Iceland Tour

Introduction

For my birthday I wanted to do a memorable trip. Unfortunately it being the middle of summer, and Covid still being a thing, my ideal exotic destinations were not options that were going to work. However there was one destination that would have cool weather, not be beset by biting insects, within easy travel reach, and long on my list to visit: Iceland. I had once, last millenium, been there for a long layover that allowed me to take bus to Reykjavik and visit Perlan. It was a surreal and very brief experience, and I had always wanted to see the country properly.

I am used to traveling alone on my own schedule and whims, but I wanted a guided tour — to take away the stress of researching and reserving hotels, parks, cars and restaurants, opening hours, where to park and all that, but also to get insider knowledge of what is worth seeing, and to get a more educational narrated experience.

I ended up booking a 9 day tour (the first and last days are “arrival” and “departure” so there were actually 7 activity days). Due to a Covid outbreak on the tour it was cut one day short, and less fortunate participants had to drop off in the middle of the tour.

In summary, the tour was expensive, but worth it. Having all the practicals planned out took a huge amount of hassle out of the trip and the hotels and eateries were all excellent, the activities and sights were a good mix and generally great as well.

Iceland Travel Tips / Lessons Learned

Weather

Summer in Iceland still means 10 Celsius and rain. Summer means very long days and almost 24-hour daylight, so especially if you’re on your own you can fit a lot of outdoor activities into a day. There are some activities such as ice caves which you cannot do in the summer.

Winter, I was told, tends to be pretty mild, so temperatures often don’t fall too much below freezing. You will have very limited daylight. Ice caves, northern lights etc. are winter activities.

No matter which season you pick, be prepared for constant strong and gusty winds and rain. For summer travel, waterproof shoes, pants, and jackets are a must, and be prepared to have a dry change of clothes available. Even if you don’t get caught in a rain, if you want to get a proper experience from some of the waterfalls the spray will soak you thoroughly.

Even in the summer, even with constant rain, inside air tended to be very dry and this is only worse in the winter. Bring plenty of moisturizer and chapstick.

Long days and glacier visits mean that you should not forget your sunscreen, even during overcast days.

Nature

Iceland is all about nature. Once you leave Reykjavik, especially once you get a bit further along the ring road, fancy spas, restaurants or shopping are no longer a thing.

There are no biting insects in Iceland, no bears, wolves or other particularly dangerous animals.

Crowds

During peak tourist season you may start to run into issues with some parking lots filling up, another benefit of a guided tour. That said, this was the busiest season since the start of the pandemic, and we just about managed to find parking at all locations.

Food / Services

The signature foods are arctic char, cod and lamb. All three were fantastic in all of the restaurants we tried them in. Burgers are popular and good as well. Restaurants generously serve free tap water. Good restaurants were popular, and it’s highly advisable to make reservations ahead of time to get a seat.

Hotels typically don’t have room service, and they may also not offer laundry service.

If you get further from Reykjavik, plan your meals and fuel, as there may be very limited options to fill up or buy food or provisions.

Keflavik Transfers

The Keflavik airport (which used to be a US/British airbase) is a good distance from Reykjavik. You can either get a taxi, which is quite expensive, or book a bus transfer from various private companies. For hotels on the outskirts of Reykjavik the bus drops you off / picks you up right from the hotel. For hotels in central Reykjavik buses aren’t allowed to drive to the hotels directly, and instead drop-off and pick-up happens from specific points.

Hazards

Sneaker Waves

Wikipedia: A sneaker wave, also known as a sleeper wave, or in Australia as a king wave, is a disproportionately large coastal wave that can sometimes appear in a wave train without warning.

I’ve lived near and visited many oceans and seas; Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Baltic to name some. I’ve never seen wave patterns or capriciousness like that in Iceland. There are some great black sand beaches, which absolutely are worth a visit, with very different grain structures. Near Jökulsárlón you get the Diamond Beach with chunks of ice from the calving glacier beaching on the black sand; there’s one reachable from the souvenir mecca in Vik, and there’s Reynisfjara with basalt columns. All, but especially Reynisfjara can have these unexpected major waves. The depth increases rapidly right off the beach, so if a large wave knocks you off your feet and pulls you into the sea, you’re toast. The water is freezing and there are brutal rip currents, and you will have expired by the time any search and rescue can reach you. Even if you see others stand near the sea or go past outcroppings, and even if the waterline seems safe, please stay at least 20m from the water.

Wind Gusts

Less of an issue when driving a small rental, but on the coastal roads the wind gusts can be brutal, and having vans and SUVs blown off the road, especially in wet and icy conditions is a disturbingly common occurrence. Be prepared for the long drives to require quite a bit of attention, especially when passing mountains.

Glaciers

As part of the tour we did a glacier walk. It was a bit of a production, with us getting fitted with crampons, helmets, rescue harnesses and ice picks and a specialized guide. As a tourist, you could just drive to the parking lot and go have a hike on the glacier. Please don’t, though. The crampons were absolutely necessary, and there most certainly are dangers on even small glacier tongues.

Cliff Edges

I’m afraid of heights so I think I generally am pretty good about this anyways, but Iceland is not a safe amusement park, and many of the dramatic coastal and waterfall cliffs have nothing to prevent you from taking a close look and falling to your death.

Highlights

Iceland is very pretty, absurdly full of waterfalls, pictoresque roaming horses, amazing coastlines, mountains and glaciers. It’s definitely a photographer’s paradise if the weather happens to cooperate, which isn’t at all a given.

The below are some of the highlights from my trip, not in chronological or geographical order, but hopefully can be inspiration for further research and pinning on a map.

The ice lagoon Jökulsárlón was a very touristy, but still nice stop, and the patterns and colors on the icebergs were fascinating. It’s right off the ring road and if you don’t take a boat tour or kayak, and can be a quick stop. Diamond Beach is right on the other side of the road. Depending on the wind conditions you should visit one side of the outlet or the other, wherever the wind is pushing the ice.

Not being used to a volcanic landscape, the hexagonal basalt formations, lava fields, and other volcanic features were amazing and exotic. The beaches, whether black sand or white sand with volcanic rocks, were worth a stop. Diamond Beach, Reynisfjara, Djúpalónssandur, Búða beach.

All the waterfalls were great in their own right. Seljalandsfoss is easily reachable, and allows you to walk behind the waterfall. A short walk away is a second waterfall in a gorge; if you didn’t get soaked by Seljalandsfoss, Gljúfrabúi will certainly take care of it. Waterproof boots or ability to hop over rocks (or willingness to get your feet wet) required.

Svartifoss is an easy climb/hike from the Vatnajökull national park parking lot and distinctive with very cool rock formations, and there’s another waterfall (Hundafoss) along the way for a bonus. There are several ~1 hour walks / hikes you can do from the park parking lot, so it’s a great place to stop.

Having visited Yellowstone, the Geysir park wasn’t particularly impressive. It has a big parking lot, is a leisurely stroll, has a mountain lookout you can climb to, and while Geysir itself is dormant these days, a smaller geyser named Strokkur erupts every 5-20 minutes in various scales of grandness. And if you’ve never been to a geothermal pool / geyser park, it’s definitely worth a stop. The park is right by the Gulfoss falls and a short distance from the Friðheimar tomato farm if you want tomato soup, great bread, and all the tomato dishes you’d like. There are likely a myriad more sights worth seeing around the park, but those were the only stops we made.

Skógafoss was another great waterfall, near the Skóga museum which is a strange mix of everything and the kitchen sink. It has some turf houses an an open-air museum, and the largest amateur and communications radio collection I’ve seen. Something to put on the list for rainy-day activities, or to learn more about the harshness of life before our modern conveniences.

For photographers, the black Búðakirkja is a worthwhile stop. There are actually some other houses and developments in the background and a parking lot right next to it, so some careful framing or being able to shoot it from the land side goes a long way. A few minutes from the church there’s a cute little beach that’s worth a visit if you’re already there. The history of the church is interesting as well.

Finally, the village of Arnarstapi has a lovely coastal walking route with fantastic coastal features and a great stone arch.

The 7 days of the trip were filled with half a dozen to a dozen stops each, so this is only scratching the surface, but it hopefully goes to show that Iceland, despite its small population, has more than enough things to see.

Posted on July 3, 2022July 3, 2022 by Toivo Voll

Alpinerx Alive Fitness Watch Review

The Facebook commercials trying to get me to buy a Swiss watch finally worked when Alpina marketed their new heart-rate monitoring fitness watch at 50% off with custom configurations. That merely made it ludicrously expensive, as opposed to unattainable.

It took a good while to receive it, but I’ve now lived with it for a week, and can share my experiences.

Presentation

The watch came in one of Alpina’s typical cardboard / leatherette display boxes with a little pillow. The charging clamp came in a hard case which was also in a very classy cardboard box, and the spare straps came in… a torn envelope? Regardless, the quality of the packaging was fine for this category of watch, and definitely a bonus if giving it as a present. Very much something from a watch company, not a tech product.

Ease of Use / Manual

This is where my critique starts. The watch came with a couple of thick booklets, which consisted of very generic instructions for multiple calibers/watch models in multiple languages, and were pretty much useless for this model. There was a little card insert with a link to a FAQ in tiny print; the FAQ was fairly useful. Otherwise I had to Google a manual for the watch, and the manual doesn’t really do a particularly good job at describing the watch or its functions, and both it and the FAQ seem to be flat-out wrong in some cases (claiming that some functions are performed with the buttons when they’re actually only possible with the touch screen), and they miss some other features I had to figure out with trial and error.

This is a brand new product which I ordered before it was even made in a crowdfunding campaign, but the documentation definitely fell short of what I’d expect of any fitness watch, let alone a premium one.

App

To nobody’s surprise the watch comes with a smartphone app. In fact, you cannot set the time of the watch any other way — which also means that if you, on purpose, would like to set your watch some minutes fast, you can’t.

In general the app is quite good. I find it more pleasant to use than the FitBit equivalent. The information I want is right there when I open it. You can use it to configure which watch screens are available and in which order, but beyond that the configuration options are meager. For example, each of the screens is what Alpina defined, you cannot configure the layout or elements at all. Luckily they’re all great, and I haven’t found a particular desire to change anything.

One bummer is that the sleep data isn’t automatically available in the morning, it takes a few minutes from when you look at it before it gets downloaded and analyzed.

One fantastic feature is a charge notification — once your watch is fully charged, the app gives you a notification of this, so you don’t forget the watch in the charger for the entire day.

In general your heart rate etc. are immediately available on the screen, some of the watch-specific things, like battery level, require you to navigate to a screen which is a bit laggier as it forces a resync of the watch.

The app has integration with FitBit and Withings and Apple Health; just what this nets you is a bit unclear to me yet.

Fitness Features

This is not an active sport fanatics watch with a gazillion features. It tells the time (plus a “world time” from another city you choose), date, your heart rate, weather, potentially some sleep statistics, and for exercise your speed and distance, and that’s pretty much it. The ads kept mentioning VO2, I’m going to have to ask whether that will be added later or if I’m just too dense to find it.

The big news here is that this watch actually accurately and reliably measures my heart rate. There’s not even a competition vs. either my FitBit Charge 2 or my earlier Microsoft Band 2. The Alpina just works.

Under normal operation, it apparently measures your heart rate every minute or so; during exercise it goes into a more frequent mode (I read somewhere that it would be every 10 seconds, but can’t confirm that.) Regardless of how it does it, when chilling I get my heart rate, and when going up a hill and huffing and puffing I get my heart rate, and they match reality.

The exercise mode can also use a built-in GPS to track your run/walk/hike, and keep the AMOLED display on, and… will drain your battery in a hurry. I’m not sure how much of it is the GPS and the screen, but you’re only getting 3-4 hours with the screen and GPS on. Not really usable. As to exercises, there are a myriad of varieties, and they come in the way Alpina deemed fit to give you, and you can neither narrow down the list nor change the order. However, due to the stateful nature of the UI, this isn’t a huge deal if you tend to stick with one kind of exercise.

It does have an auto-detection feature (at least in the app) where it figures out if you did something resembling exertion, and suggests to you that you can flag it as a workout.

A feature that the FitBit didn’t have is a measurement of your breathing rate (respirations per minute) which is available through the app.

One bizarre omission is the floor counter. The watch does count distance/steps, but it does not count stairs climbed / elevation. This is something I quite miss from the FitBit.

Other Features

There is a chronometer, a count-down timer, an alarm (tactile only, the watch makes no sound), an alternative second time zone, weather report, an interactive breathing exercise, a reminder to get active, the possibility to show incoming WhatsApp, SMS and several other kinds of messages on the watch screen, a hydration counter where you can log your water intake, a calorie consumption extimator, and step counter. What it’s missing from some other models are altimeters, UV sensors and really any other sensors.

User Interface

As solid as the watch is, the user interface seems like a bit of an experiment. You have a crown which actually does absolutely nothing except for being a button. You can’t set the time or pull it out or achieve anything by turning it. Then you have two push buttons, which do almost nothing; you use them for the chronometer function, and… really almost nothing else.

The crown turns on the AMOLED screen and cycles through the screens.

Pretty much everything else you do with the “touch screen,” which basically just means swiping left or right, and for certain things (dismissing displayed WhatsApp messages, starting and stopping exercise etc.) get an OK/Cancel or Start/Stop buttons on the screen, and you just press on the glass. I’m not sure how this works, I certainly hope it doesn’t mean that the sapphire glass is extrasuperspecial

Overall the touch screen, to me, is a bit annoying and occasionally unresponsive. There is also a tactile feedback feature; if you’re trying to swipe past the end of the list, or do similar things, the watch vibrates. This is however so faint that I’m having trouble registering it, and that means I’m poking at my watch like an idiot. I’d definitely love to make more use of the physical buttons or even a turnable dial on the crown.

As an aside, a cute / annoying feature is that to make the AMOLED visible when the hands are in the way, the watch will rotate the hands out of the way before turning on the screen, so at 6:30 you have to wait a few seconds for the hands to get out of the way before you get a display, whereas at 12:00 the screen turns on immediately.

One area where this differs from the FitBit and some other similar trackers is the memory of where you were. When you turn on the AMOLED, it shows you whatever screen you were on when it turned off. Within those screens, for example for activity selection, the same holds. You only have to sort through the gazillion activities once to find walking, the next time you go to start an exercise, it defaults to walking. Compared to my FitBit this makes the Alpina more pleasant to use.

Battery and Charging

One of the reasons I went for this watch instead of, say, an Apple Watch, was battery life. Similar to my FitBit it’s supposed to last ~5 days, and so far that seems relatively accurate. I can also get a very accurate reading in percent through the app, which makes it easier to decide whether to charge it or not.

The charging is another area where Alpina needs to rethink their approach. The watch comes with a rather bulky clip (with a USB A connector; you have to provide your own power source). The clip and cable are very well made, and the clip has a silicone pad for the glass, but the whole thing is bizarrely finicky to get a good contact, and twice now I’ve set the watch to start charging, as indicated by the screen, and as soon as I set it down something jostles and I come out of the shower to find it hasn’t charged at all. Not cool, Alpina.

That said, whether the watch is charging or not is clearly indicated by a charging screen which stays on during the charge duration, and the default setting is to enter a “demo mode” after the watch is fully charged and connected to power, where it cycles through the AMOLED screens. In addition to the app notification, this makes it very easy to tell whether it’s still charging or done.

Fit, Finish and Design

The watch comes in a dark blue specialty glass fiber / plastic case, or a stainless steel one. I wanted something lighter, cheaper, and more forgiving of scratches, so went for the plastic case. It’s very solid and feels like great quality. The bi-directionally rotating bezel is way too easy to rotate for my taste, as it’s easy to knock it around.

Overall the body, face, bezel and entire package are very much a high-quality product, and you can feel the value for price here.

The watch is fairly large, but to my surprise it is actually much more comfortable than the FitBit. I can wear it higher up on the wrist, and it just stays put without having to be tightened down excessively. The heart rate monitoring works perfectly while the watch is at a normal, comfortable level of pressure you’d use for a normal wristwatch, unlike the FitBit which required uncomfortable levels of tightening to have any hope of a reading.

There are multiple kinds of straps available; because of incentives I opted for a weird carbon-fiber-style leather affair, a more sporty fabric version, and a claspless velcro fabric strap. I skipped the diver-style rubber option. While good quality, the straps were fairly stiff, so opening and closing them to take the watch off for showering was a bit of a pain, and I am for now using the velcro one. It should be noted that this is very fancy velcro, the strap has specific fine pads that grip the strap, and so far it looks like it’s not going to cause the usual velcro fraying. Fundamentally, I put it on in the morning after my shower, and I don’t fiddle with the adjustment until the next morning. Even sleeping with it is fine.

I sleep in the dark, and the FitBit worked quite well with its wrist motion detection; if I woke up at night and wanted to know the time, I would just lift my hand and it would show the time. The Alpina does have luminous hands and markers on the bezel, but the glow after five hours is too dim for me to reasonably see, and then I have to press the button and wait for the display to turn on. Not as handy..

Alpina makes a different women’s watch where the digital screen is hidden behind a seamless face, and you can only tell it’s there when it’s on. I would have greatly preferred that, the ana-digi cutout (especially in some other outrageously expensive Swiss watches) always struck me as a bit of a cheap cop-out. That said, everything else looks great, I love the design, and the screen is vibrant and bright and contrasty, and works well both at night and in sunlight, and the heart rate and weather screens make most of the resolution. (It’s certainly not a high-DPI display, mind, but sufficient to cram a few lines of text in.)

Conclusion

This was a complete luxury / pamper myself purchase after our annual performance pay came in; it’s hard for me to justify the price otherwise. That said, I’m very happy with the price-performance ratio. It’s comfortable, it does what I want it to do far more reliably than any heart rate monitoring device I’ve had before (including chest straps!) and I like the look. Certainly not worth the list price, but at 50% off, if you want to go for luxury and are after something that looks more like a real watch than an Apple Watch or one of the Garmin/Suunto style ultra-athlete tools, it’s not a bad choice. It’s been on my wrist pretty much continuously after I received it, which says all there is to say in the end.

Posted on October 15, 2020October 16, 2020 by Toivo Voll

The Worth of a Human

The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Dignity - statue of a Native American woman with a star quilt, overlooking the Missouri River in South Dakota, USA. A rainbow is in the sky above her. — Dignity, photo by CorbieVreccan (CC)

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

I am worried about the state and future of the world. After the end of the Cold War, it seemed like things were going largely in the right direction in the Western world. More freedom of religion, sexuality, gender, rights for minorities, less war and fewer armed conflicts. In the last decade this trajectory has been sharply reversed, with nationalist populism gaining ground, attacks on minorities, power grabs by fascists, dismantling of political and democratic norms now alarmingly widespread.

I don’t know all the causes or what to do about this; I certainly agree that the fruits of the post-1980s wealth have not been fairly distributed and inequality is at a crisis level in many countries. That is not what these thoughts are about.

These thoughts are about dignity.

I got the urge to finally write something down after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on undocumented workers in the Koch Foods plant in the United States.

Non-US citizens without valid work authorization were arrested at their place of employment. They are being taken to unknown locations, likely without meaningful access to legal counsel, with no regard to their family members and children. This episode has caused outrage, especially since the organized criminal elements here, i.e. the employer, seems to be unaffected by the “law-and-order” fiction.

One aspect that grates me about this travesty of justice, as well as so many interactions between law enforcement and the public in the United States, is the lack of dignity. In the United States, when you are stopped for a traffic violation, or really pretty much any reason whatsoever, it’s pretty standard procedure that a police officer, armed with a taser, pepper spray, a club, and of course an arsenal of weapons, is standing a safe distance from you, and is verbally instructing you to do specific and unusual things. The simple act of taking out your wallet out of a back pocket or glove box is a highly suspect activity fraught with the danger of getting shot. These encounters can escalate quickly, with yelled commands, people on the ground, people handcuffed or zip-tied, people kept in the back seats of cars while their papers or belongings are checked and so forth. If you are detained, or arrested, you will be shackled, deprived of freedom, and subjected to the whim of arbitrary rules and the complete power of the correctional officers, who may well be minimum-wage employees for a for-profit company.

The only consideration is the “safety of the officer.” Any indignity seems to be justified by the idea that it keeps the person in power safe. Any indignity is justified if the human being subjected to the state coercive powers is suspected of having committed a crime, no matter how trivial.

That is what bothers me. Allowing people to be held for minor infractions is not OK. Allowing people to be ordered about at gunpoint without any reasonable reason to think they are capable or willing of offering violent resistance is not OK. These are things that seem to be taken for granted in the United States, but they are perverse and wrong. When captain Carola Rakete was arrested in Italy after bringing to port her ship with people rescued at sea, by one of the most vocally pro-fascists governments in Europe, what struck me was precisely that contrast — she was not handcuffed or manhandled. She was told she is under arrest, and escorted to a car. There were no drawn guns, no zip ties, no body armor — why would there be? She’s an unarmed ship captain with no history of violence. Afterwards, during the legal process, she was confined to house arrest, not forced to sleep in a tent in a field, or a cage, or a cell. Why should she be? Were we afraid that she was a danger to someone if she wasn’t forcibly incarcerated?

Fundamentally the only justified situation where someone should be deprived of their freedom and bodily autonomy is if they pose a danger. Does a food factory worker pose a danger? If they do not, how come they’re confronted by an army of paramilitary personnel in body armor, zip tied, and sent to a Kafkaesque system of incarceration with dubious and limited rules or rights, separated from their family, with no concern to children suddenly left to fend for themselves?

That, then, is the second part. The bureaucracy in the United States — especially when applied to non-citizens or the poor — appears to be practically designed to humiliate. Detention and prisons have no regard for a person’s dignity, and in fact frequently humiliate on purpose. Even visits to immigration offices, social security offices and such consist of unnecessary paperwork, bizarre rules, and a complete tyranny of the State that undermines the dignity of the person. The assumption that a person is an untrustworthy, dangerous, diseased threat is what everything is designed around. I find no other explanation for not being allowed to take a Kindle to my 3-hour wait in the immigration office lobby, or all the employees wearing medical gloves when touching me, my belongings, or papers I submit. There are no questions, no leeway, no judgments, just following the orders from a computer or procedure. The value and right of a person to their dignity seems to be completely forgotten.

The United States is not the only country with these issues, of course, but of the countries where I have dealt with bureaucracy, it is the most offensive. Especially in terms of the conditions of immigration detention, Europe needs to take a hard look in the mirror and go clean up its act in a hurry as well.

The lack of respect for human dignity, I fear, is both indicative and enabling of something bigger and darker. As the Declaration of Human Rights points out, it is this disregard that has in the past led to barbaric acts, and I fear history is repeating itself. If you cannot respect the dignity of a lesbian, or a jew, or an asylum seeker, a shoplifter, or even a person who is attempting to enter a country outside of the proper channels, then what is left to prevent you from treating them as animals? As non-humans? It’s the disregard of human dignity, especially on a systemic level, that enables us to not even attempt to empathize, connect, and understand. If a law enforcement officer, or a bureaucrat shows no respect for our dignity, and has no interest or concern in us as a human beings, it’s difficult to imagine why they would expect any respect from us.

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Toivo Voll

Intellectual Property Rights and Co-Creative Games

Watching the amazing creativity of so many people at College of Wizardry: Nibelungen 4, and the various wizard school larps I’ve been to in the past, combined with the failure of Dziobak Larp Studios which ran the College of Wizardy series of games, has finally prompted me to put some thoughts to paper.

College of Wizardry 13 in Czocha castle, Poland. #cowlarp #collegeofwizardry #dziobaklarpstudios

Copyrights and intellectual property are a problem with co-creative games and endeavors. In the case of a larp, especially a larp where players and volunteers contribute a great deal, the topic of intellectual property gets very messy very quickly. As long as everyone’s friendly and the sun is shining, there is no problem. But when someone who has contributed a lot to the community decides to leave, or is barred for safety reasons, or when the game is sold or transferred, or the game runners decide to make it a for-profit enterprise, these issues can become a major hurdle.

The traditional creative industry (video games, movies etc.) tends to be pretty clear about who owns what rights; for example, if you are hired as a photographer for a film production, you agree to a work-for-hire contract and the company owns your work, period. (How predatory this model is is an entirely different conversation.) You get paid, someone owns the creative output and has full control over it.

In a game, there is significant creative and professional work that goes into the creation of design documents, meta-techniques, workshop structure, game structure, behind-the-scenes game organization and a great number of other similar aspects. The design of the lore and setting to support the style of game, by picking the location, by building in conflicts, by guiding the types of stories that will be created, and making this mesh with the rest of the game design is the heart of a larp. It’s an art, and the people involved in it deserve their recognition and rewards and to claim their credit. Doing it right is incredibly hard. It’s definitely work worth protection and payment — though on the flip side, the idea that someone asserts copyrights or demands payment for advances in workshops or safety techniques might come across quite poorly in the community.

And yet, no matter how good and complete this design is, it will never be enough to run a game without creative input from others.

A larp like a College of Wizardry is different from a movie production. One of the most important parts of this kind of a larp is the co-creative aspect. A setting and all the other things mentioned above are provided by the organizers, as are potentially short character descriptions. However, players bring the characters to life and round them out and change them to be something very different from what the character writer might have had in mind.

Players and volunteers create crests, logos, companies, products, props, runes, rituals, songs, outfits, history, customs, in-game magazines, poetry, and countless other creative things. They come up with families for their characters, and backstories. Players may define how fae and work look in a given game, or werewolves, or whether it’s allowed for a teacher and a student to go to the ball together. Players may define school rules. And indeed this is a way to support the re-playability of a game; no two games will take place in the same world, and there will always be something new and different even for returning players.

This is all content created by players and volunteers, and owned by them. It’s the output of their passion. It’s the world they live in, love in, suffer in, find themselves in. If the game runners try to claim that the likeness of a character, or the concept of a character, or any such thing is theirs, and that you, as the player, can’t bring the character to another game, or write fanfiction about them to post online, that goes very violently against the sense of what is right and wrong.

This kind of a game can only work when players and volunteers are encouraged to contribute; when they build each other and the game up; when the organizers can use props and posters left behind, when people give their portraits to be used in the following games. It only works then the players of professors bring supplies for their classes, and decorations for their classrooms.

As soon as players feel like they don’t own their work, or the character they’ve been living as, or that the work they’ve put into the game now belongs to someone else to make a profit off of, the passion is extinguished. It’s no longer creating fiction together, it’s no longer contributing to a great, common story. It’s now doing unpaid (indeed, you arguably pay for the privilege of doing this!) work to line someone’s vault with new intellectual property that they can use for profit, and tell the creators they have no control over it anymore.

People are generally happy to see themselves in character portrayed in documentaries and web pages and social media. Attempting to use people for direct marketing, especially for a different game than they prefer playing, quickly gets hackles up, rightfully so — and is legally extremely dubious. The players have not signed model releases, and demanding one as a condition of play is not going to be accepted. Once more, as long as the players believe in what’s being done, they tend to be happy to cooperate, but when the project moves from collaborative fantasy to a business, things change.

Not only that, I fear there’s a shift of expectation. A commercial business with controls over intellectual property, I imagine, would produce a game where players expect to be customers that are catered to. They expect plot, they expect a good experience. That’s in stark contrast to a co-operative game where players understand that the company running it provides the setting, but the game itself continues to be a co-creative endeavor. The introduction of too restrictive intellectual property rights has the potential to harm the co-creative aspects.

It’s clear that the name of the game, and perhaps core elements are intellectual property, and anyone wanting to use them needs to get permission, and possibly a licensing deal for commercial use. Protecting the core intellectual property of the game against someone trying to take it over, or abuse it, is probably a wise precaution as well. It’s also clear that fan works, fan gatherings, and within reason spinoffs have to be allowed, and even encouraged. If a player wants to make team jerseys with a school and house logo for a game, or just in general — maybe there’s a loss of some potential licensing revenue, but there’s much more gained from the passion and advertising and loyalty the players show to the game and the world.

The quickest way to get people to bail and make their own game is to send them a cease-and-desist letter demanding payment and adding arduous conditions when a dozen of them want to get together for a weekend in a cottage and finish some plots in character.

There is a legitimate worry that the brand will get tarnished or diluted if people can do whatever they want while using the world, and that if there’s a cheap spinoff it may siphon players from the expensive main event. But that’s a balance that has to be dealt with in a more open, creative commons direction than traditional media would — because that’s exactly what this kind of a larp is: a creative commons.

It’s also clear that volunteers can only run the game so many times, and a bunch of volunteers can only make it so big and take so much responsibility. To rent castles and buses and make agreements, and to work on a game four times a year for years, you need a company of some sort, and some reasonable income to run it. I want to be clear — I would love for people to be able to do this professionally or semi-professionally. It’s a very hard problem, how does one balance these competing needs in the existing legal intellectual property landscape. I don’t have answers. I do have a lot of sympathy for people trying to make it work.

It’s impossible to run a larp while paying everyone for their labor; it’s not even close. It has to be a project that excites people, that welcomes and attracts volunteers to pour their hearts and souls into it, a project that has people carrying boxes and setting up candles in the forest from dawn ‘till well past midnight, that has people crafting and sewing. One where once done, people will rally together over something they have created together, and they feel they have a stake and ownership together; if not financially, at least in the way the created world is treated, and the contributions are acknowledged.

Posted on March 19, 2019March 19, 2019 by Toivo Voll

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

A friend of mine recommended City of Stairs (The Divine Cities #1) to me, and I picked it up not knowing much about what to expect. The genre is alternative world / fantasy, set in a sort of Victorian, or early 1900 era of technology.

In some ways the plot is the best kind of whodunit, starting with a murder investigation that ends up spiraling into something else entirely. There is a lot of dramatic tension and drive, and it’s one of the most “stay up into the night to finish the chapter” books I’ve had a pleasure to read in a while.

While the prose isn’t as gorgeous and lyrical as, say, Rothfuss’s, the writing and setting and plot is clever. Clever in an intellectual sense, clever in the way it dangles shinies in front of the reader to give pause and reflection. Clever in the way that this entirely alien world really isn’t, and judging the characters’s actions and the justness of the world can’t happen without contrasting it with ours.

The characters are maybe not all that deep but they’re interesting and original and good vehicles for exploring all the things the author has to say about things and events.

And all the while the book is a great straightforward mystery/adventure tale to boot, with great pacing. Nitpicking that some of the terms and language are a bit anachronistic feels awfully curmudgeony.

Highly recommended, four stars.

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Toivo Voll

The Invisible Library Series by Genevieve Cogman

The series consists of The Invisible Library, The Masked City, The Burning Page and the Lost Plot (at least one additional book is slated for publication later this year.)

The setting ticks so many boxes. We live in a multiverse, although most of the residents of the worlds in this multiverse do not know it. Connecting most of these worlds is The Library, an ancient institution that collects books from the various worlds to preserve knowledge and other reasons. It employs Librarians to acquire these books. There are two other factions — dragons who embody order, and fae who embody chaos.

The protagonist is one of these Librarians and her apprentice, and they find a lot of challenges in their seemingly simple task.

The protagonist is great; while there’s a bit of Mary Sue-ism, she has a great internal dialogue that not only sets up moral decisions, but is also funny.

The setting as a whole builds up so many great characters, plot hooks and places that it seems a pity if they won’t be followed up on. As it stands, there are some that seem to be abandoned half-way through, and I can only hope they will get revisited in the future before the ball of plot becomes too unmanageable.

Another very enjoyable aspect is the prose itself. It flows effortlessly, the dialogue is nice, and the vocabulary is unusually rich.

And yet the books are shy of being great. The Masked City in particular was the weakest of the series for me, as it was filled with cinematic action that got to be too much. The pacing and dramatic tension in general doesn’t seem to quite work, although The Lost Plot is perhaps the best in this regard, so hopefully the future works continue with those lessons learned. Whatever it is, the series has all the ingredients to be great, but so far only achieves goodness. They’re easy books to recommend, but not books that keep me up wanting to finish the chapter.

Three and a half stars for the series, except three for The Masked City.

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Toivo Voll

Visit to Munich

This past weekend I made a quick visit to Munich. It’s one of my favorite cities, and it’s within reasonably easy reach from me (about four hours per train). I do need to find a way to find discount train tickets, though!

The first thing I meant to do after I dropped off my bag at the hotel was to find an electronics store I had been to as a child and see what they were selling these days — assuming they were open. Instead I stepped out of the local train into a mass demonstration against the new police powers act. I have to say that seeing such civic involvement to defend people’s privacy and rights was quite emotional. Good for you, Munich!

Eventually I moved towards a late lunch to the nearby Zum Dürnbräu restaurant. Talk about history; the location has been serving travelers food for over 500 years in the same place. It’s currently asparagus season (here in Switzerland the headquarters cafeteria has asparagus weeks, the super market restaurant has asparagus specials, asparagus everywhere!) Consequently the seasonal menu here also offered asparagus dishes. I opted for a chicken dish, which was indeed very good, combining two kinds of asparagus in a cream sauce. Entrees came with complimentary pretzels, and I added a radler to stay hydrated walking around the city, and since it seemed appropriate for the setting.

Chicken with pepper sauce; white and green asparagus in cream sauce; served with red cabbage, onion, mashed potatoes, fried onions, chives, parsley and assorted other spices.

The next day was mostly spent at Deutsches Museum.

In short, it’s the world’s best science museum. There may be others that have a bigger collection of a specific thing, but considering the breadth of their collection — aviation, trains, ships, astronomy, chemistry, biology, mining, machinery, computing, mathematics, physics, ceramics and so forth — they’re unrivaled. They have a staggering collection of historic instruments and specimens of a wide variety.

One particular favorite of mine are the classic physics and chemistry hands-on experiments. They haven’t changed much in half a century, but as great experiments that allow you to grasp concepts of physics they’re fantastic. Things like capacitors where you can vary the distance of the plates and insert dielectric materials between them, all the while observing changes to the inter-plate voltage, complete with an explanation of how things are related. Unfortunately many of the classic sections still have rather lacking English translations.

Another favorite are the guided tours. A few of them require registration and an additional fee, but most are free of charge. They range from playing around with liquid nitrogen or microscopy to more detailed walks through specific departments. This time I was one of only two people taking the mining tour through their extensive staged mining section (showing history of mining, and various types of mines); the tour was led by a former miner, and to my surprise many of the exhibits turned out to be operational, as the tour guide operated wagon lifts, water pumps, and excavators. Once more, the tours are usually limited to German.

The second tour was geodesy; here I was the only person who showed up, so I got a pretty personal tour through a number of the items on display, and discussion about local history as it related to mapping and cartography in the middle ages.

The final guided event for me was the microscopy presentation. This had a lot less to do with actual technology, and was mostly about showing interesting things imaged with the museums scanning electron microscope. The presenter was funny and interactive, he took questions and adjusted what he showed based on the interest of the audience. We did get a brief demonstration of the live view and capabilities of the electron microscope with samples in real time, and ended things by preparing a piece of dried moss in an optical microscope, finding a tardigrade, and waking it up. Overall the session was supposed to take less than an hour, but we spent closer to two hours at it, and I was convinced to buy the museum’s book on the topic, as they are actively involved in using their instrument to do research with other organizations in the region, and independent research on their own. It turns out there is an amazing amount of stuff we do not know about sub-millimeter animals.

For dinner I stopped at a recommended vegan kebab joint, Erbil’s. Most of the fare was what you’d expect in your average kebab restaurant, except meat dishes were made with seitan; it’s even cooked on a vertical rotisserie. In addition there were other delicacies, vegan lasagne, desserts etc.

For my final day I visited the Deutsches Museum’s new traffic annex. While new and offering a fair bit more space, I was not quite as impressed by it. Showcased were old trains, subway cars, trucks, cars, and motorcycles, but I felt like there was not as much information on some of the topics as I would have liked. Their selection of bicycles, I have to mention, was quite impressive, from the earliest to modern, including a reproduction of a traditional bicycle workshop. As the main museum is undergoing renovations, expected to finish in 2020, some of the exhibits were being moved around; there were a few rocket-powered cars from the rocketry exhibit in the traffic annex, though with next to no additional information. They also had a section of train signals, but with no good explanation on what they meant or signaled. On the other hand, they did have interactive exhibits on hydraulic torque converters, different types of transmissions, differentials and brake systems. The star there was a full-sized 6×6 truck drivetrain with cleverly placed plexiglass windows which allowed visibility into the operation of all the components from engine to wheels.

After the museum visit, I had the good fortune of meeting up with some friends at the Hungriges Herz bistro, followed by ice cream at True & 12.

Overall a great way to spend a few days.

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Toivo Voll

Hurricane — The Fears

a CBP Air and Marine black hawk aircrew works to bring a surviving family into the aircraft after being hoisted to safety. August 30, 2017 Photo by Alexander Zamora — a CBP Air and Marine black hawk aircrew works to bring a surviving family into the aircraft after being hoisted to safety. August 30, 2017
Photo by Alexander Zamora

This is the first in a multi-part posting about life with hurricanes. I’ve added a few explicit details to non-US audiences.

When you live in Florida, the threat of hurricanes is a part of life. As far as natural disasters go, they’re not too bad; there’s typically plenty of warning so you can prepare or evacuate, and unless you live in a flood-prone area or near the shore, the danger is manageable. Nonetheless, there is that little reminder just lurking in the far corners of your mind reminding you that you’re living here at the mercy of Mother Nature.

But what exactly is that threat?

Fundamentally it is fear for both one’s literal life and for one’s figurative life. Being hurt by the direct impact of the storm, subsequent flooding, looting and violent crime after the storm on one hand, and losing one’s possessions, and the resulting emotional pain and the economic consequences on the other. For people with families and pets, this fear extends to their loved ones. How high the risk of these things is depends a lot on whom you ask, and often people’s perception doesn’t match with reality. Overall, being hit by a major hurricane in any one location in mainland Florida, especially on the Gulf Coast, is relatively low. Tampa Bay for example has not been hit since 1921, although both Charley and Irma were very close calls.

I live in a house built in 2007, so it incorporates all the updates to hurricane building codes following both the devastation from Andrew and the 2004-2005 hurricane seasons. This means the roof isn’t likely to go flying off, and the windows won’t blow in or shatter, and the structure should stay sound. I’m inland, and my lot hast not flooded in the past decade, and I’m not listed in even the latest flood plain maps as being in a flood zone. For anything below a category 4 hurricane the house should be just fine unless I get unlucky and some object comes flying through my window or patio doors, or we get a truly massive amount of rainfall, in which case any place can suffer from flash floods.

I have insurance, but hurricane insurance has very high deductibles, in the thousands of dollars, it’s only really useful against catastrophic loss. Worse, much of the damage may be caused by water (your window or roof breaks, and the house is inundated by driving rain) and unless you have flood insurance it may be an uphill battle to fight with the insurance company whether the water damage will or will not be covered.

In the case of Hurricane Irma, my most immediate rational fear was damage to the building, resulting in a lot of hassle and stress, fighting with insurance, finding contractors to repair the house and make it habitable (when millions of other people are competing for their business), finding a lawyer to deal with insurance (when millions of other people are competing for their help), significant financial loss, and loss of items of emotional importance. The secondary fear was of discomfort and inconvenience; days or weeks with no air conditioning and possible mosquitoes if the windows got broken. Both of these were high-impact/low-probability fears, but ones that I could do realistically do something about, and the magnitude of a bad outcome warranted the caution in my mind. The fear of physical injury or death was pretty far down the list.

Fears of running out of medication, food, water, or not having a place to sleep I had been able to counter by preparing for the storm, and will go into those things in more details in a later post about preparing for a hurricane.

I used to drive by the FEMA camps from Hurricane Charley and saw the years it can take a community to get back on its feet and having all the buildings fixed, so I have no assumptions of workers showing up the week after and get things fixed up in quick order.

I cannot in good conscience end without mentioning that I realize my privilege. I have insurance, and I can survive financially having to spend some nights in a hotel, or having to take Uber to work if my car is damaged, and I can buy supplies ahead of time. I live in a fairly safe community, where I have little fear of looting or not having emergency services available, and I have an employer who will not fire me if I have to stay home to deal with a crisis or evacuate. Indeed, I have a car and the money for gas which allows me to even entertain the idea of evacuating. I have a social support network with the means to lend me housing, tools and other assistance if necessary. Not everyone, including some of my friends, have these capabilities, and to them many of the threats that I do not have to fear are very real.

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Toivo Voll

The Case for Desired-State Configuration and YANG

I’ve been spending a while now using Solarwinds Orion configuration scripts to harmonize and update configurations on a large legacy network, so the significant limitations of the current model of network configuration are fresh on my mind.

Traditionally a lot of network equipment such as switches and routers are configured via a text file, where each line has configuration settings that get applied, with sometimes nested blocks of sub-configurations. For example, from Cisco:

hostname myfirstswitch
!
logging host 10.1.1.1
!
interface Ethernet0
 ip address 192.1.12.2 255.255.255.0
 ip access-group MyAccessList in
 duplex auto
 speed auto
 no shutdown

Here we set the host name, then configure the first Ethernet interface with an IP address, an access list (similar to a firewall or iptables), and set the duplex and speed values, and finally turn the interface on (on some Cisco models there’s a default for an interface to be off, so turn it on you have to turn it not-off.)

Traditional methods of configuring the switch are over a serial port or SSH, or possibly by loading configuration commands in as a file via SCP, TFTP and the like. While the exact details of the complications do change based on the method used, a lot of the basic problem remains.

In my particular case one issue is that there may be random old configuration left. References to DNS servers or logging servers that no longer exist. It’s easy enough to add a server, but unless you know that there happens to an old entry (logging host 10.1.1.1) the new configuration doesn’t remove the old. So now you’re stuck writing rules to look for configuration statements of that particular format that shouldn’t be there. Certainly doable, but it adds a lot of extra complexity.

Another issue is the order of operations. A traditional example is the above access list. It’s typically a set of “permit” statements followed by an implicit (or explicit) “deny” statement. So it’s easy to either blank an access list that governs access to the switch and lock yourself out in the middle of the configuration, or apply an access list before it’s defined. Another common issue is re-addressing devices; you change the IP and subnet mask on one line, and the default gate way on another. But changing either may stop your ability to communicate until the other is applied. Once more, there are ways around it, but it still means a lot of extra complexity in planning and scripting.

You can’t just tell the switch what configuration you want it or its components have. You have to figure out what state it is currently in, and then do a lot of conditional logic to determine how to get it to the state you want it to be. There are of course additional projects to try to abstract some of that complexity, but on some level they just add yet another level of proprietary components and a black box. Some other vendors, and even some Cisco models, allow configuration sessions with roll-backs, confirms, and the ability to do more atomic applications, but that’s still short of ideal.

One attempt to fix this state of affairs is YANG and NETCONF, IETF standards for representing the state in XML or JSON and transferring the state via an RPC mechanism. This approach isn’t perfect either, and isn’t well supported by vendors. One issue is that the capabilities and peculiarities of each platform differ so much that it’s difficult to abstract away. At the very least, though, it allows for a proper desired-state configuration, which would be a fantastic step forward.

It’ll be very interesting to see whether vendors will start supporting the IETF standards or other APIs, but it’s hard for me to see that going forward we wouldn’t quickly start adding APIs for configuration instead of the old SSH and line configurations. It’s equally hard for me to see that we’ll quickly get away from this problem, considering that typical life cycle of networking gear is 10+ years in enterprise networks.

Posted on August 21, 2017August 21, 2017 by Toivo Voll

128 Technology and Secure Vector Routing

I ran across an interesting new company today, and decided to walk through some of the technology.

You can catch the video here.

The basic idea, as far as I can tell, is that you replace or augment your existing routers with the company’s x86-based boxes. You’re not replacing the underlying Internet, despite what some of the claims might lead you to think — instead they have a proprietary encapsulation/tunneling technology. It’s a lot like a dynamic multi-point VPN, where your traffic moves from one node in your network to another over encrypted tunnels, except here the system builds “tunnels” based on sessions and flows rather than network nodes. What makes the technology really interesting, though, is that it seeks to combine many functions that you get when you maintain a lot of state and know more about your traffic and flows.

In addition to encrypting traffic from point A to point B, it allows you to do traffic engineering / optimization in the vein of SD-WAN — the presentation doesn’t go into full detail, but it’s easy to think of ways that you could optimize for cost and bandwidth, and if application-aware, send VoIP and media streams over low-latency, expensive links and bulk traffic over higher-latency but cheaper links, for example; or shift traffic patterns, allow for overflow peaking to metered links and so forth.

Simply offering an easy-to-manage multipoint VPN — which is currently a major headache that takes a lot of engineer hours to implement — and SD-WAN — which saves money — is a winner, but they aim higher.

If the system knows flows and applications, it’s an easy jump to add security functions to it — firewalls, possibly even IPS/IDS/DLP. Perhaps traffic shaping and policing as well.

There’s a lot of telemetry and visibility that is possible from a modern system that has flow and application-level visibility at every hop. It’s not that current routers couldn’t do this, but they’re badly hamstrung by lagging legacy management schemes such as SNMP.

Configuration of traffic patterns, routing, IP addressing etc. can be done centrally, in the vein of overlays and SDN.

No need to reconfigure anything on the underlying network. The idea that you don’t want to have to ask carriers for anything is pervasive, and it’s attractive for a reason as anyone who’s ever dealt with carriers can attest.

An x86-hardware agnostic approach might allow for a nice range from affordable to high-performance hardware to support many low-cost branches.

High-touch services on the routers? If Cisco is putting container support in their LAN access switches and routers, this may be the way to go.

Where’s the catch? Well, a lot of these things aren’t exactly new ideas, and the difference between wanting to do something and being able to do so is fundamental. Making firewalls is hard. Coming up with a way to route and prioritize traffic is hard even before you add more complex decision criteria to it. Troubleshooting underlying transport issues and how they present through this vector-routed mesh might be a challenge. A particular detail I’m curious about is whether the scheme requires either a transport MTU of more than 1500 bytes, or if it limits the TCP/UDP payload. It says it’s inband signaling and doesn’t have the complexity of MPLS, but it’s still an encapsulation with effectively another set of headers, unless they have a surefire way to compress every packet enough. How is the reliability, and how does it deal with outages of underlying networks?

With the advent of SD-WAN, NSX, ACI, and the already boringly old MPLS infrastructure the engineering and conceptual framework for something like this might be there, though. It does seem to me that if they can deliver on their promises, this would be the perfect time to offer any distributed businesses a simple, single-vendor solution that replaces dozens of expensive, complex, difficult-to-manage products with one centrally managed, software-defined networking stack.

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Toivo Voll

Toivo's Blog

Occasionally I have thoughts I want to share with the world