I'm a Winner

For six weeks I have participated in a program for launching new startups organized by ProblemSolvers. This was a 6-week program where I and 13 other participants generated and evaluated business ideas using Lean methodologies. Working full time we were learning by doing, hopefully "doing the right thing" and getting used to discard ideas easily before investing too much in them.

Me and my colleagues Tito, Mats and Martin.

In the end teams were formed that should pitch one of their ideas for a panel from the Oslo startup scene. Our project was a solution for employing fractional financing techniques in the electrical power market. This market in Norway will soon be exposed to automatic metering that may lead to prices for electricity varying from hour to hour, or even oftener. The price for electricity will reflect the demand at any point in time, so that consumers loose predictability of their electricity bill.

Anyway, we ended up winning the pitching competition. The judges in the panel found our presentation to be the most promising in terms of succeeding. So the plan is to toil on, initially in offices sponsored by Tøyen Startup Village.

From joy to despair on 28 March 1954

Can you see the plane in the picture? It is a Royal Norwegian Air Force Catalina about to drop mail for Hopen Radio meteorological station on Sunday 28 March 1954. My father took this picture. As far as I can remember from reading his diary they had been waiting for this mail drop for a long time. Bad weather had delayed the flight, and it would never return. The fact is that the plane crashed later on its round to Norwegian outposts in the Arctic. You can read more about the disaster in Wikipedia´s article called 1954 Bjørnøya Consolidated PBY Catalina crash. Eight people died and one survived.   

I found the picture in a photo album back in 2006 or so when I gave a presentation at my kids´ school. Parents were challenged to come to tell about the world outside school. My angle was weather forecasting, and I based my presentation around my father´s photos. If you are versed in Norwegian or just want to see more pictures from 1953-1954, then you can find my presentation here.    

It is hard to imagine how the joy of the arrival of mail was replaced with despair once the plane went missing. 

Poor man's smart mirror

By covering a computer display with a mirror foil or a two way mirror you can make a smart mirror - a mirror where you can both look at yourself and get an update from the attached computer. This is typically used to give updates on weather, news, calendar and so on. I have wanted to have one for some time, but the obvious location in the main bathroom has a mirror that is glued to the wall.

Since I am not about to remodel the bathroom or move to a new one, I thought I should look into other ways of achieving a similar effect, while leaving the mirror unharmed. My solution was to combine a unused 4:3 Dell display and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and place this so that I could see the computer display's mirror image when I stood in front of the regular mirror.


The application I tried was Michael Teeuw's Magic Mirror. It turned out that my myopia meant that I needed big letters to be able to read easily via the mirror, so some playing around with the configuration was needed. And of course I needed to force the computer to render a mirrored image on the display. The Raspberry Pi can do that, although not as easily as one could hope!

The result is shown in the image on the right. Due partly to WAF the installation did not become permanent. But I am intrigued by the prospect of adding some software for facial recognition and make the display switch dynamically between the mirrored and the normal display, depending on which way the viewer is looking. But since the Rapberry Pi needs a reboot to switch display configuration, I will need computer that implements the RandR protocol to do this.

Actually, there are a number of features that can be designed around such a platform, and an important angle is so called welfare technology - technology that is aimed at helping for example elderly stay at home instead of being taken into care. When I get older I expect that such solutions can help me take my medication, monitor my physical fitness, remind me about appointments and so on.   
  

Christmas innovation

In my previous post I showed my attempt to create Cowberry Leather. Although my wife and kids had limited enthusiasm to share, I at least liked it myself! As Christmas approached I thought I should try to make an alternative to the chocolates with cowberry filling that I made before.

So I lined moulds with strips of cowberry leather and filled the centers with chocolate. The result can be seen in the picture on the right. So instead of a hard surface with soft cowberry filling I got a hard core with a thin semisoft outside.

I feared that they were less agreeable than their predecessors, but that didn't turn out to be a problem. So what to do next year? Will I make both alternatives? These new ones were less complicated and less impressive. Does that matter, or...?

Cowberry leather - not suitable for shoes

Some time back I stumbled across this article (in Norwegian) about dried fruit in a leather like appearance, so called fruit leather.This was something I had never heard about before. Since I have more than enough cowberries in the freezer I decided to give it a try.

So I produced the sheet shown in this picture. My family did their minimal tasting, but there was little enthusiasm. So I guess this is (yet) another thing that I can enjoy alone!

Cowberries are not very sweet, and I did not add anything - just cowberries. So the taste can be a bit overwhelming. Maybe a future batch will have some sweetener added, for example some of my stevia.

But I am looking for an application. Christmas is approaching and once again I am expected to make my own sweets. Maybe I can make containers of cowberry leather and fill them with chocolate. Almost like turning my previous cowberry chocolates inside out. We'll see!

Trout sleeping in small stream

Last week was fall break for the local schools. So we were invited to a cabin in the mountains east of Gol, a small hour's walk from the nearest road. Our hosts bought the property about a year ago - two small lakes for trout fishing, a small stream connecting the two, and a primitive cabin between. Charming, candle lights could easily be the main source of light - definitely off-grid.

Before turning in the first night I went out to brush my teeth in the stream. Since it was dark I wore a headlamp, and lo and behold - a small trout was sleeping (do they sleep?). If not, then it thought it was safe since it had managed to hide its head!

Earlier, before it got dark, we had witnessed fish swimming back and forth, possibly because we scared them. Alternatively, it was part of the mating. Actually, the Norwegian Wikipedia's entry on ørret says that the name indicates that they swim quickly back and forth over the bed of streams in the mating season.

I produced my mobile and took the picture on the right. The tail of the fish starts near the middle of the picture, with the head under the stone on the top right. Back in the cabin I showed it to the others, and my hosts had never seen this before. So out they went to see for them selves. They even saw that trout have eyes that light up when illuminated by LED-light. It wouldn't be fair to pick them in their sleep. So instead my wife managed to catch two the next day - 470 and 360 grams. Enough for a taste for all of us. We had brought a small smoker as a gift to our hosts, and nothing tastes like smoked trout out in the great outdoors!

I have flowers, nuts next

Back in 2011 I bought two walnut trees. I planted one in my garden and one at my cabin in the forest. So every spring since I have been looking for flowers, hoping to get nuts. Earlier this spring I decided that I was disappointed once again - no flowers in sight.

But last Friday, I just accidentally passed by the tree in the garden. Hey - what is that?

As you can see I have flowers. And under each there is a small hairy ball, I think those are the nuts I have been waiting for.

Exciting, isn't it? I guess there are less than 10 in total. Will they all develop? Are there any competitors out there that understand what they are?

And what about the tree at the cabin? I haven't been there for a while. I had to move the tree last year because it didn't like its neighborhood. It is smaller than the garden variety. Does it have flowers as well? Stay tuned and learn more about Captain Cowberry's Walnut plantations!

Can a nekton drive?

Can you swim?
Are you insulted if I call you a "nekton"?
Well, I hope the answer is "yes" to the first question. And if you read on, then maybe the answer is "no" to the second.

Nekton refers to all the swimming organisms in a the ocean. These are able to move independently of currents of water, as opposed to plankton that just float along. So I hope that you and I both belong to that first category - I for sure can swim.

But what has this to do with driving? Well drive can be many things. In this context it refers to the apparatus that modulate electrical current to run ship propellers via electrical engines, so called variable frequency drives. A few years back I became aware that actually a large number of modern vessels use electricity to drive their propellers. This creates flexibility compared to running the propellers on the shafts of (e.g.) diesel engines, and more recently it interfaces nicely with rapidly developing energy storage technologies (like batteries).

Last week the company I work for launched a new low voltage variable speed drive for marine applications, like supply ships in the oil industry. And this new product is called "NektonDrive" (press release in Norwegian). This is a change from the typical names they operate with, like 800xA, ACS6000, PMS, and so on.

So why this sudden use of a name that can be pronounced? Well, as the product's project manager told me (my translation):

"It is a fantastic connection with what we are doing,

and many wonder how we found that name"

And what has this got to do with me, you may ask? Well, the name is the result of a naming competition. And who won? Well I did!

Urban development of my local community

My local municipality is struggling with getting the population to accept that the future needs to be planned. Population growth in general, and our closeness to Oslo in particular bears promise that we will be a popular place to live - if we succeed at combining the demands of urban living with good services like public transport and schools.

Years ago I came across a map from 1914 over the area, called "Fet - rektangel 15C" in mappese. The image on the right shows the place where I live, with surroundings. Already a hundred years ago the area was industrialized, but now the major employer is a shopping center. An up-to-date birds view is available in Google Maps, while the Norwegian Mapping Authority has a 1883 version of "Fet - rektangel 15C" here.
The black lines in the map are railroad tracks, and the local industry even produced railroad cars and locomotives. So rail is deeply rooted in the local culture, but should that keep us from getting better solutions?

So what will this area look like in the future - will the development be linear or exponential? One question I find interesting is whether the railway will continue to be the backbone of local transport or whether Bus Rapid Transit will take over. In my opinion rail is OK for people living along the line, but once you live some distance away the hassle of getting to and from the train benefits the use of cars. And that may not be future proof. As I understand, the local transport authority is replacing a system of direct bus lines with using buses to feed passengers to the trains. And it doesn't work too good. Maybe it would be better to use the area set aside for tracks for a BRT system. If this works for growing economies in the New World, then it could work for us as well.

Whether buses or trains make the needs for transport scale into the future remains to be seen. But the future also requires homes for the growing population. That is a more sensitive topic for the community. A significant number of people live in their own houses, with a garage and a garden. This needs a lot of space and makes it difficult for everybody to be close to transportation services. So the politicians want to build high rise buildings for more efficient housing. But the people don't like the prospect of having their view polluted by human constructs. So suddenly the politicians turned around, maybe because we are having a local election later this year!

Internet of Things on the High Seas

In the beginning of March I travelled to Gibraltar to board a LNG tanker. My task was installation of temperature sensors in the engine room so that key parameters could be monitored remotely, via satellite link wherever the ship is sailing.

A LNG tanker is a tanker for Liquid Natural Gas, the fossil fuel of the future. Not only is LNG a key ingredient in industrial processes and an important energy source - new regulations are also helping LNG becoming an important fuel for ships in order to reduce the pollution profile of international shipping.

On a LNG tanker the cargo is also used as fuel for propulsion. Although the cargo is kept liquid at the boiling point of the gas (-161 degrees Celsius), there is always some liquid that turns into gas, and this gas is used for energy production. The alternative could be to have separate fuel and use energy to convert the gas back to liquid, but that is both more complicated and more expensive.

Anyway, the development of LNG based propulsion in general and LNG tankers in particular is eager to understand how the energy in the gas is converted to useful work or wasted as heat. Traditional installation of temperature sensors rely on electrical wring. This can be both costly and time consuming. Therefore wireless technology can be very interesting, but a wireless sensor network can meet significant technical challenges deep inside a metal ship.

But the installation was successful - everything worked (and works) fine. In addition to making the temperatures available remotely, the information is also available in the vessel’s control room. This way it will no longer be needed for a member of the crew to walk around to take readings at each sensor.

The "Internet of Things" (IoT) is a popular technology topic nowadays. Many hobbyists are experimenting with instrumenting their homes, semiconductor companies are developing new and better components, and traditional industry are joining the IoT bandwagon. Compared to the popular image of IoT the size of the sensor and the transmitter in the picture may seem bulky. But this equipment is meant for an industrialized environment with high temperatures and vibration, so good packaging certainly seems to be a good idea!

The Drywood picture

Last year we changed the color of our house. Originally it was painted red with yellow frames around windows etc. But last year we concluded that we were ready for a change.

Part of the story has been covered already, but there is more! Because the Norwegian representative for the Dutch Drywood paint arranged a photo competition. They asked their customers to submit pictures of their use of Drywood paint, and the winner would receive a stay at a spa resort for two.

I felt that we deserved to win so I submitted the picture on the right. It shows my wife standing on stacks of empty paint cans while pretending to paint. Compared with the other entries I saw I felt pretty confident, but in a show of strength I added a Limerick:

Byggfruen vil gjerne på spa
Hun sier til utførende da
Du får stable opp spann
Så jeg male litt kan
Slik at jeg æren kan ta

Google Translate fails at making a good translation. Norwegian words like "byggfruen" and "utførende" combined with rhyme is not trivial.

Of course we won, and she invited her sister along. This was during the schools' autumn break, so I won quality time with the kids.

Eldhuset

Ascensio  tend to come on a Thursday(!), and that makes it easy to take the Friday off for an extended weekend. So the excuse for a boys on tour was there for the taking. This time we aimed for the Håøya island in the Oslo fjord.     


Håøya is interesting in many respects:

• largest island in the Oslo fjord
• unique plant life
• White-tailed eagles nested there this year, for the first time in a very long time
• part of the Oscarsborg Fortress until modern times

So we hired a cabin from the local recreational council and took the boat from Oslo harbor in beautiful weather.

I was there on a school camp when I was a kid, and coming back brought back memories. As with other parts of the Norwegian countryside Håøya is also suffering from the absence of cows, goats and sheep. They used to keep the landscapes open, but now every nice view is disappearing in shrubbery and forest.

But at Håøya they are trying to do something about it. A goat farmer brought his herd to the island to manage the vegetation, and produce goat cheese. We were too early to enjoy the cheese, but maybe next year!

House of MOS Technology

Around Easter I started the process of changing the color of my house. We renovated and extended the house around the turn of the millenium. It used to be covered with Eternit, but we replaced that with wood paneling in red and details in yellow. But making sure the house looked OK when the coloring was an oil based wood stain proved challenging. As a consequence we decided to change to paint instead.

Well, the wife suggested that we use the same colors as we used on a new garage we built in 2012, but I was skeptic because I thought the result would be too dark. But when I noticed the NCS codes for the colors I changed my mind!
In the picture I have indicated how the new colors 6502 and 8502 are used. You can also see the original colors (after wire brushing and washing). I had to remove the rain gutter to get the scaffolding in place. That is why the edge of the roof does not look right.

So why did the codes of the colors mean so much to me? Well, when I was a kid in the seventies the microprocessor revolution was happening. I never had a Apple II but its processor, the 6502, was one of the technological wonders of that time, and I read everything I could find about such things. And the 8502 was based on the 6502 with special functionality for the Commodore 128.

Both of these processors were made by MOS Technology, and I fear that having these colors on my house will be as close as I will ever get to this technology.

Call me a nerd, but it is my House of MOS Technology.

Beha #10603

Back in 1988 I bought an apartment that contained stuff that the previous owner didn't care about. One of the items was this electric convector heater produced by the Norwegian company Beha.

Since I have a weakness for old stuff I brought the heater with me as I moved, although it always ended up stored away. I guess it didn't fit with my style or meet elementary WAF standard, and its electrical wiring wasn't up to modern standards either.

Earlier this year I started a long overdue clearing out of my basement. Stuff was thrown away or recycled, but what to do about this charming, pre-war piece of Norwegian industrial history?
Well, I offered it to three bodies that I thought could be interested in giving it a good home.

It turned out that the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History had a similar one already, the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology declined politely, while the company was very interested. I suspect that they lacked this part of their history in their collections.

So we agreed on shipment and off it went, the Beha #10603 to Beha's facilities in Porsgrunn. Hopefully its lion's paw-like feet and old fashioned appearance will not keep it from being put on display there. 

Øystein's Twine

My house is partially heated by circulating water in the floors, and this hot water is generated by a heat pump. This pump, the hot water tank and the rest of the distribution system is meant to require minimal attention. But when I found myself looking for a target for my Twine, I found that monitoring the heat pump allowed me to maximize my use of its sensors.

Embedded in the Twine there are sensors for temperature, vibration and the device's own orientation. To this I added a moisture sensor, so that I can monitor:

• the temperature of the water pump
• the vibration of the water pump
• any water released to control the pressure in the system

Before activating the Twine I had to rely on observing the heat pump to get its status. As I frequently have business in the basement this was no big problem, but I had to be at home. With the addition of the Twine I can now get the status over the Internet, whether I was elsewhere in the house or somewhere with Internet access.

Access to the Twine goes via the services of Supermechanical, so I depend on they staying in business for the setup to work.

By the way, the use of solutions like Twine is included in the concept of Welfare technology, applied to finding ways to reduce the burden of the elderly boom that is expected in the future.

Try this at home!

The Never ever do this at home TV series is a huge success in Norway. Supposedly they show you dangerous stuff you shouldn't do at home. Recently this included a relatively big trebuchet used for throwing food! We all learn that we shouldn't throw food in the garbage, so I guess the idea was to show how you should not throw food with style.

But if you haven't seen the show then curiosity may have helped you do stuff anyway. That is what happened back in 2007 when my kids and I build our own trebuchet. We had previously seen a full size version in action at the Middle Ages Centre in the south of Denmark. While we couldn't throw big stones in our neighborhood, water balloons and tennis balls are pretty harmless.

So we aimed at a smaller version. Using a bucket filled with stones for load, we were able to send our projectiles far away, to where we could not find them. Or if the release of the sling was out of tune, then we had one water balloon go vertical - we couldn't understand where it went before we suddenly realized that it was about to land in our midst. So all the kids in the street and I dispersed in different directions. Nobody got wet though!

Unfortunately the weapon was lost last year when our old garage was torn down, so I hope the kids come home with a school project where they need my help building a new one.

By the way, I see from the picture that I looked younger then!

Haukenestårnet in Rømskog

Haukenestårnet is an old fire lookout tower in the forest east of Oslo. After having been taken out of use it has been reborn as a cabin in the Norwegian Trekking Association's system of cabins. So three dads and five boys went on tour during Pentecost, from Saturday to Sunday.

Visiting such cabins during Pentecost has almost become a tradition. The boys' spare time is heavily influenced by digital media, and these trips are small attempts to show them the joys of nature.
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While previous trips (check the DNT label) may have been strenuous, this was much lighter since we could almost drive to the door. There is a forest road leaving just 5-10 minutes walk to get to the cabin. But we needed an expedition, so we walked through the woods to the nearby hotel. There we rented canoes that we used on lake Vortungen. We tried fishing as well, but without success. Instead we treated ourselves to ice cream back at the hotel before we returned to the tower for a wonderful summer evening and a very good sleep.

The picture shows the group (minus me) as we are about to get back to the cars. We didn't go directly home afterwards, but instead visited a small farm belonging to the ones with orange covers on their sleeping bags. There fishing was more successful!

Rabinowitz' clothes hanger / kleshenger

This is no mystery - its the top of a clothes hanger, or "kleshenger" as it is called in Norwegian. But the fascinating thing is that if you google the name of the producer - Rabinowitz - together with the word "kleshenger" then you get at least 300 hits.

Why this interest for a clothes hanger from a mens' textile producer on the west coast of Norway. Well, wikipedia's entry on Moritz Rabinowitz describes a man that was one of Nazi Germany's ideological enemies.

If I take the clothes hanger out of use, then what should I do with this relic. It symbolizes the fight against fascism now and then, from the aryan, latin and iberian fascism of the 1940s, to the present day fascism in secular and religious wrapping.

School map from the scrap heap of history

I was inspired to buy a map from one of the Fretex stores run by the Norwegian Salvation Army today.

What was I thinking? It certainly wasn't what I was looking for. But back at the office I see that this map was from before the fall of the iron curtain, and that it is printed in German Democratic Republic. Although the Nordic countries are in focus, the map also contains parts of East Germany and some SSRs that since have regained their freedom. "Freedom from what?" you may ask, and I will point you here as a start. Since I don't have wall space for it at home, I think it will stay in my office.

Parking @ OSL -- fraudulent practices?

So you want to travel via OSL, the Oslo airport called Gardermoen. Well beware! You may stumble into the fraudulent practices of the parking company there.

Last week I was traveling again, but I wanted to reach a meeting shortly after my return on Thursday. So I took my car and I planned to park within walking distance of the airport. But early in the morning of Monday 7, January the only parking lots that were open was one far away with a bus connection and the expensive parking house. When I checked the web during the weekend there was no mention of this. So what to do? The bus would jeopardise my chances of reaching the meeting. So I had to use the parking house, even though I could see that many of the other lots were almost empty.

If information about this had been available in advance I would have planned differently, but the willingness to help travelers this way is not a priority when you can rip them off instead. I ended up paying more than 150% more than the expected price.

In my mind this way of ensuring income is very bad. They could have made an effort to help customers avoid this with information on their web page.

So if you really want to ride a bus when you travel via OSL check out Parking @ Gardermoen. The one to suspect of bad information is Euro Park. On the other hand, there is an excellent train service as well as long distance buses.