@RobinLauren on Twitter

me on Facebook

My photos on Flickr

My LinkedIN page

Navelfluff, my blog

Robin's core dump, my other blog

Hello!

I'm Robin Laurén and this is my start page on the Web. I'm a computer geek, interested in embedded computers, working on Windows and doing the rest on Linux. When i'm not geeking, i'm with my family, preferrably at the countryside, or doing some fun stuff for the radio. I enjoy interesting music, taking photographs and the occasional dark beer/rum/whisky. More on the about page.

Also...

Bloggen som saknar namn | Lokala.org | Last.FM | KIVA.org | identi.ca | Jaiku | IRC (and a whole slew of other places, which are left as an excercise to find for the reader :)

Email

You can email any adult member of the Laurén family using the address Firstname@Lauren.fi (the kids will get their addresses in due time). If you need my home address, phone number or handle on the various social networks out there, just send me a mail and introduce yourself!

Interop

My Identi.ca messages are posted to Twitter. My Twitter messages get fed to Facebook as status updates. Pictures i publish on Flickr are announced on Twitter. Articles i share on Google Reader are also announced on Twitter.

Hello!

In the Days of old, everybody just "had" to have a home page. With the advent of blogs, social networks and whatnot, this tradition more or less died away and these days you'll generally only find home pages for academics and vanity pages for celebrities. Anyways, i thought i would put together something of a starting point for anyone wanting to surf out my life and interests. Hello employees! Hello stalkers! Hello old friends and colleagues!

Quickies

I'm a bit of an idealist. I support green values, but in a way that does not have a significantly negative impact on my lazy and comfortable way of living. Thus, i will still be taking the car to drop off the kids to school and when going to work, but i will happily switch to using the bus when (if) the bus will stop more often at the bus stop near our house and take me where i want without too many detours (and the "sight seeing round"). I'd rather work for a company which supports sustainability, both of the social, economical and green kinds. Anyway, these often go hand in hand. I lend money through Kiva rather than (just) give money away. I donate a few spare cpu cycles to the World Community Grid, but not so many that it will have a big impact on energy use. I worked for the United Nations' Development Programme (UNDP) as a UN Volunteer (UNV) both because it was fun and because i could put my know-how into real change and not only profit.

Stuff like that.

I am what some would call a geek. I have a small network of computers at home and would like to have the spare time to make it work better. But then again, i have a family that really doesn't care too much about that kind of stuff. And a house which requires some maintenance too.

I am very excited about what we can do with computers, or what computers can do for us, once properly trained. Especially, i like small computers which are low on energy use and can do a small bunch of things well. Frank Stajano speaks about Peanut devices, Don Norman about Information appliances and others about The Internet of Things. Smart homes. Smart appliances. Smart stuff.

I am interested in usability of the User centered design favour, in securiy, and especially in the yet rather new field combining usability and security into what's been coined as HCIsec. I'm sure a more marketable term (like "usable security" or "secure usability") will bubble up once this thing becomes more mainstream.

I'm a big friend of "handmade" music. My tastes range from progressive rock to ska/punk to african folk/pop music. The box at the top right of this page show what i've been playing lately. It auto-updates :)

Here is my MSc thesis "User centered access control for home networks" for downloading:

Web presence

I am, like many on the web, mostly elsewhere. Up there on the right of this page, there's a dropdown menu to take you to other places i am, at least from a web perspective.

• My blog, with random and incoherententries in both swedish, finnish and english
• My pictures which i keep on Flickr.
• My professional life is rounded up at LinkedIn.

Projects

• My thesis which, frankly, is more a survey of the state of the art of the topic than a presentation of any revolutionary innovations (basically RBAC is good and trust your friends and family).
• Eventually i'll get the Freakopedia running.