Festmaskinen assembly


We drilled holes and threaded them for the 10″ speakers. A much faster and stable way to thread a holes is to use a cordless drill.


Making the shelf to hold the battery packs and electronics.


We quickly tested if our components would fit. You can see the blue LiPo-batteries in the back. The digital amplifier in the middle. And the DSP in the front.


Before we mounted the waist strap we compared the size and height of belts to ordinary backpacks.



We applied silicon to the inner edges to make the speaker more airtight.


In Festmaskinen we are using two battery packs. Each batterypack consists of two smaller LiPo batterys (3 cell, 11.1V, 8000mAh, 30C).


We glued the shelf in place.


CNC-milling Festmaskinens sign.


The DJ-booth starting to take place. Almost all the pieces are CNC-milled. We glued it together.


We mounted a spring to hold up Festmaskinens sign.


We used an ordinarry M3 screw as a hinge.


The DJ-booth needs two arms to attach it to the speaker. To hold up the two arms we used ball sockets. This make the DJ-booth able to flex side to side if lets say a dancer hits the DJ-booth. It also makes the DJ-booth to fold up.



We cut out a hole for the amplifier through the chassis of the speakers top, inside of the shelf.
On top of amplifiers mosfets we attached heat-sink.


Festmaskinen is starting to take shape.



The cables for sound at power to the DJ-controller runs through the backpack-straps.



Here we can see the LiPo-battery-charger on top, and a 12V switched powersupply to feed the charger.


The battery packs fits snuggly into the shelf above the switched powersupply.


Here we attach the last bits.


Here we have just heard Festmaskinens first sound. We configured the DSP to cut of frequencies below 60Hz and above 2000Hz for the bass-speakerelements.
For the piezohorns we applied at cutof under 2000Hz.

@Grab and Drag: WTF happened? (Firefox) [Updated 2012-05-01]

Grab and Drag (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grab-and-drag/) is a great plugin to Firefox which enables you to scroll long pages by holding down your mousebutton. It works just like Adobe Reader, a small grabbing hand cursor appears when you drag the page.
Another cool feature is “Drag Multiplier”, when you drag like a 100 pixels it actually scrolls the page 300 pixels, if you have the Drag-Multiplier-setting of 3.

If you enable “Momentum” you can throw the page in one direction and it will keep scrolling that way until it reaches the end of the page.

All these features really simplifies web-browsing, not only on tablet-PC’s but on ordinary PC’s as well!

The latest version of Grab and Drag arrived and they seemed to removed the Grabbing-option. I use to have the Grabbing-option on “Non-text, non-link” which means I could still click on text and select text and if I wanted to scroll I could just grab a empty screen-area.
[Updated 2012-05-01] I emailed Ian about this and he told me to check out the new feature TextToggle: “Dragging horizontally or clicking”, it’s designed to replace the old “Non-text, non-link”-option.

Old settings

New settings

Now I’ve to toggle Grab And Drag to be able to select text which is really annoying. It interrupts the flow of the web-browsing.

I usually selects parts of a long text to note how far in the reading I’ve come, to easily resume my reading whenever I want to.

Designers shouldn’t get the last word: Philips Touch-fail

Philips 243E2 Monitor - Touch Buttons Here’s an example of how the Philips-designers have totally failed, they used touch-controls for the menu system. Touch-controls are nice, but only on a screen-surface.
I’ve to push extremely hard to navigate through the system, it feels like I’m breaking the screen.

  • A menu-system should be easy to navigate through
  • Have a nice tactile feed-back that matches each menu-step
  • Easy accessible buttons
  • The placement of the buttons should match the lineup of the GUI-menu

Here’s a good example of a IBM monitor, they use clearly visible buttons that lines up vertically with the menu.
IBM Monitor Buttons

Many designers lay to much energy into appearance and less into accessibility. Accessibility is such a vital part of our life.

… also, computer-monitors shouldn’t have integrated speakers. That trashy speakers produce some really bad sound-quality and take too much room in the monitor. I’ve never seen someone actually used integrated monitor-speakers.

If the appearance starts to effect the functionality and accessibility of a product it’s wrong.

Ikea-hack Lerberg receiver stand


I’d this idea of a new receiver stand in my head, paralleled legs in a slight angle with different shelves.
So I browsed a little on Ikea and find the Lerberg-shelf (http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/70114753/), it was almost exactly the way I imagined it in my head. I thought if I could bend the back legs it would be nice and my maybe shorten the legs.
It’s much easier to modify an existing product than creating a totally new one, so I decided to buy it.


Here are two examples of how the shelves looks like non-modified.


I cut out the legs to make it shorter and bent the back legs.


I attached the bottom shelf to get a feeling how it would be.


Screwed the rest of the shelves on.


This is the finished result.
It turned out pretty good. It is more stable than anticipated and could maybe even hold a 42″ flatscreen.

Swedbank ATM failed today


When I was going about to get some cash earlier today, this sight met me at the Swedbank ATM at Brunnsparken.

I had to document this. This looks like quite sensitive information leaking out.

Trying to send event: AGMGR01    CS310041501105147

SEK;00100;001699;

För många sedelåterdragmnigar


You could see that the ATM is running Windows XP in the background. 🙂

Quite bad pictures, but I had the sun behind my back.