My day job is to write software, which is a very precise and complex thing to do. There is a lot of emphasis on reusable components, versioning, storing and a lot of other technical things. I love what I am doing, but it’s nice to get a break from all this stuff. In my spare time I like to do analog things (I consider sports an analog thing too). The nice thing about analog is that there is no save, no undo. You do something, get an immediate result in some form and that’s it. Of course you get better over time, but there is absolutely no way of restoring a previous state - which is the exact reason why I love it. I own an analog synthesizer (Doepfer Dark Energy) some kaoss hardware from Kong which has touch input and recently I bought a DIY kit for an analog camera.
I fell in love with the camera even before I bought it. The idea of assembling it myself and then taking actual pictures of the film was instantly appealing to me. A few days later I was diving head first into the blogsphere and reading up on color film development. Today, the equipment for the whole process shipped and I am eager to get home and start developing.

Yesterday Google+ got a new outfit and Hangout got a long overdue facelift too. I don’t mind the new looks, but my stream is exploding with UI/UX experts (or people thinking they are experts in that field) that keep complaining about the multi column layout or Hangout missing features.

The new Stream Layout

I am no expert on UI/UX at all. Actually I am the exact opposite. I’m a die-hard-use-shell-for-everything guy. I don’t understand why white and smokewhite make a difference. I don’t consider adding shadows if we are not rendering something in a 3d world. I appreciate a good UI when I see one, but I could never make one.

Google just released the Glass API and I was, like many others, eagerly waiting for just that to happen. But, having learnt my lessons in the past, I did also read the Terms of Service.

Glass ToS Section 3: Fees
No Fees. You may not charge end users any fees or collect any payments in order to download or access your API Client, or in connection with virtual goods or functionality of your API Client.
source

What’s the worst troll a tech firm could pull off? Introduce the most amazing - maybe the most revolutionary technology in the century - and immediately spoil it for everyone that might do great stuff with it.

The story

A few weeks ago, my old love to Lego came back to life.

The last time I built anything with Lego, I was still living with my parents and something around 15 years younger. Lego was something I got for Xmas and Birthdays and I absolutely adored building stuff with it. Not just the sets that came with the boxes, I build all sorts of different things (an assembled Bat Mobile that I modeled after a 2 matchbox models (here and here) is still at my parent’s house).

This Saturday my bed died right under me.
It simply broke apart in the middle of the night, waking me and my wife and I almost fell out of it.
The technical design of our former bed actually dictates that it will break really soon after buying it (we had it for less than 3 years). The whole weight is spread over the middle bar which is held in place by two shoddy plastic feet and two metal pieces, and 3 L shaped metal plates on each side of the bed.

All of the L shaped plates can be bent when you lie on the bed. And this exactly what happened. The first time this happened I flipped them around so they would bend back over time, but that only prolonged the death of the bed a bit. Once they had bent again (with me falling through the bed yet again) they were so weak that they couldn’t take the pressure for more than a few nights.

Then on last Saturday I fell through again. I knew it would not be enough to flip them around again because they had been severely bent this time and would not hold another night.