Martin Olsson

jtotheizzoe: Meteor Showers 2012 A calendar of all the major...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:58:39 +0100

Meteor Showers 2012

A calendar of all the major meteor showers taking place in 2012 that I drew up.

Of course, this isn’t all of the meteor events this year. Only the ones with the best chance of being visible. I chose only events with a Zenith Hourly Rate (ZHR, the number of peak events per hour) above 10. You should also consider the moon phase for that date, which I did not include.

How to use this:

The date on the left is the early morning after midnight on the day it will peak (so “October 7” is between midnight and sunrise on the morning of the 7th).

The constellation represents the point in the sky that the shower will “originate” from.

Choose someplace dark, away from city lights, and bring a blanket and a friend.

Enjoy.

To calculate the sunrise/sunset for your area on a specific date, go here. Many more details about each event can be found in this summary from EarthSky. Some events will favor the North or South Hemispheres, but such is life.

Feel free to distribute freely!

(Link to hi-res version)

11+ songs that Martin listened to in 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:04:19 +0100

11+ songs that Martin listened to in 2011

Photo

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:50:00 +0100

Hej Martin! Jag ser att du jobbar med webb enligt din info på nätet. Har du någon kontaktinformation? MVH/Gabriel Bergqvist

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:08:00 +0100

Ja precis - jag bygger webbsystem åt skolor, och frilansar lite vid sidan av. martin@smpl.se eller martin.olsson@unikum.net om du vill maila! Ser att du är i läkemedelsbranchen?

/Martin (070 7527746)

Photo

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:37:51 +0100

The Bolshoi Simulation via KurzweilAI

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:14:34 +0200

The Bolshoi Simulation via KurzweilAI

Jonathan (my oldest son) getting a Finnish beating at bike polo....

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:59:00 +0200

Jonathan (my oldest son) getting a Finnish beating at bike polo. A couple of Finnish players took the ferry to play some Swedes. Mayhem ensued. (Click through to see more pictures, taken with my spanking new Nikon D7000.)

dadsaretheoriginalhipster: Your dad rode a fixie before you did...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:34:50 +0200

dadsaretheoriginalhipster:

Your dad rode a fixie before you did and he’s got the track stand skills to prove it. He was a fearless street champion of the blacktop velodrome that fought steel giants for riding room. He gave the pedal honeys hot saddles when he showed off his fixie tricks and made road bikers look like bitches. He was rolling seduction with a single speed and the cadence of a hell-beast.

So hipsters, next time you’re skidding the back tire around or blowing through a stop sign because you can’t stop, remember this…

Your dad was the first to know you don’t brake what is already fixed.

Thank you to njsideshowbob-tumblr for submitting today’s photo.

Keep submitting your photos to have your dad featured.

Breaking Dev: There Is No Mobile Web

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:17:04 +0200

Breaking Dev: There Is No Mobile Web:

In his There Is No Mobile Web presentation at Breaking Development in Nashville TN, Jeremy Keith outlined why Web designers and developers need to embrace the flexibility inherent in the Web…

jocke: (via Nicholas Hughes)

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:03:27 +0200

jocke:

(via Nicholas Hughes)

More dingy sailing

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:58:00 +0200

Today was the second day out with my Flipper sailing dingy. No camera this time since I was alone. I didn’t have Rasmus as crew, and there was quite a lot of wind. I managed a fairly graceful launch and headed for the open water, tacking a few times in the harbour and only screwing up slightly. Outside of the harbour pier the wind picked up and I started getting a feel for the balance of the boat, hiking hard and nervously controlling the mainsail to adjust the power: to get this thing to really fly I need to install the trapeze or sail with a friend for extra weight.

I made it across to Nacka Strand in no time at all, planing at what felt like at least ten knots at a close reach with slightly slack sails to moderate the power. I turned around and started sailing in the other direction. The hiking straps had pulled a couple of large stailess steel screws loose so I headed back to do some repairs. Suddenly my coordination failed, I was late in letting the mainsail loose in a strong gust, and the boat capsized. I used to sail Lasers in Dar es Salaam, so I knew (in theory) what to do. Grab a hold of the centerboard before the boat turns turtle, and pull down. In a Laser this works every time, but the Flipper is a bit larger, and has a much higher mast and more sails, so no matter how hard I pulled on the centerboard the boat remained on it’s side.

My drysuit was keeping me … well dry … but hanging on to the centerboard, doing chin-ups to apply more weight was becoming tiring. A family sailing boat stopped to check on me, but couldn’t do much to help. I swam around the boat to check if the sheets were loose and undid them from the cleats. I tried again, unsuccessfully, for about ten minutes until I realised that the way to do it was to chin-up and then wrap your legs around the centerboard, hoisting yourself out of the water completely to use all your weight to right the boat. I finally got the boat right-side-up and headed back to the harbour, exhausted but pleased.

All in all I love sailing this thing: it is quite challenging, but goes like a #€@%!. Lessons learned: trapeze needed for single-handing this thing, always let sheets out before trying to right a dingy, and get a whistle so you can attract attention if you get into trouble. Upside down in the middle of a heavily trafficked shipping lane is not a good place to be.

It floats (barely)! Yesterday Rasmus (my younger son) and I...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:16:00 +0200

It floats (barely)!

Yesterday Rasmus (my younger son) and I premiered the Flipper Scow I’ve been renovating since last autumn. Even in light winds we could tell this is one fast dingy. Most things worked (just some minor equipment failure), but there is a leak in the cockpit portholes (Henrik, a fellow dingy sailor at the club suggested vaseline, which might just do the trick) and some other more obscure leak that slowly fills the outer hull with water - some considerable amount of which we had to drain before being even remotely able to pull the thing up the slipway. I’ll have to look into both those problems, and possibly add some sort of puncture-resistant floatation bags in the dingy so it can’t sink.

The Futurist's Dilemma

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:45:56 +0200

The Futurist's Dilemma:

In this 1964 clip from the BBC Horizon show, Arthur C. Clarke makes a fairly precise prediction, but one that is only half right. “We’ll no longer commute in cities,” he says, “we’ll…

Defending The Generalists In The Web Design Industry

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:20:52 +0200

Defending The Generalists In The Web Design Industry:

In recent years there has been a move away from generalist Web designers to specialists such as content strategists, user experience architects and front-end…

Rasmus helping me renovate my Flipper sailing dingy. I’ve...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:53:00 +0200

Rasmus helping me renovate my Flipper sailing dingy. I’ve spent the last six months on this project…

Winter feels far away right now. This was taken seven months...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:48:43 +0200

Winter feels far away right now. This was taken seven months ago. Note my frosty moustache…

Photo

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:43:18 +0200

Creative Class: The Selflessness of Consumerism

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:46:09 +0200

Creative Class: The Selflessness of Consumerism

Magical fruit, from Married to the Sea.

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 22:41:34 +0200

Magical fruit, from Married to the Sea.

Offline Mapping in HTML5

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 18:00:33 +0200

Offline Mapping in HTML5