Another 15 minutes

~ There is no reality, only perception

I grew up playing with Legos alot, it’s a great toy. I sometimes still get some urge to build some cool stuff with Lego but I didn’t have any left, until yesterday. I decided to get Lego Mindstorms, which is a robot lego kit where you can combine the easy fun of Legos and the more complex satisfaction of robotics and programming. The Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 comes with 1 control unit, 3 servo motors, 2 touch sensors, 1 light/color sensor and 1 ultrasonic sensor, and ofcourse alot of Lego bits to put the together. My first robot is an exploring robot, it will go about the room and turn if something gets too close or if it bumps into something. Watching alot of robot- and sci-fi movies I have learned that all robots must have an amok subroutine (often indicated by a red light being lit), so so does mine. It will run amok at random intervals and start to blink and shout “error… error… error…”. If everything is OK it will just drive around, sometimes laughing and apologizing when it bumps something. It’s pretty fun to build, program and test it, it takes some patience though, but it is not difficult. But you really should have an interest in robotics and talent of Lego building, because it’s a pretty expensive toy. Good fun though and a nice time killer on rainy day of your vacation perhaps.

Lego Mindstorms explorer robot

Knowing

No comments

Saw “Knowing” starring Nicolas Cage today. It’s a movie about a son and father getting their hands on a paper with strange numbers on it, written by a young girl 50 years ago. The father soon finds out that the sequence of numbers are information of future catastrophic events and soon enough they have to use this in order to survive. This is a very gripping movie that has all this ingridients of a success for me; good acting, plot with riddles and prophecies, catastrophies and end of the world story, great special effects and… aliens. I think it’s worth seeing, I was pleasently surprised when all my favorite ingridients were introduced one by one.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Here is a small collection of applications I recommend and find either very cool or useful for your HTC Touch HD or any other Windows Mobile phone. These applications will unlock hidden powers inside your phone and make it even more user friendly better looking. So here’s my list, in no particular order…

continue reading…

Alot of people seem to have problems with auto-updating WordPress to version 2.8.2 with the processes freezing at download, stuck with message the the file is being downloaded but nothing ever happens. This only seem to happen on some blogs, 2 out of my 3 blogs worked just fine, but one needed more help.

The problem seem to be with some plugin. Here is what you do to successfully get the update through. Go to the plugin page, select “Active” plugins and then use bulk action to deactivate all active plugins. Don’t worry if you have many plugins already deactivated and don’t want to manually activate the ones you actually used one by one, you can activate them just as easy. Now proceed with the core upgrade, it should go through right away. Then, go to the plugins page again, select “Recently active” plugins and then bulk action activate them again. All done!

If you run your WordPress blog on some hosting partner you probably have the automatic updates of WordPress core and plugins working, but if you ever setup your own Linux server and trying to run WordPress on it, it is likely that this will not work out of the box, especially if you’re running multiple websites on the same server.

I don’t want to use some 3rd party plugin for this to work or FTP, so I investigated what it is that makes it work in my hosting partners server, but not my own. I figured it was some PHP configuration missing but it was much simpler than that.

continue reading…

I’ve found myself looking alot at Michael Jackson material on the web since his recent early passing. I am not such as big fan of his really, but I can appreciate his genius. I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite songs from him, “give in to me”. Other favorites being “Billie Jean” ofcourse and “Dirty Diana”. R.I.P.

“Angels and demons” is the sequel to “The Da Vinci code”, also starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon. This time he is following clues in the vatican to find the location of an anti-matter container which has been stolen by a secret society to revenge the church by letting the container detonate destroying most of Rome. It’s a pretty exciting movie, filled with action that keeps you on your toes most of the time, but the instensity sometimes makes it hard to follow, especially with the dialogue being in Italian sometimes and some people not speaking English clearly.

Rating: ★★★★☆