www.hacklin.com/johan

LED 1 (Originally uploaded by oskay)

For a nice show effect at your next party (including the fire, the panic, and the arrival of the fire brigade), how about cooking your food without those unnecessary intermediaries such as the stove and the oven. Just plug some raw power into those sausages and watch the magic. For real magic, you can even stick some LEDs into the wurst. So far, there’s unfortunately no mention on how to construct a wurst-based flip-flop, but it’s gotta be coming sooner or later…

When interrogated by the police and your insurance afterwards you can mention that I found this via Boing Boing.

• I’m drawing a schematic map of agricultural circles… #

• I am starting my 2 months vacation with a cleaning day. Monday is cleaning day, y’know? #
• I just found out that Werder Bremen has a new main sponsor. Finally a big name, and no legal disasters or ventures into unchartered waters! #

Why does the shower curtain move toward the water (and towards the current showeree)? Turns out that complex mathematical computations have finally revealed that the spray of the shower creates a vortex which in turn creates a low-pressure region that draws the shower curtain towards the water, and thus towards the body subjected to the spray. (via kottke)

Copenhagen experienced a temporary breakout of “extreme” winter weather during the last few days. During the snowstorm from Wednesday to Thursday, I’d estimate a total snowfall of around 20 cm. Now, although that’s a nice winter, It’s not really a lot of snow. What makes this cold period unusual to me though, is that – in spite of what this photo would suggest – there does not seem to be a single plow in all of Copenhagen. And instead of removing the snow, the Danes are combating the white force using salt, which works fine for a little snow and ice, but the result of throwing salt on this much snow is “white mud”.

Understandably, the heavy snowfall caused a lot of trouble for public transportation. Most S-Trains were canceled, and DSB allowed all passengers to travel free of charge on Thursday. Unfortunately, DSB seems to be as helpless as anyone else in coping with the white force. After 4 days, most of the lines are still completely canceled, and the remaining ones only run on a very irregular schedule.

Nevertheless, the last few days have offered very nice sceneries.

Some news from the personal front. Since last thursday, the first of February, I am in Copenhagen. I joined the Innovative Communications Group at the IT University of Copenhagen, and will be working on project on location based mobile services until the end of April. The ITU is a small and very young university focusing on reasearch and education in the field of information technology, especially on intersections to other fields, such as society, psychology, etc.

My master’s thesis is finally finished, and waiting to be accepted together with my graduation, which I hope will take place in March.

The EU and other international organizations are having a problem caused by spell checkers, which they have dubbed “the Cupertino effect”. Apparently, a lot if the dictionaries in various word processors used throughout these organizations misinterpret cooperation, spelled without a dash as a misspelling of Cupertino (as in 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA), rather than suggesting to replace it with co-operation. As a result, hundreds of defaced documents have been published by the EU and others.

What’s really interesting to me here is the fact that this does not seem to be an Apple specific problem. Although the built in spell checker of OS X does suggest Cupertino as firsthand alternative for cooperation when using the british english dictionary (which is a little stupidity that Apple could have avoided…), certain versions of MS Word sport the very same “feature”. Honestly, I don’t really see why Cupertino needs to be a default entry in a word processor’s dictionary anyways. Aachen, Dorsten or Oestrich-Winkel certainly aren’t. (via kottke)

If you do, here’s some bits and peaces.

Well, I’m in Aachen, as I have been pretty much since february. I moved in with my girlfriend Janina, and have been working on my Master’s Thesis since then. I’m still on it, although the end is not that far away anymore. I just have to edit the long rants and make it into something more compact and relevant. That should be completed within the next weeks. Then, there’s a programming exercise for a course that I have been dragging around for almost a year now (actually, It’s almost exactly a year now, since the course has just started again…) that still needs to be completed. After that I have to take the “thesis essay” exam and present my thesis and I should be all done and graduate. Then I guess I need to find a job.