It's that kind of day...

I couldn't even decide if I should have coffee or tea now. But luckily, I accidentally started to make coffee, so I'll get something now.

Robot made houses

This is cool!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/15/0038259
And a video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7r-qlKkUo

Building a house quickly! I wonder how they are planning to use the reinforcing iron, but I guess that is solvable too.

Now all I need is a robot, a huge amount of building material and an area to build on, and I can start building a physical Elftown to complement Elftown :)

Some more Reference pictures

I took some photos for Hands photo reference and Foot photo reference today. I hope this will inspire more people to upload all sort of Reference pictures.

I hope be able to take some pictures tomorrow, but I'm not sure about that. Mostly I need sets of female hands and also some stuff I've forgotten. But as far as I know, this is already the best photo reference library on the Net.

Something fun for you who like games like Monkey Island, Future World, and Lassie Suit Larry:

College Saga, part 1-4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPutYwiiE0o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy4sxiAn-9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYpG938CNZ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwC08cDeSzg

Well, it's fun otherwise too. If you're bored enough to have patience to see all the horrible jokes everywhere.

Hand photo reference

I got annoyed about that people put up reference photos and then write "Forbidden to use!", "They are mine! Hands off!" and "I want to help humankind, but if I see that my pictures actually are for some use somewhere, my head will explode." on them, so I decided to make totally free hand photos. Enjoy my hand (and some shot on the left one too):

Hand photo reference

The sites

Elftown is running pretty nice now with [Sunrose], the entire crew and a huge number of active members who are creating fun. In December Elftown got about 1400 hits per day from people finding Elftown on search engines, and 50 of them became members (the ones searching for "elftown" are excluded from this). This is 33% more than November, and November was over 20% better than the month before. Hopefully this will lead to even more dedicated members and a feeling among the Elftowners that what you do actually reach the world. Horse photo reference is already on top of Google's searches for "horse photo", "horse photos" and "photo reference", and we're not even half done!

Elfpack has had a similar growth, but is 13 times smaller in the search engines, and people who end up on Elfpack mostly find something else than they were searching for. But it's getting better and there is good content on Elfpack too, if you remember that "good" isn't equal to "serious" and "boring"...

Fake is also doing fine and is growing steadily. Mostly catching up people who are too horny for Elfpack, I guess. I actually started to make a few bucks from it too, but it's still at least 10 times smaller than Elfpack in that respect as i can't show Google ads everywhere there.

As for the other sites, they are mostly hanging on. No big changes really. www.linkmeet.com is mostly used by me for uploading my photos, but a few others use it now and then, and some photo pages there are pretty popular. It needs more people uploading photos though.

www.cathug.com is way too calm. It still gets new members, but there is really not that much action there, and I would love if someone or someones would like to drive it. Not that I would hand it over to anyone who says "Can I be the CatHug boss?", but please message me if you're interested and we'll see what happens. The site needs new ideas and even more someone who can make them come true. While still making it fun, of course.

[TheRogue] is starting up a community for SCA members. He would love some help, so if you're a SCA junkie, message him!

The other sites are www.musmakers.com www.writersco.com and www.elf12.com

www.baltbalt.com http://photo.heddate.com/ http://modelica.heddate.com/ and www.farsima.com are considered dead for now, until I can get a good reason (Read: someones taking care of them and have some good ideas for marketing) to restart them. http://photo.heddate.com/ could actually do well, but I had a plan to make that a place where you only can upload photos, and then the expansion kind of had to stop due to the fact that I don't know exactly how to do that or how to build the site. Generally, I don't see a big reason to have photo people on a special place outside of Elftown and Elfpack.

Whee!

After seeing the pseudo-postman fighting with his computer for 15 minutes, I got my harddisk, so I can reinstall my computer tomorrow.

Pre-Christmas unfun

I was trying to make Christmas images to send out to my friends just before I went up north. But then the computer died and the harddisk finally gave up. I've had it for 8 years or so and it has been warning me that it was about to die for a long time, so I had no important data on it. But it means that I'll not have a computer until I install it again and get a new harddisk. Which will hopefully be when I'm coming back to Linköping.

Lilo is having a nice time here in the big house.

Other sites suck!

I was complaining on Slashdot that a new site didn't handle ÅÄÖ or Russian characters. That I can understand, but Slashdot itself did accept exotic characters! And it's so freaking easy to fix it! Well, unless your an ignorant American bastard who thinks that "foreignish" is the same as Spanish.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208814&cid=17049626 (<= My rant on Slashdot without the text "русский')

So, what's up?

Last 10 days or so, I've been working hard with programming. For some reason it goes pretty well now. And I can't sleep in the mornings, which is very unlike me.

It has been the emotions that you can see here on Elftown, that I'm mostly been working with. But also a huge bunch of smaller things. I'm trying to make the comments to wiki-pages work better for not logged in people. We'll see how that turns out, because I'm not really sure what I want yet.

I'm also thinking about some attribute so that you can select that only your friends and friends's friends can message you. It's because I want to set up a new kind of site for people who aren't interested in messages from unknown people.

As for life... I made some cakes (www.elfpack.com/_cakes) for my birthday. I'm not playing any games right now, but this Sunday I went to see some friends play World in Flames (www.elfpack.com/_World%20in%20Flames) and drink some beer.

Tonight there is an international evening at Herrgårn (www.linkmeet.com/_Herrgårn) and I'll be there. It has been pretty boring lately, but I hope it will be different tonight. 

Statistics

I'm reading logs for Elftown.

If you know anything about the telecommunication market, this isn't new to you, but for others:

Country:    % using dialup
USA          14%
Canada       12%
UK           17%
Netherlands   1.2%
Sweden        0.7%

The reason is obvious: In the first 3 countries you can dialup for free, but in NL and SE you have to pay for local phone-calls so the fee for dialup Internet is huge even with moderate usage. It's both much cheaper and better to get ADSL here.

As for myself: I have a 100 MBit LAN network from Bredbandsbolaget for only about 35 euro a month. That beats everything I've heard about from anywhere in the world.