Apple - Support - Discussions - Screen auto-dimming when I hit delete ….

LOL, this had me puzzled for a bit. While playing with my mac, I noticed the screen dimmed everytime I hit the delete key.

What happened:

• the mac book pro adjust screen brightness to the ambient light
• it has two light sensors in the stereo speakers
• when pressing the delete, your hand covers one of them
• normally this is not a problem
• … unless you are in a dark room with a desk light to the right of the mac

Hehe.

Otherwise things are fine with my new Mac. Annoying things include having to learn new keybindings and our annoying windows based intranet stuff.

But consider me switched.

I stumbled upon somebody writing about Nokia’s 2007 Way We Live Next event in Oulu. This event was intended to give the outside world a view on what is going on in Nokia Research Center.

Nice quote

Lots of interesting stuff was shown off during the course of the two days and the most interesting I came across was the indoor positioning concept. Using WiFi and specially created maps, the devices we were issued with were running the software which enabled you to move through the NRC building and pinpoint exactly where you were. So, if the next presentation was in room 101, the device would simply, and quickly show you the way. It instantly made me think of the frustration of trying to get where I want in huge shopping centres - and I figured this had to be the perfect solution.

Next week, the 2008 edition of the WWLN is going to be in Espoo and I will be giving a demo there of our indoor location based service platform, customized for a real shopping mall. We’ve demoed last years version of our software platform at the Internet of Things Conference last April. At the time our new platform was already under development for a several months and we are getting ready to start trialing it now. The WWLN event next week will be when we first show this in public and hopefully we’ll get some nice attention from the press on this.

PS. I like (good) beer …

If you’ve read my past reviews of X-plane, you’ll know that I’m somewhat of a fan of that product. It’s an ultra realistic flight simulator. If you’ll read the product page you will see that it boasts a long list of features. I can assure you, they’re being modest. I don’t pay for software very often but I’ve bought v8 and recently v9 of this one.

Anyway, I just had a little WTF moment reading this little blog post from Benjamin Supnik, one of the lead developers of X-plane who works on the scenery engine. They’ve actually ported X-plane to the iPhone! If so far, you didn’t think much of the iPhone as a development platform, look again. This is really impressive.

I just looked up the product page in iTunes and it has some nice screen shots. Of course they don’t ship the full UI or scenery. All you get is an area around Inssbruck (default area in the demo version of the normal version). Probably it is heavily tuned to work nicely on an iphone. However, the mere fact that they have it running at all is very impressive. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to link to product pages in iTunes, so you’ll just have to look it up yourself, producer is Laminar or you can go to Games->Simulation in the iphone section.

Also hilareous is Austin Meyer (founder and owner of Laminar that builds X-Plane) denying there was an iphone version of x-plane, just before he launched it on September 11th. A bit of a symbolic date for launching a flight simulator, don’t you think?

Sadly, I have no iPhone or ipod touch to play with. Working for Nokia and all that.

In April 2007, I replaced a broken power supply in my PC with a Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supply. Check my review here. A few days ago, my pc has started producing a high pitched noise. Really annoying. So, I Google a little and what do I find: Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supplies apparently have 21% failure rate. Tell tale signs include the damn thing making high pitched noise.

I have to investigate a little further but probably this means the power supply is failing after less than one and a half year. Out of warranty of course. Damn it, really annoying to have to open that case again to replace the same part. Basically, the PC is now nearly three years old and maybe I should just replace it altogether. Something quiet, fast and reliable would be nice.

In a few weeks my new Macbook Pro should arrive at work (ordered yesterday). I was planning to wait and see if I like that and if so, just upgrade to a nice Mac at home as well. Not fully convinced yet.

Feel free to recommend a decent PSU. Has to power a Nvidia 7800, 2 drives, lots of USB hardware and a amd 4400+ dualcore CPU.

Update. I ended up installing a ZALMAN ZM600-HP. Seems to have a few good reviews http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/zm600hp/. It’s expensive, over qualified for the job and supposedly really good and quiet. Sadly the rest of my machine is still rather noisy.

Screenshots And Video Of The New Joost

Joost has announced that they are changing the way their service works. Having used it quite a bit, I think this is probably the best thing for them since it was based on a misguided channel/TV metaphore. However, I wonder (along with Techcrunch) what their added value really is. It used to be that p2p seemed like it was the only way to escape from blocky, tiny videos with low frames per second and audio/video sync problems (aka Real Video, what happened to those guys anyway?).

Just last week I was looking at some videos on Vimeo and noticed that they have streaming HD now. Like Youtube, it starts streaming right away. Unlike Youtube, the video is sharp, full screen, high resolution, and mostly free from severe compression artifacts. In other words, they seem to have figured out a way to push large amounts of data to me cost effectively. I didn’t measure it but I estimate I was getting around 1mbps data from them at least.

Doing this on a large scale used to be really expensive. However, in recent years, content delivery networks (CDNs) have emerged that can cost effectively deliver large downloads to massive amounts of users. A CDN is actually similar to p2p. Essentially it involves ensuring you have a servers+bandwidth in every major provider network and keeping these servers in sync. Bandwidth inside a provider network is a lot easier to get. For providers the benefit is that they don’t need to use expensives bit pipes from other providers to get the content to you. So as long as they don’t run out of local bandwidth (of which they have plenty), they will prefer this. Also with less hops to the user, it is a lot easier to ensure there is actually enough bandwidth to the user. Essentially, this brings the best features of p2p to web streaming and makes Joost more or less redundant. Although arguably, they still have a slight cost advantage here due to their reliance on a CDN (this type of service of course costs money).

There are now several flash based streaming sites that use a CDN. What these services have in common is crappy content. There’s only so much amateur, 3 minute video fragments I can take. Also, 3 minute “commercial” fragments of full content normally broadcasted on really obscure tv channels in the middle of the night is hardly compelling. The reason for this is copyright legislation and a systematic ignoring of users outside the USA by media corporations.

Joost, flawed as it was, actually has some okish content hidden inside it. I quite enjoyed watching episodes of Lexx (an obscure but fun Canadian SF series from the nineties) and also a few full feature kung fu movies from the seventies as well as a few documentaries. I wouldn’t pay for any of that but if you are bored, it’s at least a way to pass some time. But Joost never managed to convince media corporations to provide premium content. They still haven’t solved that problem.

If you live inside the US, life is good, apparently. There’s Apple TV, Amazon, Hulu, and a few others like netflix offering massive amounts of good quality pay per view type HD content for download, and in some cases even streaming. Some of these services are ad supported, some of them are subscription based. Joost won’t stand a chance in that market.

However, for about 5.8 billion people outside the US, life is not so good. Here in Finland there are only a handful of video on demand companies whose offerings suck big time comparatively. Additionally, their UI is in Finnish which makes it extremely hard for me to use them or even to figure out what they are trying to offer me. The US based ones won’t deliver content outside the US because that requires separate deals with media companies for each country. In the US, one deal helps you reach a population of around 250 million users. In europe, countries are a lot smaller. My understanding is that to some extent this type of services is now also available in the UK and Germany, which are relatively large countries.

Finland has only 5 million inhabitants.In other words, no content for me. So, if I want to see a movie, I can hope one of the pay per view TV channels broadcasts it (I don’t have a subscription though); buy the DVD; go to the cinema; or hope one of the handful of local TV stations broadcasts something worth watching.

First impression: Google delivered, I’ve never used a browser this fast. It’s great.

Yesterday, a cartoon was prematurely leaked detailing Google’s vision for what a browser could look like. Now, 24 hours later I’m reviewing what until yesterday was a well kept secret.

So here’s my first impressions.

• Fast and responsive. What can I say? Firefox 3 was an improvement over Firefox 2 but this is in a different league. There’s still lots of issues with having many tabs open in Firefox. I’ve noticed it doesn’t like handling bitmaps and switching tabs gets unusable with a few dozen tabs open. Chrome does not have this issue at all. It’s faster than anything I’ve browsed with so far (pretty much any browser you can think of probably).
• Memory usage. Chrome starts new processes for each domain and not per tab. I opened a lot of tabs in the same domain and the number of processes did not go up. Go to a different domain and you get another chrome process. However, it does seem to use substantial amount of memory in total. Firefox 3 is definitely better. Not an issue with 2 GB like I have and the good news is that you get memory back when you close tabs. But still, 40-60MB per domain is quite a lot.
• Javascript performance. Seems fantastic. Gmail and Google Reader load in no time at all. Easily faster than Firefox 3.
• UI. A bit spartan if you are used to Firefox with custom bells & wistles (I have about a dozen extensions). But it works and is responsive. I like it. Some random impressions here: 
  • no status bar (good)
  • very few buttons (good)
  • no separate search field (could be confusing for users)
  • tabs on top, looks good, unlike IE7.
  • mouse & keyboard. Mostly like in Firefox. Happy to see middle click works. However, / does not work and you need to type ctrl+f to get in page search
• URL bar. So far so good, seems to copy most of the relevant features from Firefox 3. I like Firefox 3’s behaviour better though.
• RSS feeds. There does not seem to be any support for subscribing to, or reading feeds. Strange. If I somehow missed it, there’s a huge usability issue here. If not, I assume it will be added.
• Bookmarks. An important feature for any browser. Google has partially duplicated Firefox 3’s behaviour with a little star icon but no tagging.
• Extensions. none whatsoever :-(. If I end up not switching, this will be the reason. I need my extensions.
• Import Firefox Profile. Seems pretty good, passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, etc. were all imported. Except for my cookies.
• Home screen. Seems nicer than a blank page but nothing I’d miss. Looks a bit empty on my 1600×1200 screen.
• Missing in action. No spelling control, no search plugins (at least no obvious way for me to use them even though all my firefox search plugins are listed in the options screen), no print preview, no bookmarks management, no menu bar (good, don’t miss it)

So, I’m genuinely impressed here. Google is really delivering something exceptionally solid here. Download it and see for yourself.

Posting this from Chrome of course.

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t.

Business week has an interesting article on the economics of platforms. Interesting, but flawed. They compare two platforms (Facebook, and Apple’s mobile platform). The argument goes roughly as follows: Apple is using it’s platform to create a new market by being open and Facebook is using traditional methods of using the market as a control point. Apple is creating an open market and Facebook is making an open market more closed. The author even goes as far as to associate the keywords good and evil here.

The article is flawed because in fact Apple is not creating an open market. They have been removing applications that don’t fit their business model (e.g. anything VOIP related) and are still keeping people from writing about the APIs because NDA has not been lifted yet. Apple is acting as a dictator here. That it is a mostly benevolent one doesn’t matter. It doesn’t sound very open to me in any case. Or very new.

Sure, their platform is pretty nice and their online shop pretty usable. That’s definitely disruptive to the mobile industry, which is not used to good quality platforms and well designed use-cases such as online shops for applications. However, there’s a pretty big market for mobile applications and most people writing for the iphone don’t do so exclusively and instead target multiple mobile platforms. You can download several VOIP applications for S60 or mobile windows and other platforms, as well as numerous games, productivity apps, etc. Then there is J2ME of course with a few billion phones in the market right now. You might say it is crappy but it has a huge reach. Incidentally, Apple also blocks components from their shop that would enable people to run J2ME applications since an open source Java platform has in fact been ported long before Apple even ‘opened’ up their platform. That’s right, a good old case of reverse engineering. Apple’s platform is quite unique in the sense that people were developing for it long before Apple decided to hand out developer kits.

Facebook indeed is also not very open but they were first to a market that they created, which is pretty big by now. As a viral way of spreading new services to users it is pretty much unrivaled so far. It is Google that has created a competition for more openness with their Open Social platform, which is in many ways similar but has open specifications and may be implemented freely by other social networks. Both Google and Facebook have a very similar centralized identity model that is designed to lock users into their mutual platforms (Google Friends Connect & Facebook Connect). Google is maybe being somewhat more smart about it but they are after the same things here: making sure trafic flows through their services so that they can sell ads.

So, Facebook’s model is advertisement driven and Apple’s business is operator driven. Apple makes most of their money from deals with operators who subsidize iphones and give Apple a share of the subscription revenue. That’s brilliant business and Apple protects it by removing any application from their shop that has conflicting interests with this revenue stream.

However, the key point of the article that the platform serves as a market creation tool is interesting. Apple managed to create an impressive amount of revenue (relative to their tiny market share of the overall mobile market) and Facebook has managed to create a huge market for Facebook applications. Both are being challenged by competitors who have no choice to be more open.

Interestingly, Google is competing on both fronts and can be seen as the primary threat to both Apple and Facebook’s platforms. Google could end up opening up the mobile market for real because it is not protecting any financial interests there but instead are trying to spawn a mobile internet market. Android is designed from the ground up to do just that. It needs to be good enough for developers, users and operators and Google has worked hard to balance interests enough so as to not alienate any of these.

All three are fighting for the favours of developers. Developers, developers, developers! (throws chair across the room & jumps like a monkey). That too is not new although Microsoft seems to have forgotten about them lately.

Intriguing phrase (about Alexandria’s lighthous) from an article (page 31) by Neal Stephenson from 1996:

The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely - you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

Songbird Blog » Songbird Beta is Released!.

Having played with several milestone builds of songbird, I was keen to try this one. This is a big milestone for this music player & browser hybrid. Since I’ve blogged on this before, I will keep it short.

The good:

• New feathers (songbird lingo for UI theme) looks great. Only criticism is that it seems to be a bit of an iTunes rip off.
• Album art has landed
• Stability and memory usage is now acceptable for actually using the application
• Unlike iTunes, it actually supports the media buttons on my logitech keyboard.

The bad (or not so good since I have no big gripes):

• Still no support for the iTunes invented but highly useful compilation flag (bug 9090). This means that my well organized library is now filled with all sorts of obscure artists that I barely know but apparently have one or two songs from. iTunes sorts these into compilation corner and I use this feature to keep a nice overview of artists and complete albums.
• Despite being a media player with extension support, there appears to be no features related to sound quality. Not even an equalizer. Not even as an extension. This is a bit puzzling because this used to be a key strength of winamp, the AOL product that the songbird founders used to be involved with.
• Despite being a browser, common browser features are missing. So no bookmarks, no apparent RSS feed, no Google preconfigured in the search bar, etc. Some of these things are easily fixed with extensions.

Verdict: much closer than previous builds but still no cigar. Key issue for me is compilation flag support. Also I’d really like to see some options for affecting audio playback quality. I can see how having a browser in my media player could be useful but this is not a good browser nor a good media player yet.

I’ve uploaded the photos from my recent vacation in Spain. Earlier, I posted an overview of the places I’ve visited so I won’t repeat that here. I took quite a bit of photos and filled both 1GB SD cards I have.

Of course, I took lots of nice panorama photos as well. The latter have also been added to my special stitched photo album where you can admire them in slightly higher resolution. Too bad I don’t have the bandwidth + space to put them up in full resolution. For example the one below is originally 18319×2191 pixels wide and composed of no less than 11 8 megapixel photos and the jpeg is 40 MB. The level of detail is amazing. Wordpress is sadly messing up the aspect ratio but if you click on it you should see it properly.

I have this page elsewhere on this site where I try to keep track of various accounts I have with social networks and other sites.  I updated it earlier today with some interesting additions.

It seems finally decentralized social networking is starting to happen. It’s all very low profile now but promising. It all started somewhere last week when I noticed that one of my colleagues, John Kemp was now micro blogging via something called identi.ca. I noticed this because his status in skype was telling me. Since we share similar interests in things like OpenID and a few other things, I decided to check it out. I never really bought into this twitter stuff and gave up on updating my Facebook status regularly long time ago. But this identi.ca looks rather cool, so I signed up.

It’s basically twitter minus some features (not yet implemented) with a few interesting twists:

• You can sign in using OpenID
• It’s open source. The software identi.ca is based on is called laconi.ca.
• It’s completely open. It has all the hooks and obvious protocols implemented. For example, I microblog using a identi.ca contact in my jabber client (pidgin) over XMPP. There’s RSS and probably some more stuff.
• Your friends info is available as FOAF, thus enabling Google’s Social Graph search to work with the data there and in other places (like e.g. your wordpress linkdump).
• It’s decentralized, you can have laconi.ca friends on different servers. Like email, there is no need for everybody to be on the same server.
• It’s written in PHP -> you can probably install it on any decent hosting provider you can now run your own microblog just like you can run your own blog.

Of course being low profile, there’s only the usual suspects active: i.e. people like me.

A second interesting site I bumped into is whoisi.com. It’s basically friendfeed or similar sites with a few interesting twists:

• You don’t have to sign in or register. You just start using it.
• In fact you can’t sign in and there’s little need because whoisi creates a nice account for you on the fly that you can access using the cookie it sets automatically or a url you can bookmark.
• You can follow any person on the web and associate feeds with that person.
• There’s no concept of your profile on whoisi. It’s simply a tool for following people, anonymously. They don’t even have to use whoisi in order for you to follow them.

It’s run by Christopher Blizzard who works at Mozilla. I’m not sure if he is doing this in his spare time or if this has a bigger Mozilla labs plan behind it. Either way, he’s a cool guy with good ideas obviously. Since whoisi didn’t know about me yet, I ended up following myself, which feels slightly hedonistic, and added most of the interesting feeds. Including of course my identi.ca feed.

It occurs to me that using identi.ca’s FOAF and Google’s Social Graph search, whoisi should be able to automatically find websites related to a person from a single url by just following the rel=me links that Google can produce and then any friends from the rel=friend links. Check out what Google finds out about me from providing www.jillesvangurp.com here.

This hooking up of simple building blocks is exactly the point of the decentralized social network. It’s nice to see some useful building blocks emerge that work towards making this happen. Basically, all the necessary building blocks are there already. From a single link it is possible to construct a very detailed view of what your friends are doing all over the web fully automatically. True all this is still a bit too difficult for the average user right now but I imagine that a bit of search and discovery magic would go a long way to making this just work on a lot of sites.

GeenStijl : ANP doet Google Earth na.

Ten years ago, I was a computer science student in Utrecht who was about to leave the Netherlands to live in Sweden. At the time, I had been living for about a year in a very spacious (50m2) attic room on a top location: Domplein, complete with nice view over the square.

A Dutch reporter took some photos from a balloon which gives a nice perspective on how nice this room was. I’ve highlighted which building was I lived in. The house, a four story monumental building was owned by a lawyer. The bottom floor was an apartment he rented out and he had converted the attic into two student apartments. The front apartment, which was the largest, was mine. The front two windows were both mine, as well as the little window on the side. Total rent was 675 guilders per month. Try find an apartment with that price in euros these days (at the moment of introduction, 1 euro was slightly overvalued at 2.2 Guilders). Anyway, at the time it seemed like a lot of money.

As you can see right next to my left there is a pretty big tower and half a cathedral. In fact this is the largest church tower in the Netherlands and you can read all about the missing half of the cathedral on wikipedia. It was noisy too, especially at night. But you stop noticing after some time.

One of our interns, Filip Suba, presented a paper earlier this week in Turku at the Symposium on Applications & the Internet. He’s one of my former (since today) master thesis students that has been working in our team at NRC for the past few months. The paper he presented is actually based on his work a few months before that when he was working for us as a summer trainee (previous summer that is). His master thesis work (on a nice new security protocol) is likely to result in another paper, when we find the time to write it.

Anyway, we hired him last year to learn a bit more about the state of the art in Sensor Actuator development kit with a particular focus on building applications and services that are kit independent and exposing their internals via a web API. This proved quite hard and we wrote a nice paper on our experiences.

In short, wireless sensor actuator kits are a mess. Above the radio level very little is standardized and the little there is is rarely interoperable. Innovation here is very rapid though. The future looks bright though. I watched this nice video about Sun Spot earlier this week for example:

The notion of making writing on Sensor node software as simple as creating a J2ME Midlet is in my view quite an improvement over hacking C using some buggy toolkit, cross compiling to obscure hardware and hoping it works.

I more or less executed the plan listed in my previous post to the letter. I flew to Spain, spent a few days at Christian del Rosso’s place in Madrid and took the opportunity to benefit from the relatively mild weather (32 degrees or so) to see most of Madrid’s major touristic attractions.

After that, I went back to the airport to pick up the car from the rental agency and then drove around 3500 km in the next few weeks. Main goal of this post is to document the places I visited since I am otherwise likely to forget where I’ve been in a matter of weeks. Been there before. Secondary goal is to serve as a nice itinerary for west side of Spain if anyone plans to go there.  Which is of course highly recommended if you can handle the lack of beaches and the associated mob of beach tourism and associated bad food, service, and prices.

So, I first drove to Zamora. Zamora is a little town in Castilla y Leon and I stayed here two nights. A bit disappointing after the good things I read about it. Worth a visit but not worth staying there, which I did. Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself there. I did a day trip to Valladolid. On the way there, I stopped for a drink in Tordessilas. A small unremarkable place with a nice Plaza Mayor on which a wacky event was going on involving a lot of Seat 600’s (the Spanish version of the Fiat 500). The whole square was full of them.

From Zamora, I drove to Plascencia in the Extremadura. I deliberately skipped Salamanca to save it for later and decided not to go up North to Leon, mainly due to the weather. Plascencia is nice but my usual strategy of walk into a hotel and get a room broke down, hopelessly. For some reason all of the good places were fully booked. This is the first time this has happened to me in Spain. After five hotels I gave up and drove a few more kilometers to Caceres. Here I got lucky on the second attempt. I stayed here for three nights. I did some daytrips to Badajoz (nice drive over an empty stretch of road through very beautiful and very empty Extramadura landscape). On the second day I drove around Caceres a bit and visited the Wolf Vostell museum in Malpartida de Caceres. Considering I was the only visitor, the museum was a bit overstaffed with at least five people monitoring my every move around the place. Entrance was free and the museum mildly interesting and absurdistic.

Next stop: Trujillo. I walked onto the plaza mayor, spotted the hotel that the Lonely Planet recommends on that square whilst sipping a coke and booked for three nights. The hotel was excellent and so was Trujillo. From here I visited nearby Guadelupe and Merida.

From there I drove on to Zafra, booked a room in a hotel for two days and then sat down to have lunch on the inevitable Plaza Mayor. As I was eating it occurred to me that the place looked familiar. Then it occured to me that I had been here in 2003 and after that remembered that I actually stayed in the same hotel as well and quite possibly even the same room. Talk about deja vu. Must have been the heat, normally I’m not that slow. From Zafra I went to do some sight seeing in some small villages around it: Jerez de los Caballeros which has a nice Moorish castle and Frenegal de la Sierra which has a nice bullring/church/castle combined into one multi functional building.

From Zafra I drove to next place of interest which is Cordoba, almost 180 kilometer down the road. This is a very empty country. Cordoba was nice and I booked myself a room in Hotel Boston for two days on the Plaza de las Tendillas. From Cordoba I visited a nice castle in Almodovar del Rio and the extensive ruins of some Moorish attempt to create a new city next to Cordoba.

By now it was getting time to move in the direction of Madrid to pick up Christian. So I drove back the way I came and followed the road to Badajoz where I ended up staying three nights, despit the heat (35-40 degrees). Main feature in Badajoz besides hotels with air conditioning is that it is nearby Elvas across the border in Portugal, which is quite nice. I ended up making two trips there to visit no less than three museums. Combined with the modern art museum in Badajoz, that made four museums in two days. I was the only visitor in each. But they had air conditioning. Badajoz itself is a pretty large but isolated community but worth a visit nevertheless.

From Badajoz I drove north to Avila. On the way I was tempted by the Sierra de Gredos but decided that it was a bit too much off the beaten track for me. Only small villages to stay in and not much to do at night. I did have a nice lunch in some restaurant. Avila is touristic since it is close to Madrid. The hotel had a room but only for one night. Since I was planning to visit Segovia on the second day anyway I stayed there for the night as well. Again a nice town to see. The nice thing about both places was that there is plenty of wind which makes being outside tolerable even during the hottest moments of the day.

Then I drove to Madrid to pick up Christian. We spend a night bar hopping in Salamanca. Had lunch in Avila on the way back and the endured 37 degrees of heat in Madrid by going to the pool and then having some tapas in the La Latinas neighborhood. A NSN colleague joined to show us the good places.

Then back home :-(.

I’ve pretty much seen most cities of interest in Spain now except for Valencia, Bilbao and places in the north west coastal area. The latter three due to the weather which is usually not so good there and Valencia is in the middle of nowhere with nothing of interest worth mentioning in the Lonely planet for hundreds of kilometers around it. Unless you love beach tourism (hint, I don’t). Some day probably.

I also have about 600 photos that need to be sorted through, edited and in some cases stitched together with Hugin. So that is going to take some time but they will eventually be posted.

Next few weeks I’m going to get some sun light and heat in Spain. I’m first going to stay for a few days at Christian del Rosso’s place in Madrid. Christian’s my neighbour here in Helsinki and he is currently in Madrid together with his wife and little son Emilio doing an MBA. Last time I was in Madrid, I didn’t have much time for sightseeing so this time I will take some time to do that.

From Saturday, I’m renting a car and will be doing my usual neurotic routine of driving too much and seeing too little. The record still stands at around 4000 km in 3 weeks. That was on a trip to Spain where I visited Castilla y Leon and Extremadura. The goal of this trip is to go there again and this time visit all the stuff I somehow missed the last time, which is quite a lot.

I’ve spent the morning packing and (mostly) doing a bit of reconnaisance on Google. A few weeks ago I was considering to buy a travel guide when it occured to me that the lonely planet I have for Spain is mostly fluffy text and really thin on things like what are good places to see and stay. Sure it will cover the big attractions but the interesting stuff where I’m going is small villages and towns. I actually prefer staying in medium sized towns where parking is doable. My requirements are very simple: decent place to sleep, stuff to see, and lots of places to eat & drink. The average Spanish town has a plaza mayor, with a few bars and hotels around it and usually a parking garage nearby.

So that’s easy. So the algorithm is roughly: select town, drive to it, park on or near Plaza Mayor and try a few hostels/hotels. Never takes more than two or three attempts to find a decent place to sleep. Anyway, Google is good to that stuff so I spend the morning copy pasting together my own travelguide. I’ve a top five list of towns I’m probably going to stay in: Zamora, Segovia, Trujillo, Badajoz, Salamanca and maybe Leon again (depending on weather). I also have a few backup options and a long list of stuff to see and do. In the unlikely event I get bored with the area, I have Portugal and Andalucia within a few hours drive.