Miia Ranta » Handiworks

What I have been doing in my spare time…

myrtti — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:30:29 +0000

Warning, a photo galore! I’ve not done a proper display of what I’ve done in years, so to show my workmanship, some photos :-)

More shawls and scarfs

Some small clothing

Miscellaneous

And finally something totally else

Dear (software) Santa

myrtti — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:45:11 +0000

I know I’ve been a naughty girl this year, but I’ve honestly tried to be nice and good. If you don’t mind too much, could you skip on the coal and bring me:

a better audiobook player for Linux than the existing ones. Features that I want include m3u playlists, resume from where left on start, adjustable sleep timer, support for librivox feeds, coverfinder from Amazon, and portability to Maemo 5. I wouldn’t mind if the interface would look like Sharp GF-777, or would have a option to look like it, too!
a counter app, you know, software equivalent of this. Shouldn’t be too hard to do, but I have no experience on GTK or any other graphical tool kit programming, or any language that uses any nice toolkit for Linux, since Java doesn’t count. If possible, I’d love a Maemo 5 widget too! Need it to keep track of knitted rows.
feature to Xournal to make closed freeform shapes with fill colour. Would help greatly in creating knitting patterns.
Peace and Goodwill for everyone in Ubuntu/Maemo communities,and for me personally more patience to handle people that haven’t gotten any, especially on IRC. If this is too hard to implement, O’Reilly books would also do.

KTHX. I’ll be waiting for you. I might knit you a pair of socks, if you tell me your shoesize.

Zen of Knitting

myrtti — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:57:32 +0000

I’ve been feeling more and more stressed out lately. I have had problems in concentration, odd feelings of anxiety and lots of sleep deprivation. I’ve wanted something to take my mind off the most stressful parts of my life, and have tried to cut down on the background noise that keeps my mind occupied and reserved from more important things. One of those has been drastic cutting down of IRC. I don’t remember when I’ve been without IRC for this long – I check on how things are going on two channels now and then, but don’t stay for more than an hour.

What finally helped me to relieve that stress was knitting. I love to knit. I’ve knitted for over twenty years now. I love to design things to knit, I love to fiddle yarn skeins. I’ve had periods I’ve not knitted for ages. After breaking up with a date of six months in last February, I lost the inspiration for a long time, and regained it only first by force and then by excitement of learning and doing new.

With by force I mean: I needed to do Christmas presents. I decided to knit a shawl. My rule of thumb is though: no new projects before finishing the previous. So I had to knit the Neko hat for Seppo.

But the shawl turned out great, and so I’m knitting one for myself, with a different pattern. I’ve even started to use Ravelry, which is a total paradise for searching free patterns and ideas.

And to my surprise, well, not actually, knitting does really reduce my stress levels. People around me get warm things, I get new nice handmade clothes (socks and shawls, who knows what) and I’m not as pissed of as before. Win-Win.

Dear Sant^H^H^H^HPlanet Ubuntu

myrtti — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:44:42 +0000

For years I’ve been crying after a proper knitting pattern editor that does KnitML. Yesterday, after rambling at my employers internal XMPP coffee room about how maemo really needs that, since, hey, it really would be a killer application, a coworker pointed me to this: Knitter. No, it’s not for maemo, but atleast it’s a knitting pattern editor!

What I don’t understand though, is why it has to be 3D? Could someone who has actually made more knitting patterns than I have explain this to me?

Anyway… I tried very very hard to compile and install it myself. All my tries ended up with an error, because, to be honest, I’m really not a coder/compiler type (yet). And I have no idea what’s wrong:

knitter_gui.h:24:26: error: wx/clrpicker.h: No such file or directory knitter_gui.h:29:24: error: wx/gbsizer.h: No such file or directory

And I *DO* have all the damn wx-headers (wx2.4-headers, wx2.6-headers and even wx2.8-headers) installed. Either I’m ignoring something blindingly obvious, which is totally possible, or there’s something wrong. Whichever the case is, I’m not happy.

So. Dear Planet Ubuntu, and why not any other kind soul who is reading this as well. Please tell me where I’m going wrong, and please, would you do “[needs-packaging] Knitter” -bug to Ubuntu/Debian? I would do the latter myself, but you see, I need to knit…

//edit: btw, I’m running Intrepid on 64-bit, so if anyone has the deb laying around on their hard drive, I’d be more than happy to test it.

If I really knew how to code…

myrtti — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:21:54 +0000

I’d fix gnabblet.sis (an application used on Symbian60 phones to patch their lack of support for FBUS) to work on Symbian60v3
I’d add GNU/Gettext support to gwibber and fix the Facebook bug
I’d code a decent IRC client for Symbian60v3 phones (or others with J2ME) that could do multiple networks, hilights, aliasing, mute, tabcomplete
I’d add Adblock Plus support to Epiphany
I’d help with Epiphany/Webkit
I’d make midori less buggy and crashy
I’d contribute more to Terminator
I’d try to fix Epilicious addons Delicious functionality on Epiphany
I’d try to create a Fuzzy Clock screenlet
I’d help with irssi-otr
I’d modify apport to allow editing of the data before uploading them to launchpad
I’d code an application similar to FairIsle.jar for designing knitting patterns that would save the knitting patterns in KnitML, be GPL’d and done in Python with GTK/Qt frontends

*sigh*
/me picks up her copy of “Learning Python” by Mark Lutz and starts on page 1…

LRL 2008 UK musings

myrtti — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:41:11 +0000

As said on the previous post, I attended LUGradio Live last weekend. I’m still very, very, VERY tired, flying isn’t exactly an enjoyable experience ever, and this time the return flights were delayed because of bad weather conditions in Amsterdam.

Anyway, I left home on Friday around 0100 in the morning. The first flight to Amsterdam left at 0615 local time and I was in Wolverhampton about 13 hours from leaving home. I’ve never been to England if you don’t count the two times at Stanstead Airport on my way to and from GUADEC’06 in Spain, so it was really fun to take a train to Wolverhampton from Birmingham International – seeing some scenery on the way with English houses, canals and red brick buildings! (Yes, one has to take the most of everything!) I was lucky enough to have someone guide me around the whole weekend, and I guess Mez really thought I was insane oohing and aahing about the scenery – yes, it can amaze someone who has seen double decker buses and attached house rows and canals and such since age 3 watching Postman Pat on telly but never actually seeing them!

Anyway, after checking into Hotel Britannia it was time to head out for the preconference drinks. Finally a chance to meet so many people I’ve not met before! It was also time to dispense some of the “Greetings from Finland” gifts I had brought with me, so for example ompaul got one of the cloudberry liqueur bottles to spice up ice cream with. The time flied and I remember giving out my business cards, crocheting and walking back to the hotel…

To wake up to ompaul’s SMS “Goin 4 breakfast” with a mild headache wasn’t fun. Then again, him telling a joke that he doesn’t use emacs because he doesn’t lisp was excellent :-P

To wrap up both days talks with a few words:

I loved emmajane’s talk. All of the stuff in her speech was exactly as I think too.
OpenKnowledge is a thing that should be encouraged more – I should know, having been Wikipedia activist for years
Now I understand why Wubi might be such a problem – we really need a better way to clear out the dirty flag from ntfs with Linux
History of Samba is somewhat amusing
I guess I *should* go to Assembly this year
Respect to mjg59, AGAIN
When shall I have time and energy to start cycling again and to log the routes to OpenStreetMap?
Oooh, ooh, I’m on the top ten contributors of Terminator!

Meeting the people behind the voices of LUGradio was cool. Chinny Raccoon was kyuuuut. Crocheted a lot since had no wifi. Bought stuff from O’Reilly desk again (Learning Python and Craft: Fashioning Technology), drank way too much coffee to stay awake, enjoyed the little karaoke I listened to before heading to sleep, and am considering ordering Linux Magazine again.

not related to the conference itself:

Black pudding at hotel breakfast table tasted more like blood pancakes than mustamakkara
Had my first curry and first fish and chips
Will not drink Strongbow for a while, it got boring after a while
OMG things is so cheap in UK! example01 vs. comparison01, example02 vs. comparison02
OMG the variety of food in restaurants and shops! Vegetarian and organic choices everywhere!

hmhm. I want to move to England. I’ve fallen in love with something there :-)

Joulu on todellakin tulossa

myrtti — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:12:00 +0000

Kuvan latasi: myrtti

Vanhat vihreä-valkoiset lapaset joita käytin yläasteella ovat parsitut pilalle. Kirjoneulemalli täytyi kuitenkin ottaa talteen jotenkin – mikä sen parempi tapa kuin neuloa uudet lapaset. Lankana Tampereen Taito-kaupasta ostettu 100% villalanka ja kuviot seiskaveikkaa. Joululahjaksi menevät nämäkin.

Slacker

myrtti — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:05:13 +0000

I should really get a grip of myself. I haven’t exercized nor been eating properly for a month now. I’ve been a bit depressed (now playing: Stella – Piste.) for two months now and this is getting a bit tiresome.

Atleast I managed to finish off my silk-wool-kid mohair -scarf for myself, too bad I bought another expensive yarn that doesn’t actually fit anything. Our car(s) (heap(s) of junk) has/have caused a major inflation to our monetary funds so this excess expensive yarn is really bugging me out.

I’ve tried to keep a couple of days off from work to do some laundry and keep my stress and blood pressure levels down.

6233, education, knitting, winter

myrtti — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 20:01:44 +0000

Winter has finally arrived to Tampere, and I’m trying to enjoy it as much as possible. Yesterday I went for a long walk, listening to radio and talking to my mom on the phone. The sun and the snow were overwhelming.

Since new years my job contract has been confirmed to continue for another year, but as part-time. I asked it for myself, because I’d really need to get my studies finished at TAMK. I haven’t written my final papers for a long time, I’ve not attended any classes and I feel strange.

As I’m going to (yet haven’t) stay at home to write and go to school to study for about two days a week, I thought I could really use company phone and company paying its bills. So I requested a phone and got what I wanted, a Nokia 6233. So far I’ve managed to get it to relay GPRS to my laptop via Bluetooth and get the information from it with Wammu.

What I’ve also done is upload some music to it (from Wikipedia Commons and Jamendo and others) and put some nice backgrounds too (also from Wikipedia Commons). Not to mention my ongoing fixation about trying to keep my phones from scratching:

[singlepic=54] [singlepic=56]

I held a one day course on Linux basics this week and the feedback was encouraging. I have to confess that my old flame of teaching instead of being a resident geek feels currently very good.

Tampereen Taito-Shop

myrtti — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 08:40:00 +0000

“>Edellistä silmukkaa on kommentoitu reippaasti, kiitos siitä. Paljastui että Taito-Shopissa on kaksi kerrosta, ja tavoittelemani neuletarvikkeet olisivat alakerrassa, jonne haukankatseeni ei eilisellä ikkunaostoskerralla yltänyt. Kiitos tiedosta!