On my way home from work I pass a curious place. It is a double bridge with the upper part for cars and pedestrians and then there is the underneath level for the metro underground trains. Underneath this bridge there is a really shoddy place in otherwise very nice and posh quarters.
Last saturday we set out about 11 hobby photographers to the old Public Records building here in Stockholm. It was my Flickr aquaintance Björn Sahlström who had been able to get access to the building and we entered it with camers, tripods, bags of lenses and other gear to have a good time. The building is fairly large so we quickly spread out and did not have to step on each other’s toes at all really.
Strolling through the empty halls that used to hold all the stat public records and books was a strange feeling, I had never been there, some of the others had been on a guided tour and quickly went to photograph what they knew to be well worth taking a look at.
This building is called ”Riksarkivet” in Swedish and was built around 1880 with the intention of being able to withstand a fire. From the beginning the archive was only open during the light hours of the day because they did not want open flames or even electricity inside. Therefore it has huge windows to let enough light in for people to be able to work there with reasearch or book keeping tasks of various kinds.
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So today was the day after three days of studying the TRI regs (trafiksäkerhetsinstruktion) and two tunnel walks track side in the Stockholm Metro with the last one guiding a bunch of people watching our for their security and acting as a lookout for oncoming trains I officially passed the category 16 examination.
I missed one point on the examination and got only 49/50 and that was a silly silly mistake because I rushed the question a bit. Darn.
I am now officially allowed to guide people track side, feels pretty good :)
Photo Walk Stockholm this is the second annual Scott Kelby Photo Walk arranged in Stockholm. Make sure you mark the date 18 July off in your calendar and then join in by clicking the link above.
Välkommen till den andra årliga Scott Kelby Photo Walk (kamerapromenad) här i stockholm. Om du har lust att vara med så kom med den 18 juli. Läs mer på länken ovan!
Riksdagens borgerliga majoritet har beslutat att skjuta upp starten för FRA:s kabelsignalspaning med 2 månader till den 1:a december i år. Skälet anges vara att regeringens arbete med att göra kompletteringar till signalspaningslagen för att förbättra rättssäkerheten har dragit ut på tiden.
Från den första december måste dock teleoperatörerna föra över all trafik till särskilda knutpunkter där den kan bearbetas statistiskt och lagras för efteranalys.
För kommunikation som man inte önskar alla skall kunna läsa på vägen rekommenderas att titta på programpaketet gpg4win som gör det möjligt att kryptera all kommunikation över email med mera. Stark kryptografi är ett mycket användbart medel för att skydda den personliga integriteten och ju fler som bestämmer sig för att börja använda det rutinmässigt desto mindre konstigt och svårare blir det att utföra statistisk analys för de som skall övervaka oss.
Passa på innan det beslutas om att det skall bli olagligt att använda kryptering för personligt bruk!
Mina nycklar hittar du här.
Detta är en manuellt tillverkad HDR-bild. HDR betyder ”high dynamic range” och gör att man kan komprimera en bilds tonomfång på ett sätt så att man både kan exponera för mörka och ljusa partier samtidigt. I detta fall har jag tagit två stycken bilder, en som är korrekt exponerad för det man ser genom vindrutan och en bild exponerad för manöverpanelen på tåget. Sedan har jag lagt dessa bilder som två olika lager i Photoshop, lagt på en lagermask och sedan ”målat fram” bilden i vindrutan över den andra exponeringen. Till sist har jag plattat till bilden, sparat den som TIFF och konverterat en kopia till JPEG.
Bilden är tagen under en radiosystemstestning när vi åkte pendeltåg mellan Södertälje och Gnesta.
This is a manually made HDR by the way. HDR means ”high dynamic range” and is a technique to compress the tonal range from several pictures so that you can expose for dark and light parts at the same time. Two exposures necessary, one with the proper settings to expose the outdoors properly and one to expose the instrumentation. Then I put them together in Photoshop, applied a layer mask and then painted through the instrument panel, flattened the image, saved as a TIFF and exported as a JPEG.
This picture was taken when we were doing radio system test drives last tuesday and we had great fun in the older trains (which I prefer, the X1/X6 and X10 rather than the new X60).
Free Programming Books covers most of the today programming languages and many you did never take a look at (or need) from the past. All books are ebooks free for download and may be an assistance to you if you are learning a new language or just want to brush up your knowledge for some reason.
There are 338 books in this collection so you will have plenty to read for a while now!
My first record that I spend my hard-saved money on as a boy was of Jean-Michel Jarre and the other he released followed quickly and these were my first records that I played to the death on my parents stero. I re-invested in his music when they came out on CD and was also the reason for me to get a CD player (to transfer to cassette so I could listen in my Walkman) and therefore when I heard he was doing his second oxygene tour here in Stockholm I of course got tickets for it.
The entrance was grand, through a curtain of laser light but from there the concert was a bit flat. People in the audience was really more listeners than participants. The light show was just outright brilliant and well orchestrated and the sound was great in the old ice-hockey rink of Hovet near the Globe (where he played the last time but the sound was not very good there) and that saved the concert.
He did most of his well known routine and then thanked the audience and went of the stage. People then called him back and this is when things started to get really interesting, this is where the concert really takes off. People are standing, shouting, whistling clapping their hands and Jarre makes a splendid performance. The extra numbers are long, well though out and he gets called in a second time to do even more of that and practically this is the real concert and it was topped by a great finale.
The concert then ended just as he had entered – drawing back through a curtain of brilliant laser light and afterwards I felt that this was a really good concert even thugh the first part was a bit stiff and flat the extras recovered well.
Go see it.
I princip innebär förslaget att alla telekomoperatörer måste spara uppgifter om vem som gjort vad och kommunicerat med vem i minst 6 månaders tid. Efter domen mot Pirate Bay har flera operatörer tagit många marknadsandelar genom att meddela att man inte lagrar uppgifter längre än absolut nödvändigt för att kunna sköta sin egen verksamhet.
Det blir nu slut med det. Regeringen antog i går en lagrådsremiss som innebär att telekomföretagen i enlighet med det europeiska datalagringsdirektivet måste spara sådana uppgifter i minst sex månader. Det har höjts röster mot den radering av uppgifter som vissa telekombolag utfört – inte mist från polisen som är rädd för att de skall bli utan möjlighet att använda uppgifterna i brottsbekämpningssyfte.
Det föreslås i lagrådsremissen att även misslyckade uppringningar och obsesvarade samtal skall lagras, på samma sätt skall även positionen för en mobiltelefon under hela samtalet, inte bara där det påbörjades, lagras. Denna lagrådsremiss är ett arbete som påbörjades av Thomas Bodström (S) inom EU för flera år sedan och har nu kommit i kapp oss, lagom till andra nya lagar som FRA-lagen, IPRED, domen mot The Pirate Bay-folket och är en kugge i en rad åtgärder som görs för att stärka inte minst skivbolagens ställning på marknaden.
Efter lagrådsremissen kommer en proposition som väntas antas i juni månad. Förmodligen blir lagen tvingande till hösten.
Who are the real victims of the recent Influenza A/H1N1, also known as Swine Flu, scare from the media? Of all the cases of people who unfortunately got infected there were 26 deaths and still it got a whooping rating of 5 out of 6 on the WHO pandemic scale, the highest rating anything ever has got on the scale since its start in 2005 (just after the last scare the bird flu).
It is clear that this scale is not based on the actual lethality or how easy people are infected, a normal flu that we have yearly kills somewhere around 500 000 people (mostly those already sick or at a avery young or very advanced age) world wide and infects millions and it never get more than a ”yeah whateva” from the WHO pandemic scale – the . Where is the sense for proportions here?
I even had several people sending emails, almost daily about buying stocks of gloves, breathing masks, handwash alcohol, sterilization fluids and other such good to have if the Great Pandemic should strike us down.
Let’s take a look at what actually happened. The three top nations had the following statistics:
Mexico: 1 112 cases, 42 deaths
USA: 653 cases, 1 death
Canada: 165 cases, 0 deaths.
Out of a total of 1 930 confirmed cases in three countries there were 43 deaths.
The name itself provoked some responses, Egypt took the chance to rid the country of some 250 000 pigs because of it. Other nations had similar responses, some of the more extreme left-wing people in in Europe started to demand new vaccine factories being built.
For this people where hammered in the media with article after article about how to isolate themselves from the greater society and avoid the pig plague by avoiding contact with other people. The economical cost of the scare when people starts hamstering medicine and canned food is outrageous. In Australia people where told by local goverment no less to stock up for at least two weeks worth of food, for their personal survival.
Whole communities in the US shut down schools, work places and public office buildings for no other reason than fear based in the drummed up scare tactics of the public media conglomerates. Even when the more scientifically sound organisations finally came out and tried to calm people down they did not get by far the same headlines as the stories designed to scare people got.
Cuba closed all air traffic with Mexico, other countries followed suit leaving people there on holiday stranded for fear of a pandemy that already showed all signs of being low-risk.
I find this to be total madness.
