How to create a nice area for ice-skating? “Deep-freeze” a stadium, clear huge amounts of snow, and turn on the floodlights. While ice-skating on a lake is definitely better, the circle at Östermalms IP is large enough to offer space for skaters at all kinds of speed and abilities.

Entering a TODO item into a task manager should be as easy as typing a few words and hitting enter. Moving your TODO item to another list should be exactly one mouse-click away. All lists should be shown at once. The experimental task manager “dropandforget” does just that.

Many thanks to those who know the ice and made me have a wonderful day on the frozen Vallentunasjön – igen: tusen tack till dem som gjorde det möjligt.

Surprisingly much for the price of 299 SEK: while the range is rather limited, the router features a separate guest network, an intuitive and comparably well-designed user interface for router management, okayish help information, humble packaging, factory defaults easy to find, a short Ethernet cable, and two years guarantee. Good for private use. Quality needs to be appreciated!

Suppose, two people are working together on a set of files. How to find a version control solution that is accessible for everyone (such as Dropbox) and powerful enough for sharing code (such as git)?

KTH’s Christmas concert 2012 offered a diverse composition: traditional Christmas pieces, a Lucia procession, and an extract from Bach’s Weihnachts-Oratorium (Christmas Oratorio).

Being sick of expensive course literature in Stockholm? Relief is on the way: Secondhand books can be bought at Campusbutiken of Stockholms Universitet. There is also an online platform kthbok.com which performs a similar duty without taking detours via a reseller.

Musings about motivation: the last part of a series in favor of learning Swedish while in Sweden.

Finally! Now it is possible in Munich to look up directions and connections with public transport on Google Maps (bus connections are still missing!). According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, this took MVG (the local company responsible for operating public transport) a whole man year to finish the interface to Google Maps.

German keyboards come with ÄÖÜ. But they lack the character Å, which is frequently used in Scandinavian languages. Here is a quick-and-dirty fix to customize the xkb map for X11 on Arch Linux.

When learning a foreign language, there is an abundance of new words, new grammar, and new expressions coming in. Rehearsal is necessary in order to keep the learned items in memory. Much practice is required in order to turn passive understanding into readily available active language skills.

What use is it to ask someone in Swedish and then not to understand the answer? How to get the pronunciation right without being able to listen to Swedish? These two thoughts made listening a top priority for me when I started a new foreign language.

When learning a foreign language, full immersion probably guarantees a nearly unlimited supply of new words, new grammar, and new expressions, which never comes to a halt. When immersion is not possible, how to react?

The best way to find a good Swedish translation while in Sweden is to ask a Swede. Of course. And there is no surprise here. However, there are a couple of resources available on the web that help with translation when professional help is not available.

Swedes talk Swedish. Surprised? Swedes always talk English with you as a foreigner? Well, the game can be changed and it is not too hard for native speakers in German or English. This is the start signal for a six-part article series about how to concretely speed up your progress in learning Swedish as a foreign language, based on my experiences. Why not just talk English? This crucial question is tackled first.

Pattern recognition (EN2202) at KTH Stockholm turned out to be a very good course, concerning lecture, exercises, and the accompanying project work. Together with a fellow student, we created a rudimentary recognizer for spoken words. It is far from production quality, of course. While a good part of the coding has been prepared for the students, the task left enough freedom to play around with hidden markov models in the context of word recognition.

How can we recognize textured objects under the assumption of planarity in images? OpenCV provides extensive support for this task, and helps with local feature extraction, fast approximative matching, and robust model fitting. This article describes a minimalistic detector based solely on OpenCV for all vision subtasks, and also offers pictures, videos, and the source code.

Autumn has arrived and Stockholm dresses itself in wonderful colors. The magnificient scenery is definitely worth a few pictures.

In 2012, KTH Stockholm offered an exchange fair for local students that want to go abroad. We organized a booth for Technische Universität München.

Given a hidden Markov model, we can use the Viterbi algorithm in order to compute the most likely sequence of latent states that produced a certain sequence of observations. Neat: the algorithm is sort of breadth-first search for a maximum in a certain perfect N-ary search tree.

Charming. Unbeatable. Inconceivable. So much to the concert at KTH in Stockholm on September 12, which featured a variety of enjoyable pieces and culminated in the overwhelming “Music for the Royal Fireworks” (G. F. Händel). A fantastic display of music and fireworks in the Borggården of KTH main campus in a chilly late summer night.

Technische Universität München divides the academic year into a summer semester and a winter semester. However, it is four periods instead of two semesters at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Here is a glance at some of the implications that I can see.

Where to get a bike in Stockholm? Where to put the bike? And is it worth bicycling in Stockholm? While the practicalities are not easy to address, the efforts certainly pay out as a first trip indicates.

Time was ripe for me to migrate my Arch Linux installation from SysV to systemd. The transition was simple enough and turned out to be smooth in my case. There were not any troubles to be resolved. Furthermore, systemd made a very good first impression.

Why is the lecturer talking Swedish? Kursen är på svenska, förstås! I noted with some surprise that one of my courses is given in Swedish. It turned out to be a very welcome opportunity to listen to Swedish in a multi-modal setting.