A few months ago Code for Germany launched. An OK Lab (Open Knowledge Lab) was founded in Dresden soon after, although similar projects (offenesdresden.de) were already in place. Everything merged and Dresden has had quite an active community interested in bringing Open Data to the next level. It’s awesome. My first real contribution to this comes in form of an iPhone app using a PHP scraper backend scraping the data at dresden.de/freie-parplaetze. An Android application for this purpose came to life fairly quickly (find it here), so a clone for iOS just had to follow! ... Read more

I spent most of today moving around my e-mail infrastructure. The way I had it configured would probably bring tears to most people’s eyes, so I’ll spare you the gruesome details. Let’s just say that nothing is forwarding to Google Mail any longer and I’ll be using a different address as my main contact address from here on out. Namely me@kilian.io. The domain kilian.io has been pointing to my server at Uberspace for a little while now, but it hasn’t been much more than a little gimmick, just like kilian.sexy ;) I’ve been starting to enjoy it a lot more than koeltzs.ch though, as it carries more personality, more me than just my last name. And since kilian@kilian.io just looks ridiculous I’m choosing to go with the very informal me@kilian.io instead. ... Read more

There’s been a bug with current versions of Jetbrains products (not just Pycharm, but also IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, AppCode and surely the others as well) on OS X 10.10 Yosemite where the editor screen flickers uncontrollably when you scroll the view. It’s been making my workflow increasingly difficult and was generally unpleasing, but there is a way around this! Kudos goes to Justus for pointing this one out. All you have to do is set your favorite Jetbrains IDE to use the JVM version 1.8 instead of the default 1.6. This is easily done on OS X by editing the Info.plist found at /Applications/<PyCharm.app or something else>/Contents/Info.plist like this. ... Read more

It’s been a while since I’ve touched Blender. A lot has changed, everything is awesome. There’s not all too much to say, but I’m a real sucker for pretty clay renders, so here’s a simple little robot. Note that this render is in 2400p, the native resolution of the new MacBook Pro. I didn’t want said device to go up in flames though, so a shoutout goes to render.st (and especially their signup bonus). ... Read more

I have to admit to having been slightly jealous of a friend running Arch Linux on his laptop when he went ahead and installed xmind right through his package manager (or actually yaourt, but I won’t make the distinction here). Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with installing applications on OS X. It’s dead simple. You download the disk image, double-click it to mount and drag the .app onto your linked Applications directory. But it’s so graphical… Any self-respecting appleleptic nowadays already has the fantastic Homebrew package manager installed on their system anyways, which is awesome stuff, without question. And there is one package I have to admit to not having heard of before a few days ago, even though it has a rather big following which helps us out here. ... Read more

November 29th, 2012: Left a math lecture on a rainy day and wanted to get home as quick as possible. But it looked like I would be carrying my bike home seeing how some douche had stolen my front wheel on campus. Seeing how I moved to Dresden with quick release skewers (if I can trust dict.leo.org) however, this happening was just a matter of time. Instead of directly buying a new wheel (and new brakes, thank you, asshole! Oh, and a Pitlock system) I went with a completely new (as in old) and cheap bicycle. Fast forward to January and a few stitches on my face, and I wanted to go back to riding my bike. Total cost: ~200 € ... Read more

Optimizing every single aspect of my digital live is something I’ve been enjoying for years. It’s the little things, being able to define a new shortcut for a task that I do all day, streamlining a complex process that has had me looking up howtos everytime I had to do it, but the same has never really held true for my life away from the keyboard. I’m definitely not what you would call messy, but the organization of my desk, room or now my apartment has never been one of my strengths. I now aim to change all of that. And there’s several steps I’m taking to get there. ... Read more

(Making the Arrested Development reference in the title there was damn tempting, but nope, didn’t go for it.) I’m not a huge blogger, I know that. I’ve been installing and running away from I guess around 10 to 20 blogs in the last few years (I can at least find one of the remnants to still be online, probably due to the fact that this is the only instance I didn’t host myself) and have had a lot more fun playing around with the software itself than writing, although I always aim to change that. I guess I could write a few sentences about why I think this time might be different, but I’ve written those over and over again as well. But what I do know is that at least the software is different this time. It’s not just another Wordpress installation, it’s Ghost. ... Read more

Just got back from an awesome gig from a small local band a friend of mine plays in. They’re called the Last Dangerous Racoons and this title of theirs is definitely worth a listen! Also check out their site and bandcamp if you’re interested.

In great contrast to Alfred being one of those apps I love more than anything on OS X, the caps lock key is something utterly useless nowadays (or ever for that matter). And if you do happen to find yourself in an argument on the internet, even Homer Simpson agrees that you put a lot more weight into your statement if you take your time to press the shift key. The already mentioned Alfred however is so immensely useful, that even two keys for its hotkey (the default alt + space) is too much. So why not combine the two and have a dedicated launch everything and search for stuff anywhere key on your keyboard? ... Read more