Recent content on Hrafn Thorvaldsson
Everyone’s favorite company to dislike announced this week that their browser now has terms of use. Much has been said about this whole debacle, and by people much more knowledgeable than me on these matters. Here is a good thread over on Mastodon by cryptography and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis : Post by @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Clarification? Link to…
The first months of the new year has been such a busy time that it is only now that I’ve made time to sit down and go over the last year.
tl;dr: I’ve rewritten most of my adb related bash scripts and aliases that have accumulated over the years into a single tool that can be found here . Beginnings Link to heading Fifteen years ago I started work on creating my very first Android app. It was part of a university computer science course designed to guide us through the complete software development life cycle — design,…
Another year, another reflection. Theme Link to heading Ever since seeing CGP Grey’s video on yearly themes back in 2020 I’ve stuck to the practice, and it has worked pretty well as a mild forcing function. In 2022 it was ‘Health’ and this year’s it was ‘Growth & Learning’. Where possible I chose opportunities or activities that would allow for one or…
Link to full album Note: this post is a ’timetravel’ post, written in 2026 about something that happened in 2023, after a friend suggested to me that there weren’t enough hiking posts on the blog. I am writing it from notes in my journals and from memory.
Good tools are those that help users accomplish something while mostly staying out of their way. Browsers should be such tools, and there are many of them to choose from. Sadly however there are effectively only two browser engines available. Those would be the engines behind Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. Name me any fairly mainstream browser and there are overwhelming odds…
This post shows how to setup a fully functioning Android development environment (including Android Studio) on a Linux system by running a single command with the help of Ansible. Why? Link to heading Just before the holidays my desktop tower decided to crash and refused to boot back up again. Instead of trying to figure out what had gone wrong, or be annoyed that this had happened in the first…
Today marks five years since I started working at Íslandsbanki, and as of today, I have resigned my position with the company. Now five years is not a long time, yet much has happened since my first day at the office. I got hired into a newly formed team of experts, each with their own deep knowledge in respective niches, that was given the mandate to “shake things up” in the IT…
Lets imagine that one day we receive a layout design for a new screen from the designer, and that it looks something like this: Super easy, barely an inconvenience The design also comes with some minor instructions. The cyan rectangle never changes its size The cyan rectangle is always on the right side of the screen The green rectangle takes up the remaining horizontal space, filling the…
I was recently looking at the kotlin-results library which describes it self as a “multiplatform Result monad for modelling success or failure operations” . This library is great in combination with Kotlin Flow’s (or RxJava), and I would highly recommend checking it out. At some point though I ended up on the author’s personal webpage and specifically noticed their projects…
I am going on a sabbatical. The last two years have been tougher than usual for most people, and for many the situation has not gotten any better in the last two months. In the course of those two years my partner has had to endure two distinct cancer diagnosis along with subsequent chemo & radiation treatments. While the whole ordeal has taken its toll mentally and physically, it has also…
Markaðskönnun Link to heading Takk fyrir að vilja taka þátt í þessari markaðskönnun! Spurningarnar snúa að húsfélögum í fjölbýli og hverskonar vandamálum þau finna fyrir í daglegum rekstri. Einnig er spurt um hverskonar þjónustu þau nýta sér. Öll innsend svör eru nafnlaus. Könnunin er viljandi stutt og ætti ekki að taka meira en 5 mínútur að svara henni. Könnunina á íslensku má finna hér . Með…
Marketing survey Link to heading Thank you for wanting to take part in this marketing survey! The questions revolve around the kinds of day to day problems housing unions in Iceland may have, and what kinds of services they use. All submissions are anonymous. The survey is short and shouldn’t take much more than 5 minutes to answer. The survey in English may be found here
Growing up in Iceland in the nineties, it was impossible not to hear about Eve Online, the game that was going to do what at the time sounded impossible. A massively multiplayer online role playing game set in a persistent world where enterprising captains would roam space in their giant spaceships, striking out in any which way they wanted. Truly the vision that had been behind the classic game…
I’ve officially released the first version of a library I have been working on for a while now, that carries the very unimaginative title ‘WakatimeClient’. For the technical details you can take a look at the library page or go straight to github . Backstory Link to heading Wakatime is a fantastic coding activity tracker that not only has a fantastic range of plugins for (it…
Last year I had a lot of free time to try out some of the things that had been lingering on my ever growing to-do list over the years and top among them was Huginn which describes it self as: “Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn’s Agents create and consume…
The problem Link to heading While going through my backlog of various bookmarks, I came upon one CCC presentation titled ‘How Facebook tracks you on Android’ that sees researchers from the organization ‘Privacy International’ go through their findings on the ways Facebook tracks users on Android, outside of any use of their own applications and without any permissions from…
Today was a big day for the mobile team at Íslandsbanki as we launched our new Android banking application after 10 months of continous work, combining functionality from two of the banks previously developed mobile applications, a personal finance management application (ÍSB) and a premium card management application (Kort). In due time these two will be sunset. By having used the fantastic tool…
You may or may not know, but there exists a small island nation near the rim of the arctic circle bearing the name Iceland. The island was settled by Scandinavian vikings in the 9th century CE (though there may have been Irish monks there before) and throughout the centuries the nation was pretty much isolated from the rest of the world while being subjugated by Norway and Denmark at different…
I am qutting Facebook Inc as of today. Normally I wouldn’t think that changes in my personal software usage should warrant any explanation, however in this case I feel it may be worth explaining. Faux Friendships Link to heading It is my feeling that the platform caters to, and frankly encourages, what I would call ‘passive friendships’. By only scanning the feed for a few…
Work in progress
During our later stay in Bilbao, at the tail end of our roadtrip around Spain, we stayed at Victor’s , a really nice local from Bilbao. He was happy to give us guidance around the city and was quick to say that there are only two things you do in Bilbao; enjoy art and food. These are some of the places he recommended and why: Txukrut : A vegan pintxos place
Link to album Last august, my girlfriend and I, along with friends, went on a trip to a place far north in Iceland that relatively few Icelanders have seen, Hornstrandir . The reason for why so few have gone there (relative to the rest of the island) is in probably part due to the location. As Iceland’s northern most peninsula, Hornstrandir is not easy to get to. First you have to get your…
Link to album This month I jumped on a plane to one of these places that I had expected not to see anytime soon, that always seems so exotic when you see and read about it. I was joining the 30th birthday party of a friend of my girlfriend’s which took place in Venice. As an added bonus the Biennale (Feneyjartvíeyringurinn) was happening this year, so we got to experience one of the more…
Link to album So over the last weekend I, my two cousins and their girlfriends went on a hike in the Icelandic country side. The first weekend in August is usually reserved for festivals held around the island and involve a fair bit of alcohol. This year we decided to go on a two day hike and experience nature. The hike was somewhere around 40-45km all in all. We decided to go first to Hólaskjól,…
Link to album It had been a bucketlist item for some time to hike a well known route here in Iceland called Laugavegur. And so soon after coming back home from Canada, a friend offered up the possibility for finally checking it off the list. Its a easy walk, usually done in 2-3 days (a ultra marathon is held every year where the record is just over 4 hours!), and takes you through some fairly…
In the short story ‘Poseidon’, by Franz Kafka, the great god of the sea is said to be unhappy with his role of administrating all of Earths bodies of water. The punchline is that due to his dismissal of his assistants as unskilled for the tasks he deems so important, he is him self a prisoner of his own ego. Drowning in paperwork, he is never to be able to make time to experience the…
A couple of days ago I read an interesting article by Pierre-Yves Ricau, an Android Software Engineer for Square, where he listed reasons for why Square has moved away from using Fragments in their Android products. In it he mentioned the ridiculous life cycle of Fragments, how it makes them at times hard to handle and even harder to test against. And I agree with him. Fragments are easy to use in…
What follows is a fan fiction written by me in 2010 and takes place in the fictional universe of Eve Online “Damn it!”. This is turning out to be a really bad week, Raiukat thought as he walked to the nearest medical station. The cut wasn’t as bad as it had first seemed. Not that it mattered. If they couldn’t get the engines back online soon a small cut was the least of his…
wakatime-client Link to heading Source code A native Android library facilitating authentication and interaction with the restful API supplied by the code activity tracker Wakatime . Dependency setup Link to heading The first step is to include WakatimeClient into your project, for example, as a Gradle compile dependency: implementation( 'is.hth:wakatimeclient:X.Y.Z' ) Replace X.Y.Z with the…