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.