Stockholm shows its finest side whenever it is sunny. By coincidence, a particular Saturday in spring this year was a lot about ships — ships and their stories.

Google Chrome 25+ features a nice extension for speech input, which is enabled by adding the x-webkit-speech to text input fields. I put it into action. How well speech input actually works depends heavily on what kind of words you use, though.

Four longitudinal chassis beams of a Chevrolet pickup truck. The nodes of their corresponding finite element model shall be partitioned into clusters such that the nodes within one cluster show similar behaviour in a row of car crash simulations. The question: is the local clustering approach (LLCA) applicable? A summary of a research project.

For those like me who cannot switch easily between different keyboard layouts: How to use the German PC keyboard layout in Mac OS? This recipe worked for me: www.nullpointer.de/stuff/keylayout

Thirteen years passed before I returned to Denmark for a couple of days. In short: good friends, interesting history, and delicious food.

A weekday in April in Sandhamn: no people, no sound, almost no coffee. But plenty of water, plenty of sun, and still plenty of ice. Here are some impressions. And a riddle: what is 北京八?

Wandern in den Bergen ist in Deutschland ein beliebter und allseits bekannter Freizeitsport. Wandern auf dem Eis mit Schlittschuhen hingegen ist hier größtenteils unbekannt. Eissorten abseits der Eisdiele? Abschnallbare Kufen? Isdubbar? Fahren auf Eisschollen? Mehrere dutzend Kilometer? Gefährlich? Eine Geschichte eines deutschen Anfängers über den ersten und intensiven Kontakt mit dem Langstreckeneislaufen in Schweden.

Newly frozen black ice in Stockholm’s Archipelago on March 16. Alone the tour I went with populated the ice with 250 people, which is four buses worth. The frozen sea was beautiful but sometimes treacherous – as ever, carefulness is your best buddy.

What is more to say after more than 200 kilometers on the ice? That it looks differently every month. And in March, I got the opportunity to see an amazing mixture of old thick ice, new thin ice, and sea water.

After many days of adverse weather conditions, an ice-skating tour brings me to the second-largest lake in Sweden – which is three times larger than Bodensee (Lake Constance). Parts of the lake were covered with transparent ice with a hard and level surface.

Successful life-hacker experiment: Removed all the keys from the keyboard, washed both keys and chassis, and almost as good as new. A Swiss knife is useful, but not absolutely necessary.

Time to play search engine and experiment with PageRank. How much time does it take to page-rank a network with a million pages? I got curious during working on a university exercise and tested two power iteration variants and one Monte-Carlo method.

The schedules of most courses at KTH are formulated in terms of week numbers. Google Calendar has a hidden feature for those, who are not yet used to remembering the current week number.

Impressive experience on the ice in the middle parts of Stockholm’s archipelago — thanks to a phenomenal friend.

Gemütliche ice-skating tour on Stora Värtan. Small sight-seeing à la Shackleton included.

A minimal implementation in C++ of a role-playing game with 2D graphics, as part of an exercise at university.

As an allusion to a previous article about the wilderness in Tyresta National Park, here is a short report on the winterness in the same place but during another season. Looks completely different.

It is just appropriate to praise the public transport from time to time. Especially if it makes a trip to a frozen lake a breeze. This time it was Rönningesjön near Täby. The snow was cleared from a circular track on the lake that used to be a bathing place in summer.

See a live animation of how an artificial neural network is trained to represent a Gaussian-shaped function.

Graphs and algorithms are tightly connected. One surprisingly simple way to inspect algorithms graphically is to let the algorithms plot graphs during their execution using GML (Graph Modeling Language). The produced graphs can be formatted with graph editing software.

Strange but true: there is no Amazon in Sweden. I conceive this country as very eager to adapt new concepts and cutting-edge technology. Connectivity to the Web is ubiquituous. However, to my big surprise, there is no www.amazon.se. I could not find a matching Swedish counterpart either. Why?

Magnificient ice on the Baltic Sea within Stockholm’s Archipelago, as discovered on a tour 20 kilometers east of Norrtälje.

A blog is a nice opportunity to have a crack at different technologies. Here is a summary of systems and software involved in running this blog.

A road story on how to use my HP Officejet 6500 E710n-z printer on Arch Linux without dispensing the duplex unit and the feed scanner.

Getting the better part of the nordic winter: An ice-skating tour in the darkness from Norrviken to Brunnsviken, The evening was rounded off by some beer at Karlaplan. What else to expect from live?