Electrophotonic Timesinks

Hey everyone, readers and spambots alike. My involvement in that rocket experiment project has left me with very little time for any updates to this blog, but please check out the adventures of me and my team at our teamsite and our Swedish blog, which is part of an outreach project, KTH på Insidan, of our university.

Please take a moment to visit the latter blog, as every pageview helps us in the faceoff between project blogs. The three most popular project blogs will recieve 50 000kr (about £5000) in grant money for their project.

Red Faction Guerrilla, where you play as a merciless freedom fighter, fighting the corporate overlords on Mars using your powerful hammer

I’ve been pretty busy with exams, some new courses, and games these last couple of weeks, so I haven’t felt much for updating the blog. Curiously, Wordpress ATE the draft of the last entry I was working on a couple of weeks ago, though it might have been for the best. Still, it did put me off writing for a bit. I do get most of my blogging fix from Twitter, and it’s hard to justify filling out those microblog entries to post them here. Still, some of the autumn photos I’ve been tweeting these last couple of days might deserve a post of their own.

I’m listening a lot to Yellow Magic Orchestra, Gorillaz, the Deltron 3030 album, and Mr Scruff at the moment, and I’m definitely starting to feel inspired to write some mammoth music posts. That is, if I can tear myself away from studies and Red Faction Guerrilla, which I got extremely cheap from Impulse, Stardock’s equivalent to the Steam store. I hear that store is less restrictive than Steam when it comes to DRM, so by all means, give it a look if gaming is your thing.

Speaking of gaming, I’ve been doing that quite a lot lately, both at home and at a LAN at Visingsö. Apart from the already mentioned Red Faction Guerrilla (the best hammer-em-up since Ice Climbers, but on Mars and without seals to bash on the head), I’ve finally gotten all the stars in Braid (the hidden central theme in that game is very relevant to my interests, and this ending only confirmed it), made a Dr Robotnik in Champions Online’s character creator (which is just about all I did as I found the game terribly boring), and messed around in Heroes of Newerth, that DotA clone. Yes, DotA. It’s probably the most elitistic game I’ve played, and I hate it for it, but it’s still pretty fun to have a go at from time to time with friends. I’m not buying it though, just participating in the invite-only beta.

Shooty astronauts in Shattered Horizon

What I AM buying is Shattered Horizon, a finnish multiplayer shoot-em-up set in very near space in the very near future. Basically, it’s all about semi-realistic spacewalks with jetpacks and guns, and an intriguing suit power down mode which makes space just as silent as it really is. I’m far too much of a space geek to pass it up, and now I’m just waiting for Steam to unlock it come tomorrow morning.

An improved Orion rocket (?) for the REXUS student programme. Image copyright ESA.

While on the topic of space, something I’m reeeaally psyched over. I’ve been selected to participate in next year’s REXUS student program. In short, me and a 5-10 man group of students at KTH will be developing an experiment that will fly onboard an Esrange-launched REXUS rocket to the edge of space, at 100km. From there it will detach and carry out scientific measurements on the way down, before finally inflating airbags to airbrake and cushion its landing. I’m so damn excited about this, it’s almost a dream come true and just the kind of foot-in-the-door-of-the-space-industry I’ve been hoping for. This year’s mission has a blog; it would be pretty fun to contribute some writing to next year’s. Anyway, there are a couple of selection processes before what we propose to work on actually gets built and flies, but things are looking pretty good.

I’ve spent a lot of time raving about the wonderful Moog Minimoog, but I think this Youtube video demonstrates better than anything in writing just how neat it is.

Very impressive for a piece of equipment from 1971!

As mentioned earlier, if you have a USB keyboard and want to have a go yourself, there’s a demo of the emulated version available. I’d play around with it more myself if it wasn’t for the input lag I’m experiencing. I’ll get around to sorting that out sooner or later…

This is a game I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. Not so much for its gameplay, but for its presentation and above all music, both of which I think have stood the test of time remarkably well. Warning, opinionated author!

Music from Ridge Racer Type 4. Click to play, more further down.

In early 1999, Namco released a game called Ridge Racer Type 4, the fifth (!) installment in the Ridge Racer series on the Playstation, counting Revolution. I didn’t have a Playstation at a time, but when I saw the cover of Super PLAY magazine in I think it was April of that year, I knew I had to get one. It featured long-legged mascot girl Reiko Nagase, dressed in a white one-piece dress and white boots, in front of a sleek sports car, the rest of the cover keeping to the stark black text on yellow background seen above.

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Yesterday I headed off to Nikon HQ in Solna to have my D40 DSLR Checked & Cleaned. On the way I got sucked into one of my Photo Strolls, this time around Hagalund. The weather was great and everything had suddenly turned very autumny (been holed up inside playing video games and working on this blog too much the last week, I guess). The whole service took 15 minutes instead of the expected two or three days, so I left with my camera ready for more shooting! I decided to take a stroll through Haga Norra cemetary on the way back. It’s ginormous and has some very impressive family graves.

It’s been ages since I photographed semi-seriously digitally, and my old editing software was all Mac-only. There photos where (hastily) edited in Lightcraft’s Lightzone, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I haven’t used it that much yet, but I like the workflow and the tools it provided. It’s a bit different from other photography workflow I’ve used, but the tools seem more geared towards photography than the Photoshop-esque stuff found in most other image editing software. It’s also fast enough to be usable on my little Aspire One netbook.

Anyway, enough talking. Here’s some photos!

The Tower of Hagalund. Här bor det häxor! (klicka på Blåkulla)

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photo credit: Per Foreby

Yesterday at work, as I was exchanging my 20 krona note for two 10 krona coins in the changing machine, in order to buy a 17 krona ice cream from the vending machine for my sore throat, the following occurred to me.

Since I can only use the coins in the machine, they are actually more valuable to me than the note. Following this line of thought, two ten krona coins should NOT equal one twenty krona note, but instead, say, 22 kronas in note-money. It’s obvious a system like this must be implemented immediately! So what will happen? I Am Not an Economist, but I gave it some thought over a couple of beers, and here’s my take on it.

• As soon as this law is announced, people would immediately start trading in their notes to coins. Actually, no, this is silly. The extra 10% would hardly justify the weight of the coins.
• The ice cream would cost 15 kr instead of 17… though its more likely no one would bother to adjust the prices, for PROFIT and INFLATION.
• It’d be impossible to actually exchange a twenty krona note and two krona coins to two ten krona coins properly, as the total value would be OVER 22kr (the two coins being worth more). OH MAN SO CONFUSING.
• Essentially, we’d get two separate currencies with exchange rates between them. Prices still have to be given in totals of course, and if kronas on coins start being more valuable than their paper counterparts, we’d have to have two different currencies to pay for stuff over 20 kr. We could call the currencies KOCs (kronas on coins) and KOPs (kronas on paper), ‘cuz, you know, it sounds funny. Lets say the price of more expensive stuff would be given in KOPs. You’d then pay up to near that amount in KOPs, then divide the rest by 1,1 and pay that in KOCs. Meanwhile, prices for stuff cheaper than what we now call 20kr would only have to be given in KOCs.
• Some smartass would put out an iPhone app that made it a lot easier to pay with a mixture of the two currencies, and he’d get super rich.

Finally, when people tire of this stupid system we’d either abolish coins or abolish physical currency altogether.

OR they could just put note slots on all the vending machines.

Sony might be a bitch of a company at times, designing their own proprietary standards as soon as they get a chance and filling everything with DRM. On the other hand, they never seem afraid of innovating, and seem (or, well, at least seemed) eager to pour money into crazy new ideas.

I’ve seen this little gadget in the window of the Sony Store in Stockholm, but it was always powered down and I had no idea what it did.

Amazing how expressive a gizmo like that can be, even though it doesn’t have a face and is limited to just a few degrees of freedom. I guess that says something about how easy we humans anthropomorphize things. At least this particular robot is about as far from the uncanny valley you can get.

Of course it has no practical use and at $399 is just an expensive toy. According to Wikipedia, production has been discontinued. Too bad Sony’s amazing QRIO humanoid robot met the same fate, even long before the economic crisis.

A couple of weeks ago me and Stina started talking about going on a road trip together over a weekend, and last week we decided to go for it. On Thursday the 17th I met up with her in a café in Jönköping, and together we headed out to the island of Visingsö in lake Vättern, for a weekend away from city life.

The author inside one of the little caves of Visingsö

The family summer house on the island is where I spent most summers when I was younger. I always started missing my video games at home after a while, but it probably did me good to periodically get away from that life. Of course, this wasn’t entirely true, as me and my other summer-house friends there had Game Boys (as well as the occasional Game Gear). But still, much like I return home from my pretty brain dead job (which isn’t always a bad thing) with pockets full of post-it notes with hastily scribbled down creative ideas, the summers at Visingsö away from the digital life in Södertälje did give me inspiration for things to do once I got back.
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Hello! Welcome to my brand new Wordpress blog. I created this not only as a blog per se, but also as a public archive for my writings, so please excuse the mad diversity of the subject matter. You can find me at LJ too, but all public posts there will be posted here first, so don’t bother!

I’m an aerospace engineering student at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm, Sweden, but this subject is, unfortunately for my studies, not what’s on my mind most of the time.

Instead, the main topics of this blog, at least of the time of writing, are

• Music – I’m a huge fan of old school electronic music and the sound of analog synthesizers, so there will be articles about the hardware as well as the old legends in the genre. I will also post about cool new songs and bands I find.
• Photography – Here too, I find the grittyness and unpredictability of analog more interesting than digital. Cross-processed shots, reviews of toy cameras, and tips & tricks will be posted here.

The corny name of the blog says it all, doesn’t it? However, as I’m a man of way too many hobbies and interests, expect regular updates in the following categories as well.

• Linux and free software – Installing Arch Linux and getting to grips with the command line in the summer of 2008 was the beginning of a downward spiral of geekyness. Tutorials, reviews and everything else relating to this goes here.
• Gaming - I’ve had loads of consoles through the years, but I’m a PC gamer at heart, and a nostalgic one at that. Here I might highlight new and old games that have caught my interest. Board games go here as well, just don’t expect tired old Monopoly.
• Hardware – Whether it’s obsessing over a new phone OS or performing a dirty hardware hack on an old computer, this is a pretty bad timesink for me. Of course I’m going to write about it!

And last but certainly not least

• The Pirate Movement -  Thoughts and ideas about copyright, personal integrity go into this category, as well as stuff relating to my activities in the Swedish Pirate Party.

There will also be personal updates, mostly in English but sometimes in Swedish, tagged accordingly.

I still need to work a bit on the layout and such, but hopefully I’ll have more content up in just a couple of days. First up are some way too long raves on electronic music I wrote back in the winter of 07/08 for my LJ. Boy can I get obsessed about certain subjects…

Oh, and the background image rotates every hour. See if you can catch them all (and give me page views!!).