This is the web presence of Valentin Boettcher a.k.a. Hiro98.

Valentin:

• is a PhD student @ McGill University under the supervision of the wonderful Bill Coish.
• codes stuff.
• is a science-fiction junky and space enthusiast.
• loves jamming with the saxophone.
• is hooked on LISP and Clojure.
• appreciates C++.
• uses python a fair bit.
• likes his Kyria.

You can check out my Github, Gitlab and KDE Invent profiles for most of my projects as I publish the source to most things I produce.

I’ve got a CV.

Read more...

Da der Neuseeland Blog damals so gut lief, werde ich nun dasselbe mit Montreal machen. Vielleicht wird das Ganze weniger spektakulär als der meine Reiseerfahrungen, da ich ja “nur” einen PhD in Kanada mache, aber das wage ich zu bezweifeln. Nach langer Agonie, habe ich mich jetzt für Canada entschieden, obwohl Innsbruck auch eine sehr gute und solide Option ist. Ich bin sogar so weit gegangen, mich dort schon auf WGs und Wohnungen zu bewerben, in der Hoffnung, die Situation möge sich wie damals mit Dresden lösen. Read more...

I got my ThinkPad used for a bargain price but with locked bios/uefi-setup. Annoyingly, it defaults to legacy boot and there is no way to change that. My previous workaround was rather involved and is documented in the Arch wiki. Today however, I bricked my system at work and had to restore it in a hurry. It turns out that you can nuke the MBR of the live stick to remove the legacy boot. Read more...

My Kawai KSP-30 digital piano has been on its last leg for some time now. To get it to work at all, I had to unplug the amplification circuit whose interface on the main PCB was burnt out. Of course is wasn’t of much use by itself after that bit of crude surgery but worked fine as a midi keyboard. Figure 1: The main PCB. There must have been some creeping currents because the piano got more and more unreliable requiring hectic powercycling to boot and finally not booting at all. Read more...

First of all: A big thanks to my mentor Jasem Mutlaq and the KStars Team. Jasem, you were extremely helpful whilst leaving me a lot of freedom. With patience you have endured my mood swings and occasional panics :P. It has always been a pleasure working with you and I am certain that this will continue to be the case. Furthermore, the rest of the KStars Team, especially Akarsh Simha, Wolfgang Reissenberger and Robert Lancaster who have found bugs, helped me to debug them and suggested improvements1. Read more...

Well, we all know that the work on open source projects is never truly finished, but all of the core goals have been achieved and the time is up :). In this post I’ll briefly summarize my GSOC work and then talk about one last small but user-facing feature that I’ve implemented. I’ve successfully implemented a new DSO backend and smoothed out most of the bugs. The python framework does work satisfactory and all existing catalogs have been ported. Read more...

TL;DR DSO catalogs in KStars are now generated reproducibly in the CI. A list of available catalogs and documentation can be found here. As promised last time I’ll now go a little into the Catalogs Repository. Usually DSO catalogs are pretty static and rarely change due to the nature of their contents. But although galaxies do not tend to jump around in the sky, catalogs still get updates to correct typos or update coordinates with more precise measurement. Read more...

TL;DR Die Neuseeland-Blogposts sind nun wieder da und korrekt datiert. Zwar lagen mir die Neuseeland-Blog posts als markdown quelle vor, jedoch hatte ich den Erstellungszeitpunk unvorteilhafter Weise aus den Dateisystem-Metadaten1 ausgelesen. Nach der Neuinstallation meines servers vor ein paar Jahren waren diese Metadaten vollends verloren. Meine erste Idee war zu versuchen die Zeitpunkte anhand der Email Newsletter zu rekonstruieren. Auf diesem Wege versprach ich mir jedoch keinen baldigen Erfolg da mein eigenes Email Archiv nicht soweit zurueckreicht. Read more...

Of course the task I described in the last post looks and is quite monumental. That is why I laid some of the groundwork for my GSOC beforehand (in the actual German semester breaks). This work continued in the community bonding and first coding period and will therefore be described here. But first I want to thank my mentor Jasem Mutlaq for his support, his patience with me and his nerves of steel. Read more...

Hi folks, talking to you over the interwebs is Valentin Boettcher who is overhauling the Deep Sky Object (DSO) system in the KStars Desktop Planetarium for the Google Summer of Code anno domini 2021. This is the first post in a series and rather late in the coming, so let’s get right to it. I’m currently studying for a master’s degree in physics at the TU-Dresden in, you’ve guessed it correctly, the beautiful city of Dresden (Germany). Read more...

Note to self: If you want to make sure some nice GNU/Linux installer does not touch certain drives just run echo 1 > /sys/block/sdX/device/delete in a root shell and the drive will vanish from the system. Shamelessly stolen from: https://askubuntu.com/questions/554398/how-do-i-permanently-disable-hard-drives