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 NOKÂ 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 HÃ¥vard, and we’ll meet Karl Trygve there. Hoping to enjoy some good Belgian chocolate, beer and talks at FOSDEM.
HD DVD/Blu-ray:Â
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
Google Reader - Search!
Posted by Stian | Filed under Ukategorisert
Google reader now got a search function.. About fscking time…
Java (Sun) går open-source.
Posted by Stian | Filed under Ukategorisert
Ifølge flere kilder har Sun bestemt seg for å open-source Java. Når og hvordan (dvs, under hvilken lisens) dette skal skje er enda ikke bestemt. Håper de klarer å bestemme seg for en fornuftig lisens.
Sun har dessuten gitt ut en ny lisens som gjør det mye lettere å distribuere java (i linux og opensolaris). Forhåpentligvis betyr dette slutten på java med fetch-restrictions i f.eks gentoo.
