I'm going to Lucerne for this weekend. I'll give a short presentation at a workshop on Sunday (presenting some results of measurements in an European project) but tomorrow I'll hike to the Pilatus...

The presentation is almost finished; just some furbishing to do (on the train or tomorrow evening). I'll be back on Tuesday morning...

And Wednesday is the day to balloon!

Yesterday evening there was quite a big thunderstorm here. Not so much rain and wind but many thunderbolts. Once again I tried to catch some and this time I succeeded for 5. I did take about 200 images, though. I just set the cam to contiguous mode and locked the remote control button. The images were exposed for 2 to 4 seconds and the contrast was adjusted to enhance the thunderbolts.

Finally it's there: Google Earth for Linux! and it's even a native version (not wine solution like Picasa) and works as nicely as the Windows version… It seems to use QT and isn't perfect (dialogs look quite ugly on Linux without font anti-aliasing; it looks much much better on Windows!), but it's still beta and using it is really fluid.

I even installed it on the Q1. There it's complaining that the resolution is too low (it wants at least 1024 × 786) but in full screen mode it's very usable! (Software vendors should think more of devices like the Q1!)

Today I've been on photo tour with Jana aka [+]maggie to Meißen (a small town nearby). And as I have an UMPC now I took it with me. I esp. wanted to see if it is of use on such a hall trip. Well it is and it is not...

First as for most laptops the display is barely readable in sunlight. It's ok if you are inside (in the train e.g.) but it's really bad if you're sitting outside.

Second the internal CF slot is really slow, really slow!I tried to copy approx. 700 MB and stopped it because if would have taken about 10 minutes! At home I used an USB to CF adapter and this took about 2 to 3 minutes. Which is good. Looking in the device manager I saw that the PCMCIA to IDE just uses PIO mode. Maybe this is the reason for this bad performance. So remember to rather take an USB adapter with you if you want to have a quick look at your picture, else this look wouldn't be so quick...

Maybe someone knows how to enhance the performance of the CF slot?

Else I think this device is quite nice to carry around. 800 g of weight is ok (one and a half to two zoom lenses or about the body of the 20D) and by size it easily fits into a backpack additionally. I'm just not sure how much stress is good for the display....

I've already written, that I like idea of the Origami-Project.

Well today I did buy one (Samsung's Q1). I'm just sitting/lying on my sofa writing this entry. First impressions are very good. It's very sleek and even the textrecognition is working much better than I'd expect. As it seems to use some dictionary, you don't write in a too special style. Just HTML tags are a pain...

For some more impressions you'll have to wait a bit, just one thing: booting Suse 10.1 from an external Dun drive (USB) did work but a unfortunately X couldn't be started :-( It looks like the framebuffer has a problem...