I bought a DSLR camera. I like photography and I kind of grew away from my A520. I chose a pre-owned EOS 40D with an EF-S 18-55mm. I’ve taken a lot of pictures, but just to try it out and learn how to master the fully manual mode. I will try to get some kind of gallery online, but that is not high priority.
My new toy
I finally entered the Christmas holiday! However, this does not mean there is time to relax, no no, I have a pile of homework and lots of others things to do. Right now, I am working on a project for school. All the high school pupils have to do a 100 hour project in, more or less, any subject. I am making WiFi antennas with a girl in my class. We are gonna meet tomorrow to finalize the last antenna and test all of them, so I am preparing for everything now. A more in-depth presentation on it will be written when the project is done, and it’s due for Mars.
Pieces of WLAN antennas
There are quite a lot of interesting projects going on in my class. Last Friday I saw a couple of tubes, attached to a shelf, that are supposed to clean water. Another both interesting and advanced project is my friends Peter’s and Josef’s robot PenemuNXT. It is “A SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) implementation using LEGO Mindstorms NXT and leJOS (Java)”. Make sure to check it out.
The test setup
Peter also gave me a Christmas present. I have not opened it yet, but by using my 12th sense, I know it is a mug with a very suitable text written on it. Thank you!
Darkness, cold, philosophical thinking ruining your mind, swine flu everywhere, homework, rain and peace, and something to eat and drink.
A little something to eat
My primary hard drive broke some days ago, and I haven’t installed Photoshop onto the new one yet. The resize the image above, I used a web based photo editing software called Picnik. I can really recommend it for easier image tasks.
I am pretty sure the most of you use a service from Google. Maybe just the search engine or Youtube, but it is still from Google. I use a whole bunch of services from Google, and that is pretty scary. Google could so easily ruin my life in some way and they know everything about me too. Off course I do not use all of the Google Services, there are quite a lot of them, (count them yourself). Here are the services I do use:
Taking over my life
I probably forgot one or two… All these services are free (for personal use) and really useful. They all simplify my life a lot and are easy to use. Now, I really hope that Google will not turn into an evil company like Microsoft or like Apple is becoming.
Todo list:
The list is getting longer and time is flying by. Something more that is flying by is light. We have discussed the general relativity in class and that is, combined with philosophy class, making my brain boil, or something. Happily, in all haste I actually found a couple of hours to do something that I, kind of, actually wanted to do. I set up Debian on an iMac G3 DV (but I still want OSX Tiger to work), on a Sun Ultra 10 UltraSPARC and on Bruna, my virtual web server. I pretty much need to make an update of the Server Park page now.
The next one will be better
Anyhow, I started a mini project, and finished it too. I made my own font. I have known that it is quite simple for quite a time, but I hadn’t got the time. I thought it would include some hours of sitting and customizing every character. It did not.
I came across a site called Fontcapture. It does all the work for you, in no time. Just print out the form template, fill it in, scan it and upload to the site. Easy as cake. I hurried up writing my letters and used a thin pen, and the font turned out quite well. Much better than I expected. Next time, I will make sure not to hurry and use a slightly bolder pen to make a, hopefully, usable font. That would be cool.
I have it. The new generation of emailing – Google Wave. For those who you who don’t know what it is (and don’t want to watch the 120 minutes presentation by Google themselves), here is the video for you. So, what is the great fuzz about? I don’t know. It will probably revolutionize the way some people communicate, I, for example, sense that party planning and group work in school will ride great on the Wave.
Are you riding?
Riding the Wave right now is pretty boring though. 4000 people at the Google conference, 100 000 developers and up to 800 000 people they can ‘nominate’ (a nomination will put you closer to the front of the queue) are riding the Wave right now. Unfortunately, I just know one more guy riding, and if we want to communicate, we do that over IRC. That leaves me no one more to communicate with, and after trying out to create some waves, adding some features, formatting some text, there is nothing more to do really. If just Google would fire up the whole service, let anybody join…
I have been really busy lately. There’re a lot of things going on right now. I have been studying mostly, and that’s a bit weird. I just have half the amount of lessons compared to last year and we have just five subjects. Quite a lot of time has been spent here anyway:
Not as cozy as it looks
But good things have been going on too! I have fallen in love… in the game of Netris. Wait, did I say that was a good thing…? It’s not. I waste to much time in a terminal because of it. I really like it though and thanks to the multiplayer capabilities; I can beat my friends when they ask me to (unrelated Spotify link).
Want to challenge me?
Today, I also had the opportunity to take a look at a friend’s new Apple MacBook Pro. It looks stonking great and has a really, really high “I want” factor.
I discovered RSS not so long ago. It’s been around quite a while, but I thought it was not anything for me. I kept entering on ten or more sites everyday to check for updates. I could spend nearly an hour every day, sometimes just to discover that there were not any news or updates anywhere. I heard more and more about RSS every day too, and finally I decided to try it out.
I have chosen Google Reader as RSS-reader. It’s web-based and really easy to use. (I also has a predilection of the Google services) It works great too!
Google Reader in Swedish
This is the feeds I’m currently feeding on:
…and yes, most of these sites are about computers or web design.
What’s in your feed?
I have a pretty unique taste in music. I like kind of… hmm… strange music. I don’t like, however, people snoofing around my iTunes library, borrowing my (now lost) iPod or somehow listening to ‘my’ music. My music library is full of all kinds of music, rock, pop, sertanejo, 80s, funk and so on. I think nearly all genres are represented in some way.
Today I anyway decided to come forward with my taste of music (this is a big thing for me, must be my subconscious). Here is a Spotify playlist with all my 5 out of 5 stars rated music, with some exceptions: Brazilian music barely exists on Spotify, but I noticed today that Victor e Léo is available (a live concert anyway). Illusion by VNV Nation can’t be found on Spotify either.
Discover my taste in music
I also found Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve! They spelt it “Bitter Sweet”. I was sure it was misspelt until I looked up the track listing on Wikipedia. It’s one word on most places though.
Go listen to the music I like now! Just one thing more, last friday, I saw the movie “Inglourious Basterds“. It was amazing. One of the best movies I have ever seen. Go see it!
…homepage for my dog. You heard the line from Weird Al’s song “White & Nerdy” (Spotify link) and I decided to create a site for my dogs. It’s just a Flash gallery at the moment, but I might add something more like some info in the future. I’m adding support for arrow key navigation in the future too, but the code didn’t really do what I wanted it to do.
First and final sketch
The gallery contains 39 pictures and weighs about 3,5 mb. Unfortunately my upspeed is such a bottleneck. It will take at least half a minute to load, but if you like dogs, it’s worth it.
EDIT: The gallery is now hosted on a high-bandwidth server. The link is the same. There is also an easter egg added, click around and see if you find it.
