Miia Ranta » knitting

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

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.

Thank you for the music

myrtti — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:24:25 +0000

I’ve found the joy of music again. I’ve bought several audio cd’s lately, three to be exact. Two Finnish, Liekki‘s Kalliot leikkaa and Rajaton‘s Maa, and one classic folk-rock albums, Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The joy of listening to good music is astounding.

I’ve got a great mp3-player these days. Since I left my previous job, I needed a new phone because I had to give the one I used back. I did some research and considered Nokia’s E51 to be about perfect choice. Unfortunately I needed the phone immediately and E51 isn’t yet on stores, so after some more research I ended up with picking N95. And it has been love at first sight, since it has an excellent camera, wonderful 3G, great UI and loverly apps.

There’s been some minor things I’m not that happy with. I’ve been unable to install OggPlay for it. The placement of the handsfree-audio/video-out is very unfortunate. And as all reviews have said, the battery life isn’t exactly good. But aside those, I love it.

I’ve been filling up the memory card I bought with not only the cd’s I’ve bought, but also with music ripped from cd’s borrowed from the local library. I’ve been listening to Sound of Music, West Side Story, Notting Hill, Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve, but also Poets of the Fall. Their both albums are excellent.

Since the release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon the installation of multimedia codecs has been really easy with ubuntu-restricted-extras -package. Now the usage of Soundjuicer to rip mp3′s is really simple and doesn’t seem to require any effort, or then my old configs have magically started to work.

I also have just recently found out about a last.fm online radio client for Nokia’s Internet Tablets called Vagalume. It’s been a great joy and pleasure to have my favorite music with my 770, since not all of my collection fits into the 2GB micro-SD in my phone.

I had to, of course, knit my babies their matching pouches.

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.

OpenMind 2005

myrtti — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:19:34 +0000

I went to the OpenMind happening in Tampere Hall yesterday. The happening was great, I had the chance of hearing many interesting speeches about OSS and OS community in general.The day started hecticly with waking up and searching for camera batteries and SD cards, my mp3-player (which I didn’t eventually need, since I made an arrangement with Petri Räsänen of COSS Finland that I’d interview him via email) and my WIP Tux scarf (“Devil finds occupation for idle hands”).

After opening ceremonies, the first speaker Mikko Puhakka of SoberIT, a venture capitalist with experience of IT investing for over 10 years(?), told us about the current trends of the ICT sector and especially what intrests VC’s about OSS. The OSS, according to him, is a strange thing in the current investment climate, since it has made it possible to start new Internet service companies (web hotels, news portals, search engines, you name it) with almost no capital. That means that the people who’d really like to invest great sums of money don’t actually have that many companies to invest in, because they don’t need that much money to start the company.
Most of the innovative OSS projects have been started before the bubble broke back in 2001. Referring to that, in his last slide Puhakka made a suggestion for the community to form a national software bank, a repository for open source software, to keep software projects in safekeeping for future ICT companies, to help them build on what’s already been done instead of trying to invent the wheel all over again. Software bank would preserve innovations of dead projects.

Bob Sutor, the vice president of Standards and Open Source at IBM told us of IBM’s strategy of Open Source. IBM has given quite a few of its patents available for the OS community and I personally think it’s a great thing. His way of speech was truly American, and he was funny. I hope his attitude spreads around big proprietary software coding firms. He spoke quite a lot why IBM thinks “standards” (quotes because very few things in the ‘Net are actually real standards) are important and what action IBM is doing to get these standards more adopted in those areas that really need them most, education and health care.

Before lunch Nokias Valtteri Halla spoke about Maemo.org, the open source project that Nokia launched in May. It’s about OSS community creating software for Nokia 770, Linux / GTK based handheld Internet device. He commented Sutors notion that big companies are always surprised by the power of OSS communities, their speed and multiple points of views; When maemo was published and the codes released, people started programming software for Nokia 770 “emulating” it with their computers, creating software months before the actual hardware was released.

Lunch was great. For having only 95 cents in cash and being hungry as a wolf, green salad with herb croutons, baked veggies and ox breast were the most excellent lunch, especially since they were free. I sat next to marvelous people, with whom I had excellent conversation about communities and there seems to be a shift going on from doing things individually to doing things in a community, using software/Internet not only to do something but also to communicate, how social aspects of software are getting more and more important. I have noticed the trend but didn’t know that it already had a name, “Web2.0″. The persons I had the invigorating talk were Gerrit Visser and Teemu Arina. Gerrit even took a picture of me with my Tux WIP and put it on his Flickr page: here.

Being an Ubuntu user myself I felt really curious when Andreas Schuldei of Debian project held his presentation about “Sustainability and Revitalization of Global Developer Community”. I won’t comment it more than I’m not surprised that they are focusing on the community or that it’s on their agenda big time.

Unfortunately I had to leave the event for some pressing school work as Victor van Reijswoud of Uganda Martyrs University and East African COSS was just getting started, so I caught only the beginning of his presentation… and returned when Ashwin Navin of Bittorrent was already answering the questions… So I missed essentially two presentations that would’ve been very interesting. After that the director of Star Wreck, Timo Vuorensola spoke about the new concept of Internet movie, and how that’s going to change things around. Before, when returning from school I noticed Samuli Torssonen and after the OpenMind event had ended, changed a few words with him about pink ladyfit Star Wreck t-shirts with black print, those would be nice. Before leaving I talked with Petri Räsänen a bit, asked him for an interview and took a few photos (which I suspect are very bad ones).

After that I’ve been mostly reconstructing my web pages, yes, these, the one you’re reading now. For many years my pages have been in Finnish only, and since Gerrit seemed so disappointed when I told him I have practically nothing in English in the web and I’m increasingly active in the international Ubuntu community, now was the perfect time. I actually upgraded the whole thing to use PHP, which really is a very helpful way of keeping web pages in order. I reconstructed the file system so that updating the pages is easy with nano.

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!

Logiikka pelaa, osa 1

myrtti — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:49:00 +0000

Ajattelin aamusella tuossa hieman unenpöpperössä, että kun kerran vanhat kuvat eivät näy, niin otan uusia ja laitan ne blogiin. Otin kuvia ensimmäisistä kutomistani sukista (jalassa), ompelemastani pehmohiirestä, askartelemistani silkkipaperiruusuista, kunnostamastani seinäpeilistä ja pilalle menneistä CD-R-aihioista tekemästäni seinäkoristeesta.

Kaikki oli hyvin siihen saakka kunnes tajusin että yritin kahdeksatta kertaa ottaa yhteyttä FTP-ohjelmalla sille samalle palvelimelle jolla vanhat kuvat ovat ja joka on toissaillasta saakka ollut matalana. Tietenkin voisin kuvat muuallekin laittaa, mutta haluaisin pitää tiedostot yhdessä paikassa.

Tänään ei olekaan tunteja, joten voisin keskittyä kaikessa rauhassa huomiseen tilastomatematiikan kokeeseen valmistautumiseen. EIKÖ MITÄ!

Kudoin kaksi tuntia Vaaka-lappua. Askartelin Tiimarin rihkamakoruista neulemerkkejä tai stichmarkkeja (kuva tulossa myöhemmin). Kohta pitäisi lähteä optikolta kysymään, josko he voisivat korjata silmälasieni sangan saranan, josta kuului eilen naks ja nyt se tuntuu löysältä ja löperöltä ja lasit eivät pysy päässä.

pakko saada… lisää lankaa, lisää LANKAA! LISÄÄ!

myrtti — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:58:00 +0000

Tänään tunnit loppuivat yhdeltätoista ja paremmman tekemisen puutteessa (kun en kudintakaan sattunut ottamaan mukaan) kiertelin netissä katsomassa eri ihmisten blogeja (mm. Minnan pieni neuleblogi tuli luettua kokonaan) ja eri firmojen kotisivuja. Tuli pakottava tarve hankkia lisää lankaa, tai ainakin uudet puikot.

Nopea, nälkäisenä tehty kierros paljasti, että

Tampereen Sokoksessa ei ilmeisesti myydä mitään käsityötarvikkeita
Kauppahallissa oli herkullisen näköistä mustaamakkaraa
Ikkunaostoksilla Taito-Shopissa päättelin, ettei siellä myydä kuin valmiita tuotteita
Koskikeskuksen K-Pikkolosta oli broilerikolmioleivät myyty loppuun
Pertti Salovaara on suloinen livenä, varsinkin omaa tytärtään kantaessaan
Koskikeskuksen ainoassa käsityöliikkeessä oli surkean pieni neuletarvikemäärä
Tiimarissa ei myydä kuulakärkikyniä, jotka kelpuuttaisin kalenteri/lompakkoni kynäksi
2 euroa Mäkkärin tuplajuustohampurilaisesta on ihan liikaa

Nämä tutkimustulokset mukanani lähdin bussilla kohti Valkeakoskea ja matkalla oli tylsää, kun ei ollutkaan kudinta mukana. Naapurikaupasta ostin kalliilla pätkän mustaamakkaraa ja menin kotiin syömään ja kutomaan.

Vähän aikaa kudottuani käynnistin tietokoneeni ja neulonta-listalla tarjottiin lankaa ilmaiseksi Vaaka-tilkkujen kutomista varten! Mikä juhlapäivä! Kaksi kiloa tulossa! Kiitos Niina S (eli Ziina)!

Sivuhuomautuksena: kotisivuni ja sitä myöten lähes kaikki tämän blogin kuvat ovat jostain syystä alhaalla. Kyllä se siitä…