hackr.se

I love this.

You wanna play, check out Most Pixels Ever and Open Frameworks

A short summary of my last months of 2010. Life is good and there is a lot going on right now.

Everything started when we went to Stockholm to code and have fun during a weekend in September. It was a hackathon for open data and APIs in Stockholm called codemocracy. We ended up winning with our entry and got some hype on the internetz. Its a real time map of all the buses in Malmö, pretty cool. You find some of the coverage here, helalf.se, popdevelop.com, idg.se, feber.se, inuseful.se, peterkrantz.com, hb.se, filipandersson.se, andreas.thoresson.net, epsiplus.net and utvbloggen.se. Possibly the most fame i’ve got so far in my 30 years as a software developer (I don’t count selling cameras for $millions). Below is a short interview with @brissmyr about our hack, check it out.

All the positive feedback and our drive to do more stuff together got stronger from this and we continued with other hacks. Trying to handle a full-time job while putting your hart into projects takes a lot of time and eventually it was to much to handle. After a few weeks of talking we decided to start our own company and quit our jobs. At the time I was really broke and actually had some credit card debts. So during the last three month of working at my day-job I have tried to save every penny to be able to survive without my usual monthly salary. We have also put a lot of time into Popdevelop trying to nurture our network, meet new people, record some youtube classics and of course code.

Its has been a great year and it was a long time since i experienced so much in such short time period. Leaving my job as a technical lead for camera projects at Axis was a big step for me. Going from a big company with safety, money and career to starting your own company with no income to begin with is a big change. But the challenges we face is something we enjoy and embrace. So bring it on 2011 @popdevelop is here to stay!

First post after SSWC. I’m currently uploading some photos and videos from the event. In short we came there to meet smart people, get some feedback on our social music player and play with our twittering birdbox that we build for the event. Here are some photos, the rest will probably be on my twitter account in a few hours :)

I was reading up on some trends over at trendwatching and found this posts:Trendwatching “Mass Mingling” and it made me create this post about social tech events in Malmö, Sweden. Now days everyone wants to be a geek and the number events for us tech-heads are just growing, here is a list of a few I’ve read about lately.

@forskningsavd / Forskningsavdelningen

A creative hackerspace in Malmö that promotes learning and sharing of knowledge. Work on your opensource project or your arduino hardware hacks. Contact them on @forskningsavd, #forskningsavd/Freenode or check out their weekly Tuesday hacks. The epic event Hacknight 2 was also organized in the same venue by them.

FABLAB stapelbäddsparken

This fabrication laboratory is a small-scale workshop that supplies knowledge, tools and materials to build almost anything. Currently I think most stuff is around arduino projects since @dcuartielles is involved. Expect good stuff to come out of here!

@thoughtmade / http://www.thoughtmade.com

Awesome event I attended a few weeks ago, explained by one of the organizers as “We take hackers and CEO’s, young college students and senior iPhone developers, and we give them a Friday afternoon in a laid back environment, surrounded by incredible interactive installations and good music”. There was a good mix of hipsters and smart people and I think more events like this are planed.

minc

Is a company founded by Malmö that helps innovators and entrepreneurs with office and meeting places. Most startups in Malmö seems to be located here.

Malmöhögskola related

• Living Labs Malmö – Not really sure whats going on here, the page is kind of outdated. Seems like some creative projects were founded by them during 2007-2009.
• MEDEA dotanks (updated 27/7)- same here, not really sure whats going on but a cool presentation video.
  “MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative is a center for new media at Malmö University. Our work is built on co-production where academic researchers work together with other actors outside the university: companies, organizations, institutions and individuals. We develop products, services and productions as well as theories in the field of new media. The main focus is on new communities, publics and forms of expression.” is a short presentation taken from their site.
• Skiften – a series of really good lectures about change and new media, make sure you check out their bambuser stream.

Local meet-ups

• nosql summer Malmö – book club for database hackers I guess, read a white paper each week on a new hip nosql database.
• jsmeetup – seems like a javascript meet-up
• mosig – Malmö open source interest group. It’s a group with members interested in open source. I try to attend the meetings and hacks. They usually meet up once every second week and between that hang out on irc #mosig/Freenode or the mailinglist. Its a group of creative, smart, and nice people that love open source.

Mobile Monday

I attended one of their events a year ago and it felt kind of promising tho very corporate. They still hold some events in Malmö and Copenhagen.

Social Media Club Skåne

Seems to be a club for people involved in social media. Dunno if my irc presence is good enough?

Öresund entreprenurship

Search for entrepreneurial courses in the area

Ideon incubators and kujenga-lund

- Nice, but still in Ideon.

Sweden Social Web Camp

I just signed up for this event, its not really in Malmö but the founders live here. A lot of geeks meet up on a nice island in the archipelago of blekinge for an unconference. I think thoughtmade will help out with some art projects for the meet-up and I’m thinking of producing some kind of lightart to bring. Check out the participant list here

Malmö based podcasts

• Northern Lights – A new videocast covering entrepreneurship in the Malmö area. Was last seen filming the #hacknight at @forskningsavd
• Whats next – a new media podcast by the people behind SSWC. Perhaps the SSWC-preparations take all time now days since the url is broken.

Kujenga

(updated 27/7)
Explained very well here, but make sure to check out the etherpad were it started. They recently released a new logo and they have found a good location for kujnega. I just donated a few 100kr to help out, since i dont have the time to lend atm. Follow the action at their blog

There is probably twice as much happening that I currently don’t know about, please help me add stuff to this list!

(Updated May 12, 2010)

This blog post is a request for comments on an idea we have for a social music player based on the Dogvibes server.  Its still just an early idea and all feedback is appreciated!

About a year ago we started our social music project called Dogvibes. It all began with a simple paper design that @gyllen wrote, initiated by the release of libspotify. We did a few weeks of hacking and got a prototype running and then came the summer and we took a break to get some sun. A few month ago we took up the work and started to finish our social music server. We now have a working server and a few different clients that look really awesome! The design is very similar to spotify but we are using a webpage to render the user interface that communicates with our server. We used this approach to develop the API in the server and now we have something that handles most use cases. The screenshots below show the user intraface rendered both in a desktop browser and on an iPhone.

Now we want to improve on the social part of playing music and develop a new client optimized to select and play music for a group of people.

When hosting a party, usually you have a computer with a media player and a big playlist where you can add the tracks for the night. Depending on the people and the amount of alcohol this can fail, some things that usually happen are:

• A small part of the group tends to pick most of the songs
• People that search for music start playing their song instead of adding it to the playlist
• Some cool dude with a unique elitistic genre tries to enforce his unknown music
• Most songs only get a 30 seconds of playtime before someone changes track

Below is a description of an idea to solve this problem, discussed by the Dogvibes developers: @brissmyr, @gyllen, @swallin, @nystrom and me (@tilljoel).

SocialMusic-Idea1-Tabs by tilljoel

Everyone shares the same playlist where you can add your songs or vote on songs already added, the order of the tracks should be decided by an algorithm. It should work in a similar way as flattr works for micro payments. It means that adding, up voting, down voting tracks should cost you and if people up vote your tracks you receive(I have no clue what to call this “currency” yet). All users should regularly be given some amount of this currency, perhaps depending on number of songs in the playlist queue, user activity etc.

Search

Search for songs in a simple way, use same kind of browseability that spotify, lastfm or itunes has. The scope of the songs search could be limited in some way.

• Eighties party with 1000 preselected songs to pick from
• Normal party with all music found locally and on Spotify
• An espresso bar that only wanna play music from the genre “hiphop”

Users can add tracks from here to the toplist.

Toplist

This list contains all the tracks added and the current track playing. There are at least three different actions this view should handle:

• up vote a song
• down vote a song
• comment a song
• more?

SocialMusic-Idea1-Toplist by tilljoel

The order in the playlist should be decided from some algorithm that take into account: up votes, down votes, number of tracks added by the same person and the time since a track was added.

Social

This view should reflect all actions on the server by the users, imagine an irc-like log with information like this:

SocialMusic-Idea1-Socialtab by tilljoel

We are about to start development during the following weeks and all feedback is highly appreciated!

During the last three years, my Macbook Air has been kinda depressed. Every time i tried to install my free GNU programs using ports it has silently played this tune for me.

I am the wilderness locked in a cage
I am a growing force you kept in place
I am a tree reaching for the sun

Release me!
Release me!

I have heard this song during the last years and never really done anything about it, until today when i accidentally destroyed the Mac OS X operating system on my Macbook. When this happens, your Macbook will just boot to a white screen and display a small spinner and do nothing, yey! Mac OS X is probably the best non-free operating system out there, everything just works out of the box. I think one of the main reasons that made me feel somehow trapped inside in the Darwin world is that I could not get my terminal and Vim editor to work as smooth as on my Gentoo box. So i decided to install Linux on my Macbook :)

I downloaded the latest Gentoo build and everything booted up pretty good except that the keyboard didn’t work, my first plan was then to boot an Ubuntu CD and install Gentoo from it. When booting up the Ubuntu 10.04 CD I was in shock, since it was my first graphical installation since i changed to Gentoo many years ago. Damn it looks good now days!

Since the Ubuntu installation had me in shock I continued the installation, the process was really straightforward and easy, you can’t really compare it to a stage1 Gentoo huzzle installation. I have no clue what Ubuntu installed on my drive but I’m pretty happy have to have Linux running on my Macbook without any effort.

I come from gentoo-land and I don’t see my self changing it from my desktop computer for a while, but for my laptop i think Ubuntu is a solid pick since most peripherals just works out of the box!

Update:

• To fix the the touchpad after a sleep, reload the bcm5974 kernelmodule using the following script. Add it to /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/02touchpad and set correct permissions

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -e '/usr/lib/pm-utils/functions' ];then
      . /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions
    fi
  
    suspend_bcm5974() { /sbin/rmmod bcm5974; }
    resume_bcm5974() { /sbin/modprobe bcm5974; }
  
    case "$1" in
      suspend|hibernate)
        suspend_bcm5974;
      ;;
      thaw|resume)
        resume_bcm5974;
      ;;
      *)
      ;;
    esac
    exit $?
  

• Direct link to the Ubuntu releases
• Before booting you macbook with the Ubuntu installation CD, read about the startup shortcuts

Hello!

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much

A quick post, I just want to share a beautifully articulated story I just read. Its about the difficulty deviating from the socially constructed rules we grow up with. It’s hard to be creative and think different when we learn to fit in the box. Here is a quote from the text and of course a link. (Thanks for the link @pgilmore )

“Agile Living is about giving up our belief in the validity and importance of social labels, rules and restrictions and certainty and creating a multi-dimensional, flexible and resourceful mindset and lifestyle. It’s about becoming and creating more of the unique shapes and patterns that you love. It’s about leaving behind the boxes and ladders and welcoming variety, change and uncertainty“

A Short Story About Ladders And Boxes And Possibility

Hello, welcome to my blog!

I have never used WordPress before, so all this is kind of new to me. My plan is to use this blog to document different hacks and ideas I have and use the feedback and comments to fuel my creativity and to create more stuff. My native language is swedish but i will try to do most post in english to practice it and to reach out to more people.

Ideas and Hacks with Arduino, Python, C or Ruby

So the first thing I need some help with is how the layout of wordpress pages and posts should be, my plan is to use pages and subpages to keep information about the different projects I have and continuously update that information.

I will use the blog posts to write smaller updates and discuss ideas, problems and plans for my projects. Just as a teaser I’m posting a video from my bambuser account, full HD :). For more information on me, see Joel Larssons google profile or user tilljoel on most websites.

All feedback appreciated!

Hello
My first post ever, here we go!

April April!