As a frequent traveler, I've been long thinking about getting proper noise-cancelling headphones. Now, en-route to a Haedong Kumdo seminar in Ireland I managed to forget my usual headphones home, and so it was time to take the plunge. Here is a quick review: First impression: wow, quite a lot of cable to carry around. I got used to too...

On Saturday I was in Ballina, Ireland, and a bit nervous: there was a Haedong Kumdo seminar in town, and I was scheduled to test for black belt. Behind this was years of different sword arts, like viking swordfighting, Iaido, Kendo, sabre fencing, and two years of quite intense Haedong Kumdo practice. We tested together with two Swedes who already...

I've posted about new directions needed for Midgard's release coordination and marketing. After some discussion, I think it is time to vote and make decisions. The proposal is to switch to synchronized releases. This would make development more predictable, marketing efforts clearer and more focused, and align us with the release synchronicity movement implemented in related projects like GNOME and...

It seems many people are struggling with how to classify different contacts in the social networking services you use: is your boss your "friend" on Orkut, and are your drinking buddies valid LinkedIn contacts? To make things easy, let me introduce the beer rule: User needs two social networking services. I use FaceBook to keep in touch with friends, and...

Looks like 2008 is forming up to be a quite busy conference year, at least looking at my Dopplr page. Here are the events I'm speaking (or performing as is the case with Haedong Kumdo) in this fall: Aug 2nd: Haedong Kumdo Seminar in Mayo, Ireland: part of the Finnish team Aug 9th - 10th: aKademy in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium: Location-aware...

Earlier this month we went to GUADEC 2008 to give a talk on GeoClue and geo-information frameworks for mobile Linux desktops. Quite good fun, especially the Bosphorus cruise! After the conference we continued vacationing in south Turkey, scootering to the ruins of Ephesus and taking a yacht cruise from Fethiye to Olympos. More photos on Flickr.

A List Apart has a new survey for people involved in web business. Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every...

I've blogged about OpenStreetMap, the user-generated open content map service, before. Having electronic map data freely available will enable completely new solutions for navigation and experiencing our surroundings. Being user-generated, OpenStreetMap can cope with changing environment in a much better way than the proprietary offerings. For instance: When walking to office today I noticed there was construction work ongoing to...

Hi, all! My blog's desktop feed has recently been added to Planet GNOME, and so here is a quick introduction: My name is Henri Bergius and I am a free software hacker focused on things like the Midgard framework and some location-aware applications for desktop and mobile. I work at Nemein, a small Finnish CMS consultancy building stuff on top...

Off the Map has posted an interesting dataset of the Pamplona San Fermin bull run: In honor of the festival that kicked off this week, I thought that this was a great opportunity to show how Finder! can be a great trip planning tool. With the ability to download geographic datasets of your choice as well as create your own,...