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?

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?