DRs bull The girlfriend and I watched the first two episodes of the Danish TV-Show called "Sommer" and we found that we both enjoyed it. This got me thinking though. In Denmark, if you have a device that is _ABLE_ to access the Internet, then you are forced to pay something called "license", a tax to the state-owned media company "Danmarks Radio" (DR). While I'm not entirely against this, since they do make quite educational content, that is not strongly influenced by commercial interets, I do have a problem with the way they provide content online, or rather, the way they don't. Thing is, you can only access some of the content if you connect from an IP inside the country (due to licencing issues), but when I'm outside the country, then there are lots of things I cannot see, even though I'm paying the tax for it! Now, how difficult would it be to simply, require a login linking my Danish identity with the account? We alreadt have a system like that in place, where all Danes can identify themself on public webservices. Well. That's my first problem. The second is that they provide no easy way of downloading the content for viewing when offline or in a better optimized player. My travel laptop can not handle the web-player, but it is able to play the same content in VLC just fine. So I need to do quite an involved amount of digging through the source code of the website in order to find the link to the actual content, so I can ask VLC to stream it to disk prior to watching it. How difficult would it be to implement a download button? Next issue is just plain stupid. Their whole archive is not online, instead they are picking stuff from their archives and rotates it quite often, so if you happen to have a job and other things in life, there's a good chance that you start on a show, find it worth watching, and when you come back for the next epiode, you find that it has been taken offline. Mind you, their archives are already digital, so it's not a resource problem. Their storage-servers are also already online, but they selectively link which content can be viewed, in a limited period only. This makes no sense! We already pay for this stuff, it's our property, and we have a right to be able to access it, or to request to make a full mirror if we please. Now, it's not al bad, DR has made efforts towards using mostly free technologies to provide their content, so that it can be viewed by people not using Windows or OSX, but it was not without a lot of noise from the Danish OpenSource community. Shame on you DR, you can do better. Retro goodness I stumbled upon a nice article about the early public Internet on IEEE Spectrum which ironically have an URL that is longer than 80 characters, so I had to shorten it. I should write my own shortener some day. http://goo.gl/OQ9319 HP Stream 11 Keyboard The keyboard on this laptop is really much nicer than one would expect from such a cheap machine, and it is actually much better than the keyboard on some much more expensive laptops I've used. It has overloaded the function keys with things such as brightness and volume control, but it has done it in such a way that the F5 key, which is often used to refresh, is not overloaded, and works without having to press the FN key. Very elegant. Another cute detail that I appreciate very much is that the arrow keys are overloaded with pgUp, pgDn, Home and End, in a very natural way, FN+Left=Home, FN+Right=End, FN+Up=pgUp and FN+Down=pgDn, making it very nice for editors and viewers that use these keys correctly. They have also placed the FN key on the right side of the left control key where it is easy to reach without messing up the layout too much. Nicely done indeed, and perfect for a machine that's pretty much specced as a battery powered typewriter with WiFi and color display. Blood Machines - Turbo Killer 2 I'm a huge fan of the dark sounds from Carpenter Brut and the music video for Turbo Killer is still one of the coolest things I've seen. So when I heard that the people behind that video wanted to crowdfund a short movie in the same style, I had to back it! I must admit I may set myself up for dissapointment. Because I am expecting something like a short movie version of that music video, the feel of it, the level of detail and awesome music. I can't wait to see how it will turn out! I think those 30 Eur are well spent. Come on! Blood Machines! How badass does that sound!? Very badass indeed! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2050134024/blood-machines-turbo-killer-2 http://bloodmachines.com/ It's cold Today, I went out for groceries and temperature was -12C, but there was almost no wind, so not very bad, but enough that breathing through my nose hurt a bit. Generally, I think I'm pretty comfortable with cold, and what bothers me most about it is that it gets pretty slippery, and I almost fell twice, even though I was very careful about walking, and I have pretty good balance (which is why I did not fall, mind you). Work Burning hours on a project, almost done, hope I have enough time and luck to pull through and get the thing to the awesome place where I want it. I ramp up slow on tasks and accelerate towards the end, and now there's little time left, so I probably end up spending more time on it than I log. Delivering something that people find useful and good is very important to me. I sometimes tell that I don't work for the money, and in a sense, that is true, I would likely find something else if they didn't pay me, or if I felt that I was being paid less than my peers, but that's not about the money, it's related to the reason why I do what I do to begin with: Doing cool stuff, and doing it right. Learning and getting better feels great. But the feeling I get when I deliver something that is well received is the reason I do this. It's probably an ego boost, and a dangerous thing to get addicted to, and I'm surrounded by people far better than myself, so it's a rare thing indeed. But alas, I do it for the moments when I can understand that I've done good. ___________________________________________________________ / \ | This text is in a nice rounded box for no apparent reason | \___________________________________________________________/ * *------------+ / _____ \_____________/ / \ /------------.____.-* \_________/ \ \_________ / \ / * * they stood there forever wondering what they had lost thus time itself laid to waste in their wake as they sailed unmoving through it in desperate vain ignorance - Good night