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and tagged it with Drinks and cocktails snapshots 
Happy National Martini Day! 🍸
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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and tagged it with Drinks and cocktails snapshots Henrik Carlsson posted this
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and tagged it with Drinks and cocktails snapshots Happy National Martini Day! 🍸
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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Coronaförnekare på lista – regionrådet: ”Oj” — FaluKuriren
Dalarnas sjukvårdsparti släpper alltså in personer på sin regionslista utan att ens googla personen för att se vad hen står och argumenterar för. Det är så beklämmande slappt.
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and tagged it with Midnight Swim Sundborn Tonight (midnight between the 31st of July and 1st of August) was the ”Midnight Swim” here in Sundborn, where a bunch of swimmers swim from the damm next to Carl Larsson Gården upstream to the church and then back downstream again. It seems to be an annual thing and I heard about it last year but was too tired to check it out, something I regretted the day after when I saw photos of it and read about it in the paper.
So this year I decided to go regardless of whether I was tired or not and I’m so glad I did. It was really cool to see the lit up buoys (the right word?) that the swimmer dragged with them in the dark, and the speed they managed when they headed back downstream was simply amazing.
Here’s some photos:
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and tagged it with Podcasts Were podcasts that are ostensibly about something always this rambling, or has my tolerance gone down?
@MrHenko Not just you, I got rid of many podcasts I used to enjoy but no longer did for that same reason. Made room for some excellent new ones, so win-win.
@MrHenko At @HemisphericViews we work hard to keep things tight at around 45 minutes per episode, and when we go over there’s usually a good reason. Respect the listener’s time!
@canion @mrhenko 💯 this, one of so many reasons I love this podcast!
@pimoore @MrHenko Thank you! That is great to hear. It’s rewarding to know that the work is being enjoyed.
@pimoore Excellent feedback! Thank you!
@MrHenko Not just you. Lazy presenters wasting everyone’s time. It might take you 15 minutes to cut 5 minutes of fluff, but if you’ve got even 100 listeners you just saved the world 500 minutes!
@jeremycherfas A terrific perspective. Too many people don’t think about the hours wasted in meetings!
@jeremycherfas ”Each of these Quarterly Meetings were large and sat near eight hours. Here I had occasion to consider that if is a weighty thing to speak much in large meetings for business… In three hundred minutes are five hours, and he that improperly detains three hundred people one minute, besides other evils that attend it, does an injury like that of imprisoning one man five hours without cause.” — The Journal of John Woolman, 1758
@JMaxB not much has changed down the years. Thanks for that.
@pimoore Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Part of the problem is probably that I’m falling out of love with the format of more ”personality driven” podcasts.
@canion That’s a good principle! I haven’t listened to Hemispheric Views (yet?), but I’ll put it on my mental list for when I want to add more podcasts to my queue.
@jeremycherfas That’s a good way to look at it, and Eat This Podcast is a great example of a podcast that gets to the point. 👍🏻
@MrHenko Thank you. Appreciated.
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and tagged it with Adaptations The Stand TV shows 
Earlier this year (or was it late last year, time blurs) me and Linn watched the new tv series version of Stephen King’s The Stand and we really liked it. It wasn’t the greatest, nor most interesting thing ever made for tv but it was a fun watch. After we finished it I read some reviews and saw that a lot of people, both regular viewers and professional critics, seemed to dislike it and I just couldn’t understand why they where so down on it.
Now that I’ve only got a few hours left of the audiobook of the novel I can sort of see where they are coming from, but I still don’t agree. Yes, if you’ve loved the book for decades then the show is going to leave you feeling it lacks so much. That’s kind of always the case. It’s an adaptation, not an exact word for word retelling with sound and moving images. On the other hand if you, like me, know about the book but haven’t gotten around to reading it the show is great ”fun” and might actually push you to read the book
Stop reading here if you don’t want spoilers.
Thus far in my reading of the book there are even some things that I think the tv show does better, primarily Randall Flagg himself. In the novel he is a sort of a demonic entity from the start whereas in the show he comes of as very human to begin with, almost getting you to like him, while still there being something wrong about him. Alexander Skarsgård is perfectly cast for the roll and his puppy-dog eyes makes it all the more effective when he does do scary things. It’s much more scary with a psychotic human then a demon.
Harold Lauder also comes to mind. The character in the book never gets as interested as he has potential to be and I think Owen Teague’s portrait of him really makes him human. I think there’s much more of an interesting internal conflict in him in the show as compared to the novel, and you end up both hating him, pitying him and also understanding him in the show. In the show you can see how it really was perfectly possible for him to drop his grudges and be ”Hawk” instead, remaking himself as a likable person in Boulder, but that he choses not to.
Worth noting also is the casting of James Marsden as Stu. While not ”better” than the book, it’s simply great casting. Marsden is really the perfect actor to play this almost archetypical character, the redneck with a heart of gold.
This Article was mentioned on blog.henrikcarlsson.se
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and tagged it with micro.blog Microblogging River of News I have a feature request for micro.blog. Well, maybe not so much a feature request as an idea, or food for thought and discussion. I think it comes from a similar idea that Dave Winer blogged about a few years ago, like many such ideas seem to do.
The idea of a character limit for what’s being presented in a river of news or a social network timeline is a good one and I think two-hundred and eighty is a reasonable one. Naturally that means that longer posts needs to be truncated. The idea is that instead of truncating it with a link to the original, maybe the truncated version can be folded out when clicked/tapped to present the full post in the context of the river/timeline.
I think I’ve seen people mocking up similar ideas for twitter in the past as well.
I can see how it can become unwieldy for very long posts and/or posts with a lot of media attached to it. Maybe a two stage process where posts gets folded out to up to something like 500 characters and if they are still not visible in full they’ll get truncated with a link. Or maybe it’s a setting per client? Or maybe it’s not such a good idea at all. I’m not sure.
Any thoughts, dear reader?
@MrHenko Thanks for your thoughts! I’d like to update the timeline display so that it’s both simpler and better accommodates some types of longer posts (like photos or block quotes). I’m not sure what that looks like yet but it’s something I’d like to work on soon.
@manton Thank you for reading and replying, and it sounds like a good start to look into photos and quotes. And as I said I’m not sure the fold out solution I wrote about is the best solution, and probably not applicable everywhere.
Also, it has probably been way too long since I last told you what a great job you and the rest of the team at micro.blog are doing. So thank you for that! :)
@MrHenko Thank you!
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and tagged it with Mac Narrating my work It’s time for me to get a new computer at work this year. We generally use Macs and we get new ones every three years. From 2015 to 2018 I was using a 13″ MacBook Pro, a computer that I truly loved. I had all the ports I needed (as long as I remembered to bring a Thunderbolt to Ethernet dongle) and it was small and light in my backpack.
Twenty-eighteen rolled around and it was time to decide on a new computer. By that time some of my colleagues had gotten the new USB-C/Thunderbolt 3-only laptops in the previous year and results where mixed to say the least. To give some examples, one of my colleagues absolutely loves here 15″. Another one is quite happy. One likes everything except the TouchBar. One likes his computer but has had to have it serviced multiple times do to keyboard issues. Another one has been serviced because of screen problems. Another colleague abandoned the Mac platform entirely. I felt quite strongly that I didn’t want to get into the potential problems of dongles, keyboards and all the other stuff but I did want to stay with the Mac. Fortunately I had one option, the 15″ late 2015 MacBook Pro was still on sale so I decided on that one.
Since then my computer and me has had an on again, off again relationship. I love the fact that I rarely need a dongle to anything. I love that I can plug in both SD cards and USB flash drives whenever I want. And MacSafe keeps being great. However it is was too big for my taste. The 15″ form factor is really not for me. It has even gotten me to the point where I occasionally get out the old 13″ and bring that one in my backpack. Also for the last six months or so I’ve really felt that this machine (the 15″) is letting me down in terms of speed and the fan noise in Zoom meetings is driving me crazy.
So it’s time to get a new one. When the 16″ hit the market last year(?) I thought I new what the future held in stock for me. I hoped for a similar 14″ form factor and that that computer would be the one for me. Now such a computer doesn’t exist. But the M1 laptops exist and they seem very nice. But am I ready to jump on a new technical platform early on? Will Pro Tools, MediaComposer and similar tools work? Will all my x86 terminal tools be available for Apple Silicon? And most importantly, do I feel like I have the time to figure these things out?
Here’s basically my options:
The basic problem that all three have is that they are USB-C/Thunderbolt only. I would really, really like to have at least an HDMI port and an SD card slot. And now there seems to be some rumours about upcoming Macs that might have that. But to I have the time to wait? Last week I would have said yes, at least wait until after WWDC but yesterday I realised that the most likely reason why my 15″ wobbles on the table is that the battery has started swelling and that seems like something that will kill it sooner rather than later.
With that in mind I probably just need to suck it up and head into the USB-C world. And if I do that the Intel 13″ has a distinct advantage in that it has four ports instead of two. Two seems to be very few. Also the Intel one has a know processor architecture. Every piece of software will probably work just as well as on the old 15″, right? Right?!?!?
Well, maybe not because my 15″ is still on High Sierra.
Let that sink in for a moment.
I still use a laptop on High Sierra.
Why? Simply because when Mojave came out I just couldn’t be bothered with checking whether all the tools that I need to do my work still worked or not. I had one small child and one very small child at home and messing with things that already worked seemed like a terribly idea. And then I stuck with that solution. This computer will remain on High Sierra until it dies. This makes it quite possible that the transition to a new computer will be less that smooth even if it’s still and Intel machine.
So the ports then. Four is indeed more than two. And why settle for two when I can have four? Well…
That’s why:
Based on this, getting a new 13″ Intel machine seems like a very small step up from what I have today, but a small step that still brings the hassle of new ports and an os that means I will have to do a lot of compatibility checking. On the other hand, getting an M1 machine almost doubles my single core performance scores and more that doubles the multi core ones.
So a MacBook Pro 13″ with an M1 then? Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell, if it had four USB ports and the Air only two then the deal would have been sealed. But the port situation is the same for both. And the Air has the added benefit of being fan-less. As I currently hate the fan noise from my computer maybe this is the way to go? Or maybe not having a fan means it’ll throttle the processor way too often resulting in I poor experience in the long term? So that can go either way.
And then there’s the TouchBar, or the lack of a TouchBar. The Air has proper function keys, while retaining TouchID. Even though I’ve only briefly tried the TouchBar on other peoples computers it seems to not be something that I want to have. Potentially cool but as far as I’ve seen there hasn’t been a ”killer app” for it, but there is the risk of accidental input.
It’s a bit anti-climactic but I don’t know for sure which way to go. In writing this text I think I’ve settled on getting a new one as soon as possible, and narrowing the choice down to either the MacBook Pro 13″ or the MacBook Air, both with an M1 processor. Which of those I should go with I still don’t know.
Any suggestions?
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and tagged it with The Year of Music My yearly theme for 2021 will be The Year of Music. The point of this theme is to get me to do more music related things.
Doing that could be as simple as listening to some music during the day. For quite a few years now I haven’t been listening to much music. I often have my AirPods in my ears but most of the time what I’ve been listening to has been a podcast or, more recently, a YouTube video. For the second half of 2020 YouTube has more or less become the background noise of my life. This is something I really want to change.
I really enjoy listening to music and doing it makes me happy but it’s so easy to get stuck in the hole that is YouTube and podcasts. The podcast part has sort of fixed itself because it feels like I’ve burned out on most podcasts. Now there are a very select few that I actually care about listening to. On the other hand YouTube, as I wrote in the past paragraph, is a growing problem.
And don’t get me wrong, a lot of the stuff I watch on YouTube is great and I really want to keep watching it but every now and then I should turn off the videos and turn on some music instead.
I should probably also commit to listening to more new music, since my interest in whats currently popular has been close to zero for at least ten years now, but I feel like I need to set reasonable goals. So if I do listen to new things, that is good. But if I chose to listen to the same old stuff that I’ve always been listening to, that is also good.
Another way to progress the theme is to play music. I love playing guitar, tinker with synths, recording things and so on but I do it way to infrequently. Especially the recording/producing part has been close to zero for a long time. When I want to record something I would like it to be something that I’ve also written myself but that is something that I need to let go. I haven’t actually finished writing a song for a decade so it’s time to uncouple songwriting from recording an instead record some fun covers or something. I do have a more specific plan here, but that’ll have to wait for another day.
Making things related to (listening och playing) music is also part of the year of music. Working on the πiFi Music Player for instance is absolutely something that furthers the theme.
If I were to calibrate the monitor speakers of my home studio or rerouting cables, setup synths and so on, that would also be compatible with the theme but I need to make sure that I don’t get stuck in preparing for a recording that I never make.
@MrHenko Admirable plan and sensible goals. It’ll be fun, I bet.
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and tagged it with Books Reading I still have a hard time to reconcile the fact that reading fiction, that was such a large part of my identity as a child and a teen, is something that I do so rarely these days. Part of that is how slowly I get through even books I really love from authors that are among my favourites.
Case in point, William Gibson and his ”Blue Ant Trilogy”. According to my Reading page I read Pattern Recognition in 2013 and now, in august 2020, I finished Zero History. I really like Gibson and this trilogy has been a blast but still it’s taking my seven years to get through.
I wonder how much time I’ve spent browsing timelines and listening to people going on and on about the same things in podcasts during those same seven years.
That being said, this year might be a bit different. As I said, I’ve just finished Pattern Recognition but I’m also half-way through a bunch of books, some audio books some paper/Kindle books. I occasionally actually manages to convince myself to read a bit for pure pleasure. That makes me happy.
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and tagged it with Ameristan Flat Earth Movies 
🎞 Watched: Behind the Curve (2018)
Oh. My. God.
I don’t have words to describe how delusional I think these people are.
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Henrik Carlsson
1 augusti, 2021 23:00This Article was mentioned on blog.henrikcarlsson.se