.com/
- Web Developer
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
- Xmarks
http://www.xmarks.com/
- Yoono
http://www.yoono.com

Bildschirmfoto: Climber im Spiel Pingus

Lennart (7) und Finn (5) finden das Linux-Spiel Pingus ganz toll. Sie kennen schon alle Level von Tutorial Island, und damit alle Eigenschaften, die man Pingus zuweisen kann. Manchmal spielen sie Pingus nach. Dann steuert zum Beispiel Finn Lennart und macht ihn zum Digger, Miner, Jumper und so weiter. Eine ihre Lieblingseigenschaften ist der Climber (Kletterer), der hier in Aktion zu sehen ist. Jumper kann man ja noch ganz gut nachmachen, Climber aber klettern senkrecht Wände hoch, und das kann man nun wirklich nicht in der Realität nachahmen.

Oder vielleicht doch?

Lennart, der Climber

Als ich heute nach Hause kam, zeigte mir Lennart, wie ein echter Climber nach oben kommt. Ich konnte es zuerst gar nicht glauben und habe gleich ein Beweisfoto gemacht. Nix da Photoshop – das Bild kommt direkt aus der Kamera!

Finn, der Climber

Finn wollte natürlich auch in diesem Artikel erscheinen und bestand darauf, dass ich von seinen Kletterkünsten ebenfalls ein Bild mache.

Und da gibt es Leute, die behaupten, dass Computerspiele Kinder in punkto Bewegung verkümmern lassen …