Today I am starting my post-semester activities. Not that all grading is finished yet, and all administrative meetings are over for a while, but we had the last part of the official teaching program yesterday, so now I at least feel that the university summer has started. This means that I will (finally) start focusing more on doing research again, and I have several papers that I will try to finish over the coming months. ...
NRK (the Norwegian national broadcaster) has decided to release a HD recording of the entire “Bergensbanen” trip they broadcast last month: Friday November 27th over 1,2 million Norwegians watched parts of “Bergensbanen” on NRK2. The longest documentary ever? At least the longest we have made, almost 7 1/2 hours, showing every minute of the scenic train ride between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, crossing the mountains to the capital of Oslo. ...
Linux Mint has become my favourite Linux distribution as of lately. It is built on Ubuntu but with the added benefit of native installation of lots of extra drivers, audio/video codecs, and small programs that make life a lot easier. This is particularly important as Linux is not my main platform, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort to make everything work when I install a new system. ...
Feeling that DevonThink was a bit too CPU-heavy and too cumbersome to work with, I have started using Journler for managing snippets of information that I don’t really know where I would otherwise have put. After a few weeks of testing I feel that it solves a lot of the problems I have experienced with other PIM systems. The best thing about Journler is the calendar. Since all entries are tagged with date and time, it is possible to quickly and easily write down notes, create a few links, add a couple of images, and everything will be kept together organised according to the creation date. Of course it is possible to add categories and (multiple) tags, but the calendar view is really what I like the most.
I bought a 1TB Western Digital hard drive the other day, and it came preformatted with FAT32. Since I will only be using this on OS X machines, I wanted to reformat it with HFS instead, but had problems doing this with Disk Utility. Then I came across a thread suggesting to change the partition type to GUID, and everything worked fine. This can be done in Disk Utility as the screenshot below show. ...
Earlier today I went to the release seminar of a new book on creativity and idea development called Slagkraft - Håndbok i idéutvikling by Erik Lerdahl. In his introduction, Erik Lerdahl stressed the importance of creativity not being something that happens by random, but rather that it is a “muscle” that can be trained. Nice metaphor. What I found most interesting during the seminar was the talk by Ragnar Johansen, the marketing director from Stabburet, a Norwegian food producer. His approach to creativity and design, he told, was very much focused on the business value. His take on the chain from idea to product was like this: ...
I need to be better at using the delete-button. Computers have made it so easy to write and save lots of text, probably too easy. Since there are no limits, I tend to just shuffle things around the documents (I have one document per chapter) making up my dissertation draft. Throughout the last years, I have been collecting all these small snippets of comments, thoughts and quotes, and I have started to think that now is the time to start using that delete-button rather than just keep moving things around. It is hard, though, as so many things are interesting, but not everything is relevant.
I have been looking for a lightweight spreadsheet software, as Excel isn’t in universal yet and is nearly as slow as NeoOffice to start up. Often, I only need some basic spreadsheet functionality like summing a bunch of numbers, etc. and then it isn’t worth the effort opening one of the mastodont programs. So I have been looking for something similar to TextEdit in the spreadsheet world. Strangely enough, the only program I have found so far is BC Spreadsheet. It is freeware, which is great of course, and does the basics. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it saves to its own format, and it can only eport csv-files. It would have been nice if it could have been saving to an open office (or even xls) file. ...
I spent my flight to Montreal (which became much longer than I expected when I was rescheduled through Chicago) reading Trond Lossius’ report for the Fellowship in the arts program. He addresses a number of interesting topics: Commenting on the necessity for carrying out research for instead of on art, he discusses the concept of “art as code”: It is not only a question of developing tools. [..] Programming code becomes a meta-medium, and creating the program is creating the art work. ...
Just learned that it is possible to get auto-completion with the Esc and F5 Keys in all Cocoa applications. Just start typing, hit the button and you will get a list of matches. {width=“193” height=“426”}