Me and my friend decided some time February to go racing at Tierp Arena. Neither of us had access to car we were allowed to race with, so we bought a used 2004 Volvo s60. Now, the car was so gravely unmaintained that rust made us unable to get the summer tires off to change to the winter tires we had received with the car. We quickly realized why we had gotten away with paying as little as we did.

The week before and the week after it would have been illegal to drive with summer tires because of snow and ice, but luckily for us, it had melted from the roads for only that weekend and we could safely drive the car home. We later solved the tire problem with a strong breaker bar.

We wanted to get it ready for racing and did our best with our limited experience with car maintenance. We then bled the brakes, replaced some braking fluid, changed the oil to racing oil, removed most the interior and the back seats.

But a race car is not just about function, it needs to look good as well. I created a simple livery design in krita. We weren't able to put the entire design on the car, but we painted our door molding green and painted the mascot on the sides of the car.

We also made a spoiler from sheet metal. Making the spoiler was definitely the most fun part of the project. We first designed prototype parts in cardboard, cut the parts out of the metal with metal shears. My friend had a inverter welder, but none of us knew how to weld, so it was a lot of trial and error until we managed to put the spoiler together. It was also painted green to go along with the theme and then riveted to the trunk.

Check out our racing montage here:

I made an advertisement strip for a car's license plate frame just for fun. I designed it in Autodesk Inventor and 3D-printed it. I'm quite happy with how it looks. Here it is:

It is attached to the car using the standard method, which I don't know the name of but I'm going to call them “clips". I couldn't find any blueprint or any dimensions of these but I did find an image of a license plate frame and scaled the image to around real size so that I could see at least how high and wide the clips should be. I also used that image for determining where to place the clips.

It later turned out that I didn't scale the image correctly and the clips therefore ended up slightly too far away from each other. To fix the problem I simply cut off parts of the clips so that they would fit in the holes. Some of them broke when I did that but the problem was fixed easily with super glue.

The sign was too big to fit in the 3D-printer so I had to divide it into three parts. I assembled them by drilling two small holes on each side and then inserting glue and a short piece of steel wire. It became quite sturdy this way.

I then painted the sign. First I painted the letters and flowers white to hide the plastic texture. Then I painted the rest with a nice metallic green color that we happened to have at home.

And then it was done. It's not perfect because of the sloppy paint job and the visible cracks in between the pieces but I think it's still pretty good.

Today I got home from Öland, Sweden's second biggest island. We were there for two weeks, and walked through the unique “alvar” landscapes, which is a biotope consisting of limestone ground covered by a thin layer of dirt with sparse vegetation. The alvar grounds have, in most places, next to no ability to hold water, and are therefore very dry, so it's pretty much as close to a desert as you can get in Sweden.

We went to different beaches around the Island. The weather was almost perfect. It was warm enough so that it's comfortable to be in the water, and cool enough to not get sweaty, tired, and sunburnt when on the surface.

There are many flee markets all around the Island, much more than in any other place that I know of. I'm usually not very enthusiastic about them, but this year I bought a lamp, a coffee mug, two ceramic bowls, one tin chalice, and six books.

Before we went to Öland, we hiked for a week in the Lunndörrsfjällen area. We carried heavy bags, filled with our tent, food, clothes, and equipment. My bag weighed about 20 kg. We walked 12-22 km per day, some days on a trail, some days in places that are far more trafficked by reindeers than by humans. We walked from Kläppen, where we parked, then up past Vålåstugorna, down into Storådalen, up through Lundörren, and then back to the car.

It was a very tough trip, but it was fun and it felt good to leave everyday life for a while, but it was also nice afterwards to come back home to the luxury that is having electricity, heat, and running water.

Today me and my family got home from our hike to and from Vålådalsstugorna in northern Sweden. From where we parked the car it was slightly less than 20 kilometers to the station. We began the hike yesterday and it started to rain early on but it cleared up quickly and we had great weather for the better part of the trip.

On the way up we met a woman with a huge reindeer antler sticking out of her backpack. She told us that she had found it while walking and had been carrying it since one day ago. After that I started looking around for antlers while walking but I never found any. That may be because it's a somewhat popular trail and that any antlers have therefore already been found.

On the way back, we saw a lagopus. We came pretty close to it before it started fleeing and that's when we noticed it. It didn't run very far even then so I was able to bring out my binoculars and take a picture through them.

Today I created an RSS feed for these blog posts. It was pretty easy to do, even though I had to implement the logic for it myself. The RSS protocol has really earned it's name: Really Simple Syndication because it really is simple. All it took was using Golang's text/template package to make a dynamic XML file and then fill it with info about my posts. This page documents the RSS syntax and was very useful to me during this process.

Today the server was down for a while, don't know when it began but I solved the problem around 20:50 CEST. The cause was that my router had changed the local IP address of my web server, something it had never done before. I have now made the IP static so I do not expect to have this problem again.

What up, what up?? After half a year of not using this blog I am finally back, this time in English. The reason I haven't posted anything is that I kind of just didn't feel like it. So what happened today? I played some frisbee golf with my friends and got my first hole in one! That was quite epic. I also worked a bit on a client's website.

I bought a DJI Mavic Air drone a few weeks ago and I crashed it yesterday. It was quite rough and 3 of the 4 propellers broke. I have ordered new ones. I might make a video with my drone footage either on YouTube or Instagram sometime but I'm kind of busy right now.

As you might be able to see, I now have a new logo, which is the one with flowers and a globe with electronic devices hovering around it. I am quite proud of it. To match this logo, I have also changed the font to IM FELL English which is currently my favorite. It is based on a font used by Oxford University Press a long time ago that was imported to England by Dr. John Fell sometime in the late 17th century. The “IM" stands for Igino Marini, the person who digitally reproduced the fonts.

I also changed the license for this site from BSD 3-Clause to GPLv3 because it is cooler. The license isn't very important since this is just for my personal website but if someone finds something they think is neat, such as a css animation or an icon, and wants to copy it to their website, they won't be confused and won't have to ask for permission.

Nu har jag fixat en extremt primitiv blog. Sedan får vi se hur pass mycket jag kommer att använda den. Idag hände inte så mycket. Jag åkte cykel lite. Andra nyheter: knåker basregler är nu tillgänglig gratis som PDF.