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Crystal ball gazing

Sunday, October 13th, 2013

You wouldn't download a car - Fuck you! I would if I couldI was chatting with Matt. Fantastic discussion on all sorts of things, including… “The Future”! I’m sharing some of the things we touched upon below.

The future of 3D printing

The discussion meandered it’s way to 3D printing. Our conclusion in a nutshell: Ikea will move to a pay-for-downloading-your-model model.
If things ever get to this point, yeah, then 3D printing will really work – and it will really have changed society. Of course, maybe not everyone will have a 3D printer – maybe there will be dedicated 3D printshops with bigger, high-quality printers. But this would even work to Ikea’s advantage: higher quality printers + materials equals more happy customers. And they’d save a fortune on not having to build stores, transport the stuff, etc.

So how realistic is this vision from the crystal ball? My guts say a 6 on a scale from 1 (no way, eg. teleportation) to 10 (will eventually happen, eg. moonbase).

The future of music and artists

A few bends further in the conversation, we were noting what many others have noted before: for centuries, musicians earned their living by performing. For a brief 80-100 years, musicians could earn money by performing once and selling the records. In this period, live performances (concerts) were advertisements for the recording. But currently, the trend is shifting back. Most musicians make their living by performing, and recordings (CDs) are nowadays more ads for the concerts than vice versa.

However, the advent of better and more affordable recording equipment means that your current-day home recording enthusiast is on par (if not above) in quality with recording studios from the 80s. In fact, home recording is becoming so affordable, and its quality is becoming sufficiently acceptable – renting a studio can produce better results, but it’s no longer clear it’s worth it.

This, coupled together with the insanity that is the recording “industry” (that is, the folks who do not make music, yet make the most money off of CDs) will lead to a shift in how musicians will earn a living. And yes, the recording industry’s financial model is insane. So any shift away from that is likely for the better.

Running from Rock to Swing

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

Lindy hop logoLast weekend, Wichard was over and we went to the Rock A Field festival. Volbeat was as good as I remembered from last time they were at RAF, but other than that, there wasn’t much rock happening. On the other hand, I cobbled together a first draft of a teaching statement and a research statement that weekend, and Wichard and I watched all Indiana Jones movies (me with half an eye), Hotel Transylvania and Wreck It Ralph (the latter two movies are warmly recommended). Of course the statements I wrote need to be polished more (at least I didn’t write “X never marks the spot” ;-), but still… not bad for one weekend!

That actually came hot on the heels of a visit by Anke and Rogier, which, in turn, came hot on the heels of the Chase festival (I realise I am losing my blogging credentials right now by not linking anything here, so let me link that up for you: chase festival, Rock a Field, and yes, I’m too lazy to go back and put them in the proper spots :P).

Next up: Herrang swing dance camp! One week of improving swing dancing. And then it’s of to London for VoteID 2013 (see, now that I know to add links, I’m going crazy with them :), after which we’re immediately back to the one-day beginners Swing Dance course in Luxembourg (I’m one of the teachers :), and of course, practice all the dance moves at the Blues ‘n Jazz Rallye later that evening.

Any wonder I need holidays? ;-)

Swing Dancing is becoming “A Thing”

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

Lindy hop logoThere has been a lot of Lindy Hop dancing lately in my life. I’ve been enjoying the dance right here in Luxembourg since roughly 2010. Sjouke dragged me to the first classes by Ieva and Einar, and I’ve stayed on and even tried to help out here and there.

As one may expect, teaching 2 levels of dance classes in the week, organising regular dance evenings and organising workshops is a ton of fun. It’s also a serious strain on one’s free time. Einar and Ieva were thankfully not the only ones who realised this.

It has taken us a while, but a month or so ago we finally managed to start our very own asbl. I’m proud to be a co-founder of this club, and to be involved in helping to structure this club during this initial period. Big items on the list were actually officially starting the club (which required concensus on the statutes – yeah, that’s nitpicking), and the workshops that had been planned already before the official start.

Luxembourg dancers at smokey feetWith Einar’s blessing and tutelage, I’ve taken over organisation of the “Sharing the Fun” initiative, where experienced dancers prepare a one hour clas and share their fun at dancing with others. To top it all off, I’ve been to Smokey Feet, Swinging in the Rain, the Mini-Swede-Swing-Weekend (only advertised on Facebook, I believe) and 3 dance workshops in Luxembourg (Catrinne, Marjorie, and Balboa by Einar and Gaby).

So: holy cow! Where does one find the time to do anything else? I dunno, but I definitely did and plan to do more.
One thing that did not happen yet: creating a website for the ASBL. Once we get round to it, you’ll find more HERE than empty pages.

SokoBan 2012 released!

Friday, January 4th, 2013

Arnout de Mooij and I are proud to announce the first official release of SokoBan 2012! This is a classic version of the game Sokoban, completely programmed by Arnout and myself. We started programming this around the time we both just had access to pentiums. Or perhaps even slightly before. Well, it took so long this game can go straight into nostalgia haven!
Sokoban menu

Quick install

  1. download and unzip soko2012.zip
    Android users: you’ll need an unzip utility.
  2. install DosBox 0.74 or higher
  3. For Windows only, here’s how to create a shortcut (see also the below picture):
    • Go to the Desktop.
    • Select the DosBox icon.
    • Press Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V to copy the shortcut.
    • Right-click, select “Properties”
    • At the end of the field “Target“, add the full path of soko2012.exe.
      E.g., if “Target” was "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74\DOSBox.exe" -userconf, and the files were extracted to C:\Users\hugo.jonker\Downloads\sokoban\, then “Target” should become "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74\DOSBox.exe" -userconf C:\Users\hugo.jonker\Downloads\sokoban\soko2012.exe.
    • Change the field “Start in:” to point to the folder where you extracted the zipfile.
      E.g., continuing the previous example, “Start in:” would now become C:\Users\hugo.jonker\Downloads\sokoban\.
    • Change to the Tab “General” and rename the icon to SokoBox.

Shortcut icon properties

To play:

  • Unix: run startsoko.sh from the command line.
  • Windows: Double-click the SokoBox icon.
    Potentially the game runs slow, press Ctrl+F12 a few times to speed up DosBox.
  • Android: Run DosBox and enter the following commands:
    • cd Downloads\sokoban
    • soko2012.

Screenshots

Sokoban's level selector Sokoban's image sets
Sokoban lvl 6 in play playing lvl 5

Features

  • 48 completely original fields
  • 22 completely original, totally not-ripped graphical sets, including:
    • a fastfood-themed set
    • a halloween-themed one
    • a crisis-themed one (bring your money to the bank)
    • a Sinterklaas-themed one
    • a christmas-themed one (notice that Sinterklaas != Santa)
    • a few inspired by videogames of the 8-bit era
    • and more!
  • a stand-alone level editor
  • a stand-alone graphics editor (heavily updated in 2012!)
  • Keeping tracks of 2 types of highscores:
    1. the best efforts (least moves, then quickest) for the first 10 levels
    2. the 10 players who got the farthest completing all levels
  • A player-state saving system, so that you could continue to improve your score for the 2nd type of highscore
  • Level selector with thumbnails of the levels
  • a demo mode (don’t touch any key for a while in the beginning, and the game will play one of the first 20 levels).
    Pointless? FUN! :)
  • Opening and ending scrolling titles
  • Insanely trivial-to-break encryption scheme for said titles :)
  • And, lest we forget: CHEATS! Including a complete internal level editor. I kid you not.

System requirements

Yeah, that’s sort of it. This game was in development for a while, and unlike Duke Nukem Forever, we never deviated from the original specs. Sure, we need some memory (640K is enough :),  CPU (press Ctrl+F12 to speed up, Ctrl+F11 to slow down — these are dosbox controls, not ours), and some graphical requirements (stock VGA modes). Really, your smartphone can handle these. With two fingers in its nose.  :)

Development history

Question: what does this version of Sokoban have in common with such pretentious names as Guns n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, or the game Duke Nukem Forever?
Answer:

  • Chinese democracy: in development 1998-2008
  • Duke Nukem Forever: in development 1997-2010
  • Sokoban by us: in development 1994-2012

Message to take home: all good things deliver. Alternatively: not everyone can maintain their development quality as long as Arnout and I can :)

Thanks

Big thanks due to everyone who helped and inspired us. You’re probably named in the titles already!

Questions/comments

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me!
If you’re reading this blog, you ought to know how :)

Day 8: SokoBan

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012

I’m on a biking holiday — first time I’ve done such a thing. Here’s a short summary of what’s happened so far:

Day 8: Utrecht – Zaltbommel

Bike counter settings:

begin: 559km
end: 625km
cumulative avg: 19.07km/hr
route: Annoying, very annoying.

This day I planned to follow the LF routes to the south. Unfortunately, there were various construction sites in Utrecht, and consequently, some routes were rerouted. Luckily, this was well indicated. Score one for the ANWB / bike tourism! The paths are important enough that temporary breaks are well rerouted! Woo hoo!

That’s what I thought near Utrecht Central station. 200 meters onwards, I began to change my mind. The next crosspoint was nowhere in sight. After biking around for 20 minutes and ending up back where the confusion started, I got fairly annoyed.
Finally, after about an hour, I managed to leave Utrecht, and was on my way. Again, I had some crosspoints, but since I didn’t have a full map of these surroundings, I just followed my route out of Utrecht and then planned to follow the main LF-route. Yeah right.

Many, many annoyances later I arrived at Arnout and Aukje’s place. Seriously, I even managed to mess up the route in Zaltbommel. Today was definitely not my day for following routes. At Arnout and Aukjes, we had a wonderful dinner, I played a bit with the kids, and in the evening, Arnout and I had a nostalgia-inducing flashback by reviewing SokoBan. Arnout and I coded that (in BASIC!) and finished it in 1997. Arnout found an old version, and was rather proud of how complete the game was (menus, level selection, graphics selection, etc.) To my surprise, his version included a “level succesfully completed” routine — I had a version stored somewhere that didn’t have that. Then again, his version missed the autoplay (which any self-respecting game has, right?), which my version had. Same thing for soundblaster support.

Apparently, we had a need for version control back in 1996 and didn’t realise it.

At any rate, we merged the end-of-level cheer routine into my version, and I’ll post a zip-file with all the stuff here. The game runs in Windows 7 under dosbox, which is quite cool (seeing as the game was written in the days of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 / Dos 5.0 — althoug finishing it took a year or two :)

Day 4: The joy of a revisioned bike; day 5: the joy of water

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

I’m on a biking holiday — first time I’ve done such a thing. Here’s a short summary of what’s happened so far:

Day 4: Eindhoven – Breda

Bike counter settings:

begin: 292km
end: 362km
cumulative avg: 18.6km/hr
route: AquaBest, wilhelminakanaal (via Tilburg), Oosterhout, Breda.

In Eindhoven, I took most of the day off — my bike wasn’t ready till 4 o’clock anyway. I went to an outdoor shop and got myself another quick-dry shirt for biking, and a new vest to replace the vest I had forgotten to bring (intended to bring 2 vests: one for biking, one for the evening. Ended up bringing just one :s).
My new super-duper vest repels water, is windproof, and should be warm! Which means that till now, I have had zero opportunity to wear it — way too hot :)

At four I picked up my bike, and left for Breda and Bobby. The route was fairly easy: Go to Aquabest, get to the channel, bike on till you turn left and end up near Bobby. Just after passing through Tilburg, the route passed a store and I stopped to pick up a little something for my host: a small bonsai tree. I had to fiddle with the luggage a bit, moving some stuff to the other bike bag, but in the end, it all fit.
Or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I got to Bobby and found only one shoe in my bike bags. It was way hilarious, and annoying at the same time.

Nevertheless, it was a good day. I arrived at 8, we had dinner and then went to town. When we got back, we were still chatting, which sort of continued till 3 in the morning. Fun, but since I hadn’t slept much, that was pushing it a bit. Moreover, somewhere in the evening, Bob and myself were invited to a sailing trip the next day. It sounded great, but it involved leaving at 8am…

We managed to be more or less ready to go at 8 am, and were picked up quarter to nine. :s.
The day was great! Sjammy and kwotte are really nice guys, and it was fantastic to be on a yacht once again. In the evening, we had dinner somewhere in town, and sort of stayed till 2am :)

All in all, a fantastic rest day!

A Gig ain’t what it used to be…

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

The other day, my desktop at the office got a memory upgrade: from 4 to 16 gig. So, after this glorious update, I booted my computer and clicked the system properties to see how much memory was reported. 14.8 Gb.
Le huh? 1.2 Gb evaporated? Still quite some improvement, but whatever happened to the 1.2 Gb? Local helpdesk: “that’s normal nowadays”.

??

In a second story: I bought another USB stick of 32 Gb. Plugged it in just now, and checked available disk space. 29.8 Gb.
Le poep?!?! 2.2 Gb down the drain??

So guess what:

  • 16 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 14.9 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024
  • 32 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 29.8 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024

This is probably old news to some people, but it’s news to me. It feels like underhanded tactics. I feel robbed!

Happy New Year!

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

A quick look back on 2011: personal highlights.

  • Meeting Aga
  • Visiting Tenerife, Corsica, Darmstadt, Graz, Vienna, South Africa, Canary Islands
  • Teaching crypto :)
  • Kindle and PRS-T1 (oh yeah I love gadgets)

Well, it’s brief, but there’s plenty of stories behind those things. Some of them ended up here. Not all of them though, and I doubt they will (too much backblogging is not good for the back ;-)
Anyway: best wishes for the coming year!

Kindle goodiness??

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

kindle logoOkay, I know this is silly… but ever since Tenerife, I’ve been wondering about an e-reader. You see, if you’re hauling all your luggage on your back, less weight and less bulk counts. A lot. On the other hand, if you’re backpacking, you have marvelous experiences with nature all day long. But in the evening, you might be resting in a mountain hut, in a tent, or anywhere else removed from civilization (read: television). Which means that you best be packing whatever it is you need to wind down.rgeous views don’t necessarily cut it — I like reading!

Well, carrying more than 2 pockets wasn’t really an option. I read fast. Especially when there’s not much else to do. So 2 books don’t last a whole holiday. As such, I wondered… an e-reader could potentially contain thousands of books, and thousand is more than two.

For months, I’ve been going back and forth between the Kindle 3 3G and the Sony PRS 650. Both have awesome screens. The Sony’s firmware seems a tiny bit cooler (PDF reflowing, support for ePUB format), while the Kindle 3G is cool because it offers 3G access to Amazon’s Kindle store. Almost everywhere. Then again, Sony’s trinket has a touch screen. Oh my oh my, how to choose??

One issue cropped up: PDF reading. You see, I don’t often go backpacking. I travel for work more often, and I usually take a big stack of papers along to read. If I were to splash out on an e-reader, wouldn’t it be great if I could take all relevant papers with me everywhere and read them easily? Frankly, when I went backpacking, I considered taking a small stack too…

Both the above readers are 6 inch (15 and a bit cm). If you have a PDF with only text, the Sony thingy can zoom in and out (Kindle apparently not so much without conversion, and the conversion apparently sucks). But if there’s formulas, it starts to suck. Apparently on both. From the few colleagues I know who have one, all mentioned that they gave up on work-related reading. Damn.
It would probably feel like a half-solution. Grr. Not good enough.

Along comes Amazon to help me out. Sure, you cannot read ePub on Kindles. In general, it’s more locked in than other devices. But: now they have the shiny new eInk Pearl display in a whopping 9.7″ (24.6 cm — almost the 29.7 cm length of an A4) format! Welcome, Kindle DX Graphite 3G! Can’t wait till I get my hands on this wonderful item (it’s actually a gift — how lucky do I get to be??). So yeah, excited and curious… will it be cool? will it be too big or perfect?
Will let you know later!

PS: They got E-inks in colour? cool :) Not necessary though, but cool :)

Tenerife, day 3 part 2: hitchhiking away

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

cable cart shadowWhere were we? We’d climbed up to Teide, I danced on the volcano, and then we descended to the top of the cable cart. The route we planned (to Pico Viejo and beyond) was closed, so we decided to abort the plan and take the cable cart down. On the way down the cart operator pointed out some native mountain sheep — but I didn’t spot them. At the cable cart base station, we treated ourselves to a brunch and sat down to figure our plans out.

During brunch, Aga said there were basically two options: back to Los Cristianos and beach out the rest of the holidays, or to go to somewhere called ‘Los Gigantes’. Were we to go to Los Gigantes, we could also go to something or somewhere called “Masca”. Apparently, it was gorgeous and wonderful and amazing and more!

As it turned out, we didn’t have to make the choice for a while just yet. I innocently asked how we’d get there. “Hitchhiking! Or, if that doesn’t work, we’ll take a bus.”
Errr… hitchhiking? Le what? Never done that in my life. Then again, never too old to try something new :)

The bus schedule was rather… disappointing. There was about one bus per day, and it was going near (not to) Los Cristianos. To go by bus to Los Gigantes, we had to take this bus (which left from somewhere sort of nearby) at 4pm. Did I mention it was roughly 10am? Even if hitchhiking hadn’t been suggested, I would’ve probably opted for it… or for walking.

We left the base station and walked to the main road. In line with our desire to hitch a ride, we were walking on the right (non-left) side of the road. The first few cars passed… grmbl. Then, one slowed down a lot, and we both thought “success”! But apparently he then saw our backpacks and raced off again. GRMBL!

Anyway, the primary plan was to hitch a ride directly to Los Gigantes. Failing that (which was likely), we’d hitch a ride to the point where the road to Los Gigantes forked off from the road to Los Cristianos / the beach. I heard a car coming, and we both turned and put on our bestetest smiles. Amazingly, the car pulled over! We were about to successfully have hitched a ride! AMAZING!

Cute hitchhikesterFor me, this was a completely new experience. Luckily, Agnieszka had done this before, and she struck up a conversation quickly. The Danish couple that had picked us up were about our age, and had rented a car to explore Tenerife. For a brief while, that sounded quite appealing to me. Rent a car, and explore the country side together with your girl. You could find all these wonderful spots … hmmms. The parts where we had walked, were inaccessible by car. And they were pretty damn amazing. And actually, with this car, there were some nice views too, but we were mostly speeding through them, not really having the time to admire them. Upon reflection, the hiking sounded slightly better.

Since the friendly Danes were heading in the direction of Los Cristianos, we asked to be dropped off at the fork. There happened to be a toursistic stopping place there, because of the nice view of the lava field leading up to mighty Teide. As you can see, we ditched the hitchhiking plan for a while and acted as tourists :)
According to the bus plan, there ought to be a bus stop around here, so if we failed to hitch a second ride, we could always make it to Los Cristianos.

After a round of taking photos, our collective thumbs had had enough of a break, so we broke them out, all fresh and shiny. Car number one…. shiny thumb, admire the shiny thumb… no. Car number two… number three… no luck. After 40 or so minutes, we figured it might have something to do with the location. There were lots of tourist walking around, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that some of them were in need of a ride. Following that logic, we hiked some ways up the fork, waiting for a car to Los Gigantes. A few came, accelerated and passed. Grmbl. We took some more photos (it’s a photo-blog! :), and our hope of reaching Los Gigantes dampened.

hitchhiking failureBy noon, we had walked back to the viewpoint and tried again from there – with the idea that any ride is better than no ride. Still, no luck… or was there? A car pulled over… was that for us… it could be… I went over, but the couple was Spanish, so I waved Aga in and let her figure it out. By then I figured they’d stopped for some photos, not for some tourists. Turns out I was right :s

Aga seemed quite down by this. I realised that a young girl hitchhiking is different from a bloke hitchhiking, and again different from a couple hitchhiking. Probably, had she been by herself, she would’ve by now hitched a ride. I almost felt like apologising… Ah well, couldn’t be helped. Plus, we were having fun together. Up to the point where she seemed to see the hope of Los Gigantes / Masca evaporate into thin air.

Figuring “what the hey”, I proposed we just started walking to Los Gigantes. I reckoned that a still-standing hitchhiker might be less appealing to pick up than one that is already hiking. Well, the second one sort of radiates an air of “you can make my life easy or not, but I’m going to get there.” as opposed to the “make my life easy please?” view. Well, pure speculation of course, and far-fetched reasoning, but enough to convince me to start moving, and it was good to not stand around anymore.

So we started in the direction of Los Gigantes. A few cars passed without acknowledging our thumbs. We polished them a bit and kept walking. Another car approached, we raised our shiny thumbs, et voila! Magic happened!

It turned out to be the Spanish couple who had earlier not picked us up, but stopped for photos. They weren’t heading to Los Gigantes, but they were going a short way in our direction. Grateful for any forward motion, we joined. This time, Aga was the only one doing the talking – Spanish is not my forté. They dropped us at a rest place besides the road, and we went bravely on. Again we showed our prettiest thumbs at any cars coming our way, and if they passed, we silently berated them and kept marching on.

It wasn’t long before another car pulled over. This time we were picked up by a friendly Swedish couple, I’d estimate the age of my parents. We had a fun chat, especially when the gentleman turned out to be working in IT as well. We talked shop for a bit, until the signs from both ladies clearly indicated a change of subject. :)
They were going to Puerto de Santiago, which was immediately next to Los Gigantes. More accurately phrased, “Los Gigantes” is a series of impressive rock formations protruding into the ocean, and also the name of the harbour region of Puerto de Santiago (which is next to the rocks). The friendly Swedes dropped us of in the village, near a sign pointing to the harbour. within 20 minutes, we were there, and on our way to find an apartment.

Antonio's

Aga had a particular location in mind, and we did find them in the end. The apartments were at about 1 minute from the harbour… if you crawled slowly. The lady at the desk told us that there were apartments available, but they were still being cleaned. Recall that we hiked up Teide earlier this day, and had been walking in warm weather quite a bit… We were both ready for a shower. That they could offer us in the mean time, so we had a shower. Afterwards, Aga wanted to go to the swimming pool. I wasn’t that interested to begin with, and didn’t feel too comfortable leaving our luggage there. Moreover, the room ought to be done in about 10 minutes, so why not?

And indeed, after a little pushing we got into the room and dropped our stuff. Our balcony overlooked the harbour, and not from far. We collected ourselves a bit, and then we went out to explore the town and grab a bite to eat. While exploring the town, I suggested tapas – that is a typical spanish dish and we hadn’t had the occasion yet. So at the village square, we asked if the bar had tapas. They said “yes”, but should’ve said no. We ordered “papas locos”, which I expected to be potatoes (papas arugadas, our favourite Tenerifian dish by now, consists only of salty potatoes). Imagine our surprise when we were served french fries with cheese and ham. And when I write “with cheese and ham”, I mean “with small cuts of cheese and ham sprinkled all through the french fries”. This was by far the weirdest dish either of us ever ate.

While more happened this day, I’ll leave it at this. That way, at least you can ask me about the Rincon De Antonio, next time we meet. Hasta Luego!

PS: Yes I did touch the water in the evening, after dinner. Heighest point in Spain in the morning, lowest point in the evening. Fun, no?