White Christmas

It looks like we are having a white Christmas. Or we are definitely having a white Christmas. With about 20 centimeters of snow. Temperatures from -3 C to -10 C over Christmas and more snow on Christmas eve. It's looking good.

For my Finnish readers

I have my blogs, web pages and other web accounts all linked together. So if you go looking for my blog this is probably where you will land first. But if if you happen to know Finnish or are a native Finnish speaker I would like to recommend my other blog. It's written in Finnish and called: Suomenruotsalaisia ajatuksia

LED lights are the future

I've been meaning to write a blog about LED lighting for a while now and it seems  suitable to dot now that this years winner of the Nobel prize in physics have been revealed. Those that came up with LED lights.

Well The EU banned traditional light bulbs 2012. Before that the alternative to lights bulb was energy saving lamps. And those of us who tried them out didn't like them at all. They were supposed to last longer than light bulbs and used much less energy. That was the only good thing about them. They were expensive and sensitive to thrusts. Like if you had a heavy shopping bag and slammed it a bit hard down on the kitchen table when you got home from grocery shopping, chances are the energy saving lamps worth 20 € or more in your shopping bag was broken. You couldn't dim them. You were alls supposed to dispose of them separately, you couldn't throw in your trash can. Since there were no clear guidelines on where to bring them I bet most still ended up in the household waste. Releasing the mercury they contained where the waste was disposed of. I bet by 2020 you will have a hard time finding a energy saving lamp in the store shelf. It was a temporary solution that will be phased out by itself during the next few years.

The next solution was halogen lamps. Most lighting in our home right now are halogen lamps. They look and worked like traditional light bulbs, they are cheap and uses a lot less power than traditional light bulbs. The downside is they still use a lot more power than energy saving lamps and get hot. They have been blamed for causing a number of house fires.

Then LED lamps came along. First they were expensive, then they got cheaper. Still not as cheap as halogen lamps but almost on the same levels as energy saving lamps. We got a LED flashlight to use at work it uses one AAA battery. I haven't dared to look straight into it's light. Fearing it might cause me to see a bright light for several hours afterward. I have a 6D cell Maglite at Home, this little LED flashlight brings out more light than the Maglite does.

Compared to light bulbs LED lamps are using about 1/10 of power that light bulbs needed, even less than energy saving lamps. They also last a lot longer and are not that sensitive to thrust. They are getting cheaper as they become more common. Some of them look a bit weird but that's not really an issue. The only bad new is that if you need dimmable lamps, those kind of LED lights are about as twice as expensive as the normal LED lights. This is the future.

Finding my way back

I have begun exploring the world of blogging again. Joining different blogging groups on Facebook and blogging communities on Google+. And the most important thing of all; writing a few blog posts. I've needed a different approach to blogging than I had 5 years ago and I think I'm finding out what that is.

I'm not sure how to describe it in words but momentary blogging is  not my thing. I don't have the time or ability to do that. What I need to do is to think out a few blogging issues while I don't have the ability to blog and then write about them when I do have the time.

Another thing, the HBlog app for Windows Phone is a much better app than I thought it to be. I didn't like it at first but it's much more useful than going trough the Blogger web page on my phone. It does all the thing it's supposed to do in a simple way and nothing else. It doesn't feel tedious writing with it as it can do trough the web page on the phone. I like it.

Feedly

I finally got into Bloggers own Reading list setting and deleted every blog I have been following. I've been trying to get get my hands on that settings page for over a year and I finally got in and deleted everything. No worries though, all of you who are reading this have been moved over to Feedly or Google+, or will be shortly, so I'm still reading all of your blogs.

For some time you have been able to add blogs to the reading list but not remove them as you can only do from the settings page which you haven't been able to reach. And even before that it worked really badly. Blogs you added could be removed after a couple of weeks all by themselves and blogs you removed could be added  after a couple of weeks all by themselves. The removing or adding of a blog required something between 3-5 attempts during a course of 2-4 months. This was as good as it got.

I had blogs there going back close to a decade and a large part of those bloggers are no longer blogging for various reasons. There were also people there who I had no idea who they were and/or the had actually deleted their own blogs. Time to go.

But since then both Google Reader and Google Friend Connect has been discontinued. Blogger Reading list was built on those two platforms so it has sort of become this appendix that well, doesn't really work or have any use but still hangs around. Google+ is what you work trough now if you go all Google. I love Google+, it's better than Facebook, but not all of the blogs I read are on Blogger. Some use Wordpress and other platforms so this is were Feedly comes in and it works great.

Writing season

I know I have periods when I write less. I also have periods when I write more. That also goes for blog commenting. I always read blogs, all the time. But sometimes I feel like I have nothing to add to the blog by commenting it.

Lately I have been really drawn towards blogging again. I realize I need to change the style of blogging. Back in the old days I used to think of something, sit down and blog about it. With a family that doesn't happen often. Yes I still get several ideas daily for a great blog post but it's all forgotten once I sit down in front of a computer. So shorter blogs on my phone this one is written on my phone and it's tedious) and longer posts, somewhat planned ahead, when I know I have the time.

I'm a night owl

This is brilliant.

Intelligent People All Have One Thing In Common: They Stay Up Later Than You

Summer

Well dear blog readers, summer is finally here. Although we had a very small taste of it in May, all of June was cold. Some days people were still wearing beanies and small children most of the month. But with July came summer. We had beach weather most of July and the last few days it has been so hot I've have really enjoyed being at work because we have AC. Well for a Finn 29 C (85 F)  is hot.

Today is warm, around 20-24 C and rain showers are expected in the afternoon. So it's a fairly good summers day today. An according to the fortunetellers that call themselves meteorologists  we will have summer for the rest of the month. So it's looking good.

Android

In the mobile sphere and tablet sphere Android is king. Not because it is better but because it has the biggest market share and it has the biggest number of apps for its users. I have no personal experience of Apple so I really can't comment on them. But I can compare Android to Windows Phone or shortened WP. And it's really quantity over quality.

First of all have you ever tried writing a long text on Android? Or just a sentence? The text on the screen seem to be one word behind your fingers on the virtual keyboard. And I'm a slow writer, And speaking of the virtual keyboard. On a tablet you can usually hit the right "key". However try a Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini and you'll be writing everything twice, at least.

And then there are virtual books. I know good writing costs but e-books available for the Android platform usually all cost something. And finding an app that can use you Google Drive or OneDrive a e-book source is difficult. Have you found one? I haven't.

Using a browser of any kind on a Android system. Well it helps if you got other things to do at the same timer

The only compliant I got against WP is that they should have entered the tablet market earlier and their tablet(s) are too expensive. A phone screen is still small. And the lack of apps for WP. Well  that's not really a compliant. Sometimes quality is better than quantity.

6tag vs Instagram BETA

After having tried out Instagram BETA on my Nokia for a couple of months I decided it was time to go back to 6tag. I began with 6tag but due to some crashing and in my mind a more difficult user interface than Instagram BETA I switched to Instagram BETA. It worked fine except that it was often very slow on wifi. But the last few days it stopped sharing pictures to Facebook. I have no idea why because on Android it works and on 6tag it works. So back to 6tag.

Twitter & Instagram

I wish I had more time and inspiration to blog but I don't.  So for those interested in my life look to the right of this blog  post. There's a Twitter feed and a link to my Instagram page. It's only short comments and a few snapshots of my life and my thoughts. Something to read in between those blog posts that do get written sometimes.

Tropiclandia

Today we spent a couple of hours at the local spa (Tropiclandia) with the kids. It was fun and we were all tired afterwards.

This is all written with the tablet and I think I will never write long blog posts with this.

HBlog vs Blogger

After trying out Google's own app for Blogger I think HBlog for WP is the better app. I'm writting this with the Blogger app on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. It's a wonderfull tablet but blogging all together are meant to be done with a keyboard.

Reading list

The RSS reader on this site, yes Blogger, is probably one of the worst there is. Yes it's on the same page as you your blogs but I've been trying to remove a few blogs lately and every time I try to do that, the settings page is not even reachable. And sometimes none of the blogs on the reading list shows up, like today.  Please Google, fix it.

My social networking

It's only recently that Instagram became available to us Windows phone users and since then I have experimented a bit with different platforms for different social networks.

Blogger: Well it works best on a PC, preferably laptop however you put it. Every smartphone has dictionaries that fill out words after just writing a few letter sin the words. Nokia Lumia has also a very exact keyboard and you can easily switch between dictionary languages. But still it's painstakingly slow to blog on your smartphone.

Facebook: It's the jack of all trades, master of none. The internet version of a food processor in your kitchen. Can be used on everything and everywhere but it isn't exactly interesting and innovating any more. One of the really good things about Facebook is that you can tie everything too your Facebook account. Like Twitter or Instagram and every time you tweet it turns up on your Facebook timeline. I disabled tweets on FB by the way. I will explain why later. Strangely enough you can't put your blog on your Facebook page. You could do that in the beginning but Facebook decided to keep their own "blog platform" called Notes which is the lamest attempt to a blog platform I've ever seen and nobody uses it.

Instagram: It's the new cool place on the internet were all the cool people hang out. It was recently bought by Facebook. Whenever you upload a picture there you can also upload it to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, VKontakte, Tumblr and Foursquare. It's very much tied to you smartphone since there's really not much you can do on it's website except like and write comments  to other Instagramers you are following. But once you get that picture up on Facebook you have all the things you can do with picture on Facebook.

Twitter: I've had a Twitter account for years but I never got it to work with my old phone. The website version is really good. All the more complicated settings you must adjust within the website version. But for the actual tweets, it's on a smartphone where it shines. I now use it as a independent social network and I have a Twitter widget on my Blogger blogs. In case I want to update my blog readers (I'm fully aware there aren't that many of you out there) on something and I do not have the option to write a full length blog post. As in I'm not near a PC. I sometimes share my Instagrams trough Twitter too. The reason why my tweets are no longer on my Facebbok timeline is that my Facebook friends which is basically everyone I know, would get flooded with for them uninteresting and annoying tweets. They make sense as independent tweets and on my blog but it's not for Facebook.

So this is how I do my social networking.

Test

This is a test, using HBlog. In order to see how labeling works...

New blog app

So I downloaded this app called HBlog for Windows Phone. It's basically as simple blog writer for Blogspot. You can even add photos they say. I haven't tried that yet. So a blog writer for when you are out there somewhere and  maybe due to a slow internet or your limitation of bandwidth for this month is closing in on you and you can't or don't want to load the whole Blogger webpage in order to write something that is too long for Twitter or is missing a picture for Instagram. Since my mother tongue is not English I write way too long sentences.

I really don't blog that much any more bit having the possibility to do so on the run is something that makes me feel comfortable. I like to be preprepared. It's a part of my personality.

BBC Radio 1

I'm a fan of BBC Radio 1 and that lead me to download BBC iPlayer for Windows Phone. Yes I have found Radio 1 streaming apps elsewhere usually they do not work that well. Well I knew the TV part would be disabled outside the UK on it. But I was hoping the radio part would work. The radio part didn't work either. So it was basically at TV and Radio schedule for BBC.

Also from the time I downloaded it last night until I uninstalled it this morning I had about 200 % increase in battery drainage per hour. It drained half my battery in 12 hours while I was sleeping most of the time. Maybe it has something to do with it being used outside the UK or maybe it's just poorly updated which some of the user reviews said. Anyway I'm not trying that again.

Social networking

I like Facebook. It has brought people I would not otherwise have any contact with  into my online social network. And it's great for getting updated on what you friends and relatives are doing. And planning social events with other people  without it is virtually impossible. I would even say that is has become as important as your phone or TV. You can live without them but it will make life very difficult.

BUT once you have gotten everybody on board it has sort of turned into this little village. And little villages are full of gossip, showing off, drama, people spying on each other, small close knit friends groups that shun outsiders and people with a different opinion or lifestyle than theirs and so on. And frankly it's crippling creativity.

So I've been looking at alternatives. And the result is more blogging (right here), more tweeting and a bit of instagramming. Yes Facebook does have everything but somewhere along the road it turned into a utility, just like your washing machine. You need it but the entertainment factor has plummeted.

Twitter and Instagram are fairly simple and yes I know the later is owned by Facebook. But in all their simplicity they are fun. Last night I took a picture in the dark of the backyard ice rink I've built the last few weeks and put it up on Instagram and you know what, it felt like fun. I haven't had that feeling for Facebook in years. And you can automatically share your tweets and Instagram photos to Facebook.

And when it comes to creativity, I had a great blog. I used to love updating it every day. And I had always something to write. That is creativity and I guess that is what I'm trying to get back to...

Backyard Ice Rink II

Since the later 2/3 of December and the  first one and a half week of January was warm. Warm as in around +5 C every day, no snow to be found anywhere and my first backyard ice rink was well gone before Christmas. Well winter came and the last two weeks has been around -15 C every day, sometimes as warm as -2 C and sometimes as cold as -25 C but -15 C seem to be the standard temperature.

So without too much trouble it was easy to create another backyard ice rink, the second one this winter. And I learned a few things more about creating the ice. -5 C is bit too warm. The water doesn't freeze fast enough and it tends to melt too much of the already made ice so you get bubbles and it may break trough the ice wall on the sides. You make one to contain the water as you make the ice thicker. -20C and colder is too cold. If you want lots of thick ice and a good ice wall it's great. When you have come to the other end of the ice rink the first part you have hosed down has already frozen over. And also if you get a lot of water on it so you get wave movement on the ice those wave pasterns can also freeze over. Not an even smooth ice but great for building mass. -15 C is ideal, you get all of the water you want on the ice and and it freezes slough enough to build a smooth surface.