Robocup 2013 – Trailer

Author: Aasemoon

18 Mar

Filed under: Electronics, Entertainment, Fun, Robotics, Technology

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tallow Candle”

Author: Aasemoon

16 Mar

Well this is interesting. Apparently, recently a never published unknown tale of Andersen’s has been discovered! The story is said to be one of his earliest works. Here you can read a translated version of the story. And here‘s the most informative article that I’ve so far found about it. I’ve read the story a few times already… for some reason I really love it.

Filed under: Authors, History, Literature

Google Reader Shutting Down… Grrrrrrr…..

Author: Aasemoon

15 Mar

Seriously Google, what in the bloody hell?

It’s not just that Google launches projects with half-baked concepts, gathers a small user group, and then discontinues the service hanging the users to dry. But it’s also that Google launches a good, useful, well developed service, throughout the years gathers a large number of users, and then out of the blue decides to shut the service down and make the lives of all these users complicated. =(

It wasn’t just that they recently discontinued Friend Connect that me and some of my friends were actually using. It wasn’t just that they disabled my G+ profile and therefore half of my Google services because they thought my name wasn’t “real”. Now they’re going to shut down Google reader, which is probably the single web service that I use more than any others [with exception of my stuff on my own domain]. I’m angry, I’m furious, I’m exasperated, and I’m not the only one.

I’ve exported my feeds, and I’ve found a couple of possible replacements. Feedly is the one I’ve switched to as of last night. The Chrome version looks good and the Android version looks great. And still, there’s so much they don’t do, compared to GReader.

Ask me again why I don’t like Google.

Meh.

</vexed rant>

Filed under: Google, Horrible, Internet, Technology, Web

Quantified Self Meetup, Zeo, and my own odd sleeping habits!

Author: Aasemoon

14 Mar

Due to my collection of genetic peculiarities, I’ve undergone quite a number of tests and studies throughout my life. However last night during the “Quantified Self” meetup, I

realized I’ve never actually looked into my sleeping patterns and stages. Given my truly weird lifelong sleeping habits, I think it might be interesting to do so.
For as long as I remember, I’ve slept an average of 4 hours per cycle. As a child perhaps I would stay in bed longer, but the 4 hours were all the sleep I needed, and it’s still the same. I can force myself into sleeping more, that actually can at times work, but it will result in something like what people usually experience when they don’t get enough sleep. There have also been times when I’ve gone for a number of days with much less than that, or no sleep what-so-ever. And then I sleep for a much longer time, and all is well. The little sleep that I get is quite enough, and I’ve basically never had a problem with being tired, sleepy or out of energy during the day. None of this has ever had a negative effect on my health, mental sharpness and so on. The few hours that I sleep are usually deep, unbroken, and apparently quite fulfilling! [Some years ago there was a study about this, titled “The Sleepless Elite“. Didn’t offer much in terms of answers though…]
The other odd bit is the way I dream. I’ve heard in many occasions, including last night at the QS event, about people attempting to induce lucid dreams. There’s been quite a good deal of speculations about the positive or negative results of doing that. The thing about me, is that I don’t have anything other than fully lucid dreams! I dream quite a lot, I tend to remember my dreams clearly, and in my 29 years, I have never had a dream that wasn’t lucid. I’ve been trying to figure this one out, talking to psychologists, neurologists, and you name it…. so far I’ve not come any closer to knowing why.
So with all this, it was very interesting for me to look at the sleep charts created by “Zeo Sleep Manager“. The device detects and records your REM, Light and Deep sleeping stages [among other features…]. This is something I’ve never tried, and I do wonder, with my little “situation”, how my chart would look like. Perhaps I should give it a try.
More on the QS meetup, it was also interesting to see Last.fm presented as a self tracking tool. I just realized that I’ve been doing this for quite a few years now… I listen to humongous amounts of music on daily basis, and I can’t really tell you what kind of music “I like”. Depending on my mood and state of mind, I could be listening to just about anything. What I’m listening to is a reflection of my psychological patterns, and for many years now, my close friends and I have been looking at my Last.fm charts to get an idea of “how I’ve been doing”! So yes, haha, Last.fm is in fact the perfect self tracking/study tool! =)
And that’s about all I have to say for now….

Filed under: Aasemoon, Events, Life, QS, Science, Technology

IoT Entrepreneur Journeys

Author: Aasemoon

13 Mar

Oh, huumm, I forgot to mention… the IoT meetup last week, titled “IoT Entrepreneur Journeys”, turned out to be pretty fantastic. I was originally not planning on going, so I have to thank the friend who convinced me to go. =) Great crowd, great discussions… much learned.

Out of the 5 companies who’s founders were present, [Evrythng, DecentLab, EnvEve, Koubachi, Yaler], I had actually never heard of Evrythng before. And I must say I found what they’re trying to do quite exciting. So, check out their website!

Filed under: Events, Technology, Zürich

The Dark Knight [Finally] Rises

Author: Aasemoon

11 Mar

About a year after all the buzz, and everyone [and most likely their dogs] having already watched “The Dark Knight Rises”, Saturday night I finally managed to watch the movie. =D I had simply not found the time before, especially given that I’ve [please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me….] never really been that big of a fan of the Batman movies. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always had fun with the movies and the comics and heck, even the old TV series. =) I’ve just not really been a _fan_. At least, not till now.

The recent Batman movies [Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale] have been quite different from the older versions. There’s now actually a plot, a real story, some fantastic character development. And now, with this latest movie, I’m actually a fan! For the first time in my life I’ve actually watched a Batman movie that I’ve really truly enjoyed enough to even feel like watching more than once. =D

Of course it also appears [at least so far] that this is going to be the last Nolan/Bale Batman movie, which is quite a shame. This has definitely been the best version of Batman so far, and I really would have liked to see more of it….

Filed under: Comics, Entertainment, Motion Picture, Movies, Sci-Fi

History of Functional Programming Languages

Author: Aasemoon

8 Mar

Last week, as mentioned before, I attended a lecture titled “History of Functional

Programming Languages”, which was organized by the “Zurich F# Users” group. For the few folks who were asking me about it, here you can find the PDF version of the lecture slides. It was a pretty cool lecture, so enjoy! 😉

Filed under: Coding, Computer Science, Events, F#, Functional Programming, Lectures, Programming

2nd Swiss OpenStack UG meeting

Author: Aasemoon

21 Feb

On Tuesday evening I attended the 2nd OpenStack user group meeting at the Switch building in Zürich. Out of the numerous presentations, the most interesting [well, the most relevant you could perhaps say…] to me were the “Heat” presentation, and the “CloudFoundry on OpenStack” one. If anyone here is interested in the topic[s] you can check out the presentation slides here. You can also view the video recordings of all the talks here.

Oh, yes, and there’s of course pictures. And below there’s a couple of pictures with me in them looking all sorts of dazed.

P.S.: YES, the pizza was great! [Thanks for the reminder! =P]

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Computer Science, Events, Programming, Technology, Zürich

How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

Author: Aasemoon

16 Feb

I just finished reading “How We Are Hungry” by Dave Eggers. The book is a collection of

short stories, most of which are more like images of a situation than actual stories. I’ve read books in this style before and I’ve not always been a fan of them, but I really enjoyed reading this one. The very last story, “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned”, which is told by a dog, is probably my favourite. =)

Filed under: Authors, Books, Literature, Reading