Month: April 2012

Volkshochschule Regensburg Cooking Course: Indisch

A local friend of ours and novice cook drummed up some interest in a cooking course, and we managed to fill up the Volkshochschule Regensburg‘s classroom kitchen on a recent Tuesday evening. Sarah and I attended with some new friends and some old ones to get our Indian cuisine on. Continue reading Volkshochschule Regensburg Cooking Course: Indisch

Donaumarkt, Regensburg’s farmers’ market

One of my weekly joys is a Saturday morning stroll along our island and over a bridge to the south bank of the Danube to scout for groceries. There are lots of local producers represented there: family-run dairies, butchers, bakers, and vegetable farmers, along with a few beekeepers and herbmongers. Some of them are pure-organic producers, too. It took us a couple years of living in Regensburg’s Altstadt before we stumbled upon it. I don’t think that’s because it’s any sort of a well-kept secret (indeed, there are murmurs of uprooting this market and moving it elsewhere in town), but rather because there’s not trace of it come Saturday afternoon.

To help you warm up, or wake up (whatever the case may be), Moccafee has a tiny mobile outdoor coffee shop set up.

And if you’re very good at the butcher stand, you might even get a little reward for your behavior.

For now, at least, you can find it (nearly?) every Saturday morning on the south bank of the Danube just east of the Eiserne Brücke. The rest of the week, it’s plain old parking lot on Hunnenplatz. Get there early for the widest selection and best ease of browsing. It gets crowded pretty quickly after 9:30 and could well be deserted by noon.

View Donaumarkt in a larger map

Kubuntu + Dell Vostro + Wireless Networking = *headdesk*

I bought a new, old computer — a Dell Vostro 1310 — on which to play around with Linux today. Here are the things I’ve learned:

  • I am not sure the processor in this notebook is a 64-bit processor (it’s an Intel Core 2 Duo…but I don’t know which series, or whether that matters. I am not a hardware person). I eventually gave up after the installer crashed a couple times at critical junctures and I am having better results with the 32-bit version of Kubuntu.
  • Telling the BIOS to boot from CD/DVD or SD card reader or USB device in order to start the installation process really didn’t work all that well. Google was my friend on this one; someone out there reported better results after a cold boot. I think that’s what finally worked for me, too.
  • There’s a dreaded Broadcom wireless card in here. I’ve struggled with those for so many years now, and I’m not alone in that, so I am kind of surprised that it’s still such a big hassle to get wireless networking actually working in this day and age. In the end, I gave up, too. I couldn’t make the WLAN in my apartment work on Channel 13 with this network card. I kept seeing other networks in and near our building, but never ours. Some Googling revealed that others had similar symptoms, and that you can use sudo iwlist chan at a command prompt to see what channels are available. I tried proprietary drivers. I tried generic drivers. I didn’t mess with any kernel modules (like I used to have to do, the last time I had Linux running on a laptop). So since I could only get the card to acknowledge Channels 1 through 11, I just switched our network over to one of those instead of fighting with it any longer, and I guess it’s all hunkey-dorey now.

Still don’t know what I’d do, however, if there were a compelling reason to use Channel 12 or 13. I wonder if this is the same problem other guests were having with their smartphones last summer while visiting us.