27 September 2015
I was not super active as a photographer during this years Rebusrally, but I wanted to share a few photos here. We had incredibly fun, even though we were close to useless when it came to solving the rebuses. This year we were “fildelande piratkopior”, something completely impossible to translate.
It was most likely my last rally (since I’m becoming so very old nowadays), which is kind of sad, since it’s always so much fun. Thanks to Andreas, Håkan, Mathias, “Ganne”, Rasmus, Linus, Carl and the eminent driver (and possibly captain) Ylva. This was not the year when we were winning (that was a reference Ylva), but I would guess that we laughed more than the winners, so in some sense perhaps we won after all. God that was cheesy, sorry about that. Hope you like the pictures, I sure laughed over some of them.
22 September 2015
This weekend me and Mikaela visited Ellen’s parents at their farm outside of Skövde together with Peter. Ellen’s family was extremely welcoming and really nice to us. We had an amazing time with all the animals and the beautiful nature and got to experience lot’s of interesting things. We sat on horseback for a few minutes, set up a pen for the sheep, watched the sheep getting trimmed, got a really nice view of the landscape from a cliff, ate lots of great meals and of course played around with the dogs all the time.
Most of the photos found below were shot by Mikaela by the way, so I can’t take all of the credit for that.
21 September 2015
I have some great news (which isn’t news for a lot of you). I will do my masters thesis work together with Vidar at Stanford University. I think I’ll write that again: I’m doing my master thesis work at Stanford. This is really cool and almost unbelievable. Together we will study numerical methods and models for induced earthquakes for professor Eric Dunham under the California sun. We will leave just a few days after new years and then come back and collect our degrees at Uppsala in June. I am really into the field of area we are going to study, and everyone we have met seem to be great and professional people.
This means almost half a year in the US and now half a year of preparations in the form of both course work and paperwork, the first kind of work being a whole lot more interesting than the other. In fact, I think I have never been so motivated for school, since I now have such a concrete goal to strive for.
Also, this is one of the major reasons for building this blog, since I now have a nice way of writing blog posts when I’m at Stanford. I will make sure to update with photos, information and other stuff as we work on the project and go for some adventures. And as you can see I’m already trying to get my English up to speeds. This is probably one of the most unexpected and amazing adventures in my life so far, and I just can’t wait to get started.
The background picture is borrowed from http://greenleaf.stanford.edu
16 September 2015
The 28 of March this year Mikaela and I went to see Jonathan Johansson perform at V-Dala Nation. This was some time ago, but with this new blog I thought it would be fun to throw in some pictures I shot at the concert. It was an amazing concert and you should really check out the new album Lebensraum, where he actually managed to surpass his previous records, and they’re also amazing. I would even rate him as my favorite Swedish singer at the moment. I’d really recommend you too see him sometime.
9 September 2015
This story, believe it or not, starts with a smart (dumb) tv. Me and Mikaela are users of HBO Nordic for some time now, and while the tv-series there are really amazing, the software have always been years behind the market leader Netflix. Anyway, just a couple of weeks ago we were still using my PS3 for Netflix and our smart (dumb) tv for HBO Nordic. Netflix on the PS3 was not too bad, but the smart (dumb) tv app was pretty horrific. Then HBO Nordic stopped supporting the smart (dumb) tv platform and therefore offered us a platform that they supported for free. You guessed right, we got ourself a little chromecast.
And it turned out to be pretty amazing. In fact I now have a hard time understanding why we didn’t purchase one way earlier. The really cool thing with the chromecast API is that the little hdmi-thing you attach to your tv actually does all of the work. This is quite different from Airplay, where the picture is mirrored and the sender therefore does a lot of work. What this means really is that my phone will act as a remote controller and the battery life of the phone is not at all affected when I watch Netflix.
I actually think that Google has been very clever here. The fundamental idea is that the best current remote controller is a multitouch device, where you have access to great apps and a great interface. The TV or the chromecast then acts as a very simple device that is only capable of showing media content sent from the phone.
For an Apple fanboy like myself the obvious competition for the chromecast is the Apple TV, but I actually do have a couple of big problems with that product. The remote controller is way worse than a modern phone for browsing content and the apps are far behind their mobile counterparts (if they exist at all). Of course you could mirror the content with Airplay, but then your phone would quickly run out of battery and get warm like discussed before.
Hey Kim, you might say, what about the new Apple TV presented at the Apple keynote 5 minutes ago then? Well, it sure looks a lot better than the old Apple TV and it is definitely a whole lot more ambitious than the chromecast. For us who read the Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs it was also exciting to finally see Apple’s take on a modern TV solution. There are some very interesting ideas there and perhaps it is a good idea to have a completely separated platform with apps that really take advantage of a bigger screen. Perhaps the few functionalities of the chromecast will seem too limited in the future, but right now I find that it does everything I need in an incredibly smooth way. I come home, pull out my phone of my pocket, lay down on the sofa, open Netflix or HBO Nordic, browse to the tv-series or movie that I want to watch and with just one click I have it one the TV. Apple’s new remote controller is an interesting idea, but somehow I am still not sure if it truly is better than the interface on my phone. And just to have one less remote controller on the TV table is worth a lot for anyone like me.
