A. Aronsson’s WeBOLLog

My first and only MP3 player is a Creative Muvo 128MB, which has survived lots of things since about 2002. Airplane travels, rounds in the washing machine, too many bus trips… it has been very reliable, though without a display or even a shuffle feature it leaves you wishing for more.

This Tuesday I got a new MP3 (etc) player, finally. Yet again a Creative, but their Zen X-Fi 8GB. When looking for a new player I wasn’t so much browsing for MP3 players, but something that could do a little more. The Zen X-Fi can play back video and it has a very nice speaker built in, those were the feature who made me pick it. Now I have various videos I’ve made on the device as well as a bunch of Anime episodes. I’ve successfully watched two episodes so far, and it works very nicely at 2.5″ and 320×240 pixels. I love it :) But enough about the player.

I remember seeing a whole lot of the transparent monitor pictures online, very well made too, and when I discovered I can easily change the wallpaper on the player I just had to try this.

So, here it is… the translucent media player!

If I ever buy myself a laptop, I will do this for each and ever place I put it in! Well, maybe not.

Lately I’ve been really busy with a few projects which are still not public. One of them is almost good enough to post soon, planned it last Tuesday… but then I got more ideas to implement… you will see, soon! (promise!) There’s so much going on, phew.

Today I got a package I had no idea what it contained, as I have ordered quite a few things lately. To my joy it was a gym bag which I had spontanously ordered after seeing a bag in the same range on Prylfeber.se! I love it, a bit small, but I don’t things will fit… I’ll just bring a smaller towel! Oh, and if it isn’t obvious enough, I’m still fond of LEGO, even though the new Technic parts freak me out.

I ordered it directly from the LEGO shop!

The USB-FAN!

I can’t open the windows in my office and the ventilation is not adjustable.

I use the fan to cool myself down after having rode the bike to work or after I’ve been running around in the factory trying to get things to work properly. It’s priceless to be able and cool down to stop the immense sweating!… yeah!

For 69SEK (~$10) at Teknikmagasinet it’s a dirt cheap way to make my working day more comfortable!

It’s very nice now when the air here is hot and damp, very high humidity makes it heavy to breathe. The first few days after the vacation ended it poured down outside, timing!

This Thursday I finally got my NeoCube! I ordered it after seeing it online, somewhere, at April 30th. So I had waited just about 10 weeks! I’ve been plenty busy with other things in the mean time, but I was still happily excited when it arrived!

The mail arrived directly in my mailbox, all the way from the US, which was nice. I ordered the Cube-Tastic Value Pack, which at that time was $10 cheaper! The popularity and availability is reason enough to increase the price, I think, so the new price is justified.

Building with these magnetic balls sure is a new experience for me, very interesting. It took me a while to re-realize how the relationships between magnets makes them behave when arranged in a structure, but after that a whole lot of possibilities opened up in my mind.

Below is a video I compiled yesterday. I’ve been trying out a camera I borrowed at work, a Sanyo Xacti VPC HD1A. As my floor is all wooden boards the camera sways a bit when I move around, even with it mounted on a tripod. It’s extra noticable as the camera is zoomed in. I also had problems with the weird MP4 format it uses for its media, rendering errors when fading between clips and choppy playback. I ended up re-encoding the lot of them! What a hassle! Luckily, I found a neat application for doing just that!

I’ve dreamt about having a large trampoline since forever. When I was a kid my family had a tiny one, and we bounced quite a lot on it, but again, it was really tiny. I’ve seen these fairly large trampolines on several lawns for many months now, and in my head I subconsciously decided that I would someday get one of my own.

Today I was out shopping with my family, I was helping them pick up a freezer they bought online, and was going to shop around for various other things as well. As I goggled the list of offers at a cheap all around store I saw it. A 2.4m diameter trampoline for 995 SEK. That’s currently $166.5 or £85. (the US dollar is crazy cheap compared to the Swedish Crown right now, and has been for a while…)

Instant buy! I even picked up a bright red dolly to cart around the box with. Actually, I had pre-decided to get a dolly as well, ever since I carried my bike home from the post office, that really hurt my arms! This just ended up being the perfect timing!

Ah, I want to go bounce a bit more right now, thought it’s late! :3 My back will probably be a few decimeters shorter after summer.

Update: The foldable IKEA bike I mention here is not the one IKEA now sells in their stores. As I say below it was a gift to the UK IKEA employees. The bike available for purchase is most likely of higher quality, at least that was my impression when I saw it myself.

As my really old bike was, well, really old, I got a new one off of eBay about a year ago. A folding bike IKEA gave its employees in the UK for free, as a Christmas gift. It has been quite fun to ride, but the gears are so close to the ground that they collect dirt really easy. This has caused the arm that stretches the chain so it wont skip over the sprockets to stop working, making it hard to switch gears or use any power to battle uphills, as the chain will just skip around on the gears. Really annoying.

This got me, yet again, to consider a new bike. When the back tire produced large bulbous bubbles ripping through its side… there was no question about it. I got the folding bike so cheap it would be fairly pointless to repair, I’ll give it to someone who likes fixing things instead.

At the beginning of this week it finally arrived, my Electra Stream Ride Rat Rod Cruiser! Thank you so much Ridelow.co.uk! In contrast to the folding bike it has a back pedaling breaking system, internal hub gears and a wicked design! \( ^___^ )/

I had to piece it together, but it wasn’t too hard, and the gears were already calibrated, so it went fairly smoothly.

I’ve been riding it to work for a couple of days now, and after a few adjustments to the handlebar and saddle it rides like a dream. It sure is different to ride a bike that differs so much in weight, size and handling compared to my old one, but it’s a very welcome change. <3