Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

posted this note on and tagged it with Different Seasons Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Stephen King

I just finished Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and now I’m holding back tears and I need to write something down immediately.

I consider myself a fan of Stephen King. I want to say that came to King quite recently, all though when I looked up that post I realized that it’s eight years old this year so maybe ”recently” is a relative term. Anyway, for those eight years I’ve read quite a few of his novels and a couple of his short-stories and I pretty much love them all. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is probably my all time favorite, thus far.

Unsurprisingly I’ve watched the film version quite a few times and I love it. Part of the magic of listening to this novella now is in my memories of the movie. Even though it is narrated by the wonderful Frank Mueller, some times I hear Red’s words in Morgan Freeman’s voice. I also see Freeman and Tim Robbinson in my mind’s eye.

But mostly the magic i King’s writing, and his impeccable ability to have empathy for his characters, and to make us readers feel for them. Red is by no means a saint. In fact, he is indeed a murderer. If we disconnect him from the story, and from Freeman’s portrait of him, we all agree that he should be behind bars. But I don’t thing anybody can read the novella, or watch the movie, and believe that he is not worthy of redemption, and of hope.

This feels very topical today, when there is an election year here in Sweden and much of the past for years, both from the current government and from the opposition, has been about being
tougher on crime, on locking people up for longer times, on making it easier to lock people up. I honestly think every single politician should read this novella this year, to at least have some empathy.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Books Different Seasons Reading Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Stephen King

After finishing 2001 yesterday, I needed to start a new audiobook on my commute. I didn’t want to spend to much time choosing so I scrolled through the downloaded books on Prologue and ended up glancing on Stephen King’s Different Seasons, so I started Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

I’ve watched the film version multiple times, but I’ve never read the ”short story” before. It hooked me right away so I’m already an hour and a halt into it.

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posted this note on and tagged it with 2001 A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke Books Reading

Yesterday evening, after blogging about reading it, I finished 2001: A Space Odyssey and I really, really liked it. From what I’ve understood it has gotten some (maybe even a lot of) critique over the years for spelling things out in the ending part, rather than being artfully vague like Kubrick’s film. Personally, I prefer the spelled out version.

Keep in mind, it’s been at least ten years since the one and only time that I watched the movie so I’m working from old memories here. However, I do remember not ”getting it” in the end. Now, it’s perfectly fine to make a movie that not everybody ”gets”. It’s even okay to make a movie that you are not supposed to get.1 But 2001 seems like a movie that has a clear narrative, but then decides to make the ending abstract even though nothing up until that point has been like that.

By contrast, by spelling things out the book can focus on the ideas and present them in a clear way.

  1. David Lynch’s approach to movie-making comes to mind. Like Mullholland Drive. ↩
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posted this note on and tagged it with 2001 A Space Odyssey Books Reading The End of the World as We Know It

After bailing on Frank Herbert’s Dune I’ve dipped in and out of a few books. First, I gave ”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” a go. Maybe it’s the audiobook’s fault, maybe it’s mine but I just couldn’t stand it for more than fifteen minutes. So instead I jumped into The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, an anthology telling stories about the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. This was much more my cup of tea, but about half (maybe) into the third short-story I lost steam and I took a break. That break has lasted for a month or so now.

A week or so ago I started Arthus C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now this is absolutely my cup of tea! I watched Kubrick’s movie many years ago and it is a classic for a reason. That being said, I think I’m one of the weird people who like the novel better.1 The story is fascinating even though I know where it will all end up. It’s got just the right amount of details to keep the nerd inside me interesting, while not getting bogged down in endless regressions on orbital mechanics2. It also feels quite relevant again as our interest in space travel are increasing again, at the same time as the current fixation on AI.

The format of the audiobook also fits my life perfect right now. A single chapter is never longer than fifteen minutes, which happens to be the length of my commute to work. When they’re significantly shorter than that, two usually adds upp to no more than fifteen as well making it perfect for listening to while driving to work.

  1. Thereby making Kubrick movies and their novels a two for two in favor of the novels for me ↩
  2. I love your writing, Neal Stephenson, but if I’m not in the right mood your books can be a bit tedious. ↩
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The first hour long meeting today only needed twenty minutes, and resulted in us being able to cancel the second hour long meeting of the day, and and we could also cancel the two hour meeting scheduled for tomorrow.

The working day couldn’t possibly go any better than this. :)

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Progress update on the IKEA TRÅDFRI to Home Assistant migration

posted this note on and tagged it with Home Assistant Smart Home

The smart home migration project is going along fairly smoothly. I spent most of Saturday on it (today’s Tuesday) and then I’ve kept fixing smaller things along the way.

The physical challenge of resetting and re-pairing the LED drivers ended up being less challenging then I expected. The shelves were easier to move and the drivers less tucked away than I thought. Instead what proved to be the hardest part was getting the FLOALT ceiling panels to disconnect from the Ikea gateway and connect to Home Assistant. After many superstitious rituals I think I’ve landed on the problem and solution. The Ikea gateway was ”taking them back” as soon as I reste them, so once I disconnected the power to the gateway before resetting the panels, it worked fine.

So now all my lamps, outlets, LED drivers and buttons are moved to Home Assistant. I do however have a lot of work left to do in Home Assistant. Currently there are way too few scenes and automations, most of the buttons are not setup to do anything and too many daily operations1 requires us to use the phone app to turn on and off lights.

Primarily I need to look into the remotes, particularly the simpler on/off buttons. In one case it and a LED driver is paired together and the button controls the driver, even thought as far as I know I haven’t setup anything in Home Assistant. I assume there is some sort of way to tell a device that it should be controlled by a button and that on, off, dimm up, dimm down, etc. will just work.

  1. The only acceptable number here is 0. ↩
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Also, I found a simple video tutorial in Swedish1 to get started with TRÅDFRI stuff on Home Assistant.

  1. Well, skånska ↩
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Thing’s to keep in mind when migrating an IKEA TRÅDFRI setup to Home Assistant

posted this note on and tagged it with Home Assistant Smart Home

This is a continuation of my recent post about migrating my TRÅDFRI stuff to Home Assistant. As I wrote in that one, it’s important to note that you will be forced to factory reset all your bulbs, switches, dimmers, etc. meaning all your settings will be wiped. It is annoying to redo all settings and all labels in Home Assistant but it’s not in any way impossible.

What is worth noting, and potentially very complicated, is how you factory reset them.

TRÅDFRI short cut button

To reset this button, unscrew the back of it and push the button next to the Bluetooth pairing symbol four times. So far I’ve connected one such button to Home Assistant and it worked without any complications.

A photo of an Ikea shortcut button

Lightbulbs

The TRÅDFRI bulbs needs to be turned off and on five times in quick succession. So far, also not a problem for me.

LED Drivers

Here is where I’m running into trouble. To reset the LED Drivers I need to press a small button on the driver itself, using for instance a paper clip. It is by no means hard to do, but a couple of my drivers are wall-mounted behind cabinets, meaning I have a stimulating afternoon ahead of me.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Home Assistant Smart Home

Today, almost a year after I purchased a Home Assistant Green, I’m finally committing and moving all my Ikea TRÅDFRI smart home stuff from Ikea’s own gateway directly to Home Assistant using ZBT-2 as the Zigbee antenna/gateway. So far many things work as planned, others are more involving.

The main issue to be aware of if you are going this route is that you can not transfer settings from the IKEA Smart Home app to Home Assistant. The only way, as far as I know, to make this transition is to factory reset every single TRÅDFRI gizmo in your house and pair them with Home Assistant, re-labeling, resetting, making new scenes, etc. I was more or less counting on that so I have set the whole day aside for this.

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posted this note on and tagged it with From TV shows

Poster from "From" Earlier this week Linn and I finally managed to stay awake after the kids had been put to bed, and we watched the first episode of the latest season of From. It is by no means a great tv show in any sense of the word, but we really like it. The premise is interesting and it manages to keep things exciting over time.

Clearly it is not an expensive ”prestige tv show”, it’s more like low budget schlock, but that doesn’t bother me. Back in the day, tv was low budget and schlocky. The great shows of the 90s, like The X-files or Twin Peaks for instance, occasionally looked like crap, had meandering episodes, ”mythology” episodes that contradicted each other and so on and so forth. Yet they were entertaining.

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