Run for the hills! Financial bankpocolypse!
Posted by Stian | Filed under Bog-skinke
Half a year ago I decided to get an Icelandic bank account since they provided an awesome interest rate compared to my old bank, after getting it though I decided against using it because of the financial trouble that has been brewing on Iceland the last year or so. I went with a Norwegian bank instead - Bank Norwegian. I still have an account at Kaupthing and they send me emails from time to time, which content has become more and more desperate..
About two weeks ago the first Icelandic Bank basically went under and had to get help from the Icelandic state - Glitnir. Days later I got the follow email from Kaupthing:
“Kaupthing Bank is solid. Kaupthing Bank’s posision is very good and will not require assistance from the Icelandic government, unlike another Icelandic bank… etc.. etc.. blah blah blah…”
Followed by an email 3 days ago saying that they are increasing the interest rate (meaning that they need more money..)
Today the Icelandic state went in and took over Kaupthing, and it now controls all three of the largest banks on Iceland. Hours later Kaupthing locked down all bank accounts, it’s not possible to use credit/debit cards, or the online bank service. There is no way to use or withdraw your money. Which led to the email that I just received..
“Because of a very complicated situation and a large amount of email, we’re sorry to inform you that we are unable to answer any inquiries via email. Please follow our web pages and online bank for more information… blah blah blah..”
Kinda glad I didn’t go with Kaupthing right now :p
Tags: bank, iceland, kaupthing, online bank
Secure beneath the watchful eyes..
Posted by Stian | Filed under Personlig, Tanker
I want one of these:
It’s a poster from the government body in charge of transportation in London, these were put up all over London back in 2002 when they first introduced CCTV cameras on all public transportation (?). As you might know, England is the country with the most surveillance in the world (1 CCTV camera for every 14 people) - 500.000 cameras in London, and 4.200.000 cameras in the entire country. The poster is like straight out of Orwell’s 1984, and I want one! I wonder if the people that made it were playing on the Big Brother theme, I hope they meant it sort as a joke..
There is apparently also a similar poster made by an american bus company, it looks more like a war poster though.
If you have any idea where I can get these, please let me know!
Tags: cctv big brother
Norwegian online banks..
Posted by Stian | Filed under Tanker, Teknologi
You should be able to afford something better than the cheapest SSL certificate when you’re a BANK, come on, get at least the wildcard one.. and preferably one with Extended Validation so that people get that fancy green validation line in modern browsers.. Cheap bastards..
Also, the two last days most of the manjor banks in Norway have had big problems with their net bank service. According to Norwegian newspapers this problem was caused by a piece of hardware malfunctioning at EDB Business Partner.. You’re the heart of Norwegian Internet banking and you have a single point of failure?? (if the newspapers are reporting this correctly.. who knows..).. But anyway, you should have multiple redundancies in every possible point of failure when doing something like this..
.. today’s little rant
Håvard - Bringer of Entropy
Posted by Stian | Filed under Bog-skinke, Personlig
Green plot is me walking from home to Fløyen. Red plot is my route back home trying to follow Håvard. Not even experts in the field of Chaos Theory can predict his path.
Klein Bottle
Posted by Stian | Filed under Bog-skinke
Got my handcrafted glass 2-manifold from Clifford Stoll recently. It’s a bottle which outside is it’s inside, and it has 0 volume (well, at least in it’s usual habitat (4 spatial dimensions) and not immersed into our 3 spatial dimensions..)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
Here it is, in a dark room, illuminated by a blue LED:
And here is the crazy guy who makes them:
If you haven’t seen it before, you should check out his TED talk.
Bergen 3D
Posted by Stian | Filed under Linux, UiB
I’ve spent some time working on a virtual 3d bergen as a part of INF251 (Computer Graphics) this semester. Basically what we did was to render the terrain based on a height map (a file containing a height value at every x,y position), modeled some buildings, added textures, spline based camera paths.. etc..
Mine was developed on linux and uses Glut, GLEW, GLM, DevIL, Vmath.. etc.. You can fly around in Bergen using FPS-style controls (WASD+RF/mouselook).
See my page over at the university for som larger screenshots and a movie..
1 Gb for under 1 NOK..
Posted by Stian | Filed under Teknologi
For the first time the price of harddrives have fallen under 1 NOK per 1 Gb.
Current prices:
500 Gb Samsung: 495,-
750 Gb Samsung: 721,-
1 Tb Samsung: 999,-
And I just bought a couple of 750s some weeks ago, should obviously have waited and gone the 1 Tb route.. :/
The Norwegian Customs Tariff.
Posted by Stian | Filed under Ukategorisert
I’ve been buying a lot of stuff from places like ebay lately. You can generally save money doing this, because of the falling dollar value (1 USD was 5.07 NOK the other day). I generally try to avoid going over the duty-free limit, but it happens on big items from time to time. Most items (electronics at least) only have value added tax (moms), while some have an extra customs tax. All of this is described to the smallest detail in the customs tariff ( toll.no ). I had a look at it the other day and found some weird things.
Turns out that the customs tariff discriminates based on gender. Some examples: Bathrobe for men: 10.7% tax, bathrobe for women: 6.9% tax. Singlet for men: 10.7% tax, singlet for women: 6.9% tax.. the list goes on. What happened to gender equality?
Luckily though, there is no extra tax on nuclear reactors, enriched uranium, armored tanks or spacecrafts (and possibly also combinations of this - armored nuclear powered spacecrafts..) . But I suspect that they cut their losses on this through heavy taxation on dextrin based glue, which has a 495% tax.
Some updates..
Posted by Stian | Filed under Ukategorisert
Camera:
Recently ordered myself a new camera to replace my 4-5 year old Olympus mju 3xx. I don’t really take many pictures, but my old one has been bugging me a lot lately, especially after I bought a bigger memory card. The start up time on the olympus seems to grow exponentially with the size of the memory card, using a 512 mb card (which is small by today’s standards) it takes so long to start that you might as well paint a picture instead. Whatever you wanted to snap is probably long gone before the camera is ready, unless it’s something like the pyramids or a big mountain able to withstand corrosion long enough for the camera to start up. The old camera also uses XD picture cards, a type that never really caught on - as a results it’s way slower and more expensive than the more popular technologies (SD(hc) / CF / whatever).
I didn’t want to go all out on the most expensive cameras since I don’t really take a lot of pictures, so I had a look in the ~2000 NOK category. Two cameras seemed to be fairly popular, Canon Ixus 70 and Samsung NV8. They’re about even in all the tests I’ve read, and evenly specced, so I went with the samsung because it looks slightly better imho.
Belgium:
I’m going to Brussels this friday, never been in Belgium before so I’m really looking forward to it. Traveling down with Håvard, and we’ll meet Karl Trygve there. Hoping to enjoy some good Belgian chocolate, beer and talks at FOSDEM.
HD DVD/Blu-ray:
Seems like toshiba finally gave up HD DVD today, basically leaving the format circling the drain. The two formats are basically identical from a technological point of view, but since blu-ray provides the most control over the consumers (region coding, bd+ drm, etc) this was probably just waiting to happen. It’s not like these restrictions are going to prevent piracy anyway, since equipment to dump streams from HDMI is already out there. Since it doesn’t stop piracy then all it does is preventing people that legally bought the movie from doing things like transferring the movie to a different device (want to watch it on your ipod? no can do! you have to buy it again..) and to bleed more money from consumers through price differentiation (no cheap movies while traveling overseas or on ebay for you!). I guess that going for the PS3 was the right choice for me, but I fear that the best (most friendly) format lost, we’ll have to get used to bending over for sony the next years…
Master:
Still trying to decide on my master for this fall, been leaning slightly more towards Visualization lately though.
NRK releasing TV-series on bittorrent.
Posted by Stian | Filed under Ukategorisert
Seems like NRK has started releasing their own production using bittorrent, and it’s even fairly high quality (1024×576, 24 fps, H.264 @ 3 mbit/s). Awesome, it isn’t HD, but good enough for this kind of use. Lars Monsen’s Nordkalotten 365 is the first show to be released, at the moment there are only one episode out but they will release the entire series over the next couple of days.
This is really a step in the right direction: distributed download and high quality video in a good format. Much better than their net-tv. Their first release is just to measure the interest for this kind of content, I hope this will be successful and that we eventually get NRK’s entire media library online in the same way. Recommend that everyone download this, even though they don’t like this show, just to let NRK know that we are interested. And who knows, you might like the show, I bought the book some months ago.
Torrent of first episode: Nordkalotten_365_ep_1.mp4.torrent
RSS-Feed for the series: Nordkalotten365.rss
