Not dead

I am not dead, still alive and kicking even though I let the blog be for the past couple of months. Not sure how many people look here from time to time (if any) but I plan to revive the blog and keep up posting. I even took time today and updated WordPress from the ancient version I was running.

This year the stupid 5-day festival I was talking about last year took place again in our town but this time we were prepared: we took vacation days. We went for a week to Romania, this time by plane so we won’t waste 4 days just driving. We left right in the morning when the great event started and came back one week later.

The vacation itself was nice although a bit too hot, I don’t think there was a single day with temperatures below 32C or so. We spent 2 days in Bucharest, another 2 at Paraul Rece and then 4 days in a tiny village somewhere in the neighborhood of Buzau. On our way back from there we stopped for couple of hours in Brasov so Freya had  a chance to see the the city center and bit around.

We flew with German Wings, a local “low-cost” company. I say “low-cost” because, while cheaper than a normal airline, it’s still not so low after you add all kind of things, like extra suitcases and so on. We also had the dubious privilege of landing and taking off from Baneasa Airport, which still seems ancient and out of last century.

Eventually we came back to lovely Germany where we were promptly welcomed with 18C temperatures and gray weather.  And then we started work so things are back to normal :)

Hohenzollern

Really nice weather today so we took a trip to visit the castle of Hohenzollern. The castle is situated some 50km south of Stuttgart and it’s considered the ancestral seat of the Hohenzollern family, which eventually become german emperors. It’s interesting to note that one of the first kings of Romania, Carol I (or Charles I) was a Hohenzollern. Small world, eh ?

I took pictures, of course :)

Pretty things – custom Kindle cover

Bad Cannstatt

Bad Cannstatt, the largest city district of Stuttgart. We took advantage of the (somewhat) nicer weather and went for a walk in the old part of Bad Cannstatt.

The second picture represents the oldest residential building in Stuttgart, it was built in 1463. That’s old.

Bike

Even the bikes need to rest :)

B29

B29 Bundesstrasse. Took the picture from one of the overpasses during one of my bike trips, probably freaking out the drivers who saw me in the process.

Fog and morning sun

Looks like this:

Whenever it looks like the weather or light will be nice, I carry my camera with me and one morning I managed to take that picture. Very nice morning light.

HTC Desire

Couple of months ago my phone – a Nokia N85 at the time – had an unfortunate accident and the display got damaged really bad. I guess liquid crystals, water and electricity do not combine well. It kinda still worked for a short while but then it died completely, even though the phone itself appeared to be working.

So I needed a new phone and after many, many years I came to the conclusion it’s time to say bye bye to Nokia and get myself a phone which runs Android, the mobile operating system developed by Google. I ended up getting a HTC Desire classic and I have to say that there is a huge difference between the Desire and my old phone:

True, the N85 was already somewhat old but it’s really refreshing to be able to run an open operating system, totally opposite to the closed Symbian Nokia used. I kept the official HTC Android version which came with the phone only couple of days and then unlocked the phone and installed one of the many custom Android versions developed by the community of open-source enthusiasts. The advantage of such customized versions is that updates are released much quicker, they contain many new features which are not present in the official releases – such as encryption support, lots of optimizations and speed increases, energy efficiency, new audio types support and many more.

The hardware is quite capable, basically it’s almost a full blown computer in small form. Speaking of computers, this is again one of those times when you realize how amazing are all those technology advances.

I remember some 20 years ago or so – which is not so much in the big scheme of things – my father brought home my first “real” computer, an Amstrad PC1640. I guess that’s when I got hooked to computers.

I know that comparing the two of them does not mean much but it’s fun remembering the old days when there was no such thing as Internet. Let’s see, a few interesting statistics:

• Processor – The Amstrad had an Intel 8086 running at 8Mhz. The Desire has a Snapdragon mobile CPU running at 1Ghz. Increase: 12400% ! Crazy, eh ?
• Graphics – The Amstrad  had a nice EGA graphic card which was capable of 16 glorious colors and a maximum of 640×350 resolution. The Desire has a 800×480 resolution which can do 16 million colors. There is no comparison of course but back in the day I was in awe at the nice colorful games and I didn’t care at all that you could actually see the pixels on the screen. That was enough to play games such as The Secret of Money Island, Prince of Persia and the Sierra On-line games: King’s Quest, Space Quest and so on.
• Memory – The Amstrad had 640k, the Desire has 576MB
• Storage – The Amstrad had 2 5.25″ floppy drives. Yes, the huge ones. In addition to that it had a 20MB hard card, which was basically a huge full slot EISA card  (the grandfather of PCI) which made some disturbing noise when reading and writing data. The Desire has a 16GB micro SD card which has no moving parts, it’s infinitely faster, makes no noise and it’s smaller than my fingernails. You could probably swallow it and not notice.
• Connectivity – The Amstrad had none, there was no Internet back then, not for the home users anyway. The Desire has a myriad of connectivity options, most of them can provide speeds which  were only a pipe dream during the Amstrad’s time.
• Weight – The Amstrad weighted around 7 kilos, it was not exactly portable. And then you had to add about 10 kilos for the monitor. The Desire has 157 grams :)

The future should be exciting technology-wise, if we manage not to blow ourselves up that is.