Category Archives: Life and stuff …

IEEE Chat Session

Christian M. Schmid,
,

We had the very first IEEE Region 8 SAC online chat session this year. About 40-50 participants from all over Region 8 (Africa, Europe, Middle East, Russia) dialed in. We (Piotr, Femia, Maciej, Rui Costa) tried to give them an update on

I guess there are a lot of exciting things coming up in 2014. Some people started sharing screenshots from the online session on facebook. I can’t resist to share with you the screenshot of this pink desktop by Christine Avdikou.

1522935_10203021811289754_507451353_o

Pro Scientia

Christian M. Schmid,
,

I am part of a network and scholarship program called “Pro Scientia”.

One of the aspects of “Pro Scienta” is that the scholarship students meet once or twice a month. During those meetings one of the students presents his research, art or any other topic that has some scientific, religious, cultural, historical, social and whatnot relevance, which is then open for discussion.

All of the scholarship students are grad students and mostly PhDs. Today we had a presentation from Benjamin, a PhD student in the field of education and psychology, about “Development and learning of leadership skills with a special focus on principals”. Well the actual title was a little shorter, but that’s just my interpretation.

pro_scientia

The discussions are often intense, they are totally worth it. I’ve never found myself having discussions in such an interdisciplinary setup before joining Pro Scientia. In the photo you’ve got a lawyer, an engineer, a priest, an architect, a social scientist, an artist.

So if you are a grad student or artist who happens to be in Austria, are interested in interdisciplinary discussions and are good at what you do, you might want to consider applying for a Pro Scientia Scholarship: http://www.proscientia.at/.

A Screenshot

Christian M. Schmid,
,

Designing and building stuff that exploits physics to serve a specific function, that’s what I think it comes down when you ask me about what engineering is.

Today I took this screenshot that is almost like a stereotype for what we electrical engineers do. Actually this PCB (short for printed circuit board) was not even designed by me. It was designed by a gifted colleague who did it according to my specifications.

platine

It’s the power supply for my newest 77-GHz radar front-end, which would be the really interesting part. Sadly I can’t show you the radar, because if I would I’d not be able to publish it in any scientific journal or conference. Something like this http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6507334 or http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6697594. And publications is what the scientific engineering community also lives for.

Walks and Teleconference

Christian M. Schmid,
,

Today was an idle day. Some playing portal, some cleaning, relaxing and going for walks. It’s way to warm around here, so it feel a little like walking in April.

plesch 2014

Later that night we had a teleconference for the next IEEE Region 8 Student and Young Professional Congress in Krakow, Poland – the event formally known as IEEE Region 8 Student Branch Congress (SBC). The meeting was dedicated to online promotion of the event.

I think in the end it was a good meeting, although I do feel that we are making progress too slowly. But we have still enough time left, so I’ll promise you it will be the best SYP congress ever!

There was a time when

Christian M. Schmid,
,

… I was a musician. The time when I practice the piano for hours every day and the time I played at least a gig every week. Today I am an engineer with a profound understanding of music but with a lack is practice. Maybe that’s a good thing. Because there’s no pressure, no need to make a living out of music.

Today I had one of those once-or-twice-a-month gigs that I still do with a band called Bojazzl at a small bar, about an hour from Linz. Their piano player had broken his clavicle and they had asked me to jump in, which I really enjoyed. Although I would have needed more rehearsals to really make the most out of it.

canape

IEEE JKU Linz Stammtisch

Christian M. Schmid,
, ,

While my job as IEEE Region 8 Student Representative involves working two and sometimes three levels higher up in the IEEE geographic hierarchy, I always enjoy staying in touch with the local student branch (SB) at JKU. After all that’s the entity where my IEEE track started.

Being past past past chair is one thing, but what is really rewarding and makes me happy is to see that the SB is even more active than in my days and that they prosper like never before. Apart from many other activities they still have their monthly series of Stammtische, which are social meetings that try to bring students and industry closer together.

That is exactly where I spent today’s evening: The IEEE Stammtisch featuring Commend.

This is how it works: The SB approaches companies that might be interested in giving a presentation. A company representative joins one of those meetings in a local bar and pays for drinks, food and some extra cash for the SB. In return the SB provides the infrastructure (beamer, …) and the students.

What’s in it for the company? To get in touch with potential future employees or customers. What’s in it for the students? To get in touch with potential future employers and to learn about what’s happening outside the academic world.

What’s in it for me apart from that? Grabbing a beer with friends, getting to know the future leaders of the SB and learning about what matters to the current generation of engineering students.

image

Another Round of “Try something new for 30 days”

Christian M. Schmid,
,

When looking at the last couple of my blog posts, you could think that I spend most of my time around computers. I guess that’s mostly because I rarely blog about other things. That’s about to change for the next 30 days.

A couple of years ago a came across this TED talk entitled “Try something new for 30 days”.

I’ll do it again and this time the challenge is to write a blog post every day, for 30 days. Many of the posts are going to be boring and are not going to be relevant to anyone, so I am not going to push them through facebook, twitter or anything else, but they will be here.

Logitech K810 + Ubuntu

Christian M. Schmid,

The Logitech K810 is a nice keyboard, but it does not work with Ubuntu out of the box. Still contrary to what some websites might lead you to believe, it does work. The following instructions worked for me on Ubuntu 13.10 & 14.04.

  1. Start a terminal (terminal 1)
  2. Install the tools needed for this walk-through 
    sudo apt-get install bluez-hcidump bluez-utils blueman
  3. Enable Bluetooth on your Ubuntu machine (you might have a hardware button, don’t forget about that)
  4. Start the bluetooth manager (blueman) from your start menu, dash, or whatever other way of starting programs your desktop has
  5. Start another terminal (terminal 2) – yep you’ll need two for this exercise
  6. Get the K810 into pairing mode by pressing the button on the back of the keyboard and then one of the device buttons on the front (F1-F3). You should see the bluetooth light flashing now.
  7. In terminal 1 run 
    hcitool scan

    if the K810 is found this should give you something like

    Scanning ...
       xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx   Logitech K810
  8. Copy the address of your K810 (that’s the xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx)
  9. In terminal 2 run 
    sudo hcidump -at | grep pass
  10. In terminal 1 run 
    sudo bluez-simple-agent hci0 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
  11. In terminal 2 you should now see the passkey which is a number
  12. Type that code on your K810 followed by enter
  13. The bluetooth manager should now show the K810.
  14. In blueman select the K810 and mark it as “trusted”
  15. Now click on Setup and follow the dialog box.
  16. Tada, you’re done, you can now close all terminals as well as blueman.

The Function Keys

By default, the function keys (the ones above the numbers row) are assigned to special functions like media control, which I find annoying. – Every time you want to do something normal like Alt-F4 or search via F3 you need the Fn key. Logitech’s windows software on the other hand lets you invert the Fn key. Actually all the Windows software does is to send a certain string of commands to the keyboard, which some clever Linux Guru has reverse engineered and coded into a nice little program, that can be found at  http://www.trial-n-error.de/posts/2012/12/31/logitech-k810-keyboard-configurator/. I’ll again add a step-by-step guide:

  1. Optional: Go to http://www.trial-n-error.de/posts/2012/12/31/logitech-k810-keyboard-configurator/ and read about how he did it ;)
  2. Install a compiler 
    sudo apt-get install build-essential
  3. Download and extract Mario’s program 
    wget https://blog.chschmid.com/media/k810_conf-v0.1.tar.bz2
tar -jxf k810_conf-v0.1.tar.bz2
  4. Compile it 
    ./build.sh
  5. Run it 
    sudo ./k810_conf -d /dev/hidraw<x> -f on

    You will have to replace <x> by the hid number that was assigned to your keyboard. In my case it is hidraw2. Of course there are more clever ways, but just work through the numbers brute force starting with hidraw0. – Mario’s program is clever enough to detect if it’s not the K810.