I attended my very first real life auction yesterday. The Helsinki Lost Property Office once again arranged their monthly auction to get rid of a bunch stuff that has been collecting dust in their shelves for over three months without anyone claiming them. Bad for the losers, good for the Office and people looking to buy cheap pigs in a poke. As a real auction-noob, this is of course exactly what I did.
Archive for the 'The thing they call Life' Category
It’s been about 6 years since I last painted something in my flat. That was when we repainted basically the whole apartment, floor to ceiling. A couple of weeks ago it was again time to get the paintbrush going. I’ve been wanting to get a magnetic chalkboard for some time and considered several alternatives, from buying an IKEA version to hang on the wall to painting the actual wall myself. The handyman in me naturally opted for the latter alternative. This was, however, not without difficulties.
Lately, I’ve been curious about what’s consuming electricity in my flat. My electricity bill just increases as more and more geeky appliances find their way into my home. So yesterday I bought an electricity consumption meter and started measuring. This is what I’ve found out so far.
I just discovered the perfect solution to one of my biggest problems in recent memory, i.e. controlling playback of my music playing on my Home Entertainment Computer. It’s called mpd and I love it. I love it I love it I love it I love it. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier? It lets me remote control music playback on my entertainment machine from virtually any device in my flat. Well, I don’t think there’s an mpd client for coffee brewers yet, but still.
One of the last small collateral projects I participated in during my time at HIIT has now been released.
It’s a video.
More precisely a small demo video showing a usage scenario for a small demo application (yes, the keywords are small and demo) tying together some of the technologies we’ve used in a bigger project. The technologies include a speech synthesizer, a 2D bar code reader and something under the hood that I can’t remember.
Why bother? Because I play one of the leading parts in this blockbuster. View it here. Oh, and have a look at the project page here.