The spring and summer of 2022 I focused all my attention on making the Kullfallet garden look nice.

Most of the stuff I grew from seeds, which was fun, and kept costs down.

Finally I also planted fruit trees, something I had wanted to do for years.

Through the years of playing drums, I've just been winging it with drum tuning until I have a decent sound. So I thought I'd try to really understand how this works, to be able to reliably create a great drum sound.

It turns out that it is very complicated, and there isn't much science around this. There is plenty of advice and demonstrations on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet. Even from professional drum techs and top level drummers, the advice is mostly pragmatic; "do like this until it sounds good".

After extensive reading, watching videos and hands on tweaking on my own kits, here are my thoughts on the subject.

Is the world a giant simulation in a super advanced computer, much like the movie The Matrix? With computer games getting more and more realistic, and advances in artificial intelligence, this seems plausible. It relies on the idea that we are biological machines, and that there is nothing in principle preventing a computer to simulate an entire human being or even the rest of nature and the universe, so how can we know if we exist for real or if we are a simulation?

The spring of 2006 Google Maps had begun to make a great impact on people with its detailed satellite imagery. People all around the world would zoom into their neighborhood to find their house, and do virtual tourism, looking at landmarks like the Michael Jackson mansion and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

I had recently moved to Thailand, and was looking for something creative to do. As I played around with the satellite imagery, it struck me that the next cool thing would be detailed photographs from every street on the map. The idea was to transition down from a top-down view to a street view, for any location in the city. The daunting task of collecting all this imagery made me put away the idea for a few months.

This is an experiment with a language learning app that I created in 2019. The idea is to build a foundation in one logical step at a time, instead of the usual way of memorizing phrases. 

It also keeps track of your confidence in each word and grammar rule, so it can use spaced repetition.

You can try it here: bjornmoren.com/languagelogic

This is a simple experiment I created, with a computer simulated map that has a very deep zoom. It uses procedural generation to randomly create a base map, and then adds details as you zoom into the map.

You can try it here: ZoomWorld.

I decided to make a training diary software again. I took the experience from making TrainersLab back in 2003, and tried to improve on all different areas, and also make it primarily for phones instead of computers. 

Technology has developed a lot since then, but the general design principles from that time still holds true. After 14 months of work, the result became Athletium.

Feel free to try it here: athletium.app.

Video tutorial: All about Athletium.

This summer I got busy with clearing a big area of forest near my house, and digging down pipes in the ground. I also finished many smaller projects, including an energy meter, doors for my garage and a new front yard. 

A lot of projects were done last summer at Kullfallet, for example a garage with a workshop and a new well.

Here are some misc smaller projects I finished at Kullfallet last summer, but was too busy to blog about.

I am patiently awaiting spring to move back into the cottage. 

Colin Archer was a Norwegian ship architect, who in 1893 designed and built the class of rescue ships now simply referred to as "Colin Archer". The extremely rugged vessels became iconic in Norway.

Archer spent a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect hull, making the ship almost unsinkable.

I find this ship to have really beautiful proportions and lines, so I decided to build a model of it.

After running my solar power system for a while, and planning the heating system, it became clear to me that energy storage is the hardest part to solve.

The electrical batteries are the weakest link of the system. Unless you spend a lot of money on a large battery bank, you will have to be thrifty with your consumption, and you constantly worry about the charge level. 

This is an idea for a business that manufactures custom furniture using particle board. The client designs the furniture using a simple computer interface, and the furniture is then quickly manufactured using robots, and delivered as pieces in a box, IKEA style.

Slogan: We guarantee to have the furniture you want, because you design it yourself.

Snabbmöbler is Swedish for "fast furniture".

The cosmological argument usually comes in a form similar to this: Everything that exists has a cause, so the universe itself must also have a cause, and that cause is an agent outside of time and space, i.e. a god that created the universe.

The reason the cosmological argument seems so persuasive is that it is easy to compare with how humans interact with the world. We are a species that thrive on our ingenuity with our own creations, so why wouldn’t the universe itself be a creation too? The problem is that there are two different contexts here for the word “creation”.

I've played drums on and off my whole adult life, and it's a big part of what keeps me happy and balanced. It is an awesome feeling to be part of creating music and to bring joy to other people.

I am self taught in drumming, and wasted a lot of time on making mistakes. Writing this text I hope to help fellow drummers to reach their goals faster.

If you have access to free firewood, then using it to heat your home becomes an attractive option.

In this entry I will explore the different firewood heating methods, and make some calculations for my cottage.

The floors of my cottage feel cold and are generally in bad shape. So I decided to replace them, and started with the bedroom first.

A common way to stabilize freezer temperature is to insert some bottles of water, which will turn to ice. This will increase the thermal mass of the freezer, so the temperature will be more even over time.

With freezer stabilization, you can extend the time the goods in your freezer will be cold in the case of a power out. This can also be useful for a hand carried freeze box.

The house exterior of Kullfallet was finished last September. Here are some pictures of the process.

Some of my favorite songs with great electric bass parts.

Time to shower some more funk over this blog. Can never get too funky for me!

David Letterman retired from the Late Show recently. It is hard to find a more quick witted and obnoxious talk show host. Add to that a healthy dose of self deprecating humor, and he became my favorite for many years. Here I've collected a few YouTube videos with memorable moments.

I will try and collect pictures of the flora and fauna of Kullfallet. This will be ongoing lists, that you can access by clicking on the links to the right under the section "Pages".

To start off, I've created the pages "Flowers of Kullfallet" and "Trees of Kullfallet". I hope you'll enjoy it.

Is there anything more depressing about a house than rotten moldy walls? It is as if the house fails in its primary function to provide shelter. The Kullfallet walls were in dire need to be replaced.

But the wall boards sit on a timber frame, which first has to be inspected and fixed. If taken well care of, a timber house like this can last for centuries. But given a chance it will deteriorate quickly by moisture and vermin like ants and rats.

The first step in renovating the old cottage at Kullfallet is to replace the roof. It is old, leaky and rotten. And it was made on the cheap, way back in the 1920s.

As I tore off the old roof, it was interesting to see that building technology hasn't change much in 95 years, only materials have become better. It was built as a truss structure, covered with a sheathing of boards from end to end, then a layer of water protection wood shavings covered by hardboard. Then a grid of lath for the roof tiles. The new roof will be the same method, except the water barrier will be tar paper instead.

The organ is a great instrument, and fits really well in funk, acid jazz and gospel music.

Below are some funky organ parts that I like very much. 

Providing electricity for your home is a challenge for the independent home owner. It is also an interesting topic for sustainability and technology reasons.

The market is still very small for alternative ways of powering homes, but steadily growing as prices of solar panels and batteries go down. In the future I think every home will use its own power.

This post outlines the parts needed for a solar power system, and shows what components I plan to use for my own system at Kullfallet.

Most systems are grid-tied, which eliminates the need for batteries, and enables you to sell surplus electricity back to the grid, in effect making the meter run backwards.

My system is not grid-tied, and therefore more costly, but also makes me 100% independent.

It has been an impatient wait for the snow to melt, so I can finally move into my new house. But preparing for the move kept me very busy with buying tools, equipment, food and a car. We also took a trip to clean out the house and get acquainted with my neighbor, a friendly 80-year old lady living alone 800 m from my property.

It will be a challenge to make it work. No electricity, no running water, no plumbing, no indoor toilet, no shower, no kitchen, no heating (broken chimney), a leaking roof, parts of the floor missing, parts of the ceiling missing, unusable entrance road, and a climate where it gets below 0 C (32 F) in the night. So it will be like camping out for the first few months. Luckily I have a spring with fresh water, and a solid internet connection. 

Buying land is pretty straight forward in Sweden, and can be done by foreign nationals as well. However there is short supply near all metropolitan areas, so you'll have better luck in rural areas, and they are plentiful.

It has become very popular for our European neighbors to buy leisure properties in the Swedish country side, especially Germans and Norwegians. With a forest cover of 57% and a generous right to freely roam it (allemansrätten), many people find it an attractive safe-haven from their busy lives.

All aspects of life in Sweden are heavily regulated, and so is the ownership and purchase of land, so the buyer needs to beware.

So a new chapter begins in my life. I have bought a remote 15 acre forest property in the heart of Värmland, Sweden. My intention is to repeat what I did in Thailand, to create a small farm and live off the land as self-sufficient as possible.

The area is famous for rolling hills of never ending spruce and pine tree forests, full of wild-life such as moose, bears, wolves, boars and deer.

Climate is similar to southern Canada, with winter temperatures at 0 F (-18 C) and summers at 75 F (24 C). When I visited the property this February, the snow cover was around 15 inches.

The closest town is Sunne, 30 minutes away, where some 5,000 people live, and it has some useful shops. This is a cultural center that draws a lot of tourism, both for nature experiences in the summer and down hill skiing in the winter.

I am fascinated by chess. Not the actual playing of the game, but finding a way to solve it; to beat the game using a computer and come up with a strategy that always wins.

Chess has approximately 64! / (32! x 8!^2 x 2!^6) = 4.6E42 possible states the game can be in. That's a four followed by 42 zeroes, a humongous number. It would take the fastest supercomputer in the world 3 billion billion years to just enumerate them. That is, if it had anywhere to store the data, because it would require a memory the size of the earth.

I'm not happy with the progress of software development today. Like with other products of human thought, software systems and methodologies over time tend to become bloated and difficult to understand, instead of focusing on their essence.

Comparing with another area of thought, for a country to have a great constitution, it requires a re-boot from scratch, as with the US constitution in 1789. But it seems inevitable that this system of laws and rights swells up beyond recognition. People are ultimately motivated by self interest. Let enough time pass and the legal volumes will grow to embarrassing levels.

I used to enjoy watching documentaries. They gave me a way to visit remote corners of the world, learn how things are constructed, and see the details of a historic event. But not anymore.

What happened? I guess commercial pressure sucked out all real content and replaced it with dramatization and scripted fiction.

This touches on a bigger subject: is reality so boring that no one cares about it anymore? Have we become so desensitized to our experience here on earth that we only respond to larger-than-life stories?

I did not plan ahead for my Central American tour either, I never do. But fortune brought me to some of the most beautiful places I've seen in my life. Overall this trip was a great adventure that made me rethink my impression of Guatemala, and unfortunately dislike El Salvador.

I had just recovered from my Belize tour, and set out on the 3rd of November by driving from San Ignacio to the nearby border of Guatemala. Due to computer malfunction of the immigration system, I had a boring three hours to kill, but soon after that I was on my way westward.

The idea of insurance may seem good at first glance: you pay a small sum of money monthly, to get a guarantee that you will receive a larger amount of money to cover for an unexpected cost in the future.

Life takes random turns and you never know what will happen next. Maybe you crash your car on the way to work. Maybe someone burns down your home. Maybe you lose your job.

In its simplest form, it could be 100 friends agreeing to pay $100 per month to a common pool of money. Each year $120,000 is collected, which is then paid out to the members who are struck by misfortune that year, for example $80,000 to Carl who suffered a house break-in, $30,000 to Amy to cover a stolen car, and $10,000 to Steven to pay his hospital bill when he broke his leg. Seems fair, doesn't it? Not really, because some people are more careful and diligent than others.

TrainersLab was a Windows application that I created together with a Swedish bodybuilder in 2003. In those days you called it a "Multimedia CD-ROM" to make it sound more fancy.

We parted ways and I continued on my own, redesigned the application and published a new version in 2005, as downloadable on the internet.

I still think the technology I used and style of user interface of this new version is very interesting, and could motivate doing a postmortem description of this dead product.

Would you want to live on 12 square meters? I was thinking about this as I got busy drawing up a 20 foot shipping container home in Sketchup.

Shipping containers are relatively cheap and sturdy, and saves a lot of time when building a tiny cottage. They also lock up safely. And when you get bored with your surroundings, you just load it up on a truck and move somewhere else, taking your home with you.

The water wheel is an interesting invention. It has always fascinated me in its simplicity and elegance, and it is used on a stream, which involves the soothing sound of water.

It has been around for more than 2000 years, commonly used to power mills. During the industrial revolution it eventually got replaced by the turbine, which is more efficient.

There are three types of water wheels: The undershot, where water enters under the center of the wheel, as illustrated to the right, the overshot, where water enters above the wheel, and the vertical axis, where the water flows straight down onto a wheel that looks more like a propeller.

The material used is commonly wood, but wheels out of steel can also be found.

Do you think life as an artist seems glamorous and cool? Do you enjoy doing drugs when you are working? Or perhaps the mere mention of the word "work" makes you feel uneasy? Why not try being an artist? It is not as hard as it seems.

The brilliant documentary Exit through the Gift Shop illustrates my point very well. The story is about a wannabe graffiti artist who captures the acts of famous taggers with a camera as they are out in the streets, and then decides he wants to be an artist too, and puts on a giant exhibition in Los Angeles.

Might sound like far from home, but there was some funky stuff going on in Sweden too in the 1970's. Big nostalgia trip for me to listen to it again.

A lot can be learned about human nature from looking at the history of Liberia. I visited the country in July of 2011, invited by a friend to explore the region for possible business opportunities. On this trip I had a chance to see with my own eyes a failed state brought to its knees by corruption and primitive culture, not just read about it and ignore it as we commonly do.

After the American civil war ended, the American Colonization Society was created to help former slaves return to Africa, where they were thought to have better opportunities. The ACS had admirable goals and was actively supported by Abraham Lincoln and James Monroe.

I'll admit it up front; I'm not very interested in sports. But I have trained on and off in the gym my whole adult life, and I hike in the forest almost every day, so I'm into an athletic lifestyle. Just not in a competitive way or with made up rules or silly accessories like balls or clubs.

Why do we have a fascination with people who can do physical feats like kicking a ball between two posts? It seems so arbitrary. But perhaps it reflects on our ancestry when physical skills like speed, strength, dexterity and throwing precision were what got you the meal of the day, or fought off intruders. Perhaps sports are the modern day refined versions of such skills. 

Sports lets us watch and admire our heroes when they do their feats, and it gives an outlet for our innate tribalism when we cheer on our team. Life of today is so safe and has so little drama, that our evolved brain becomes under-stimulated. No surprise that sports are so popular.

In October of 2013 I went to Belize with the idea to settle down there for a few years. I thought it sounded nice since it is in the tropics and the official language is English. It's a small country with only 340,000 people, and land is still cheap to buy, even virgin forest can be found. 

The population is mostly Mestizo, with big Kriol groups, and some Native Americans. The western parts have big communities of Mennonites, very much resembling the Amish in the US. They have succeeded well in agriculture and trade. Along the coastline are the black Garifunas.

Why do people pay more for a meal than the agreed price? Is it because they are exalted by the superb service, or is it out of pity for the server that brings the food? It is socially very awkward to get away with not paying gratuity, and I believe that's the real reason people do it. It is a form of bullying that certain industries use to get more out of the customer, and oddly people just accept it as normal.

Did you ever want to live in your own country, to make your own rules? Tired of adjusting yourself to other people? 

One solution is to buy a decommissioned cargo ship, and then strand it on a very shallow part of the sea, on international waters. You need really deep pockets and an adventurous spirit to succeed with this, but what an exciting adventure it would be!

A 250 cc offroad motorcycle is the perfect compromise in terms of weight, price and ability to ride through difficult terrain in the country side. You sit up straight which is easy on your back and arms, and you have a good view of the traffic in front of you. These bikes are usually made for loading up gear, so it is easy to tour on them.

Before I visited Colombia I had only a vague idea about Latin American music. In this post I have collected some of my favorite songs heard in the streets and in salsa clubs around Medellin.

I have lived on and off in Thailand for eight years, and visited Colombia five times, spending in total a year there. They remain my favorite places on earth, both cheap, beautiful and interesting.

Selecting a country to live in is of course very much a matter of personal taste, but I will try to be as objective as possible in this post so you can make up your own mind. 

This is a house I used to own in northern Thailand, living there from April 2010 to July 2013. I ran out of money and sold it, but saved the below document that I created to attract buyers.

It was a great experience and I learned a lot about house construction, farming and local Thai customs.

This tour took me some very varied places. It was interesting to explore the rural parts of these beautiful countries. However no camera was brought on this trip, so I hope my words will be vivid enough to make the story enjoyable.

First a summary to give you a taste of the adventure:

• Three weeks, starting April 16, 2012.
• Stopped and fined by police twice.
• Jumped on the street by police and searched for drugs.
• Pressure cooker heat mixed with numbing cold and a sprinkle of rain.
• Conquered a land slide and got interviewed on TV for it.
• Vast expands of nothingness makes you feel very small.
• Nothing beats the Andes for majestic views.
• Chain jumped the sprocket, but was fixed road side.

I have been playing around with the idea of having a vehicle as a permanent home, to be able to tour around and explore the world as economically and independent as possible.

Here are the criteria for the solution:

• Simple technical solutions that are easy to repair.
• Truly independent, with no need to visit hotels, bath rooms or restaurants.
• Economical to operate over great distances.
• Safe to sleep in at night with no worries about intruders.
• Easy to cross country borders without the hassle of paperwork.

The solution is a solar/muscle powered over-sized bicycle, which has foldable parts so it can be reconfigured in different modes.

Since my joint problems prevent me from doing serious strength training in the gym, I've focused on low impact endurance training instead. I've never been really good at it, or even liked it, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I used to do a lot of hiking in the past, but usually just for fun with no goal in mind. I guess I had a fairly ok cardiovascular fitness, but nowhere near real athletic standards.

I remember that when I did my military service at age 20 we ran a 10 km forest track once a week. 52 minutes at my first try, and five months later I finished the track in 42 minutes. Pretty ok since I had never done serious endurance training before. But my body weight was 70 kg, not 96 kg as it is today, and that is a lot of additional weight to move around.

GS Elevator is a provoking and funny Twitter account that I subscribe to. It is described as "Things heard in the Goldman Sachs elevators do not stay in the Goldman Sachs elevators."

Let's compare two comedies, both directed by Frank Oz, and both with very high scores at IMDb.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favorite movies of all time. Hilarious, exciting, scheming, and with great acting performances by Steve Martin and Michael Caine.

It's about two con-men tricking women out of their money, and how their paths cross on the French riviera. It turns into a competition that has many unexpected twists, and a very surprising ending.

The other comedy is Death at a Funeral, which is about the craziness that can happen when family secrets are revealed at a stiff English funeral.

I found almost nothing funny about this movie, and this got me thinking about the subject of humor, and why people see it so differently.