Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

A video of me playing Zooropa, using a Mooger Fooger Low Pass Filter, Line6 Echo Park delay and a Boss ME50

posted this on and tagged it with Guitar FX U2 Video

So I’ve made a YouTube video. I’ve been pondering the idea of making a video for a while now, mostly because I like to try out various ways of expressing myself online. (Which is the reason why I also occasionally do a microcast.) I’ve made a few videos for work that I’ve put up on YouTube but I wanted to make something that wasn’t for work, something where I speak into the camera vlog style for at least a part of the video.

So the thought of making a video has been spinning around in my head and little over a week ago I finally stumbled upon something to make it about. Here’s what I wrote in the description on YouTube:

An attempt to make a sound similar to what the Edge has on Zooropa, using a Fender Telecaster, Mooger Fooger MF-101 Low Pass Filter, Line6 Echo Park, Boss ME50 and a ZVex Nano Head amp.

A few weeks back I watched a video from Pro Guitar Shop where Andy played Zooropa using a ZVex Super Seek Wah and two delays and I got really fascinated by it. It made me realize how simple the actual playing in this song is and made me think about making my own version. Then the other day I recalled that we have a bunch of Mooger Fooger pedals at work and I started to wonder whether the Low Pass Filter with an envelope could be used as the auto-wah effect.

The answer, in my opinon, is yes and this is the video I made using the Mooger Fooger and two delay pedals from my ”collection”.

Maybe this is the only video I’ll make, maybe it’s the first of many. Right now I don’t know but I do know it felt good to hit publish on this, even though I have a lot of complaints to myself about the technical quality of the video, but I’ll save that for another day.

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Zelda – Twilight Princess

posted this on and tagged it with Nintendo Twilight Princess Wii Zelda

Last week I started playing Zelda – Twilight Princess. I’ve had the game for quite a while, over two years I think, but haven’t really felt like I had the time to get deep into it until now. When I started playing last week I saw that the only save file I’ve used was last modified on New Year’s Eve 2014, so it’s been a while. :)

I really didn’t have much idea about what the game would be, other than that it was a Zelda game. The playing I had done two years ago had taught me how to move around using the Wii controller and given me a taste of the look of the game but nothing more. When I got further and further into it during the weekend I got really hooked. It was a much darker game then I expected, more like Majora’s Mask then any other Zelda game I’ve played.

There’s a lingering feeling of despair all over the world and the ”twilight realm” that’s spreading across the world is really scary.

That being said, if you haven’t played this game and think that you might do it one day, then do it! Stop reading right now. The less you know about the game the better.

Now that the ”spoiler horn” have been officially fired, let’s talk som specifics. As the game started I really thought that it would be similar to the beginnings of Ocarina of Time. I was told that I was going to go to Hyrule Castle and possible see the princess. The sun was shining and things seemed fine. Yes, a kid got missing and I had to rescue it but the monsters I had to fight to do that were not that bad and I felt like I had things under control. The I got pulled into the Twilight Realm and man is it creepy.

I had heard before that Link could morph into a wolf in this game, so I wasn’t that surprised when I first transformed but I had not expected the alternate world of twilight that I was supposed to navigate. Nor had I known that I didn’t control the metamorphose myself.

And the monsters… The monsters of the twilight actually freaked me out. Not just in a ”they are hard to beat” kind of way but in a, holy shit this is nightmare inducing kind of way. Some of them reminded me of the demogorgon from Stranger Things.

Thing is/was a bit rambly but I just wanted to jot down how much I love this game now, as I’m about eight hours into it. I feel an urge to keep playing, even more so than usual with Zelda games. Right now I’m more fueled by the need to save the children of my village then to save the world of something similar.

Last night, right before I stopped playing, I found the wooden sword that one of the kids had used. It was stuck in the ground in a twilight covered part of Hyrule and at that point I really didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep playing all night long but that just isn’t feasible right now.

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Regarding Apple’s suspension of Kapeli/Dash and the discussions of the matter on ATP and Core Intuition

posted this on and tagged it with Apple Kapeli

On this weeks Accidental Tech Podcast (191: The Failure Mode of a Train), Casey, John and Marco talked about the controversy around Apple closing the App Store account of developer Kapeli. (I’ve mostly been out of the loop on this thing so most of my knowledge of it comes from said ATP episode.)

The discussion was informative but part of it left me feeling uneasy. My problem was that it seamed like all three hosts thought it was perfectly reasonable for Apple to be able to dictate what the developer expressed in public, if he wanted a chance to get his account back.

This seems so wrong to me. Either the developer broke the rules is such a way that it way right to close his account and that’s that, or he did not break the rules in such a way and therefore his account should be reinstated regardless of what he says or does in public.

Having an eight-hundred pound gorilla like Apple dictate what its developers should write on their blogs if they are ever in a controversy with them seems so wrong, regardless of whether what Apple wanted this particular developer was 100% true, 100% false or anything in-between. The App Store rules system is already iffy enough, should we also accept that Apple can dictate our complaints in public?

I was glad to hear the Manton Reece seems to agree with me as he argues similarly on this weeks Core Intuition (Episode 254: It Blew Up In This Case). (Overcast link with timestamp.

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The endless frustrations of using Siri

posted this on

There’s a dearth in my podcast cue at the moment, so I’ve been relistening to some old podcasts. Currently I’m listening to Hypercritical #38: ”Virtually Spotless” and early on (Overcast link with timestamp) John and Dan talks about Siri which I assume had just been released when this episode was recorded.

Anyway, it’s interesting to listen to John’s concerns with a few years hindsight and realize that so many of his concerns are still valid. Siri can frustrate to no end. Even when ”she” correctly translates what I say into text the parsing fails me time and time again.

Here’s a recent example. My fiancé and me recently switched our grocery shopping list to a shared iCloud Reminders list. One of the supposed perks was that it would enable us to use Siri to add stuff to the list. The list in question is called ”Shopping list”.1

Me: ”Add bread to the shopping list.”
Siri: ”There doesn’t seem to be a list called the shopping list.”
Me: Frustratedly inputs the item manually instead.

After a few days or maybe a week or something, I had an idea:

Me: ”Add bread to shopping list.”
Siri: ”I’ve added it.”

Tried it a few more times and could confirm that shopping list is a known list and therefore work, however the shopping list does not work. How is such a basic thing not working?

And don’t get me started on how bad the iPhone is at picking up voice from any kind of distance other than right next to it.

My point is this, how can Siri still be this dumb and often so useless when it seems like Amazon’s Alexa is much more reliable to use? Apple has had years to fix this now but progress is so slow.

  1. Well, technically it’s called ”Handlingslista” which is the Swedish translation of Shopping list, and yes Siri ”works” in Swedish as well. ↩
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kUTTypeImage is defined in MobileCoreServices.framework

posted this on and tagged it with Narrating my work Objective-C

This gets me every time I try to create a sharing extension for iOS. I follow along with the WWDC session ”Creating Extensions for iOS and OS X, Part 1” from 2014 and when I encounter this line, I get an error:

The problem is that kUTTypeImage is unknown to Xcode. The solution is to import MobileCoreServices.framework.

(For more on this, check out this StackOverflow thread.

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Förskola

posted this on and tagged it with Iris Pappaledig

Idag är första dagen som jag lämnade av Iris på förskolan. Vi har varit där under några dagar i förra veckan också men även när hon var själv med de andra barnen och pedagogerna så var jag kvar i huset, så det här var något nytt.

Iris verkade inte tycka att det var någon stor grej. Hon kunde nog inte bli av med mig fort nog. :)

Jag har så smått börjat se fram emot att hon ska börja förskola eftersom jag vet att hon älskar att ha många barn och vuxna runt sig, så jag tror att hon kommer trivas bra, och för att det faktiskt vore skönt att låta någon annan få trilskas med henne ibland. Trots det så hade jag en stor klump i magen när jag gick ut genom dörren utan att ha henne i släptåg. Klumpen sitter delvis i nu när jag skriver, så det är väldigt dubbla känslor.

Men jag ska hämta henne redan klockan elva idag, så det går nog bra.

”Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning…”

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Liking stuff via the blog

posted this on and tagged it with Yak-shaving

I watch, read and consume a lot of stuff on the web. Recently I’ve taken a particular interest in YouTube, and I see a lot of cool, watch-worthy stuff there.

Sometimes when I see something awesome I click the thumbs up in YouTube, sometimes I don’t. Regardless, I also want to post some of the stuff that I like to the blog.

So far I’ve lacked a good way to do that. Part of what I lack is a good workflow to do it, one that makes it as low friction as possible but the main part is that I don’t know how to best display it on the blog. It would probably make sense to create a custom post type for ”likes” or ”interactions” or something similar, but I can’t help feeling like that is yak-shaving.

Therefor I think I should just get on with it. I’ll publish microblog posts with the text ”I liked (♥️) this:” and then a link (complete with u-like-of-microformat) to the video. I’ll also tag the posts with the like tag.

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Do you know of a good way to rip Blu-rays with subtitles intact?

posted this note on and tagged it with Blu-rays Dealing with home media

I’m trying to rip the video (and audio) from Blu-rays1 into an iTunes and AppleTV friendly format, while preserving subtitles and, this is key, not burning them in. I’ll write a detailed post on my needs, findings and workflow soon but right now I just want to throw the ball out to you.

I’m currently using a mixture of MakeMKV, Don Melton’s video transcode scripts, Subler and iDentify 2. The workflow I’m currently using requires me to add external .srt-files for subtitles, since I don’t want to burn them into the video.

Do you, dear reader, have any experience with this? Any suggestions for me? Please get in touch! (E-mail: henrik [@] henrikcarlsson [dot] se, @synvila on twitter or just send a webmention to this post.)

  1. Off course I’m only talking about Blu-ray discs that I’ve gotten written consent from all the rights-holders to do this. ↩
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Replies and comments

Quick thoughts on the Nintendo NX

posted this on and tagged it with Nintendo Nintendo NX

A handheld console that can be connected to a TV seems like the right way to go, at least in my opinion. As previously discussion on this blog I love my 3DS but there are countless times that I’ve wished that it supported AirPlay or something similar that allowed me to put the video up on my TV.

Nintendo has been playing the game its own way, totally detached from the other console manufacturers spec race, for a long time. Maybe this is the way for them to go.

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How I manage what goes into my news rivers

posted this on and tagged it with River of News WordPress

Almost a year ago I wrote about WordPress’ Link Manager. It’s an old feature of WP that seems to get very little use these days. But it is a way to collect links to websites and, this is the important part, their corresponding RSS/Atom feeds, and get an OPML file os the websites in question.

Collected links can be put in categories and every category has its own OPML. You can find the OPML for all my links here.

OPML is one of the file formats that can feed a river in River 5. As far as I know the OPML that River 5 reads needs to be in the lists folder in your River 5 installation, so at first glance that seems to rule out using WordPress’ OPML feature.

The not so secret sauce that makes it work is the ”include” node in OPML. In my lists folder I have and OPML file for each and every river I want River 5 to generate. Each of those files contain a single <outline> node that links to the corresponding category among my WP links.

For example, my ”Everything feed”:

This tells River 5 to include everything it finds at the URL http://blog.henrikcarlsson.se/wp-links-opml.php which, as I just mentioned, is the full list of links that I collect in my sites link manager.

So whenever I want to add or remove a link (site/blog/etc) I just use WordPress’ link manager. That makes it very simple to add and remove stuff and therefore I’m more likely to try to add new sites to the mix and see if they add to my satisfaction or not.

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