Sometimes you realize that certain things in the past are not nearly as far gone as you may have thought. They may not even be behind you at all.

I started my weekend with a realization like that, and so have spent the rest of it sort of fumbling around, feeling a bit shattered and attempting to regain some lost balance. It is much too early to tell, but I am at least moving in some right-like direction. Time will tell where it leads me.

I have written down quite a few thoughts, and spent quite a bit of time talking to people about it. Anything but thought processing, especially through conversation and interaction with others, seems kind of pale and unimportant.

It is strange to think that there is a normal Monday at work coming tomorrow. I think it will be one of those days where my perspective is shifted in a new way to make everything feel different. I enjoy that kind of shift in itself, so in a way I look forward to that.

But I know I will not bury this in work. It is time to grab this part of the past, process it and finally put it back where it ought to be in the timeline.

I have not written here much lately, but I have actually been pretty good at writing in general. Much, if not most, of it has even been on paper. While I have been making notes in my paper notebooks on and off, morning pages have mostly been off. But the past few days I have got into them too againm and it feels nice if not earth-shattering. More simply satisfying and cosy is that I have started writing a bit in the evening as well. In bed, nice-flowing Japanese pen in hand and a Moleskine notebook for surface. Cosy cosy cosy, I am starting to like my handwriting, starting to try and get certain letters to look a little bit nicer. Things like that. Becoming a better handwriter, having a great time and becoming a generally better writer in the process as well.

Keeping a diary, the people of Olde would have called it.

It is like a weblog, but physical and without the comment spam.

I am trying to improve my writing with this little entry too, writing it mostly eyes closed, trysting (to some degree) the accuracy of my fingers and my knowledge of the keyboard. More fun, and more relaxing for the eyes. Even if Iglance up all the time, not at all like that time when I wrote a whole long entry without looking at all.

Candy monster

I have been pretty hard on the candy this week. Last night I bought a six pack of dammsugare (wonderful marzipan covered rolls of various doughs, both ends dipped in chocolate) on the way home from work.

That should have lasted for at least three occasions. Yet, somehow, probably influenced by the evil powers of the universe, they only lasted for one. And that despite being served after two healthy plates of spaghetti and meat sauce.

Today, it was time to be a different man. So, along with a decent movie, I had upward of a litre of chocolate flake ice cream.

And now that the apartment is more or less free of candy and ice cream, perhaps I can go back to leading a healthier life ...

But hey, today I skipped the coffee and stuck with red and green teas. Got to count for something, that. Right? Cough ...

Otherwise a good amount of things are packed, some other things have been thrown away, and winter incredibly and wonderfully maintains its grip on Lund. I love the extra light and calm, and am enjoyed by all those seeing more trouble than fun in it. But it is a good thing I got a long run in on Saturday, because I do not seem to get out for any longer distances while new snow keeps coming.

My eyes tell me it is time for bed. Take good care!

Update: A user's manual for the C-200 is now available online. It includes all the information I missed in the package when I bought mine. See the external link "C-200 manual".

In the middle of the summer of 2009, I did what we all do when the weather is warm and sunny: I went and got myself a nice big full HD television.

This, naturally, created all new problems and questions in my home. The foremost of which being that I had exactly one source capable of delivering any kind of HD viewing material. That source was my Imac, and even it struggled a bit too much for comfort when it came to full HD.

So, it was Time for Another Box. A media player of some sort. After benevolent prodding from well-meaning friends, my mind settled on the Popcorn hour C-200. A device which promised to do anything I might want it to, look pretty good, be open for modifications and updates and which was almost, but not quite, shipping.

The upside about that was that it spread my toy purchases out a bit. The downside was of course the silly situation of having an Imac sitting right next to the TV for a couple of months (with me sitting on the floor in front of it whenever I wanted to use my computer. Being lazy can be both uncomfortable and look silly when the stars align the right way).

I preordered my Popcorn and patiently sat around (often on the floor) until it was delivered toward the end of November. I had it delivered to work, picked up a 2.5" hard drive for internal storage on the way home and set about dismantling my new toy right after unpacking it.

My first impression was that the Popcorn hour was both larger and much more solid than I had expected. It is pretty much all nice solid metal and sized like a good amplifier or DVD player or something similar. The remote control fits in with most other remotes of the world: black, packed with buttons laid out in a decent order and with a rather mushy feel to each keypress.

The makers pretty much expect people to open up the box themselves, and they clearly put some thought into making it easy. One single screw is all it takes to get to the relatively spacious insides, and once there everything comes naturally if you have ever been inside a computer before.

However, I am not sure what you would do if you had never opened a computer case before. My Popcorn came without even the slightest shred of information on installing things internally. I do not know if I would have figured out that the mount point for the 2.5" drive was hidden below the bay for 3.5" devices without prior experience, in fact I'm not even that sure how I figured it out even now. And to get to it, the whole 3.5" bay needed to be dismounted, which took a lot more than one screw. So, I think at least a little diagram or something similar would be in order to give people a clue about how to install drives.

3.5" devices should be a much simpler story though, that drive seems to be slot-in. So all you would need to do in that case is open the front hatch, slide the drive in and be done.

To sum up the physical side of the C-200, I like the hardware and have had no problems with it. But I do think it could have come with at bit more information on how to handle it.

Usage

Popcorn hour connected to your TV, you want it to show something. The two basic options are to either put media on your Popcorn hour, or stream it over your network. The Popcorn comes without any internal storage, so if you do not wish to stream you have to get a hard drive (as I did), USB memory, DVD drive or something similar and connect. I have not tried the streaming aspects at all as playing films without needing a computer to be turned on was a large part of the attraction for me.

The Popcorn runs a whole host of services (and more can be installed) to let you put things on it. Plug it into your network, turn on a service or two (FTP for example) and start sending media to it.

Well, unless you try to send too fast ... I noticed that both the Popcorn and my Imac support gigabit ethernet (while my router does not), so I figured I could save some time by connecting them directly and transfer things. No luck, as actually activating gigabit speeds overwhelmed the device and made it lock up after a random while. Odd, and hopefully very fixable. But once you know it, you can luckily change a setting to force topping out at 100 megabit and just wait a bit longer for everything to finish.

Once you have your media, just browse to it, hit play and enjoy. I have yet to find a file which would not play, which is exactly the way I hoped it would be, and everything including full HD runs nice and smooth. The step in convenience is enormous from messing about with an extra computer, cables, VLC and dual screen setups to this. It just works, exactly the way it should be, and I have no clue why, somewhere deep down, I did not dare to expect that.

That said, there are snags every now and then. I have had one movie file for which sound just would not play, and sometimes when watching highly compressed avi files I get visual artifacts and corruption which looks a lot like what you'd get if the player could not keep up. On a device powerful enough to handle full HD content smoothly, choking on 700 megabytes of fuzziness seems odd, to say the least. I am wondering if some unusual encoding and/or some rogue background process might be to blame. In any case, all the more reason to stay away from content of low visual quality. It probably hurts the soul of your HD screen in any case ...

But there is more. Popcorn hours are very open and have a pretty active community discussing them and churning out various kinds of applications and extras. For example, the community has built a replacement web server you can install to speed up many applications. There are also various kind of download systems, new looks for the menus, applications to watch movie trailers and so on.

The one extra I use most, however, is the improved version of Transmission. The C-200 has a builtin bittorrent client (an older version of Transmission if I understand correctly), but it is not very pretty and not very configurable. So you can install the latest and greatest instead, which gives you more options and a very slick web interface which even works great on the Iphone.

This means I can be on any device and stumble on a torrent I want to download. Then I can download the torrent file (or just copy the link), surf into the Transmission web interface, feed it the file (or link) and get on with my day. I may be the very last person in the world to discover this, but it really feels somewhat magical to hand off long-running downloads to a dedicated machine and then be free to shut down the computer or anything else you can think of. The only thing you notice is some of your bandwidth being eaten up and whatever noise your C-200's hard drive may make while spinning.

Another advantage of the active community is that people have compiled rather substantial lists of compatible hardware on the wiki. That means you can look up hard, USB, DVD and blueray drives and see which brands and models are sure to work before getting one. And if you do run into a problem, chances are someone else has already been there and written about it. Never underestimate the amount of headaches you can save by searching the official forums and wiki.

What is not to like?

To sum it up: this is a device for those who like a little tinkering. It is not something Apple would release. The menus could be speedier, look prettier and gigabit network speeds could actually work. And you need to browse wikis to find out how to do things. But really, doing the homework is the demanding part. I have not run into any problem which required actual unix-hackery-type skills to solve. But you should not be afraid of port numbers, FTP usernames and passwords or similar things if you want to get the most out of your Popcorn hour. (Note that I have never tried any other devices solving the same problems, so I have no idea if other vendors provide simpler solutions.)

The only problems I have really had have been how to conveniently install and reinstall applications. As of right now, using the Windows application NMT community installer seems to be the smoothest way to go for me. It also got me sorted out when something (might have been a failed upgrade by a different installer) broke Transmission for me.

Oh, that thing about gigabit networking locking up the device is rather annoying too, even if it does not normally affect me at all.

Yesterday Apple introduced the Ipad, their all-screen, all-touch computer which looks much like an enlarged Iphone and can also run Iphone applications.

Personally, I would have thought it wonderfully entertaining if Apple had not released the Ipad. I would have loved to see the reactions of all those future-predicters on the web. But no mind, the pad is here and I know I want one.

Some people seem less certain, but I am not even sure when I last felt such an immediate need for a new toy.

As for what I will do with it, I will do everything I do today on my Iphone and/or on my old laptop, and it will probably take over some tasks from my Imac as well. Completely in agreement with Apple's stated intentions, everything the Ipad lets me do seems more appealing to do there than on the Iphone, laptop or dekstop. The phone (or Ipod) has the advantage of portability and always being with me. The desktops or laptops have some power, flexibility, screen estate and (sadly) openness advantages. But full-screen (on a larger-than-pocket-sized screen) and completely multi-touch adapted applications right in your hands, that is just a whole different thing. I can see it easily taking over all my surfing and email handling as well as a share of my media watching. And I am so looking forward to drawing in Brushes or other applications on it.

I am also looking forward to a whole new world of touch applications. I am not sure if Apple would allow such a thing, but ever since the Iphone debuted I have had a feeling/dream that it should be possible to create a great, highly visual and touch based IDE.

Starry-eyed guessing

Time to add my own to the ocean of predictions: I predict that the Ipad will be hugely successful, and that it will happen in a sneaky way so that many people will not notice until the Ipad is suddenly everywhere. Kind of the same way things went with the Ipod. Some people will moan about the things it does not do and how it should be different, right up until the moment they get to use one and find themselves having to change their minds. People will find killer apps, their own sets of things which are simply better, easier and/or more fun to do on the Ipad than on any other device. I could easily imagine another screen size or two coming out and replacing the lower ends of the Macbook line, but that is not part of my prediction.

One more thing

I had another thought on my way home from work: not only will the Ipad sell more because it is priced lower than expected, it will also absolutely kill the sales of everything cheaper in the same product category. What are the chances something 100 or even 200 dollars cheaper will feel appealing when an Ipad is such a small-ish step up? Especially as something significantly cheaper is highly unlikely to feel as well made.

... my dear old model M keyboard is heading for the trash.

Unfortunately, its brokenness is still true. Shift and control just will not respond, no matter what I do. But I am typing everything but capital and special letters on it right now, and it feels just as wonderful as ever.

Sigh ... good bye old friend. I miss you already. Typing is not the same without you (something everyone agrees with, no matter what they think of the noise produced).

There is no other way to say this, but compared to this awesome power, Apple truly makes puny girlie men keyboards.

I would take another one in a heartbeat, and even quicker if it came with a Windows/command key. One can dream ...

So, if you want to adopt a broken yet wonderful keyboard, have another one to donate or, even better, are able to repair one, give me a call or something. Preferably quickly.

A quick sketch shamelessly exploiting a fleeting feeling.

It could be worth noting that I am not wallowing in sadness, far from it. A fleeting feeling, like I wrote. Plus drawing this and looking at the result made me feel even better.

Ever since I got into the habit of running again, almost four years ago now, I have only got lighter. More than ten kilos, in fact. This has some strange effects for me.

To start off, I can actually consider myself both quite thin and in good physical shape. Both these things still feel new, surprising and energising to me. Rightfully or not, my self image has always been more along the lines of "slightly too round and definitely not in good shape".

I can eat whatever I want, as long as I do not do it all the time. And this, just like exercise in itself, seems pretty self-enforcing. I keep eating decently, and when I do break out into candy, desserts and other great things I do not consume as much of them as I may have previously. But I certainly enjoy good food, drink and candy just as much as I always have.

Another fun effect is that I have become twisted enough that I sort of expect every irregularity in exercise and/or food intake to completely break the trend and turn me into a shapeless blob. There is still a kick when, as has been the case every time to far, I get back into my habits and discover that this is not the case.

However, there is at least one potential downside for the rest of the world. My natural tendency is to not consider what I do very special. I assume that someone else who puts in the same amount of time will achieve a similar or better result, and I rarely consider my own achievements remarkable. In short, I tend to assume that what I do everyone else can do at least as easily. I am not quite sure, but once you get the feeling that running 21 kilometres well under two hours is not such a special thing, it might not help or motivate other people to say that anyone should be able to do the same pretty easily.

Where does it stop? I have no idea. So far I have kept improving, but I get the feeling that I am approaching a level that I should try to maintain "indefinitely" instead of trying to push for more. Once I started thinking that I am in my best shape ever, the thought that it might all be downhill from here was not so far off. Hence: a thought to enjoy it while it lasts, make sure it lasts as long as possible, and do not try to pull any mad stunts which could backfire and ruin things.

Yes yes, I know I am getting old. I am trying to be at ease with it, see? If this is as good as it is ever going to get, I can still feel good about it.

Trying new, and great, pizza att pizzeria Algarve.

Walking the short walk to Algarve from the bus stop, enjoying a brief glimpse of a new part of Malmö.

Also the first pizzeria pizza in a long time.

Spending much of the evening with B and K
going through gradually more expensive apartmens
until,
disappointed at Sweden's limited offering of super-expensive,
we turned to Copenhagen
only to be left unimpressed.

Being exposed to the home of four cats
unmedicated
walking away afterwards feeling surprisingly good.

Bus journeys filled with music.

Marveling at heat escaping from warm bodies manifest as clouds of breath.

Feeling at ease with the world.

It is time to rest.