With winter on the way I have finally started scoping for a snow blower. The last two winters have been terrible around here and there is no reason to believe the coming winter will be any different. The weather has historically been cyclical with a couple of bad winters in a row. On the other hand it seems as though precipitation has increased around these parts.
I guess it would have all been manageable had it not been for the reasonably busy street outside the house and the fact that snow plows don’t do as good a job as they used to. From my point of view, they drive by more often than they used to, but take no care not to deposit a wall of snow in front of the driveway. At best, you can expect them to come around with their truck-sized snow blower, grader and whatnot twice a season. Bottom line is if you don’t clear the driveway at least twice a day some days, the car will be stuck or at best you’re looking at an ever higher "bump" of icy, compacted snow that will stay until spring. Add to that the extra wide driveway and keeping the mailbox clear of snow.
So this year I figured what the heck, lets find a used snow blower that will do most of the work for me. Only problem is, the pool of used blowers seems to have been depleted already last year. The fact of the matter is that if you wait another two months or so and the winter turns out to be every bit as bad as the last one you can’t even find a new blower, regardless of price. And actually there is one more problem as I don’t want to pay too much for a machine that will inevitably spend most of the year in storage. €300-500 seems like plenty enough.
Basically, that leaves me scrounging for used 70s or 80s blowers from brands like Gilson, Ariens, MTD, Canadiana, Stiga etc. Buying a new budget model today just doesn’t make sense. You can hardly get a decent 8hp model under €1000 and many of the "supermarket brands" probably aren’t any easier to find spare parts for than models that are thirty years old. Plus, I much prefer a classic Briggs & Stratton engine compared to new more or less no-name Chinese brands. Gimmicks like electrical starter, heated handle grips or lights don’t really impress me. And features like differential drive are obviously far beyond my budget anyway.
I have also spent a lot of time researching the principal functionality of snow blowers as well as look at tons of Youtube demonstration and repair videos. I need to know what to look for so I don’t make the worst beginner’s mistakes at least. Ideally I would have liked to be more comfortable with machine repair but I guess I have to get by anyway.
Filed under Garden by Björn Hallberg 4 months ago | 149 views
A whole week of open beta. How gracious. I must admit I was a little bit excited. Until I had to re-activate my account with EA (and their Origin service), download Origin, install some browser plugin (like in Battlefield Heroes and Play4free), install the game including punkbuster and finally get my ass handed to me on some infantry-only city map. Not worth it.
BF3 might be a fantastic game at heart but with all that hassle, the heavy team-play orientation and punkbuster spyware I just don’t care for it. These games have gone down the crapper game-play wise since Battlefield 1942. Reminds me of the five minutes I spent playing Counter Strike. There should be a special game-mode for people who like team games, i.e. coordination and social interaction. The rest of us are fine with running over and picking up wooden crates with a red cross on them and only existing in a team so far as to not purposely shooting our teammates.
This game will be a virtual bonanza for cheaters that are able to bypass Punkbuster. I mean, a radar or wallhack would be golden in this sort of game where you feel about as lost as an ant on a football field. Maps have poor visibility, everything moves too fast, you die at a split second and you’re all like "the fuck was that". Something is clearly wrong with the gameplay and learning curve here when the first thing that comes to mind isn’t how great the game is but rather how much you could use a hack.
If it comes down to a contest, I much prefer the lumbering pacing of World of Tanks. I don’t know if its some sort of commentary on aging. I mean, I still enjoy games like Unreal Tournament and such. Tribes and Planetside were fun. I’m currently moving through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I quite enjoy that. It’s too bad that somehow, somewhere along the line, someone ruined PC gaming.
Filed under Games by Björn Hallberg 4 months, 1 week ago | 210 views
I just have to say once again that I have grown really fond of Ebay. I mean, here I was, looking for some cat5e utp cable to extend my home network (and hopefully kill both wireless and powerline networking).
But buying long segments of utp cable is not so straightforward as it might seem. The only way to get a really good price was to buy a roll (100 meters at least). But I only wanted 50 meters tops, and that would have cost me over €30. It’s a good thing I checked Ebay.co.uk then, because here I found cat6 cabling for almost a third of the price (including shipping). Who knows about quality, but the cable I was about to buy locally wasn’t exactly high-grade either. We’ll see if this was a smart move or not.
I also ordered some miscellaneous network punch down and testing tools from China. I expect a lot longer delivery times on those though, given what happened last time. Clearly, European postal services and customs delay Chinese imports on purpose out of sheer spite. Last time I ordered something the package spent three days in China and three weeks in various places in Europe.
Now all I need is a spectacularly long ladder so I can get up to the attic and install some new cabling and connect the living room. My only regret in all of this is that I didn’t install more electrical tubing back in the day. Just as there is a phone outlet in every room, there should have been an ethernet port as well.
Filed under PC by Björn Hallberg 4 months, 2 weeks ago | 252 views
Seeing as Xfire refuses to modernize, and Raptr turned out to be bunch of whining babies I’m looking for greener pastures. Yes, I still have Wakoopa running but it is not exactly ideal. So anyhow … someone over at the Xfire forum did everyone a favour by pointing us to Evolve.
Evolve is still in beta and has under 4700 actual members. But from what I can tell it holds great promise. The website is extremely clean and fast loading. And best of all, the game tracking works kind of like Wakoopa since it looks at running processes instead of going by hard drive path searches or any manual interaction. As for adding new game support server-side, it is a great deal more user-centric than Xfire and in particular Raptr. If you want official support for a game YOU can write a rule for it and send it in. You don’t have to wait for some snotty admin from hell to do it for you (or not at all, and then ban you like in the case with the idiots over at Raptr).
The main downside that I’ve found so far would be the lack of features. At least compared to Raptr. But that is why they call it a beta, right? Also, the IM client is fairly bloated and lacks pretty much everything in terms of features. You can’t even double click the tray icon to restore the window. And it consumes between 60 and 100 MB of RAM. Kind of like Raptr before they optimized it. That is what you get for including a full web browser I guess. It is very much like Steam in that regard. The dev team are of course acutely aware of this and have pledged to optimize the allocation of system resources in the near future. I have a good feeling about this!
Filed under Software by Björn Hallberg 5 months, 1 week ago | 234 views
I made a couple of claims about WP7 a while back that I would like to revise now that new information has come to light.
- The updated IM+ multi-im app now supports the MSN protocol. So either MS changed their mind, required more extensive testing or there was some miscommunication somewhere. So perhaps MS is better than Apple after all.
- The Omnia 7 network problems seems to have been fixed, maybe. Samsung Sweden is now accepting phones to be sent in for what seems like a radio firmware upgrade. They will provide a replacement phone allegedly during the upgrade which might take days or weeks. I did inquire and they do in fact upgrade imported handsets as well, including the German 16 GB version. Also, the Omnia 7 Ebay price has gone down another ten euro since last I checked.
- App deployment has actually picked up a bit since last I looked. Major milestone releases like Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies have shown that WP7 is a serious platform that can get the job done and has the support of app developers.
- Warez, even though relatively hard to find and limited in selection, is also present for the platform. I guess my Google skills just failed me last time. Of course, side loading apps requires some sort of jailbreak but it would seem that even the Mango beta has been beaten in this regard (and for the Omnia 7 no less). So from what I can tell, installing hacked / pirated xpa files is quite possible.
The point of course is that WP7 just got a hell of a lot more attractive. We’ll see what happens. There are a lot more WP7 devices coming this fall and I am of course curious to see the specs and whether or not they will further impact the price of the 1st generation devices.
Addendum 2011-08-17: I’m going to have to recant once more. The upcoming IM+ version 1.4 once again drops MSN support at the behest of Microsoft. The Omnia 7 remains broken or at the very least crippled. The "fix" may have worked in part but handset is still wobbly (and Samsung support seems to have messed up the OS or settings). And no apps of any importance have been forthcoming in the past month. And quite a few games have been dropped from the marketplace due to expiring licenses (no warning, no refunds). That just about sums it up. I’m back to being unenthusiastic about the platform.
Filed under Gear by Björn Hallberg 6 months, 3 weeks ago | 358 views
A grill pan is obviously a must-have in the kitchen. Top ten or fifteen gadgets probably. And after much deliberation I was finally able to come to a decision.
I discarded the idea of Teflon or ceramic pans fairly early. They will both eventually scratch and will probably not stand up to the high temperatures required to reach a Maillard reaction with very little added grease. I did consider the cheap Teflon models from IKEA initially because of the price, but soon realized that they wouldn’t work on a (future) induction cooker. It quickly because clear that cast iron was the only way to go. Not only will it last several lifetimes but it also works on all sorts of cookers, including an open flame and of course induction.
I eventually settled for a Ronneby Bruk cast iron 28 cm grill pan. The price was reasonable, even though I had to mail order it. The pan has the dual spouts as well as dual handles. Main handle is stainless steel, making it oven safe. The latter is immensely important since the primary way to "re-condition" a grill pan is to bake it in the oven.
The only real downside I can think of, except the obviously hefty weight (3130 grams), is the relatively narrow handle. It feels better than the Skeppshult equivalent, but it still is a bit awkward to hold that much weight so far off the pan’s center of gravity. I’m already thinking of modding the pan by adding some sort of removable silicon sock or tubing to the handle.
Addendum: Having tried the pan I am quite impressed. Sure it got awfully hot and there will be some smoke and vaporized water. And cleaning the pan was a pain (I’m told it gets better). But the taste was fantastic. In many ways better than my barbeque. What was lost in terms of smokiness was gained in steady and evenly distributed heat. At least my experience with a barbeque is that it is either too hot or too cold and unless you are blessed with near infinite patience, you’ll end up with food that is either burnt to a crisp or fails to achieve a proper Maillard reaction. And add to that the fact that a barbeque takes half an hour to set up and ignite. A grill pan is just faster and more predictable that way. And besides, unless you have a real sophisticated outdoor kitchen, barbequing is just so backwards. Why on earth would you keep running back and forth between your kitchen and the garden like an idiot when you can stay put in the kitchen and actually get other things done while you’re grilling.
Filed under Food by Björn Hallberg 7 months, 1 week ago | 483 views
Another item from Ebay (£4.99). I’ve been looking for these basically forever both on- and offline in Sweden but to no avail. Those that I have found have either been ridiculously expensive or made of plastic. Plus shipping and handling from the UK is actually a great deal more affordable than what you’d typically see in Sweden.
So anyway, jam funnels are immensely useful, not only for getting jams, curds and whatnot into jars but for practically anything around the house. This funnel is branded Kitchen Craft. The stainless steel obviously means that you can use it at any sort of temperatures, it wont leave a metallic taste unlike aluminium and that it is dishwasher safe. Outside dimensions are 145 mm width, 82 mm height. Spout is 34 mm on the inside, 35 – 38 mm outside (it is slightly conical). Basically designed to fit all sorts of jars.
I did deliberate whether to get the 30 mm spout or wider 50 mm models. I noticed a lot of angry comments on Amazon as people had mistakenly bought a small funnel and were now trying to push through the world’s chunkiest chutney or something. But I also looked at some of the various glass jars that I had and noticed that 50 mm was just too wide. By my calculations you’d do well to not get anything wider than 40 – 45 mm if you intend to use those tall, narrow jars and want a one-size-fits-all solution.
Filed under Food by Björn Hallberg 7 months, 2 weeks ago | 334 views
Earliest crop ever. Or at least in a very long time. And had June not been so cold and rainy the season would have started two weeks earlier still for sure.
Overall I am very pleased with my new raised strawberry patch. Weeds have been largely non-existent, and it all looks very neat and professional. And it’s clean, dry on top and moist underneath, enough so that you can walk barefoot across the patch.
Filed under Garden by Björn Hallberg 7 months, 2 weeks ago | 379 views
I normally don’t photograph birds because it’s just a lot of work. But this semi-rare bird happens to be nesting close by. Here is the Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus) displaying two of its characteristics, (1) the chick riding on the back of its parents and (2) eating feathers, in this case feeding it to the chick.
More in the Nature 2011 gallery.
Filed under Life in Pictures by Björn Hallberg 7 months, 2 weeks ago | 429 views
This is something I’ve been trying to find for ages now. Fairly pleased with the way they turned out, but in all honesty I would have preferred mitts without thinsulate / lining. Don’t know if this will give me a broader or a narrower window of usefulness though. Thinsulate is considered a joke by many outdoor enthusiasts because of its poor insulation so perhaps it wont be too much of an obstacle. Basically I wanted a cool and well ventilated fingerless mitt for days when you can’t go for any ordinary glove.
A big plus with these types of gloves is that you maintain dexterity and can of course operate capacitive touch screens (not that I have one, I still swear by resistive screens) and cameras.
Sizing was acceptable though the openings for the fingers, especially the thumb, were a bit tight. But I reckon they will stretch.
Filed under Apparel by Björn Hallberg 7 months, 2 weeks ago | 483 views
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