Sky in the Finnish evening

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General, Moblogged | 3 Comments 

The sky yesterday had some nice colours and of course I was there with my nokia camera-phone to capture the moment

  

Skype: P2P telephony

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 2 Comments 

I've recently used Skype as a way to get in touch with friends instead of using older methods such as MSN, and I have to say that it's amazing. The whole thing works based on a P2P (peer-to-peer) technology similar to the one used in popular filesharing P2P apps such as Kazaa or eDonkey but instead of sending music files or the latest w4r3z, we are sending voice.

I have to say that the quality is amazingly good, even better than a traditional phone. However, due to the unreliability of the IP network sometimes the sound will be totally screwed (garbled sound, cuts and silences in the middle of a conversation, etc) But when it works well (around 85% of the time) it does work well! If you would like to save some money when communicating with your friends, give it a try There are clients for Windows, Linux and OSX even though the Windows client is the most advanced and supports things like group conversations. The Linux and OSX clients are still under development and can be considered beta quality but work quite well nevertheles... Finally, you can also make calls to normal fixed phones and mobile phones via Skype by paying a small fee per minute, something they call SkypeOut credit. I don't think that 1.7 eurocents/minute is not so much compared with normal telephony rates...

The biggest SUV available!

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: News, Fun | 0 Comments 

This is possibly one of the funniest articles I've read lately (well ok, it's not that I read that much but I found this one particularly funny): Kiss My Megatruck, Dude. It's about the latest SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle), a beast that makes the the Hummer look like a tiny spot on the road... The truck is simply amazing, but I completely agree with the [witty] points raised in the article related to absurd demonstrations of machismo (though I have to admit that I like one of these SUV myself: the Volkswagen Touareg )

How long can a Sim live without peeing?

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Links, Fun | 0 Comments 

When playing God, there's always a little temptation to torture your Sims, right? This torture comes with pictues: How long can a Sim live without peeing?, I found it terribly funny specially when the whole neighborhood pee on them and die laying on their own puddle of pee. Simply hilarious And here goes another funny one: A Week in the Life of The Sims 2

Archeological Anomalies

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Links | 0 Comments 

Some interesting, curious and odd archeological anomalies for you... (they could also be all fake, too)

Cottaging!

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Fun | 1 Comments 

After sailing, we spent last weekend in a cottage (1st-3rd of October), in a place called Seeteri. Seeteri is a farm that offers cottages for rent which look very nice and at a reasonable price It is hard to say whether it primarily is a farm and then a place that provides accomodation or viceversa but the result doesn't really matter Seeteri is located about 10km from Somero which is a small and peaceful village in the middle of nowhere in the Turku region, and about 100km west of Helsinki.

There of course we did all the usual things that you'd do in a cottage in Finland: visited the surroundings, walked around the lake and enjoyed the beautiful look of the Finnish Autumn, rowed, grilled, had a sauna (a real sauna, not one of those electrical ones!!), walked around the forest picking up berries and mushrooms (I even managed to find some familiar ones... "rovellons" for the Catalan speakers, but I didn't dare to pick them up because I wasn't 100% sure) and in general, enjoyed a really beatiful view in a gorgeous environment. What else can you ask for...? Oh yes, we also had something to drink

I would highly recommend it to anyone wishing to see a bit more of the real Finland instead of staying all the time in Helsinki. Also the price for the cottage was only 223Ä for the whole weekend and it was big enough for 6 persons so that's actually less than 40Ä/person.

(click here for the whole photo album)