Star Wars in Scandinavia

The Star Wars Exhibition is currently in Örnsköldsvik, below are some photos that I took when visiting the show this week. Please visit http://www.starwars-theexhibition.com/index.html for more information.

Google is down...

It is strange how used I been to a specific service, Gmail stopped working and my first thought was to check Google reader if anyone else had reported the same problem. How do I find my information if I not going to use Google services? Searching? Well there are other alternatives than Google but it feels strange. I managed to find an URL from the back of my head and got some more information about the outage:


http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/systemwide-gmail-outage/

Guess this is a warning for depending to much on a single service provider... (including this blog) Maybe I should continue updating my DNS book with important IP addresses if another well used service goes down...

It's all about timing...

The deadline for submission to Seedcamp 2008 is 23:59, Sunday August 10th

I just transmitted the application to Seedcamp and I don't think that the timing could be much better. On the 25th we should know if our last minute changes made a difference.


(Yes the actual deadline was BST and not CET but that would remove much of the excitement in this post if you guys knew that...)

Report after the 8 day hike

Guess to much other things came in the way of my reports of the hike, so here is finally the report:

During the hike I had the phone mostly turned off, but I drained the battery down to about half twice, and with the limited sun we had I managed to charge the phone the whole way up again.

What I had learned from my last time where:
* Only trying to charge the phone when there is decent amount of sunlight. The iPhone will turns itself on as soon as it recognize an USB connection even if the current isn't sufficient to charge the device.
* Leaving the phone in Airplan mode while charging and minimize the brightness, since the phone will turn itself on and also show the battery logo there is a good idea to turn off as much as the phones features as possible.
* Not draining the battery completely, when the iPhone has less than 10% left of the battery the phone will go into some kind of emergency charging mode disabling all the features when the charger is connected until it reaches about 20% of battery. At home this is probably not such a big problem but if you where planning to make that very important phone call you will not be to happy when you realize you have to wait for the sun to shine for half an hour or so before the phone will be usable again, especially as you where able to make the call before you connected the charger.

I know this probably is not what you are expected to do while 4 days out away from the closest settlement, but I couldn't resist to use the last reception to surf the web and send some pictures, I also enjoyed a movie in my sleeping bag, not really because I felt like watching a movie but simply because I had the battery left to use :-).

Conclusion, with a conscious usage of the iPhone a small solar panel can truly make your internet experience mobile, even in the deepest of the Swedish/Norwegian forest.