Daniel Eliasson

Something cool is happening right now, namely that manufacturing is moving back to the individual. Back in the day, the village blacksmith would do all the metalworking for his whole village. Industrialisation put an end to this, and centralised manufacturing in large factories, and standardised the products we got from them.

As technology has moved forward, it has now become possible for people to manufacture things in their own homes that weren’t possible just a decade or so ago. The material necessary to make a 3D printer can now be bought for less than €500 and assembled at home, after which it’s possible to make all sorts of plastic items. Considering that commercial 3D printers start at €30 000, this is a huge difference. Of course, the home-machines aren’t as powerful, but they do allow for quick prototyping.

The ideas behind open source software have also been applied in the manufacturing space, with sites like Thingiverse, where makers (as the people in the movement call themselves) can share the designs for physical objects, and improve on them.

Admittedly, not all that much utility has come out of the maker movement as of yet, but there is an enormous amount of enthusiasm, and a whole lot of cool stuff, a lot of which is covered by Make magazine. I believe that this movement will make a big difference, particularly in places like Africa, where there is little in the way of large-scale industry, and where there are already scores of people reparing cars and bicycles at the side of the road, as well as people making computer cases from bamboo, making their own arc welders and making energy-efficient ovens that can bake a dozen loaves of bread with just a couple of pieces of coal (all reported by the excellent Afrigadget).

I’ve been watching this stuff from the my software-oriented sidelines for some time, wanting to, but never getting around to, joining. This semester, however, Stephanie has a course in electronics design, where she and I have gotten on intimate terms with a microcontroller and various components that it controls: an LCD screen, a keypad, a buzzer, etc. Inspired by this, I thought that the perfect place to start a hobby in making cool stuff would be the field of so called physical computing; simply put, programming a little computer to control electronics.

So I ordered me and Stephanie each an Arduino Duemilanove:

Programmable over a regular USB port, the Arduino Duemilanove sports a 16 MHz Atmega328 microcontroller, with 32 kB flash memory for programs, 2 kB RAM, and 1 kB EEPROM memory. It has 14 digital input/output pins, 6 of which have PWM (pulse-width modulation) support, and 6 analog inputs.

These are pretty cool and capable little machines, as evidenced by the numerous projects featured on Make’s blog. Now the question simply remains: what to do with them? So far, I’ve had the idea of making an ultra-sound rangefinder, and this week, I want to go to a vendor of radio-controlled aircraft to investigate the possibilities of making a quadrocopter, similar to this one.

Dear readers, any suggestions?

Remember Ok Go? The band that made the cool long-shot video with the treadmills? Well, they’ve made an even more impressive video this time, featuring an almost four minutes long Rube Goldberg machine. Enjoy:

According to plan, the pancetta should’ve been done curing this Monday, so when I came home from work, I immediately yanked it from the fridge and had a poke.

Both pieces of meat were very firm to the touch, a good sign that the cure had penetrated properly, so I got them out of their bags, rinsed the cure and spices off under cold water, and patted them dry with a towel. Unfortunately, I had made a mistake in not removing the skin from the fresh piece (shame on you, Ruhlman, for not mentioning this in the book, but only in your blog comments). A few cuts later, the skin was removed, and it was time to hang the pancetta. I made a hole in one corner of each piece with a toothpick, then widened it with a chopstick, and threaded some string through.

I hung the pieces from a rail in my cupboard, where there’s no direct light, and they should be safe from bugs. The recipe calls for hanging for 7 days, but that’s in a much colder environment than Cape Town summer, so I’m probably taking it down on Friday morning.

Of course, I couldn’t help but cut a small piece off and try it. I fried it gently and ate it straight from the pan. Wow. I had cut off a lean piece with little fat, and during frying, the meat shrunk very little, releasing no liquid. Quite unlike the bacon you get in the supermarket, which emits that white liquid that it then boils in, while it shrinks to a third of its original size.

As for the taste? Well, the meat is salty; not too salty, but just about to cross into that territory. Of course, paired with less salty items, it’ll mellow out. It’s chewy without being tough, and it was beautifully juicy, with a concentrated flavour. I could eat this stuff all day long.

Even without hanging or smoking, this is just plain better than the bacon you get at the supermarket, and comes at about the same price. I would strongly recommend my mother (hej Kerstin!) to give this a try, just cut it into thick slices and freeze in suitable portion sizes, then use in stews, pasta sauces, pea soup, with beans, or for an English-style breakfast.

I’ve been meaning to try to figure out a way to smoke meat in Stephanie’s little braai, and I think that I must get on top of it for my next batch of pork belly.

Speaking of terror against the global financial elites, a JP Morgan office in Greece was bombed, CNN reports here. The bomber called in and warned ahead of time, so no one was hurt. Yet the message is clear.

With some of the money my parents gave me for Christmas, I treated myself to a book I’ve been eyeing for a while: Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This brilliant books describes the techniques of salting, smoking and confiting, as well as sausage-making and throws in recipes for a number of pickles and sauces as well.

The book naturally inspired me greatly, and I decided that a suitable first project would be to cure a pork belly and then hang it to dry for a while, making something like pancetta (I would have gone for bacon, but I still haven’t figured out a way to smoke meat in my flat).

The first thing I had to do was source some curing salt, which is regular sodium chloride mixed with nitrite, which will preserve the meat from a number of nasty bacteria, as well as preserve a nice pink colour and give that special cured meat flavour. After some looking around, I found a friendly German butcher on Kloof street who sold me a little bag of pink salt (the curing salt is dyed to prevent it being mistaken for regular salt; nitrite isn’t good for you in large amounts).

Unfortunately, he and I struggled to arrange a pork belly for me. He could never guarantee that he’d get one, only say which days he might get one in, and I could only rarely get off from work in time to get to him before he closes at 18:30.

Finally, yesterday, I poked into Raith’s, a German deli in Gardens centre, and asked if they had pork belly. They did, and at R66/kg, it didn’t hurt my wallet all too much to get myself a whole 2.5 kg big side. I brought it home, cut the ribs off, divided it into two smaller pieces, and then cured it, using brown sugar, cloves, bay leaves, black pepper and allspice for the flavouring. Each piece went into a plastic ziplock bag, and they are now lying in my fridge, curing.

I will be turning them over every other day, and next Monday, they should be ready. Then I will wash them off, dry them, and then wrap them in cheesecloth and hang them to dry in my cupboard for about a week.

The recipe I’m using is the one in the book, but if anyone got inspired, Mr. Ruhlman has also posted it on his blog, so you can see what I’m going for.

Anyone with an interest in current affairs would do well to add John Robb’s excellent blog Global Guerrillas to their RSS reader (or, for the technically challenged, to their bookmarks). A while back, the following passage from Robb got me thinking:

Global financial elites have set up themselves up as a virtual global tribe through story telling, rites of passage, obligations, largely leaderless, segmented function, etc. The allure is definitely there (a similar process led the elites of the USSR to jump ship, which precipitated the collapsed of that superpower). Another way to look at it:  except for the method, there’s very little difference between this tribe and al Qaeda. Both do us damage.

This is an interesting thought; many (most?) seem to agree that the global financial elites have done a large amount of damage to us, yet the systems in place are unable to protect us from them. When threatened, the financial elites acted in their own interest, and succeeded in hijacking the nation-states to rescue them, at the cost of the little people.

The global financial elites (hereafter: GFE) are thus in some ways in control of us, and we are unable to protect ourselves using the approved channels: politics (elections) and the legal system (lawsuits). Yet the GFE is sorely lacking in protection from other methods, particularly that good old favourite: violence.

Apart from a select group of individiuals in the top of the pyramid, the staff of the banks, investment firms and government agencies that are hurting us are vulnerable.

Currently, entering the financial system is possible for many young, ambitious, people with an education. They will even garner respect for it, and the payoff is large. However, the GFE lack a really compelling culture that would attract people against the threat of violence.

Imagine an open-access website, possibly a wiki, where the identities, movements and habits of every level of employee in the financial system is tracked. Any knowledge that exists out there about every such person could be collected and presented nicely. Given a fictive investment bank trader, it would be possible to know his regular work hours, where he eats his lunch, when his wife drops the children off for football practice, and everything else.

With such intelligence about a person, it is easy to perform attacks, which could range from relatively innocent, like public shaming for supporting the system, to downright violent, like arson, or assault.

Police methods for solving crimes like these rely heavily on personal connections and motives. Leveraging a public database of information, anyone sympathetic to the general cause of stopping the GFE could perpetrate attacks with little likelihood of being caught and sanctioned.

With the police unable to protect them, the GFE would need to turn to private security solutions, but these would be prohibitively expensive to extend to low-level employees (even bank clerks could be targeted using the above-mentioned methods), and this would likely lead to very few people being prepared to risk it by going for a career in finance. The multiplier effects on the investment in attacks would be enormous; attacks can be performed at extremely low costs, whereas protection is highly expensive and inconvenient.

Please note that I do not intend to setup this service, nor will I condone it, or participate. This is purely a hypothetical argument, but it is interesting to me. I think we are likely to see solutions like these pop up as the economy worsens and loyalties shift from the nation-state to tribal, religious and other affiliations.

It is time, dear readers, for a real treat. Afrikaans rapper Jack Parow. Enjoy.

Jy dink jy’s cooler as ekke, want jy rook Yves Saint Laurent sigarette
Jy dink jy’s cooler as ekke, want jy’t ‘n tattoo van ‘n slang op jou tette.
Jy dink jy’s cooler as ek, want jy’t ‘n plakkaat van Led Zeppelin bo jou bed
Jy dink jy’s cooler as ek, want jy’s elke jaar by die J&B Met.

Jack Parow bra ek’s n poes woes
Jy eet caviar en couscous
Ek drink Klipdrif, jy drink Peroni
Jy’t vriende in Swede, ek het vriende in Benoni
Ek koop al my klere by die local Pep Stores save more
Jy koop al jou fokken klere by a store
Jy dra net fokken Polo shirts
Shame, jy luister na die Dirty Skirts
My naam’s Parow, dik heavy uitgeskollie
Jy lyk soos Jeremy de Tollie
Jack Parow, die life van die party
Jy dra net fokken Issey Miyake
Jy’s too cool for school, eks mos kief
Ek’s grasshopper, jys Lacoste sportief
Jy lat die koek flop, ek lat die huis rys
Jou meisie het ‘n foto van my piel op haar Space Case

Die Heuwels Fantasties feat. Jack Parow – Die Vraagstuk

Ek soek kaffïen
ek soek nikotien
ek soek my steak gaar
ek soek ‘n meisie wat wag as ek dronk uitstap by die bar
ek soek ‘n enkel
ek soek ‘n dubbel
ek soek ‘n triple sonder vrae
ek soek ‘n wensmasjien
so as ek vra is alles kla daar
ek soek meisies sonder high heels
ek soek meisies sonder base
ek soek meisies wat saam met my staan en vir almal dit wys
ek soek regte vriende, vriende wat deur alles staan by my
ek soek vriende wat heeltyd by dieselfde styl bly
ek soek my jeans los
ek soek my hare een kleur
ek soek ‘n lewe sonder dwelms sodat ek weet wat gebeur
ek soek dronk inhibisie
ek soek uitkyk en ‘n visie
ek soek minder wannabes en meer mense met ‘n missie
ek soek minder MTV
ek soek mense wat in hul psige delf
ek soek net fokken mense wat fokken dink vir hulle self
ek soek goeie waves
ek soek paarties op die strand
ek soek ‘n yskoue bier en ‘n joint in my hand
die mens is ‘n tropdier
dis saamwerk wat klop hier
ons het nie meer die energie
om hierdie fakkel agterna te jaag nie
geen vrae op hierdie antwoord nie
ons het nie meer die energie nie
ek soek kruise
ek soek labels
ek soek engele
ek soek duiwels
ek soek mense met messe
ek soek mense met bybels
ek soek mense wat hou van trip-hop
ek soek mense wat hou van trance
ek soek mense wat hou van hip-hop en wat langarm dans
ek soek poppies
ek soek gangsters
ek soek jocks
ek soek boere
ek soek mense wat drink, kots en kruip oor die vloere
ek soek paarties by evol
ek soek paarties by shack
ek soek paarties by danskraal
ek soek paarties by my flat
ek soek castle
ek soek hunters
ek soek port
ek soek wyn
ek soek die cane-trein
ek soek bottels brandewyn
ek soek water
ek is dors
ek soek tjops
ek soek wors
ek soek mense wat nie kwaad raak nie as ek mors
ek soek liefde
ek soek haat
ek’s bly
dan is ek kwaad
ek soek mense wat by my kuier tot dit laat raak
drinking games waar niemand ooit wen nie
ek soek ‘n bar waar ek kan drink waar niemand my ken nie
so wie gaan by my staan in die koue oggendryp
wie gaan by my staan as die donker suutjies inkruip
wie gaan lê in my arms as die tortelduiwe roep
as die son opstaan opsoek na vars bloed
want vriende bly vriende maar jy staan eintlik alleen
as die donderweer slaan staan jy alleen in die reën
as die vloede kom soek jy alleen vir ‘n brug
ek stap in die donker strate opsoek na ‘n straatlig
die enigste ligte in die nag is die vure van hel
die enigste vriende wat jy het het al lankal geval
in die donker ure skink net duiwels nog ‘n dop
satan sit saam met sy kinders en kyk hoe kom die son op
as ek op die dood is wie gaan langs my bed sit en vir my bid
wie gaan in die grys mis blomme op my graf sit
ag fokkit
kla’ geworry
ek’s kla’
as jy my soek ek’s die ou met die snor by die bar

Well, almost. Snake, actually, and more “behind the house”.

Over Christmas, Stephanie and I went to meet up with her family in Oubaai (previously mentioned here). We had a nice time, and one day, I was treated to my first African snake experience. Awesome shit.

Alet, Stephanie’s poor mother, was about to pick up some rose branches that were lying at the back of the house to put them in the trash bin, when she realised that she was about to poke a pofadder, a quite venomous snake. After some deliberation, we called the admin people, who sent out a couple of young guys to catch the snake and release it next to the local river.

Sneaky snake.

In 2007, I officially emigrated from Sweden to Germany. In a dataset I found at SCB, I am told that I was one of 925 men to do that. The dataset breaks down Swedish emigrants during the years 2000-2008 into country and gender.

In total, 344 600 people emigrated from Sweden during these nine years, an average of about 38 300 per year. Of these, 52.8 % were men, and 47.2 % were women.

In the map below, you can see the countries of the world colour-coded after the amount of people who moved there. Data is missing on a few countries, and there is no data on some 31 000 emigrants. But the rest is here:

Please click that picture to enlarge it, m’kay?

So, what are the top 20 destinations in total, and broken down for men and women?

Some things I note about this:

• Men like the Nordic countries better than women.
• Women seem to prefer western countries. This could be because of gender inequalities in much of the world.
• Men like Thailand, women don’t.

Do you see anything else interesting, or have any ideas about why the results differ like this?

As a side note, Germany and South Africa are number 6 and 37, respectively, in the full stats. For men, they are 6 and 35, while for women, they are 6 and 37.

In response to my last post, my good friend Stefan and my evil sister Maria both replied with similar counter-arguments:

1. Buying a house allows you to leverage your money through the loan, which means that even a more modest interest rate might end up making you more money than investing a smaller amount at a higher interest, and
2. The total cost of living in a rental (rent) must be compared with the costs of owning (fees, interest, taxes) in order to make a fair comparison.

These are very good arguments, particularly 1) might give pause. In order to get a grip of how big these effects are, I went back to good old SCB for some more data, and found their data on costs renting or buying newly built flats.

Let’s assume a person or small family that wants a flat with 3 bedrooms and separate kitchen in the Stockholm metropolitan area. They decide on a flat built in 2008.

According to SCB, the yearly rent for such a flat is about SEK 103 487, while the fees in a bostadsrättsförening are SEK 57 540. Buying the BRF costs SEK 2 279 477.

I did some research on the average costs of home loans etc, and we will assume the following:

• a down payment of 10 % (SEK 227 948) is made,
• a realtor fee of 3 % (SEK 68 384) is paid,
• a top loan of SEK 205 153 is taken out at an interest of 5.5 % p.a., to be repaid in 15 years,
• a bottom loan of SEK 1 846 376 is taken out at an interest of 3.5 % p.a., to be repaid in 30 years,
• property taxes are 0 for the first 5 years, then 0.5 % for the next 5, and thereafter 1.0 %,
• the value of the BRF appreciates with 7 % p.a.,
• and finally, the alternative investment (stock index funds) appreciates with 9 % p.a.

These values should be reasonably fair to both sides of the argument. Calculating the full monthly cost of ownership (BRF fees, property tax, interest and amortisations), we assume the renter will invest the difference between this and her rent on the stock market.

Further, the renter also keeps the savings that the buyer has to put as a down payment and pay for realtor fees with.

After 30 years, the owner of the BRF sells his flat, and compares his wealth with that of the renter.

The renter has SEK 16 025 559, the (former) owner has SEK 18 501 369, meaning that the owner has an edge of 15.4 % over the renter after 30 years.

However, the bigger point I was making in my original post is that you shouldn’t think of your home primarily as an investment to make money off of, but as a purchase. One big reason for this, which I overlooked in the original post, is that it’s not liquid. You need to sell your home in order to realise your gains, and then you’d have to either move into a rental, or buy a smaller place, or one in a less popular area (such as the countryside). You might not be willing to do that after getting attached to your home.

Here’s how my last post should have been formulated:

“So, is a home an investment? Well, of course. Should you think of it as one? I don’t think so.”

But who wants to read kak like that?