Here is a mixtape list for running 30 minutes that includes a 5:43 warmup and 7:09 cooldown and 30 min of actual running. I originally had a James Last song live here but it did not fit well with the audience applause and stuff so it has been replaced.
Most of these songs have a really high bpm to get your tempo and step cadence up to close of 180 steps a minute but they vary a little which your running also should.
WARMUP: Clint Eastwood – Gorillaz
RUN: Born to Boogie – Hank Williams Jr.
RUN: Vaterland – Melotron
RUN: Up Tempo – Leo Kottke
RUN: Rocka På – Markoolio
RUN: Bloodshot Eyes – Pat Benatar
RUN: Breakthru – Queen
RUN: Shame, Shame, Shame – Aerosmith
RUN: Lakeside Drive – Nitzer Ebb
COOLDOWN: Jamo – Cooldown Mix – Skyway
Warmup: 5:43, running 30:00, cooldown 7:09, total 42.9 minutes
And of course, here is the spotify link. Load your mobile spotify client up, select to use offline for the playlist and then keep running! Off-line mode is great since it does not drain your battery as fast and you can keep running even if your 3G coverages is not so good where you are running.
Running taken up again. Two times now on a treadmill at work and that’s actually not bad at all. I thought I would hate it dearly but it does work actually.
Bonus is that the machine can read my pulse belt so it means I can do really good pulse training without effort, it is really easy to regulate speed and incline on the machine whilst running so you can keep the pulse in the zone all the time.
Doing round of about 3.5 km in 30 mins at the moment, will set out to increase over time up to 5 km and my goal is still to run ”Midnattsloppet” in August which is a 10 km run.
A summary of each week’s training will be posted. I am aiming for three runs with one day of rest between them and then two days of rest in the weekend. Right now the runs will be the same all three but I will later divide them into shorter runs with intervals for speed, longer runs with slow tempo for distance and recovery runs.
Electronic Body Music groups: The Cassandra Complex, Die Krupps, Melotron, A Split Second, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, à;GRUMH, Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy, Laibach, Cat Rapes Dog, DAF, Einstürzende Neubauten, Depeche Mode…
These are for me the most prominent EBM bands I was listening to in high-school and later and still comes back to now and then. Now thanks to spotify I can share a link with Ichimusais Essential EBM where you can listen to some of these ground breaking bands greatest…
Here is your essential guide to Electronic Body Music.
During tuesday night we took a test train out from Work to check the radio communications equipment in the tunnels of the blue line on the Stockholm metro. During these tests we found at one of the turning points these incredible stalagmites formed by water frozen to ice. This water drips from the ceiling of the tunnel and forms incredible shapes.
Today I believe they started melting again because the temperature has gone from sub-zero to just above now and just walking down the street is really a perilous business these days…
The photos below are not taken with my ordinary camera but with my work cam which is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3:
Taken in Saltsjöbaden, Stockholm, Sweden using Nikon D70s and Nikkor AF 50/1.8D. Post processed in Adobe Lightroom.
One of the greatest things with a SLR type camera is that it is possible to control the focus in the picture. This area is known as the DOF or the Depth-of-Field, or the Depth of Focus. This the space in a picture where things are in focus. In front of the DOF is the near out of focus field and beyond is the far out of focus field. There are certain things that controls this field and this article will describe them and how you can use them to improve your pictures. Without going into the actual optics, I will try to explain how to achieve the desired DOF and what it can be used for.
What affects DOF?
The DOF is actually the part of an image that is in focus. Any lens have a certain volume where things are percieved to be in focus and this volume or field of focus is referred to as the DOF. There are several factors that influences this, one of the most important factors is the aperture setting of the camera.
The aperture
The aperture controls how much light that falls into the camera at a given moment, it is a diaphragm in most cameras it is located inside the lens or just behind it, in the SLR type cameras it is located in the detacheable lens that is part of a camera system.
The aperture can generally be set in several steps. Earlier lenses permitted a limited number of steps but modern lenses and digital cameras permits the aperture almost always to be set in steps of 1/3 of a EV. The aperture is expressed as a ratio between the focal length and the diameter of the diaphragm and therefore it is written as f / 5.6 for example.
Cheaper lenses have a more narrow range of apertures than more expensive lenses, this means you can ”open up” the aperture more on the expensive end, this is sometimes called ”fast” lens (because they give shorter shutter times for the same scene during same conditions as a less expensive lens does) or more ”sensitive”.
If you are using a good lens and you are setting it to the lowest f-stop permitted then you will have the most narrow DOF that this lens can produce. This is a start and a setting you might want to use during low light conditions but remember that your shallow DOF can make it difficult to get the full scene in sharp focus.
The focal length
The focal length plays together with the aperture of course as we have already talked about. The focal length is what you ”zoom” to when you zoom, or the fixed focal lenght of your prime lens. The smaller the focal length, the wider the field of view and the deeper the DOF becomes.
The greater the focal length, the more you ”zoom in” the shallower the DOF becomes.
The focus point
The focus point is the last part of our equation. The closer to you the focus point lies the shallower the DOF is. The further away you focus the deeper the DOF will become.
It is all about rations between these three, the aperture, the focal length and the distance of the focus point. If you want to create a shallow DOF you should open the aperture, zoom is as much as possible, go close as much as possible and then focus closely.
Remember also that most of your DOF is behind the point of focus, when you focus on somethin the DOF arranges so that you have 1/3 of the range in front of your focal point and 2/3 behind it. Make use of this!
Portraits
This is used in portrait photography to create a sense of depth in the image. Typically you see the model in sharp focus and the background cast in blurriness, this is due to using the DOF properly.
Portrait optics are usually in the range of 90-135 mm focal range and can often be used with an aperture up to f / 2,8 which allows the photographer good control over the DOF and to photograph in the low light of dawn and sunset.
Hyperfocal charts
Finally
These are the things that affects your DOF:
Focal length
Aperture setting f / x
Distance to focus point
When you focus on something the DOF extends 2/3 beyond that point and 1/3 in front of it.
This is a summary on my favourite applications on the Android platform. If you have an android phone and wish to test one of the applications, check that you have the ”Barcode Scanner” application installed first, then you can use this application on the QR Codes for each section to automatically get the link to that software in Android Market. Once the code is scanned use ”Open in browser” function.
I am so bad at the running and exercise things right now that I ought to be ashamed of myself, or at least a little embarrassed.
I will go down to the gym at work on monday and see if there is some way to start jogging again. Outdoors is just too slippery right now although the cold is nit si much a problem for me.
Many people are considering SSD (Solid State Drive) in their laptops. There are of course many reasons for this, the SSD is silent and less heat generating, in many cases less power consuming and above all else, not susceptible to shock or sudden movements of the laptop.
Field engineers love SSD it has extended battery time, made laptops that are quickly closed and shoved in a bag much less prone to overheating and they can be used in harsh electro-magnetic evironments such as in the vincinity of radio trasmitters without risking that the hard disk loses data.
The problem with XP and SSD is that most drives made with this technology requires an erase operation on an entire block before it can be written back to the drive. This means that things like disk caching and so on works different from with standard disk drives and needs to be tweaked in order to get maximum performance out of it.
Most SSD manufacturers also guarantees only 10 000 writes to a cell and although most SSD uses techniques such as wear leveling where the cells are written to in a fashion to spread the wear on them over the whole disk eventually they will start to fail. An SSD is a rather expensive item still so people would like to maximise the life spand of their drive. Hence the following tweaks.
Select the drive for which you wish to administer the caching policy (your SSD)
Select Properties
Click on the Policies tab
Look for the option ”Enable write caching on the disk” and make sure it is selected
Look for a second option ”Enable advanced performance” and select it.
This option favors throughput/speed at the potential risk of data corruption. Since this is to protect removable drives from suffering data corruption if they are removed while a write operation is in progress — you may safely change this option on your internal SSD.
This trick can also be used to increase performance about 10-fold on USB-attached disks, but then you should be very careful when removing them from your system, use the device manager to disconnect before you remove them.
Other tweaks
Hibernation
Turning off hibernation can mean a better performance and longer life for the SSD because then Windows will not have to update the page file constantly in anticipation of a hibernation order.
Go to the control panel
Open the Power Options
Select the Hibernate tab
Uncheck Enable Hibernation box to disable
Click Ok
Reboot your system and the hibernation option is gone (but you can still use sleep mode of course which is brilliant in combination with SSD.
