A few days ago, I wrote this post about the underground trains in London and Stockholm. This sparked the conversation you see to the left on Twitter.

SimCity!!! I love SimCity. I used to play it loads, but haven’t had the chance to in a long time. I have the game installed on my Mac, but have lost the disc. After obtaining the disc again through completely legitimate means, I remembered why I stopped playing — SimCity 4 on the Mac is slooooooow.

Eventually, I bought the PC version for £10 and started playing. I saw that the game came with regions to play on that match real-life areas — London, San Francisco, New York, etc. Wouldn’t it be fun to build a SimCity on a region that matches Stockholm? Yes, it would.

After searching for a while, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to find one. Then, I stumbled upon a page describing how to create SimCity 4 regions from a greyscale elevation model.

Superb! All I’d need to do is find an elevation model of the Stockholm area and I’d be set! My search eventually led to the ASTER project then to NASA’s ASTER GDEM (Global Digital Elevation Model) site. After following an incredibly simple order process and waiting a few hours, I had my data!

Problem is, the ASTER satellite data simply isn’t accurate enough for my incredibly demanding needs, and the data I managed to get wasn’t good enough. In the screenshot below, I’ve written “Stockholm” on the map approximately where Google Maps puts it at the same zoom level. The map shows the Stockholm city area and surrounding suburbs.

So, now what? Eventually, I turned to Google Maps. The standard and terrain maps, while lovely and clean, are covered in roads and labels. The satellite picture shows the water-covered areas fairly cleanly (a few clouds notwithstanding), so while it wouldn’t give me a height-accurate SimCity region, I’d at least get one with the lakes and stuff in the right place, which is good enough for a game of SimCity.

I suppose.

So,  this is what Google Maps’ satellite image gave me for the region:

Using Photoshop, I manually selected all the water with the Magic Wand tool, and saved that selection. Then, I created a layer of flat 25% grey (just below sea level in a SimCity elevation model), and another one of flat 40% grey (just above sea level). Using the earlier selection, I punched a hole in the 40% grey to show the 25% grey underneath. The result:

With that made, I followed the instruction on the page linked earlier to create a SimCity region. After fifteen minutes of data crunching as I experimented with getting the right scale, SimCity finally gave me this. Hooray!

If you compare it with Google’s terrain map of the same area, you’ll see that apart from some jaggy edges on the lakes (which can be smoothed out in-game), it matches pretty well with the geography of the area:

All this only took about four hours. Now I can finally play my game!

In the week we came to Stockholm in 2009, the thing that most amazed me, and the thing I told everyone about when I got home, was the underground trains.

Compared to the London Tube, the Stockholm Tunnelbana is in another league. It’s clean. It’s smooth. It’s quiet. MY PHONE WORKS UNDERGROUND.

Everyone else here looked at my excited, hyper reaction with confusion. And, why not? Here, a smooth, quiet train where you can sit comfortably and use your phone is how things should be. It’s how it should be in the UK, too.

In my opinion, these two trains are a great way of showing the differences between my experiences with the communication and public travel infrastructures in the two countries. Pay particular attention to the audio — they were both recorded by the same camera, set to the same volume setting. The audio has been boosted in iMovie, but by the same amount on both videos.

First, a London Tube train clattering between stations:

Second, a Stockholm Tunnelbana train travelling smoothly between stations:

See what I mean?

A long time ago (well, two-five years ago), I used to do a lot of photography. Not professional photography, but I used to go out with my camera and take pictures for the purpose of taking pictures. This started when I was a kid and my Dad let me use his Olympus OM-1 — a fully manual camera whose battery was optional and only powered the light meter. He taught me how to use it, how shutter speed and aperture size worked and what they did to the picture, and so on. From then, I was hooked.

Some of my early photos from that camera:

More recently, real life has got in the way of this. My amazing camera and lens (an EOS 5D with a 28-105 f/4 USM L) has been relegated to taking holiday snaps and other menial tasks that I could use a compact camera for. Indeed, a couple of years ago I bought a Nikon P6000 compact as it’s easier to carry around.

A few months ago, I noticed that the screen on my 5D was failing. I’d been wanting to replace it with a 7D for a while, but I was actually upset when I saw the faulty screen — my 5D is five years old and full of dents and scrapes, each of which has a story attached — most of them are from clambering up and down rocks and waterfalls at Yosemite National Park.

Moving to Sweden has given me a great reason to get back into photography again — this is a beautiful country. I’ve decided to endeavour to publish one photo per day for the next year, and if I succeed I’ll turn it into a printed photo book to keep for prosperity.

This seems like as good a time as any to go over my photography ground rules. I’ve seen far too much “photography” recently that attempts to fix bad photography with the over-application of soft focus, sepia, wonky angles and other miscellaneous effects. Also: if you’re a “photographer” at a wedding and all I can hear is the beeping of your camera, you need to think hard about your career choice.

So, my ground rules?

• Quality over quantity. Digital isn’t an excuse to take hundreds of shots of the same thing in the hope that one will come out. Think about your shots before you take them.

• Minimal editing. Cropping, slight contrast and saturation bumps, etc are fine. Editing out a tree isn’t.

• Less is more. Effects can sometimes enhance a picture, but only if used sparingly. As a rule, if I look at a scene and wish I had my old film camera and some black-and-white film, it’s OK to make that picture black-and-white on the computer. Hell, in some instances I’ll go to town on a picture — the following photo has a ton of effects applied to it, but hopefully it follows the ethos I follow with HDR photography: if you can tell it’s HDR (or has had loads of effects applied to it), you’re doing it wrong:

So, starting today I’ll hopefully be posting a photo a day of the area I live in and Stockholm City. Don’t expect any consistent level of quality, though — I’ve been out of this game for a long time. In fact, the first photo wasn’t even taken by me — my fiancée took it while I was messing around with a fishing rod.

I’ll be uploading each day’s photo to my Flickr set: Sweden in Pictures. If you use an RSS reader, you can keep up-to-date with it using this RSS feed. If you don’t, follow me on Twitter and I’ll post on there when I’ve added a new photo.

The buildup to this move was insane. We flew over to Stockholm twice — once in September 2009 to make sure we actually liked the country and again a month before the move to look at the apartment we’re now living in to make sure it was what we wanted.

We’ve been thinking about this move since March 2009 — 18 months ago. After that flight a month ago, we confirmed the apartment and things kicked into high-gear. The last week before we left was one of the most draining weeks I’ve had in my life — literally every day I had several things to do and places to go, often miles away from each other. A couple of days before we left, we visited a friend’s place and was greeted with “Bloody hell Daniel — you look knackered!”

Then, we packed everything we could into the car and undertook the longest road trip of my life — 1,500 miles from our house in Bedfordshire to our flat just south of Stockholm. The trip took four days of driving and camping in more or less constant pouring rain to complete.

Now, just over a week after our arrival, life is more or less completely back to normal. Yesterday, I went shopping for a fishing rod and some speakers for my computer. Then, we went to do the weekly food shop. Then, we watched Scrubs on TV before going to bed.

This isn’t what I was expecting. We’ve moved countries, to a place with a completely different language and culture. The 1,500 mile drive really pushed home how far we’ve actually travelled, but now we’re here there’s hardly any culture shock at all. I was expecting to feel completely out-of-place, to be having a really hard time and missing home terribly. The worse it’s been so far was a few minutes back in the UK when we dropped our dog, Chester, off at the kennels that’d be looking after him before his flight out to meet us — for a moment, before being shown his frisbee by the person looking after him, he didn’t want to leave us and was trying to run back to me. At that moment, the magnitude of what I was doing hit me so hard there was a couple of minutes of uncontrollable floods of tears until I snapped out of it and carried on.

To be honest, now we’re here it’s a bit of an anticlimax. The months of preparation we did — the trips, the Swedish lessons, the weeks of reading and learning about Swedish culture made this place a second home to me before I even got here.

Which, to be honest, is the best thing that could’ve happened. I’m already enjoying and experiencing this new place, learning the area and getting horribly lost on the Stockholm ringroad (half of which is underground and foils the best of satnavs). Of course there’s going to times when I miss my home and friends in the UK — especially so for my fiancée, who is much closer to her family than I am mine and less used to moving away — but I seem to have gotten the worst of it out of my system already. Bring on Sweden!

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed my recent… saga.

I’m moving to Sweden in eleven days. The plan was to put a bunch of our stuff and our dog in the car and drive through France, Germany, Denmark and finally Sweden to get there. Our dog already has a pet passport and has had his rabies jabs. The only additional entry requirement over the standard EU passport requirements is that the animal must have a positive rabies antibody test 120 days or more after the original vaccination was given - the standard EU requirement is 30 days.

Three weeks ago, we sent off for the second test. There’s still six months until his rabies booster is due, so what’s the problem? I confidently paid the £75 and waited patiently for the result.

Two days ago, the result came back. A positive result comes back at 0.5 thingys per something or higher, and his test last year came back at exactly 0.5. This test, however, came back at less than 0.1 thingys per something.

Shit.

The only option remaining is to fly him out. As the UK and Sweden are both completely rabies free and don’t have open borders, they have an agreement where animals can travel between the two countries without a rabies vaccination as long as it’s a direct journey — by plane or boat.

The cost? £1,300. After the phone call from my vet, I tried to figure out what I could sell to get the cash together to get this done — money has hardly been plentiful recently. My piano was an excellent candidate, but very hard to sell!

After a while, I decided to sell my work machine — a Mac Pro and two displays. I won’t be taking it to Sweden anyway, so it’s not like I’ll miss that they’re gone!

As I was sifting through the files on the Mac Pro in preparation for wiping it for whoever buys it, I had a sinking feeling. That machine has gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff in it - virtual machines, all the code I and employees have ever written and several native operating systems for testing.

The original idea was to take my laptop to Sweden and put my work stuff on it. It’d be amazing! However, the thought of all those years worth of work cruft being merged with years worth of personal cruft on one machine gives me a headache. There’s definitely a strong work case for having a dedicated Work Mac, and the change from selling this Mac Pro and its displays will buy a new iMac - perfect!

This is stupid. I’ll be working from home in Sweden, and at the rate I’m going I’ll have my home laptop, its 24” LED Display, an iMac and my development Windows machine all in one room. However, I can’t put all these operating systems and virtual machines on my poor MacBook!

It was at that point I remembered that the 27” iMac can act as an external display for other machines. Perfect! I can fill the iMac with virtual machines and native operating systems (replacing my development PC) as well as my work clutter without destroying my poor laptop. At the same time, I can sell the 24” LED display and use the iMac as the laptop’s main screen.

Genius!

The only problem is that I have less than two weeks to sell all this stuff and get the money from PayPal into my bank account. I may well be visiting the Bluewater Apple Store as I go past on the way to Sweden to collect an iMac!

9:30am

“Ha! Suckers!” I thought, ambling into work at 9:30, pleased at being almost on time for work for once. I’d queued up at silly-o’clock once before, for the launch of the iPhone 3G two years ago. It hadn’t gone well — my store ran out of iPhones before I got to the front of the queue and I wasn’t that far back at all.

For the iPhone 4, I pre-ordered for delivery instead. I sat at work smugly tweeting about not having to queue. You can set your watch by the UPS van here — if your watch is only accurate to 15-minutes, at least — so I was confident I’d have my iPhone by 4pm.

Refresh refresh refresh. Online tracking assured me my parcel was out for delivery. Refresh. Out for delivery.

4pm

No UPS truck. I phoned UPS.

“The iPhone rollout is causing delays today,” the friendly lady offered. “Your van is probably just running late — they’ll be running until 7pm.”

Time passed. I called again a few times. Each time, same answer.

My repeated attempts at getting answers had got the UPS call centre to put an “urgent resolution request” or some such to my local depot. They’d call me back!

Refresh. Out for delivery.

7pm

They didn’t call me back. I phoned the call centre again — as soon as the computer answers, star-zero-zero to get to a human. “Your request is due to be resolved by 8pm.” Annoyed, I decided to go home.

Refresh. Out for delivery.

7:01pm

The phone rang between the office door and the car. “Hi, this is someone from the Luton UPS depot” said someone who probably actually had a name. “I’ve been looking for your parcel, and it’s actually here at the depot.”

RAAAAGE.

“It’s been here all day, actually.” I heard her brace for a barrage of abuse.

Stay calm. Calm calm calm.

“Can I come and collect it now? Normally UPS won’t let me collect unless you’ve tried to deliver at least once.”

“That is normally the case, but since this is our fault I can make an exception.”

Damn right you’ll make an exception, I thought but didn’t say since it probably wasn’t her fault. Determined to not waste half of another day, I set off for Luton.

7:40pm

“If you could just write your address here, I’ll go and find your parcel.”

*Writes*

“Daniel, right? I think I spoke to you on the phone earlier. I know exactly where your parcel is — I’ll be back in a minute.

7:42pm

“Sign here, please.”

*Signs*

She hands over the parcel. Triumph!

“So, what happened? How can a package be scanned in as on the truck, but not actually be on the truck?”

“I’m not sure — I think the driver for your area was off today.”

“Oh, so there’s a big pile of stuff for my route back there?”

“No, only one or two things actually.”

I saw the panic spread across her face as her web of lies started to untangle.

“I’ll be sure to pass this on to our supervisor to be properly investigated. The exit is just over there — press the white button to open the door.”

7:50pm

Mmmmm, Pizza Hut. What wasted day? Hmmm, I wonder….

Refresh. Poor Android phone, so diligently tracking its replacement. “19:01: The package was missed at the UPS facility. UPS will deliver on the next business day.”

Sigh.

9:10pm

The lines marking where I’m supposed to cut my SIM down into a microSIM go through some of the metal contacts on the chip. That’s fine, right?

9:13pm

“Your iPhone is now unlocked.”

Bliss.

Sometimes you see something that you absolutely must have. The reason might be stupid, but the instant you see this thing you know you have to have it in your life. A few days ago I saw something on eBay that had just that effect on me. Thankfully, I won the auction for only £10 — making it the least expensive “must have” item ever.

Allow me to present…

The Macintosh Performa 5400/180 in black — 180Mhz 603e CPU, 1.6Gb hard drive, 16Mb RAM and an 8x CD-ROM drive.

This machine — or one just like it, at least — was the first computer I used for any length of time as a kid. It was originally purchased as a machine for my father’s journalist work — I’d mainly use it to help him at his office. Eventually the machine came home, and although its main use was still Dad’s work, I’d get to play with it in the evenings.

This compter taught me so much. It taught me how to build a city in SimCity. It taught me how to write a letter properly in WordPerfect. How to edit images in whatever hellish software came with the SCSI scanner we had. It taught me the internet with its 33.6kbps modem. Eventually, it taught me how to program.

To this day I think this machine is beautiful and I prefer it to the original iMac. The design is compact, sleek and still practical — the front panel below the monitor unclips to access the floppy and optical drives. Undo two screws at the back and the whole motherboard slides out, also giving access to the hard drive.

Our original machine was upgraded far beyond its means — it had a USB 1.1 PCI card, a G3 processor upgrade and 96Mb of RAM. Eventually it blew up when my mother switched it on one day. By then, sourcing a replacement power supply was futile and it got replaced with a G4 Cube.

This machine reminds me how far technology has progressed in my own short lifetime. This machine, shipped in an era when users still needed to be taught how to use a mouse, was a powerhouse in its time. Now, the phone in my pocket is several hundred times more powerful.

When I went to collect the machine, the guy selling it to me listened to my story of our original Performa and smiled. He understood my daft attachment to an old, obsolete computer, and spoke of recently buying a crappy old motorbike for similar reasons. This computer will remain with me for as long as I can, causing arguments with my future wife when she wants to throw it away to make room for our second kid’s bedroom toys.

That day is a long way ahead. On that day, I can foresee me trawling eBay on my iHoloPad, saddened by the loss of my childhood friend. I’ll light up, seeing a Mid-2009 MacBook Pro — the machine I’m writing this blog post on right now — for the future-equivalent of £10. My wife will sigh, and we’ll start this cycle all over again.