Now that it’s finally finished, I’m very proud to announce Budget Toko!

Budget Toko sells all kinds of cool gadgets, watches, audio/video equipment and a whole lot more. Go check it out on www.budgettoko.com.

You can also like us on our Facebook page, we appreciate this very much. Feedback is also very welcome.

For now I’ll use the server to host my websites, but I’m planning on experimenting with Java applications in the future.

It’s an interesting experience to manage everything by myself for a change. There are a lot of things that need configuration and tuning. Especially security is a challenge.

It’s not easy, but I’m confident I’ll make it work and help me get a better understanding of webhosting and Linux.

When I’m done playing with the server and have some free time, I’ll move this website to it as well.

We were supposed to build and program a robot in about three hours time, after which we could test them in a friendly competition. Having seen children do this in the past, it was a welcome change to try this myself some time.

Three hours is not enough to build and program a serious robot for a competition, but it was nice to see some old colleagues and acquaintances.

To improve the quality of the transitions, I’ve improved the following things:

• Rending the morph at a higher resolution.
• Using better codecs to encode the age morph and the resulting video.
• Making sure the faces are about the same in size.
• Paying more attention to individual details as they transform (eyes, nose, chin, etc)
• Using a higher fps for the videos.

More about this video on this page. Enjoy!

The quest was based on the movie “the game” and was organized quite nicely. It started with us getting texts from unknown numbers, a few days before Saturday. The texts were quite random, and at first I thought it was a wrong number. The day after that I got a text from my own number!! After discussing it at work, it seemed that my colleagues got the same kind of weird texts, and we connected the dots.

The day itself started with us getting a key to a safe containing a suitcase with mobile phone, gps tracker and other neat gadgets. We had to use them in various assignments that were giving to us. The assignments took us all over the city and while we were doing them we got texts saying things that could only be known if we were followed, making the experience complete!

We concluded with the publishing of the score and a nice barbeque. Very well organized and fun day for all ages!

The training is originally used for salesmen, but there are a lot of things that can be applied in everyday live.

Last Thursday I received my certificate.

• Rending the morph at a higher resolution.
• Using better codecs to encode the age morph and the resulting video.
• Making sure the faces are about the same in size.
• Paying more attention to individual details as they transform (eyes, nose, chin, etc)
• Using a higher fps for the videos.

These improvements will make the transformation a lot better looking, but also take a lot more time to create. To give a preview, I made this video to show the extend of the improvement.

When the new video is ready, it will be posted on this page.

We learned to control and get out of a slip, emergency breaking and even getting out of a car that is upside down. We also got some great theory course and I really think I learned a lot about controlling a car in traffic.

It was a great experience!

It was a very nice experience to do something that has to do with something entirely different then computers or software. Also, it might help me to save a life someday.