Technology


The Solitude racetrack

The most famous racetrack in Germany is of course the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Not everybody knows that, until 1965, Germany had a second racetrack embedded into nature. In a situation similar to Spa – Francorchamps, it was a relatively long (11.4 km) and fast racetrack entirely on public roads. It was […]


Visiting Spa – Francorchamps

I recently had the chance to visit the famous Spa – Francorchamps racetrack. It is one of the oldest and certainly the most interesting track remaining in the Formula 1 calendar, and has a reputation that is surpassed only by the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Being situated in a depression, and not […]


The BMW family tree

To me, modern BMW car history begins with the introduction of the Neue Klasse in 1962. This modern sedan, with its newly developed front-mounted engine (the famous M10) and rear-wheel drive, was a turning point for the then-struggling car and motorcycle manufacturer. Most modern BMW cars can trace their lineage […]


Dension Gateway installation

My BMW 318ti compact has the original BMW Navigation Business radio/tape player. For looks and value, I wanted to retain this system instead of getting a new radio, but I also wanted the possibility to listen to podcasts from my phone (I always listen to X-Wing podcasts when traveling alone), […]


My BMW 318ti compact

More about my car history and how I found this car, and why i bought it can be found here. By BMW 318ti compact (E46 model) was built in early 2002. It is equipped with the 2.0L N42B20 Valvetronic engine which develops 143 HP and 200 Nm of torque, and […]


My car history

VW Golf II I bought my first car at the end of my military service, in April 1999. It was a dark blue two-door 1990 Golf Madison (VW had many special models at the time to push the aging Golf II) with the 70 HP 1.6L electronic carburetor engine, that […]


Peavey Valveking Royal 8 mods 2

It’s been a long time since I wrote about guitars on this site. After a hiatus of almost four years, I started taking lessons again half a year ago and play almost every day. This also meant dusting off my amp, a Peavy Valveking Royal 8, a 5W all-tube amp […]


Stoomtreindagen 2016

Een paar foto’s van de Stoomtreindagen 2016 bij de Stoomstichting Nederland. Onderdeel van het bezoek was een rit naar Gouda en terug achter 01 1075, Nederlands snelste stoomlocomotief. Dit is een van oorsprong Duitse 01.10 (de driecilinder versie van de bekende Baureihe 01 sneltreinlocomotief) met een maximum snelheid van 140 […]


CEC on the Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi is hooked up to my AV Receiver using the HDMI port. My AV Receiver sits behind a cabinet door, so it cannot be controlled directly using the remote unless I open the door. This is not an issue when watching TV, as TV and AVR communicate using […]


Playlists in Pi Musicbox

Pi Musicbox has no built-in functionality for creating playlists for local music files that are located on the SD card or a USB drive. Playlists (m3u files) need to be located (by default at least, this can be changed in settings.ini) in /var/lib/mopidy/playlists. Filenames must be absolute of course. I […]


Pi Musicbox – First steps

After downloading Pi Musicbox from the website, follow one of the tutorials for writing the image to an SD card. If you want to change settings before first booting up, you can do so under Windows by editing settings.ini in the config folder. If you plan on running headless (i.e. […]


Betaalbaar Audio/Video systeem deel 3 – Streaming

CDs en andere fysieke media zijn niet meer de belangrijkste bron van muziek. Alles draait tegenwoordig, ook in de Hi-Fi wereld, om streaming: Internetradio, Spotify, het afspelen van muziek van netwerkschijven. Ook de traditionele Hi-Fi merken hebben dit begrepen en spelen in op deze trend door streaming-spelers of door deze […]