For the last two weeks the whole family, including the two dogs of my parents, payed a visit to Finland. We rented two mökkies, the traditional finish cottages – which of course both had a sauna (actually one of them had two saunas) and of course both had the sea directly in front of them. And as cheesy as it looks, this was the view in front of the mökki where @caschasan and I lived:
Of course when you visit a place that is surrounded by forest and sea with the aim to live a little bit closer to nature than usual you have no internet connection. At least our cottages had no internet access, well not even a water-connection (which is very typical, you have a sea and a well nearby). Even though in Finland you have the legal right for a fast internet connection and there is almost no spot without wireless connectivity I decided to do a little internet diet for two weeks. Because it was a spontaneous idea I had no strict rules about what to consume or to avoid. But basically I only read my private email accounts and checked the weather for the next few days when we had access to the WiFi of our lessor. And I only open emails that looked somehow important - so almost none.
What did I miss
For the first days I really missed my RSS reader and reading "the news" at least every morning. But the feeling of having to be informed about what happened in the rest of the world faded away very soon while grazing trough the wood, cooking of the fire, discovering some of the uncountable small islands and of course sweating in the sauna. Really surprising to me was that I totally forgot about podcasts, even about those I await eagerly every week like Hypercritical. The thing I missed on regular basis over the whole holiday was twitter. I am not completely sure why that is, but probably because it‘s ability to connect to friends and to share some happy moments. What also bugged me a bit was that I maybe missed some very good stories on HN. All in all it was an interesting experience to find out what services I missed.
Never the less I really enjoyed the night in Helsinki with a lot of open WiFi‘s to download podcasts for ride home and skipping over all the left over RSS items. And by the way my dad drove to the open WiFi of our lesser EVERY DAY to download his newspaper to his iPad – so which generation is addicted here?
At the end some more pictures:
Yes you really have to have some German beer with you if you visit Finland. (Karhu is drinkable though).
There are a lot of discussions on why Apple changed the new MagSafe power adapter. First of all they made the new one thinner and therefore incompatible with the "old" MagSafe. The reason for this, Apple told us, was that the new models become thinner and thinner and at one point the MagSafe adapter would be to thick for the new MacBook body. This is kind of sad because until know you could charge every mobile Intel Mac with the same adapter. But at some point you have to change even the most popular connector (we will most likely see the iPhones/iPods/iPads Dock Connector change) So even if we are not yet at the point where it really had to change, I am ok with that.
The other thing that changed is the form of the connector from an L form to the T form which it had at the beginning if it‘s life. There are a lot of complaints about this too. Most of them saying that the the L form is much better. I think this isn‘t that easy to say. Since pictures can say more than words and I am not that good at writing words I made a video:
The purpose is to state two points. First of all, not all MagSafe 2 magnets are too weak. Mine is more on the too strong side. Second, even if the L shaped connector has a much weaker magnet, if pulled from the wrong direction it is extremely hard to pull of.
Correction:
I wrote MacSafe but the connector is acually called MagSafe.
When upgrading my MacBook Air to Mountain Lion I ran in to a problem, which drove me nuts for a few hours. After I started the install process of Mountain Lion the MacBook Air rebooted and presented me, as expected with a password screen for my File Vault 2 encrypted SSD. Since this is my first machine with an encrypted boot drive I already feared trouble with the encryption and I did not have to wait very long. I entered my password, which only caused the password field to shake as if it was rotten. My password is very long and it‘s not unusual I get it wrong the first time. After the fifth attempt I was convinced there was something wrong.
I rebooted the Air hoping it would boot back into Lion, which I did not. Even pressing the option key wouldn‘t help it. I thought it was broken but hesitated to enter the recovery key or go back to the backup I made with Carbon Copy Cloner.
Since the Air is only my second machine I set it aside and ignored the problem for a while. When I booted it up some hours later, my password still did not work but, much calmer now then befor, I discovered a small keyboard layout selection field in the top right corner. I switched over to a German keyboard layout and everything was fine again. (I‘m sorry that I have no picture of the screen)
Lessons learned. Apple isn‘t as perfect as I would love it to be. Passwords with special characters are tricky. Nothing new here but sometimes you have to experience it on your own.
Yes you really have to have some German beer with you if you visit Finland. (Karhu is drinkable though).
Some mushroom from our "backyard".