...the devil in Helsinki

My goal was to process all my pictures taken this year before the year ended, and I almost made it, but not quite: yesterday I uploaded the last pictures from our little excursion to Finland in June. An old friend of mine who lives in Japan these days was going back to Sweden with his wife for the midsummer celebrations, and had booked their flight to make a stop in Helsinki for a couple of days. We decided to meet up with them there, so we got rooms at the same hotel, Helka (warmly recommended), and brought our car on the ferry from Stockholm. That way we could both walk around Helsinki on our own for a day, and after our friends showed up, we made a day trip by car to see some sights outside the city, in particular Hvitträsk, west of Helsinki, and the sleepy town of Borgå to the east, with its old wooden buildings. The next day we said our goodbyes and drove westwards to spend midsummer on Åland, stopping in Åbo on the way to do some more sightseeing.

This was a great opportunity for us to do really touristy things in Finland (as the pictures show), and we had a lovely time, with sights ranging from the latest in Finnish furniture design in Helsinki, to the over 700 years old cathedrals of Borgå and Åbo.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hobbit (1982 game) graphics engine in Javascript

Tunnel like hall Great river Trolls' path Narrow place Dragon's desolation Straight smooth passage Dale valley Trolls' cave Forest gate Lake town Goblins' dungeon Dark dungeon Trolls' clearing Elvish clearing Lonelands Elvenking's cellar Goblins' big cavern Gloomy bewitched place Running river Lower halls Spider place Front gate One of the first computer games that really fascinated me was the 1982 text adventure based on The Hobbit, for the ZX Spectrum. I was 12 years old when I first played it, and it was immediately clear that this was different from any other game I'd seen. It was a text adventure, but some locations had illustrations in brightly coloured graphics, which although crude by today's standards really helped transport you to another world back in those days of mostly monochrome screens and text-only adventure games. There is much more to be said about what made the game so special - in fact, the graphics ...
Read more

Recreated ZX Spectrum (Bluetooth Keyboard)

Image
(Originally posted on Google+, Sep 30 2015.) So I got myself what has to be the nerdiest bluetooth keyboard in the world: http://sinclair.recreatedzxspectrum.com/ Quite expensive too, for a bluetooth keyboard. But build-wise, it's a perfect replica of the ZX Spectrum we know and love. Feels exactly right and has the correct key labels. Which means that used with a decent emulator, it recreates the feeling of typing on a real Speccy (without resorting to blind hunt-and-peck which is generally the case if you use a PC keyboard). And after some fiddling with figuring out how to unlock the full bluetooth QWERTY mode as well as the Speccy-specific mapping, I can confirm that it works as advertised as a generic keyboard for Android, iOS or Windows. I only had to ask myself, "can I think of anyone who's a more suitable target for this product" to realize that I really had to get it. It's certainly not for fast touch typing, but programming on a Speccy was more ...
Read more

The times they are a-changin'

Recently I got a call from my dad, who was having some problems with his computer, along the lines of "there's something wrong with the damn internet again". Since I was the one who set it up for him, I don't mind fixing problems when they occur, but I find that the hardest thing with these debugging sessions over the phone is to get him to quote the exact messages he is seeing. It's kind of interesting, as if the words and concepts are so alien to him that he zones out after only a second, and is actually unable to read them aloud. A typical exchange goes like this: -So, dad, what does the error message say? -Oh, something about the Internet. -OK, but what does the text say, precisely? -I dunno, Microsoft and Internet something. -Dad, can you please tell me exactly what the text says? -I just told you, it says it can't find the Internet. -Where is the message, I mean, what program does it come from? -Well, dammit, it's right here, on the screen! And so on...
Read more