Month: October 2012

Wine tasting and tour in Baden-Baden

October 31, 2012 — No Comments ↓

We arrived on the premises of the Baden-Badener Winzergenossenschaft on a sunny early autumn day, just in time for the weekly tour on Fridays. The vineyards start right next to the parking lot, at this time of the year they were full of ripe grapes. The tour covers all processing steps and required equipment to make wine. When the grapes are delivered, they are first cleaned a bit and then weighed. Apparently, there can be huge line of trucks packed with delicious grapes waiting in season. For this reason, there are 14 presses that can be operated in parallel. When the juice has been…

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Spicy applesauce

October 31, 2012 — No Comments ↓

On their last visit, my parents brought a lot of ripe apples fresh from their garden. Applesauce seemed like a good idea to use a lot of them right away. Since the black jalapenos on our balcony were also doing well, it was time to put it all together. Next to the apples and jalapenos, we added the juice of one lemon and vanilla extract made with vodka. We peeled the apples, boiled them together with a little water, the lemon juice, and diced jalapeno. As soon as they got softer, we mixed it a bit and let it cool down.…

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Colorful mass: LED bar for bikes

October 12, 2012 — 1 Comment ↓

While cleaning up my office, i rediscovered our color LED bar that paints colorful images while you ride your bike. The Persistence of Vision (PoV) device is mounted into a bike wheel – it consists of 34 RGB-LEDs and an MSB-A2 wireless sensor node. The sensor node measures the bike speed and adjusts the LED switch time, so that the whole image is displayed in exactly one full rotation of the wheel. This way, the image appears to be in a fixed location for the observer (provided you ride fast enough). We built it initially for the long night of science,…

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From apples to juice (and wine)

October 2, 2012 — No Comments ↓

The apple season was pretty good this year, so we were looking forward to our appointment at the Dorfgemeinschaftshaus Reiffenhausen to have our apples transformed into delicious apple juice. The DGH has a still functional Mosterei which allows you to bring your own apples (and bottles) and leave with your own juice. But before that, we first had to get the apples off the trees. It took half a day of shaking the apple trees and gathering the fruits from the ground. The results were about 200kg of apples including Boskoop, Alkmene, and Jakob Lebel. When we finally arrived at…

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A walk in Strasbourg

October 2, 2012 — No Comments ↓

On a sunny Saturday in early fall, we visited Strasbourg, which is right next to the Rhein river in France. The inner city is surrounded by canals and still features many old houses. And of course there is the famous Cathedral of Our Lady in Strasbourg. Here is a picture of the little dog we found inside. While the size of the cathedral is already impressive, the colorful windows are pretty outstanding when the sun light shines through. After the cathedral, we walked through the shopping area and found great places for chocolates and cheese. We finished the walk with…

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