Welcome to my humble homepage...

Hi! You've wound up on the homepage of Sampo Niskanen. Here you can read a bit about me, my intrests and find some software that I've released.

Dancing is a dear hobby to me. I have danced historical dances since 2004 in the dance groups Linnea and La Fiamma di Danza. I am the admin of the Finnish historical dance wiki. Recently I've also started folk dances in the dance group Petkele.

I am also enthusiastic of model and amateur rocketry. I have been in the team building and launching the first hybrid rocket in Finland, Haisunäätä. Later developments have included an active roll control system and real-time telemetry streaming to the Internet. I am the current chairman of the Finnish Astronautical Society, and am also the main developer of the model rocket simulator OpenRocket.

Another hobby is live-action roleplaying or LARPing, though lately I haven't been as active as earlier on. It's a wonderful way of experiencing things impossible in the real world in a safe but exciting way. In Finland LARPing is, as I have understood it, quite different than that in the U.S. Here much more effort is put into emotion and the overall mood of the game, while typically minimizing the amount of rules. The pages concerning LARPs are in Finnish, but you can have a glimpse of my characters on my LARP page.