Civilians keeping track of Operation Odyssey Dawn by monitoring aircraft radio

“The U.S. military has dispatched one of its secret propaganda planes to the skies around Libya. And that ‘Commando Solo’ aircraft is telling Libyan ships to remain in port – or risk NATO retaliation.

We know this, not because some Pentagon official said so, but because one Dutch radio geek is monitoring the airwaves for information about Operation Odyssey Dawn — and tweeting the surprisingly-detailed results. On Sunday alone, ‘Huub’ has identified the tail numbers, call signs, and movements of dozens of NATO aircraft”

Listen: Secret Libya Psyops, Caught by Online Sleuths | Danger Room | Wired.com

Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again?

In recent weeks many Pirate Bay users have received an email, allegedly sent by The Pirate Bay team, encouraging them to download a course on how to make money from the site. The email is clearly sent by spammers, but since this is not the first time the Pirate Bay user database has been exploited, users are starting to worry how it’s possible that their personal info is leaking out again.

Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again | TorrentFreak:

Of course it’s bad if someone got hold of personal information but I’m mostly surprised that are people still using The Pirate Bay.

Charlie Sheen has over 3 million followers on twitter

Yesterday Charlie Sheen tweeted a price to his 3 000 000th follower.

3 million followers in less than 20 days on Twitter. That is crazy!

2011 MacBook Pro models suffering from overheating?

It might not be overheating but owners of the new 2011 year models of the MacBook Pro laptops with dual graphics cards are reporting repeated reproducable hard freezes.

Here is a 39 (currently) pages long Apple Support discussion thread about the problem

There is a summary so you don’t have to read it all.

I hope Apple fixes this problem as I’m thinking about buying one of the new MacBook Pros.

Five iPad 2 Parts Sourced From Japanese Suppliers

For these three components, then, Apple could face temporary supply issues not easily resolved by the company’s savvy supply chain management. And iPad 2 shortages could follow.

Five iPad 2 Parts Sourced From Japanese Suppliers | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD: “Three Key iPad 2 Parts Available Only From Japan”

Easy photo processing with Flare

I went a bit crazy with the photo above but the new Flare for Mac is just so much fun.

It is like Instagram but for the Mac and I love Instagram on my iPhone.

Time will tell how Flare will fit into my workflow. Maybe I’ll stick with Lightroom for the more serious processing and use Flare when I want something more lightweight and fun. Or maybe I’ll just do the basic processing, like noise reduction in Lightroom and the rest in Flare. Another possibility would be to do the noise reduction with Noise Ninja and skip Lightroom altogether. We’ll see, but Flare is so much fun to use that I’m sure I’ll use it a lot.

Uppsala-Kungsängen

Uppsala-Kungsängen from Joakim Andersson on Vimeo.

Uppsala -> Kungsängen. 50 km 4h 21m.

What we did last weekend. Lots of fun!

Sparrow the new Gmail interface?

When I first read about Sparrow I was a bit skeptical. Why would I want a native mail client for my Gmail mail, there is nothing wrong with Google’s web interface. I’ve used it for years and always been happy with it.

To buy Sparrow when I felt so satisfied with my current setup felt very distant but yesterday I found out that there is a free version of Sparrow that shows ads and is limited to one gmail account, so suddenly I had no reason not to try it out.

It’s a fresh look on your inbox. If you’ve used a twitter client you will feel right at home but it actually works surprisingly well for email as well. The keyboard navigation is a killer, the only thing I have to use the mouse for is to resize the preview window. I know that Gmail has keyboard shortcuts as well, but for some reason they feel more natural in Sparrow.

I’ve gone from “What would I need that for” to “Maybe I should actually buy the full version” after using it for one day. I think that shows how great Sparrow is.

Give it a try, it’s free!

Amazing filming by Red Bull

Watch this! http://www.artofflightmovie.com/

Jfokus 2011

A short list of the things and sessions that stand out in my memory after spending two days at Jfokus 2011 last week.

The venue was amazing. Ever since working at bwin, with offices in the house on the other side of the road from the new Waterfront building, and looking out over the construction site while having lunch on the balcony I’ve been skeptical to the construction of the Stockholm Waterfront building. But even though I might not like the exterior design, the venue worked great for the Jfokus conference. The rooms were great and the exhibition/lunch/coffee area was big enough to not get too crowded with over 1100 people moving around.

The WiFi worked now and then as expected. It’s amazing how hard it can be to provide a working wireless network for a tech conference. But when it worked the #jfokus hashtag on twitter was where the action was.

If I would select one session per day that I especially enjoyed it would be “Physics in Android games” by Pär Sikö and Martin Gunnarsson on day one.

See More Angry Birds Various at IGN.com

They showed how easy it is to integrate a physics engine with a 2D library on Android using the free AndEngine framework by creating a simple Angry Birds lookalike called “Angry Nerds” in like 100 lines of code. Very impressive.

On day two the “Future-proofing collections: from mutable to persistent to parallel” session by Martin Odersky naturally stood out from the rest as I’ve recently become a Scala fan-boy.

If you like Scala you just had to go to the session with the creator of the language and he didn’t fail to deliver. During the very interesting 50 minutes he told us how we will need to make use of parallel computing to use the full potential of the future processors, and how functional programming in Scala makes that easy.

I would also like to mention Neal Ford’s closing keynote “Abstraction Distractions” which was thoughtful and enjoyable even though I had to leave early. Hopefully I can watch the rest when the video recordings are released.

To summarize my first JFokus, I’m very satisfied. The organizers (and @matkar in particular) did a terrific job getting good speakers with interesting content. If you were not there you missed out!