Aftermath of the "Final Solution"

Germany has its history written all over it, most of which every German would like to forget (or rather, not think about it anymore). But at times, the history sends its messages as gentle reminders of the pain the country and its people went through. 

Yesterday, some workers at a construction site, about 4kms from where we stay, uncovered human bones, what the experts later found to be the remains of a German soldier.

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The remains also had 2 metal belt buckles, the knapsack of the soldier (which had an ashtray, a toothbrush with paste tubes and some coins) and some ammunition.

During World War II, Pforzheim was bombed a number of times. In one of the largest raids carried out by the British Royal Air Force, on the evening of February 23, 1945, about one fifth of the town's population, over 17,000 people, were killed, and about 83% of the town's buildings were destroyed.

Ironically, German authorities began an excavation yesterday at another site south of Berlin that they believe contains one of the last undiscovered mass graves of Jews killed by the Nazis. 

The excavation site marks the spot where, on February 2, 1945, 753 sick men and women, originally from Poland and Hungary, are believed to have been killed by the SS after being transported from Auschwitz death camp.

True reminders of the Final Solution (Endlösung) on Earth day.

It's only a flat tyre after all

I was at Karlsruhe Zoo during Easter weekend with my family. 

What amazed my 3 year old son the most was not the monkeys at the zoo, but the bus undergoing repair in front of the zoo.

It blew me away too, to see a pick-up truck and a van at the spot, engaged in replacing a tyre and 20+ onlookers (all watching just the tyre being replaced with at most curiosity).

Seems like German tyres are really tough! They rarely let the rim touch the ground.

Really delicious!

A s my collection of DVDs (especially, the Thomas & Friends and Noddy favorites of my little mouse) grew, I was finding it extremely difficult to catalog them. A spreadsheet would have been a good solution some years back. But I don't think I could manage the time anymore to type down all the inventory details into a sheet manually.  I stumbled upon a wonderful tool which cut the eternal Gordian knot for me. 

Delicious Library

The Mac OS X based tool acts as a digital shelf. The really cool interface (which truly looks like a wooden shelf) displays the covers of all DVDs and books I have. All I had to do was to 

scan the barcode (ISBN/UPC) on my books/DVDs with the in-built camera on my notebook and Delicious Library downloaded all the necessary information from the Internet like the author, release date, description, and even a high-resolution image of the cover and added it to the library. The scanning and downloading of information is incredibly fast (that is, 4-5 seconds).  I even managed to catalog my television, DVD player, notebook and many other devices with the simple barcode scanning. The cool thing is, as soon as it locates the information on the net, it reads out the name of the item for me. So I don't even have to look at my screen while scanning and can queue the items one after the other. 

This is how my shelf looks like now.

Delicious! Isn't it?

Don't forget the holidays anymore

A typical German doesn't have to look for to find out the official holidays in Germany. For someone who is not used to Germany yet, it would be good to have them on your calender and automatically updated every year.

If you are using an iCalender based email client like iCal, Thunderbird etc. simply create a new calender subscribing to the calender from Apple at webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/German32Holidays.ics. Now all German holidays would be available on your calender with English names and the German equivalent for them. 

It is not necessary that these are really holidays in your state. To create a customised holiday list (Gesetzliche nach Bundesländern) visit erweiterungen.de, Project24.info or Feiertage.

Love films? Then you would love this

There are many video libraries in Germany where you could rent movies and games. I have to say, they are soon going to be things of the past. First and foremost, they are expensive. You would have a shell out at least 2-3€ for a DVD movie, to see it overnight and return it the next day. Secondly, they have limited collection. And lastly, to rent a DVD, you would have to drive to the store twice  -once to fetch and again to return.

A promising alternative is LOVEFiLM.de. It is not an online service like MaxDome where you 

rent a movie online and watch it online (either on your computer or using a special receiver on your television). LOVEFiLM.de lets you rent DVDs online and have it delivered at your home via normal post. There are no time restrictions. You could watch it at your convenience and post it back using the prepaid postage cover sent to you along with the DVD. You primarily pay only for the DVD and not for postage - both ways. For as low as 11.99€ per month you could watch unlimited DVDs. 

Services like MaxDome might appeal to many people as they don't force you to go to a postbox often. The killer arguments for me against them are that, these services are available only on Microsoft Windows platform (if you are watching it on a computer and don't have the special receiver for the service). Even if it is available on other platforms like Mac OS X, it is not fun to watch the movie on a "small" screen. Also these services have movies only with German audio. DVDs from LOVEFiLM.de have of course the English audio available for selection.

I checked out a free trial with LOVEFiLM.de  and was pretty satisfied with the service. 

If I don't appear to be exceedingly marketing the service, go and give it a try.