Archive for category Internet

Jul
17

Weather Bonk – Amazing real time weather site

Posted by on Monday, 17 July, 2006

A burst of activity from me recently, as you can see. It’s a three-day weekend here in Japan, and I’ve got loads of time on my hands suddenly.

I wanted to share with you a premier weather service I found the other day, courtesy of Waxy.org (King of Links!!).

It’s called Weather Bonk and uses Google Maps as a basis for presenting real time weather data and web cams from all around the world. You can add your own Web Cams to the page as well. It doesn’t seem like you can edit already exisiting web cams; which is unfortunate because I found a web cam which is in the totally wrong place. Scroll down slightly south of Tokyo (just by Tsurumi) and you will find a web cam there which claims to be Odaiba. Yes, the web cam shows Odaiba, but that is not where Odaiba is located! (I’m going to contact the people running it to see if it can be moved.)

Anyway, all in all, it is a brilliant site to check real time weather conditions for a large part of the world. Go check it out.

Jun
23

A Tale of Sweden, Piratebay, DRM and Filesharing

Posted by on Friday, 23 June, 2006

CDs
If you have read my blog since the beginning, you may have noticed that I used to write a lot about copyright issues and generally took a rather positive stance towards the different piracy-factions and supported them in spirit through their different tough times.

However, recently, this topic has become rather infected in Sweden. It seems as though the opinion of the general public has become somewhat radical by international standards, and a recent survey done by SIFO showed that roughly 50% of the Swedish population thinks that filesharing should be legalized (article in Swedish). L-E-G-A-L-I-Z-E-D!! Recent discussions in Swedish media show that in general, the Swedish public does not want to pay for any kind of entertainment; be it music, TV-shows, or movies. There is a kind of political movement going on now, headed by angry file sharers under the name Pirate Party who are actually going to participate in the government elections this coming Fall. Their official stance is that filesharing should be OK, because the entertainment industry’s monopoly and outdated business model does not work anymore. I see a lack of alternative distribution models presented by the modern Swedish pirates, and suggest that the motive is pure greed. “Why pay if I can get it for free?”

Moving to the discussion one sees in the USA and UK (among other countries), I see there is more moderate focus wihtin the filesharing dicussion. In general, the people fighting for rights of the consumer are generally doing just that, and nothing else. They want to fight DRM and other restrictions of use that the entertainment industry (and its allies) tend to attach to every digital product they sell nowadays. The anti-DRM discussions and protests can get heated of course, but overall they are a whole lot more sensible than the Swedish debate.

To sum up what I have seen from the two related, but oh so different, discussions: in the US, people are willing to pay for entertainment in digital form if the price is reasonable and fair use is possible after purchase; whereas in Sweden, entertainment in digital form is regarded as having little to no value at all, and should be given away for free.

The latest happening in the Swedish debate is the fact that it has surfaced that the US government and MPAA have lobbied the Swedish government to do something about the piracy and filesharing, otherwise Sweden would face sanctions from the WTO. Some Swedish politicians are outraged by this. They say it’s terrible that the Swedish government would act like puppets bending over for Hollywood. I say, stop crying for pete’s sake. The filesharing that is going on in Sweden is of course not 100% illegal, and some filesharing is even good in my opinion, in the sense that it opens up a path for lesser known artists to reach out to a larger public. But the fact remains, the majority of filesharing that is taking place through The Piratebay and other filesharing networks is of the illegal kind, “downloading because I don’t want to pay” kind. And if Sweden cannot curb this illegal activity on its own, then why should not the property right owners step up and try to do something about it? It’s OK for MPAA to take actions against China because there is a massive market for pirated DVDs, but it is not OK for MPAA to voice their opinions against Sweden’s rampant filesharing? Hypocrisy, I say.

I was once agreeing completely with the Swedish pirates’ case, but recently I have been sickened with the discussion. I am now taking a much mroe moderate stance in this discussion. I am for: no DRM and fair use rights for digital media; lower cost for digital media; less geographic restrictions on distribution of entertainment. I am against: legalized filesharing; the opinion that digital media has no value, and other moronic behavior.

Jun
06

Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack

Posted by on Tuesday, 6 June, 2006

OK, so I’m an Internet geek, so sue me, but I rolled on the floor laughing when I read this story:

Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack

CORY DOCTOROW: And I have a background wallpaper skin of the Ontario subway system with all the stop names cleverly rearranged to spell out the names of the characters from “Harry Potter”.

Not funny at all if you’re not already an avid Boing Boing reader. (Via Waxy.org, the king of links.)

By the way, if you’re totally clueless on who this Cory Doctorow person is, you can read up a bit on him here

Mar
28

Lightening up the mood a little

Posted by on Tuesday, 28 March, 2006

Well it’s that time of the year (?) when I think one should lighten up the mood of your blog a little… So I decided to throw in a bunch of these LiveJournal-esque blogthings or self-tests:


Your Blog Should Be Blue


Your blog is a peaceful, calming force in the blogosphere.
You tend to avoid conflict – you’re more likely to share than rant.
From your social causes to cute pet photos, your life is a (mostly) open book.

Well, my blog is partially blue, does that count?

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English
20% Yankee
15% Dixie
0% Midwestern
0% Upper Midwestern

This is pretty interesting, because I have heard people say I speak in an Upper Midwestern dialect on a number of occasions… Apparantly I don’t, because if Blogthings-test says something, then it’s the truth! 😉


You Failed the US Citizenship Test


Oops, you only got 6 out of 10 right!

Well I was not really thinking of applying anyway, so…. (sour grapes?)


Your 2005 Song Is


Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani

“This shit is bananas B-A-N-A-N-A-S)”

For you, 2005 was the Best Year Ever.

Yeah, that’s my shit! 😀 Seriously though, 2005 was a good year, but Hollaback girl good? Wow, that’s quite a bold statement!

Mar
12

My latest side project!

Posted by on Sunday, 12 March, 2006

I’d like to present to you my latest side project; the new home page of the Scandinavian Cup golf tournament. Those of you who have seen the old one (still active at http://scancup.groth.hm) will see that it’s a dramatic change, and for the better I hope. Here’s a screenshot if you’re too lazy (or have no interest in it):
Screenshot of Scandinavian Cup Homepage

The short, not-so-technical explanation is that I based the new homepage on WordPress 2, making it very easy to update with news and articles. As I am somewhat of an HTML-dork I’d like to toot my own horn and explain the technical goodness of it too, I warn you: if you do not know what “wordpress” or “css” is, then stop reading now!

I warned you, I shall now dive into the technical details of the homepage… First of all, I set out to make the homepage using WordPress as sort of an experiment, to see how well you could utilize WordPress as a CMS – my conclusion is very well! The structure of the site is pretty much non-bloggy, but more classical news-site style. Nowhere will you see posts lined up after one another in chronological order – all the loops have been altered to act as sort of archives or lists of articles. The main page contains two loops showing the two main categories of posts: news and results. I have categorized all posts by type of post (news, results, etc.) and by which tournament it relates to (it’s a biyearly tournament). The backbone of the results pages are pretty much the same as the earlier page, i.e. it imports an .csv file of results and displays it in a table format. Fairly easy to just export the tournament results to .csv and upload.

It took me a few months to create it, mainly because I’m busy at work and lazy, but also because I was struggling with the CSS design. I changed between many different designs throughout the design period, and finally settled on the current one, which is slightly “Web 2.0” styled, although I hate to fall for design trends like that. Basically, I opted for Arial mainly (it’s a clean font, good for news/blogs I think) instead of Trebuchet or Verdana as I had dabbled with before. The color scheme is so-so, I must admit. I wanted it greenish to reflect the golf-theme, but I can’t say I am completely happy with the result. I consider the design of the site as work-in-progress. If anyone has any design ideas, feel free to contact me about it – I am not professional web designer so I find myself lacking that “magical touch” to make a site look perfect.