What happened in Simrishamn?

A couple of entries ago I reported the knitted cover on lampposts in Simrishamn, Sweden.

So why was I there? Well, this was one of multiple visits to this fascinating town were I was participating in a EPCIS based traceability project on behalf of TraceTracker. That link just there covers the project highlights (and I'm the one facing the camera in the picture).

Another memorable thing was that I for the first time since I was in my teens had the pleasure of tasting
bøkling. Now I keep asking for it in Norwegian shops, but so far I have not succeeded.

Luggage blindness

A couple of days ago I landed at the international airport in Nairobi, Kenya. Once again I was on tour to help a local company with traceability solutions.

As I was waiting for my luggage to appear on the baggage carousel, I started to doubt whether I was looking for the right thing. Maybe I was using some other suitcase than what I was looking for, and that it was on the carousel all the time. Or maybe even my suitcase had gone missing.

Luckily, before I could declare that I suffered from luggage blindness my suitcase appeared, and all was well. But I coined a new term, didn't I?

Cowberry chocolate cake

My Captain Cowberry alias may need substantiation. Cowberry is an alias for Vaccinium vitis-idaea, and many know that better as Lingonberry. Through my work with traceability I have given a number of courses in implementing traceability solutions, and a key example in those courses have been an example traceability modell for cowberry jam.

But now to today's subject - cowberry chocolate cake. You can either use your favourite recipe for French chocolate cake and sprinkle
cowberry over it, or use the following:

Ingredients:

• 0.3 liters of icing sugar
• 200 grams of chocolate (70%+ cocoa)
• 200 grams of butter
• 3 eggs
• 0.2 liters of flour
• 0.2 liters of cowberry
Recipe:
• heat oven to 175 degrees C,
• melt the butter, sugar and chocolate over moderate heat
• beat the eggs into the chocolate mixture one at a time
• stir in the flour
• pour the batter into a 20-24 cm springform cake tin
• sprinkle the cake with cowberry
• bake the cake for 25 minutes (add 5 minutes it the berries are frozen)
Serve with whipped, sour or ice cream.

Dual RFID tags in Pack & Sea's fish crates

Recently I participated on a project that sought to create traceability on fish caught in Swedish waters. While we affixed GRAI RFID tags to fish crates on the go (this was a pilot), we also observed some of the characteristic green fish crates from Pack & Sea. So we decided to try if our standard RFID readers could read these as well.

Reading those fish crates turned out to be no problem. But to our surprise each of the crates from Pack & Sea contained two RFID tags, with different identities. So if we had a stack of, say, 10 crates and one was from Pack & Sea, then we would read 11 identifiers.

This seemed very impractical in harbors where fish crates from a number of sources may be used on the same vessel. So to avoid having different routines for the presence of such crates, we decided to avoid them.

Actually, I do not think it is according to EPCglobal's guidelines to have use two identities in this way.

VLC in the garden

Arghhh! I thought I should try out the new MeeGo on an Acer Aspire One I had lying around. Worked like a dream, but lack of applications seems to be a problem. I was not able to read documents in µsoft formats - there was no UnclosedOffice around.

Anyway, I thought it was time to implement my plans for Internet radio in my garden. MeeGo wasn't the easy to use thing here either. So an Asus EEE 900 came to my rescue. It already had VLC installed, so once I located the streams of Danish radio (via dr.dk), I was able to share jazz, rock and other sounds with visitors that came by. I even had a set of PC speakers available, so neighbours could register my increased level of garden enjoyment.

Are Swedish lampposts cold in summer?

Check out the image on the right. It shows a lamppost with a knitted cover. I found a number of such lampposts on a visit to Simrishamn in Sweden in early May. They were nice, but why? Are the lampposts cold in summer, or had they just forgotten to remove them after winter?

Leucochloridium paradoxum in Strømmen

Last Sunday a movement caught my attention in my garden. It turned out to be an example of Leucochloridium paradoxum, that is a parasite in a snail trying to get the attention of a bird so that the bird can eat it! Well, I had my Android availabel, and the result is this short film:



As I showed my discovery to the neighbours I certainly reinforced their impression of me!

Welcome to Captain Cowberry's Kitchen

So I am creating my own blog. We'll see what happens here, but I expect a mixture of spare time, technology, curiosity and work related things.