Contemplations by Thor /tɔː(r)/

I've been holding out for over a year, not giving in to the second hand offers for an overpriced Playstation 5. A quick trip to the US also revealed that the store were empty and with no prospects of restocking before christmas. With this information,  I figured that the price would go up again coming christmastime. With an offer for a PS5 at 9000 NOK including an extra controller and a webcam I figured the wait was over; this was about 1500 NOK over the retail price at the time. The deal was made on FINN.no a Sunday morning, and by the time the kids were out of their beds, the PS5 was on the table. They went insane! Setup on the old Samsung F8000 gave a taste of what the new console had to offer, but without a 4K tv, we did not get to see the real benefits of the new over the old console. The hunt for a new TV started right away. Hardware requirements were 4K at 120 Hz, HDMI 2.1 ports, VRR and low input lag. At first, the Sony Bavia XR's looked promising with their "made ...

 Some BMW MC people discussed the other day that it could be a good idea to share our favorite routes in Trøndelag. I just wanted to check how this could be done with google maps. This first test is from my GPS tracklog when I rode to Mo i Rana to drive on the Arctic Cicle Raceway.    The second map is just a route generated in Google maps that is shared:  

 2,5 years ago I decided to upgrade to a AC band capable router. After reading reviews I decided to go for Linksys EA9500. That was a mistake. Coming from a very reliable nighthawk, RT-N66U, the Linksys was a huge disappointment. The software on the EA9500 was never good, and I don't think there was one firmware upgrade in the period I used it either. Secondly, the range was not good. First think I did was to get a Linksys RE7000 repeater. For one of my son's I bought an AC band PCI adapter. Although good tranfer speeds were good, the connection dropped frequently.  I resolved to using the old RT-N66U as bridge for this connection. I tried a custom firmware for the Linksys. I managed to get it installed but it was not stable so I had to revert to stock. For the home office, the EA9500 was very annoying with dropping MS Teams connections. At best, transfer speeds was in the range 200-250 mbps. That was ok, had it only been stable. Last week I decided to replace the home router....

 My airpods have seved me well since 2017, but this winter they started failing to work when cold outside. I figured it was time to replace them. I started reviewing the top-of-the line products out there, and quickly narrowed down the list to three candidates. Bose probably has the best active noise cancelling, otherwise Apple Airpods Pro and Jabra Elite 85t comes out pretty equal. I never liked the Bose design, and with rumors of  new AirPods Pro coming in April, I decided to go for the Jabra. I have Jabra Elite 85h in the office for comminication, and I like them a lot. The software, especially on mobile devices, for setting up the sound options is really good compared to Apple. 85t uses the same software. My biggest concern were the fit. You don't get to try buds, and you don't get to return them. In that sense, the Elite 75t active would have been a safer choice as they are lighter and a more snug fit. When I tested the 85t for the first time, the software told my the fit...

My days in Matlab is definitively not over, but it's a clear trend that more and more people I work with tend to use open source software tools for data analysis and visualization. This has motivated me to test alternative tools and compare them with matlab with respect to functionality and performance. Recently, I've been working with correlation of data from gas sensors. For the SINTSENSE concept, I collect data from the sensors into an Influx 1.x database and plot data using grafana. I found not functionality to plot the correlation between sensors, so I resolved this by extracting data from the database every hour, calculate the correlation cofficients and then push them back into the database. This data was then plotted in grafana alongside the sensor responses. The work with SINTSENSE made want to explore the possiblities of doing correlation analysis on timeseries data. The calculation of the correlation is straightforward, but in order to calulate dynamic correlation, d...