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Take Cover, Yacht Cover Aloft
The Dear Reader may remember that I recently reported from the hibernation grounds of the local yachting club. Here’s a photograph from the same site, taken by my dad. It demonstrates why you might...
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2011 Enlightener & Obscurantist Awards
The Swedish Skeptics, of whom I am the chairman, have just announced their annual awards for 2011 [a - b]. The Swedish public TV show Hjärnkontoret receives the Enlightener of the Year award, “…for...
View ArticleHow Is Energy Consumption Moderated In A Car?
Car question. When I turn on my windshield wipers, the energy for those two step motors comes from the battery. And it comes to the battery from the gas tank via the alternator. This means that if I...
View ArticleThe True Steel of the Ancestors
Above-ground atomic explosions and reactor leaks during the past century have produced a pretty funny atmosphere full of exotic heavy isotopes. In radiocarbon calibration this error source is called...
View ArticleLaptop Has Replaced Umpteen Specialised Devices
Junior’s been through an extended period of various lighter ailments that have affected his school attendance record (but not his grades) considerably. I believe this may be partly due to his sedentary...
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Rare Plane
Rode a pretty rare/air plane Bromma – Kallinge on Friday morning. It was a Saab 2000, a 1992 Swedish turboprop model of which only 63 where ever built. (Apparently they saw daylight in the mistaken...
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DIY Strap Fastener For Samsung Galaxy S III
The people behind the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone made an odd design decision. They got rid of the standard fastening point for a strap. And the backshells on the market don’t have a fastening...
View ArticleFlew To Öland
Yesterday I went to Öland and showed my students some sites and landscape. We were joined by human geographer Carl-Johan Nordblom who knows all the post-Viking stuff. Lovely day! Though we couldn’t...
View ArticleDynamic Map of Chinese Unrest
The Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo censors searches for the names of places where there are protests (currently Shenzhen). You could write a script that searches for the main Chinese cities on Weibo...
View ArticleJapanese Robot Development Driven By Xenophobia
Reading a term paper by one of my Växjö students, I learned something surprising. Being a well-read and erudite sort, Dear Reader, you may not be surprised. You already know that Japanese women have...
View ArticleI Was Wrong About Book-On-Demand
Here’s a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote: Lately I have come to think of...
View ArticleTech Note: Get Rid Of LibreOffice’s Annoying File Recovery Failure Message
This bug in OpenOffice / LibreOffice has been with me for years and years. You open a file, you delete it while open, you close LibreOffice — and then LibreOffice will henceforth tell you eeeevery time...
View ArticleSamsung Sweden to Linux User: “UEFI BIOS Bug Not Our Problem”
Linux is a common operating system, not least in its Android version, and it is universally assumed that a PC (or whatever “IBM compatible” is called these days) will be able to run it. In fact,...
View ArticleTech Note: How To Install Linux On A Laptop With UEFI
Here’s what I did to replace Windows 8 (boo) with Linux Mint (yay) on a 2013 Asus ultrabook with the problematic UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware, using an external DVD drive...
View ArticleSwedish Linux Users: Avoid Elgiganten
As detailed here before, a few Samsung laptop models have a firmware bug that makes them liable to becoming inert bricks if you install Linux. It’s a one-way process. This happened to me when I bought...
View ArticleOwnit Deploys Wifi Routers With Security Hole Across Sweden
My whole housing development recently changed Internet Service Providers. We now have optical fibre from Ownit, offering hundreds of megabits per second. It works just fine. But there’s a security...
View ArticleIs Facebook’s Android App Monitoring My Phone Calls?
Facebook’s Android app seems to be monitoring whom I talk to on my phone. A few days after I’ve called somebody who wants to submit a paper to Fornvännen, or after I’ve texted the mom of one of...
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20 Years On The Web
I got access to email through the SöderKOM BBS in 1994. In early 1995 I got a dial-up connection to the Internet via Algonet, an ISP started by my childhood buddy Ragnar. And in June of that year I put...
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Ten Years Of Portable Internet Access
My 2006 smartphone, a Qtek 9100 On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It...
View ArticleSatnavs and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don’t throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don’t let the sum you’ve...
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