This post mainly relates to a UK citizen marrying a Swedish citizen, though could be useful to people from other EU countries…

Sofia and I are getting married in just under two months. The wedding will be in Småland, Sweden and we’re really excited about our friends and family who are coming! As we’ve been preparing I’ve been able to learn a bit more about the legal side of marriage over here. I’m a UK citizen (and resident) and Sofia is a Swedish citizen (and resident). Here’s the process we have gone through so far…

1. Certificate of No Impediment: I visited a registry office in the UK and notified them of my intention to marry Sofia.  I had to show them various forms of identification and provide them with her details, as well as the details of where we will be getting married.  These are placed on a notice board for 6 weeks to give members of the general public an opportunity to notify them if I have been married before.  Once the 6 weeks are up, the Certificate of No Impediment is issued.  According to Swedish law, the certificate is valid for 3 months from the date of issue.
2. Marriage Licence: Next we visited Skatteverket (the Swedish Tax Office), filled in forms and provided them with our IDs (Passport for me, ID card for Sofia) and the Certificate of No Impediment.  They took photocopies of our IDs and the Certificate and will mail us the Licence within 2 weeks. This license will be valid for 4 months, so it was important that we visited Skatteverket at the right time: too early and we would have a license that expired before our wedding, too late and our Certificate of No Impediment would expire.
3. The Wedding: This can be officiated either by a state official (at a District Court, or City Hall), or a Vicar (in this case it’s the person, not the venue, that counts).

Here are a few resources you might find useful if you’re going through this process:

• Embassy of Sweden, London: Getting Married in Sweden
• About.com: Swedish Marriage License Information

(photo: Sharaff)

Apparently Tom Tykwer, who directed Run Lola Run, is working on a screen adaptation of Dave Eggers’ novel “What Is The What.” He told a recent interviewer:

There’s another project that I’m actually quite deeply involved in, which is based on a book called “What is the What” by Dave Eggers, who you know probably from his first novel, which was called “A Heartbreaking World of Staggering Genius”, that was his first book. He’s a great writer and he did a book called “What is the What” that is based on the story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I’m developing that too right now.

(via kottke)

Is your lack of fancy camera equipment — you know, the $3000 21-megapixel DSLR with HD video and f/1.4 lens — holding you back from making good photographs? Maybe the problem is with your thinking.

(via kottke)

A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons was released on the 12th February. It shows that many countries are in denial about the issue, and that without better information sharing there will be little success in fighting it.

Worldwide, almost 20% of all trafficking victims are children. However, in some parts of Africa and the Mekong region, children are the majority (up to 100% in parts of West Africa).

(photo © Mitchell Kanashkevich)

While it certainly makes web pages seem more alluring (in that “I wish I could tell what’s written here, it must be terribly interesting” kind of way), the way that the text of some web pages are scrambled (see above) when accessing websites on a Mac has always frustrated me.

Today I stumbled upon a solution: erase the phonetic version of the Times font. Click here or here for more details.