Magnus' blog

2007-07-31T13:14:00.000+02:00

Pappersväggar was great! Already looking forward to more from Aivide Lindquist.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris was put on hold, since HP7 (sic) came out and I had to read that. Great ending to the series.

The writing style (of the first 100 pages or so) of Jonathan Strange... is a bit too detached to catch my interest. Hopefully it'll change further into the story.

2007-07-09T16:52:00.000+02:00

Summer=vacation=reading!

I finished John Ajvide Lindqvists novels Låt den rätte komma in and Hanteringen av odöda this winter, and just bought his next short story collection, Pappersväggar.
"Swedens Stephen King" I read somewhere, and I agree.
I hope, for the sake of all non-swedes, that he gets translated to other languages real soon.

I also bought Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris. I have really high expectations on this book.

Of course, the real reason I bought these books is to bear waiting for the final Harry Potter book. Ahem.

2006-05-29T15:03:00.000+02:00

So, I live in a construction site...
(We're hoping to get the last 2 rooms in place before our guests arrive in less than a month)

2006-05-29T14:56:00.000+02:00

Finally GCALSYNC has arrived, perfect for using your Google calendar on the go.

2006-04-17T02:01:00.000+02:00

We looked through old photos today, and found these before-and-after shots of the front room of our summer house.
Nice huh? :)

2006-03-21T11:59:00.000+01:00

This is an idea I got feeling a bit bored playing WoW this sunday:
What if we would create real life quests for oneanother?
Questing in RPGs is all about setting a goal for yourself and achieving it. That simple.

OK, I'll go first:
"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to collect $1/1 Euro/10 Swedish Crowns that you would not have earned otherwise (so you can't just take it from your paycheck), and give it to a charity of your choice".

(Disclaimer: I'm not telling you to commit crime)

Please use comments to report back what you did to complete the quest, and to present your own quest ideas.

Good luck! :)

2006-02-24T14:25:00.000+01:00

The pony tail got a little dorky in the long run.
So I cut my hair and grew a beard.
This is what I look like now (like a dork in short hair and beard, that is :)

2006-02-24T14:06:00.000+01:00

I just found this old photo of my cat Stinas kittens..
I know already 50% of all pics on the net is cats and kittens (as to the other half, well "know what i mean nudge nudge?").

I just can't resist posting it, they're just too damn cute!

2005-12-09T10:06:00.000+01:00

We've been working out every 2nd day for 3 weeks, starting to enjoy it :)
Phone's been dead for a week now, comhem's having capacity trouble. grr...

2005-11-16T13:15:00.000+01:00

Long time, no blog.

Been playing WoW since May.
My guild recently split up, but I expect the game to keep my attention for another 6 months or so...
and then the Burning Crusade expansion will be out 2006.

My granddad died this summer :(

Came a good way towards finishing the summer house. Two rooms still not insulated, but we managed to stay there until mid-October.

Bought a card at the local gym, did my first workout there yesterday.

Work has included logging tools for mobile phones, and some USB development.

2005-04-10T18:21:00.000+02:00

Ohh, buttons! Click the link to talk with me (you need to have Skype installed, I presume):

BTW, Trillian 3 Basic highlights and links to Wikipedia definitions in your chat text. Incredibly addictive!

2005-04-10T18:12:00.000+02:00

Installed Skype today. Looking forward to see how things turn out for this IP-telephony thingy...

2005-02-28T14:31:00.000+01:00

If you own an xbox, and haven't played Ninja Gaiden, you really ought to.

I finished it last week (on normal difficulty), but KOTOR2 (a great game, make no mistake) is still gathering dust as I'm replaying Ninja Gaiden...

The combat engine is incredible: easy to grasp, yet hard to master. This fanmade advanced combat guide has more info.

2005-01-04T10:42:00.000+01:00

X-mas vacation; got an xbox and a dance mat.
Going to get it modded and try StepMania, which I've heard is considered the best dance game.

Played KOTOR and Fallout, both great games (and I don't consider myself a big fan of SciFi RPGs).

Note to self: Oven-baking the christmas ham is a good thing; don't mess around with boiling it next year. And let it cool off before rosting it!

2004-10-04T17:38:00.000+02:00

And here's one of my granddad Bengt, from last summer.

2004-10-04T17:35:00.000+02:00

(oldish picture, but I'll post it anyway.) My brother Mattias, admiring the work we did on the summer house

2004-09-17T12:03:00.000+02:00

Best Firefox plugin yet:
weatherfox.

Works great all over the world!

Note that you'll probably have to change you security settings to install the .xpi (you'll see a yellow bar at the top of the page (at least with Firefox PR1.0) where you can do that).

2004-09-15T12:50:00.000+02:00

2004-09-14T00:40:00.000+02:00

Our cat Rasmus had an Epileptic seizure last week. We've took him to the vet to make sure he's ok otherwise. We've only seen it once in two months, so hopefully we won't have to medicate.

2004-09-06T21:35:00.000+02:00

Oops, BloggerBots UI wasn't all that intuitive. Sending Rasmus again.

2004-09-06T21:33:00.000+02:00

In all fairness, here are the two other cats, Rasmus and Stina.

2004-09-06T21:26:00.000+02:00

Can't wait for October...

2004-09-06T11:09:00.000+02:00

I started a nethack techniques wiki.

Trying out email blogging (I guess this goes into the title?)...

2004-09-03T14:47:00.000+02:00

...and this should show up in the body text. Well, that's all, really.

2004-08-31T23:16:00.000+02:00

Experimenting with bloggerbot... (my cat Pluto)

2004-08-31T23:02:00.000+02:00

Not to spam, but Google is throwing invites my way like there's no tomorrow!
Mail me and I'll send you one.

2004-07-17T21:54:00.000+02:00

I've come to think about the Fermi paradox (it's my vacation, and weather's cold, so I've been watching Discovery Channel a lot).

Maybe it's not so strange that we don't see any aliens in the vincinity
- we're only looking at a timespan of, let's say, 1000 years. Any
evidence of visits before that are likely lost in the dirt (literally)
and forgotten.

I mean, what traces did we ourselves leave on the moon? A flag, a few footprints and a launch pad. Good luck finding that!

I don't know if they would have left something, either.
I mean, wouldn't it be somewhat impolite of them to go:
"Hello, we come in peace etc... By the way, do you mind if we leave a gigantic memorial of our visit, in case your culture collapses and you forget all about us?"

Anyway, I hope we'll hear (again?) from them in my lifetime. That said, I'm off installing SETI.

2004-07-14T00:25:00.000+02:00

Oh, this is a good one:
Is God a Taoist?

Not so much about religion as determinism vs. free will (after reading you'll see that 'vs' isn't all it's cracked up to be).

2004-06-13T17:41:00.000+02:00

Bittorrent is just soo good.
My ISP should think so too, since just about the only time I notice my upgrade from .5 to 8 Mbit is when I'm downloading torrents.
Without it, I'd probably have kept the slow DSL and be fine with that.

Thought I'd also mention SuprNova as a good source for all kinds of torrents.
It's nice to be able to fast forward through all those crappy blockbuster movies you're supposed to have watched, but wouldn't dream of renting anyway :-)

2004-06-09T10:43:00.000+02:00

Gary Oldman cast as Sirius Black in the latest Harry Potter movie! Brilliant!
This will be the first one in the series I'm pretty confident to be able to persuade my gf to come watch with me...
Nice to hear that the more mature and sinister theme of the later books haven't been altogether Disneyed out of the script, too.

Oh, and I got a few more Gmail invites today. Well, I'm not the only one.
3 invites; that's like $60 according to ebay... strange days, indeed. I'll just give mine away.

2004-05-13T16:08:00.000+02:00

Tried the Temple of Elemental Evil demo last night. Not bad at all.
There are a few gui issues (sluggish mouse, hard to see fallen foes etc), but I look forward to future games with this engine.

In all, a pretty nice game, and a good implementation of the D&D rules... for all us who think NWN should have had a turn-based mode.

2004-05-13T09:49:00.000+02:00

Feel like you have too much free time?
Need a few more good sites to keep up-to-date with?
Check out The Webby Awards: 2004 Nominees & Winners.

2004-05-03T19:52:00.000+02:00

Oh, and I also watched Kill Bill yesterday. Pop-culture-o-rama!

2004-05-03T19:49:00.000+02:00

Finished Salvatores Paths of Darkness quadrology last night (downloaded from Kazaa, read on PDA. I've bought the 3 previous Collector's Editions, though).
Great fantasy, and now it's on to The Thousand Orcs, sporting the most wicked cover art yet. Go Drizzt!

2004-05-01T23:11:00.000+02:00

Got my first 2 invite 'tickets' to Gmail, allowing me to invite friends to the beta.

Still got one invite left *nudge* :-)

2004-04-27T16:25:00.000+02:00

Got a Gmail Beta account today.
Welcome to exercise the spam filter: magnus.nilsson@gmail.com :-)

2004-04-26T11:06:00.000+02:00

Logged in to see if I'd get the googlemail ad everyone's talking about.
Well, I didn't, but since I'm here I might as well blog a bit.

Been playing Diablo 2 a bit lately.
It's a relaxing clickfest (a la solitaire) - but it does get boring quite fast.
Between the superior gameplay of NetHack, and RPG depth of real pen-and-paper roleplaying, I again remember why I never had the patience to get past Act I.

2004-03-04T21:31:00.000+01:00

Finally ascended a monk in NetHack today!

Weaponless, vegan, genoless, polyless, used 5 wishes.

Man, the Wizard is hard to kill with your fists!

My last wish was for a wand of death, and Rodney saw the dangerous end of it a few times...

Woohoo!

2004-01-31T12:58:00.000+01:00

This just makes me happier about switching to Mozilla.

It's so stupid you'd think it's a spoof. What are they thinking?

2004-01-08T19:53:00.000+01:00

What you can't say

Brilliant article; a must read.

2003-12-15T03:01:00.000+01:00

I finally bought a new PDA, a Palm Tungsten T3.
It's great for reading (big screen for a PDA) - I read 'Down and out in Magic Kingdom' last weekend.
It also has bluetooth, so I can connect to my PC and browse the net while sitting comfortably in the living room.
I'm blogging this lying on my bed!

2003-11-26T20:37:00.000+01:00

Well, this far running Linux as my main OS at both home and at work has been really fun!

I've been able to get all multimedia stuff running (listening to music, watching movies - also with TV-out - etc.), except Shockwave, which isn't implemented for linux yet (no big deal).

I've recompiled my kernel to get a few custom USB modules working (didn't have to, but it was an exciting experience).

I've tried out most X-windowmakers, and settled for icewm.
A minimum of blot, but still useful enough.
Plus, if I find a feature I can't live with or without, I can recompile it rather quickly (did it once to get the mail notification to work with my webmail-only account).

The only things I need Windows for right now, are:
- a few games (I haven't taken the trouble to get Wine set up). I guess NWN:Hordes of the Underdark will keep me on Windows at home for a few weeks. Haven't gotten the mouse to run smoothly on NWN for Linux.
- Lauterbach ICE debugging (no drivers for Linux).
- Programming Windows apps, naturally :-)

2003-11-05T19:36:00.000+01:00

I rarely get upset about software (or anything else, for that sake).
Sure, software can be stupid and user unfriendly - programmers are people too, and people make mistakes.
Today, however...

I updated the drivers for my optical MS mouse, since I have been running on the generic wheel mouse drivers sice my last reinstall of win2k.
Installed fine and everything, but when I fire up Mozilla Firebird, my browser of choice, it turns out MS has changed the default behaviour the wheel button to switch application.

And there's (obvious) no way to reset the wheel button click perform 'wheel button click'!

The only way I can see this, is that MS doesn't want me to use tabbed browsing in their OS (which is just plain evil!).

So I won't.
I have Linux both home and at work, and the only reason for me to be running Windows is
1) developing MS-only software and
2) playing Halo.

So that's what I'll use it for.
For the rest of my computing needs, Linux is fine by me.

2003-10-24T00:39:00.000+02:00

My first blogpost from linux - installed Knoppix Linux yesterday.
Basically Debian with better hardware detection, I guess.
apt-get is really a wonderful tool - just seeing all those apps just waiting to be downloaded... it's mindblowing.
Said goodbye to W2k by playing the Halo PC demo this weekend.
Let's see how long I can keep myself from installing Win2000 on those 10 gigs i left unpartitioned... :-)

2003-10-16T19:57:00.000+02:00

Started learning morse code. It's really fun!

2003-10-14T00:31:00.000+02:00

Beat NetHack for the third time, this time as Samurai. My previous ascensions were as Valkyrie and Wizard. No special conducts yet, though.

2003-10-12T22:54:00.000+02:00

Joined The Brights today.

2003-09-21T22:10:00.000+02:00

Interesting criticism on a common meme:
Friction matters!

2003-09-21T22:07:00.000+02:00

Blargh. Worked 70 hours this week, and still brought work home over the weekend...

However, the tango lessions started again last tuesday - fun as always.

Also looking forward to DMing again next sunday.

2003-09-09T20:34:00.000+02:00

DM:d my first D&D adventure this sunday! _Extremely_ fun.
Finally, a good way to combine creativity and recreation.

2003-08-31T22:06:00.000+02:00

Spent the entire weekend reading The Dark Elf Trilogy.
Salvatore is an incredible writer.

2003-08-22T11:38:00.000+02:00

Installed BlogThis at work too.
TGIF

2003-08-21T20:53:00.000+02:00

Installed Firebird; great! - but mozblog didn't work at all, so I forgot about this blog...

I just installed blogthis instead.

So, what's happened since last autumn?

I've turned 29.

I still love my job as a programmer. Getting more and more into embedded stuff.

I got together with some other people and now roleplay D&D pen-and-paper semi-regularly. In fact, we have a game coming up this sunday. I thought I'd start DMing a bit, too.

2002-10-01T10:40:00.000+02:00

Bicycled to work and back yesterday (50 km!), but was too exhausted to blog about it last night. I think I'll do it once a week, though; I could do with the exercise.

2002-09-29T21:28:00.000+02:00

Good weekend. Saturday night me and gf went tango dancing, and today we picked two big bags of apples - and had apple pie for dinner.
By the way, here's a funny one: What Software Version Numbers Really Mean

2002-09-22T11:10:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was a good one.

I got that IRC D&D introduction. In two hours we covered very basic combat and movement - I understand why good DMs are so highly though of.

I also got my first moderation points at slashdot. Silly thing to get excited about, but interesting to see how the system works.

2002-09-20T11:41:00.000+02:00

My D&D tutor never showed up on IRC. We agreed to try again Tuesday night.

2002-09-18T22:29:00.000+02:00

Got mail from Eric Raymond - I'd almost forgotten I volunteered to proof-read the Jargon File.

Hopefully, this means a new release is on it's way - I, for one, would like to be able to decipher some of the geekier Slashdot posts...

2002-09-18T22:15:00.000+02:00

Tango lession tonight (as usual on Wednesdays this autumn).
We finally started practicing some of those fancy spins and twists we've seen the teachers doing.

If you've ever considered taking dancing lessions, I can recommend tango - it's someone's cruel joke to call it a dance, and everyone's just as confused as yourself :-)
Don't get me wrong, though - it's really a lot of fun!

2002-09-17T16:02:00.000+02:00

Thursday night = D&D night.

I'm going to have my first go at roleplay over IRC - supposedly the closest
you can get to the "real thing" (pen-and-paper d&d that is).

2002-09-17T13:29:00.000+02:00

Added haloscan commenting.

2002-09-16T22:46:00.000+02:00

Watched Harry Potter tonight. Not bad, but like LOTR:
If you haven't read the book, you'll have a hard time following the plot
- and if you have read the book, well, the movie's never quite as good, is it...?

2002-09-16T11:51:00.000+02:00

Hey! This is my first post using mozblog.

2002-09-16T10:58:00.000+02:00

A truly minute step for mankind, but a giant leap for this blog. First post, that is :-)