Category: Journeys

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

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Explore Tromsø

I made it to Tromsø and walked from the airport into town.  Closing in on midnight, I found the very cute hostel I had reserved without trouble. A mix of staff, guests, and pets was sitting in the living room watching the football game. I joined and had a very interesting discussion with one of them about life, the universe, and everything. Around three at night I crawled into my dorm bed after a very rich day.

The next morning I had a stroll through town and bumped into one of the guests playing music in the street. He joined me for breakfast at a café. Him being from Birmingham, we had a nice conversation about his disappointment regarding the Brexit.

After I had bought all the supplies I needed, I walked across the bridge and to the cable car.At the top I first enjoyed the scenic view with a refreshing drink and then hiked into Tromsdalen. At the end of the valley I turned east towards Skarvassbu, a DNT hut. After a long and exhausting hike uphill, I found a beautiful spot on a hill to pitch my tent for the night. 

After a long and good sleep, I had a laid back breakfast with beautiful sunshine. The one-minute porridge works very well with milk powder and cold water! During the day, the path back to Tromsø lead me over a plateau and down a very rocky valley with streams, lakes, and waterfalls. 

When I got back into town, the owner, employees, and guests were sitting in front of the hostel discussing life, the universe, and everything. The usual 😉 I bought some drinks and olives with feta for dinner and joined them. Later we all moved to the beach at the other end of town for a bbq in the midnight sun.

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Explore (Northern) Norway

Last year I heard about the Widerøe Explore Norway ticket which is Interrail for flying in Norway: Choose from three zones and fly as much as you want for two or three weeks. Of course that cought my attention and I decided to do that in summer ’16.

So here I am, I dug out one of my previous packing lists and packed my things for three weeks airplane-backpacking across Norway north of Trondheim. Tent, sleeping bag, mattress, … everything and the kitchen sink (well, a stove): 16kg, not bad.

The planned tour includes 18 flights in 12 segments: Trondheim – Tromsø – Kirkenes – Vadsø – Mehamn – Honningsvåg – Hammerfest – Lakselv – Andenes – Leknes – Røst – Brønnøysund – Trondheim

Today’s first trip to Tromsø includes 5 stopovers in Brønnøysund, Sandnessjøen, Bodø, and Stokmarknes. In Bodø I had enough time to visit the National Aviation Museum. Especially the U2 spy plane interested me, but on arrival the receptionist told me that this section was closed. Luckily she was very kind and helpful and allowed me to take a look nonetheless 🙂

Tonight I should make it to Tromsø where I’ll spend the next days.

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Hiking on the other side of the fjord

What a tur 🙂

I took the ferry to the other side of the fjord in order to hike one of the hills we can see from our side. A friendly farmer let me park my car in his yard and told me about a little trail leading into that area.
Ferry Flakk - Rørvik Farm Parking
Everything afterwards was just barely visible animal trails (thanks animals, nice trails you trampled there 🙂 ). I even saw a couple of elk in the distance, though too far and quick for a photo! At some point I realised that I would not be able to reach the top I intended to (Munken) and decided to set up camp on another really nice hilltop (slightly north-west of Stegavikdammen). Although this spot was missing the panoramic view across the fjord, it had some funny and very audible sheep in the valley below.
Hiking the back-country Mountain Sheep
What an evening Real Turmat
After a nice warm meal of turmat, I went to bed with a glimpse of the city lights on the other side of the fjord and the stars above (the nights are dark enough again). As I had placed the tent behind a little hill, beautiful sunshine only woke me at about 8 in the morning. After a simple breakfast of bread, cheese, and liver paté, I headed back following a slightly different path.
City Lights Good Morning Sunshine
Refreshing Lake Ferr Rørvik - Flakk
The new backpack I tested on this trip prove really comfortable and practical. It allows you to open the whole front-side similar to a sports bag. This makes organising and accessing the equipment way easier!

The full set of photos can be found in my OwnCloud.

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Bymarka Tur

Instant Müsli (with milk powder), tour food, freshly waxed hiking boots, and beautiful sunshine! Ready for an overnight Bymarka tur.

Instant Müsli Tur Mat
Real Tur Mat Hiking BootsSunshine over Lian

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EclipseCon Europe 2014

Last weeks EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany was great! Thanks to all those active contributors, who made this event possible. Additional to the usual Java and Eclipse topics, there were very interesting sessions on the Internet of Things, web technologies, and OSGi.

It all started on Monday with a meeting by the Eclipse Science Working Group where things revolved around representations of scientific data and their visualisation. Key projects were the Eclipse Integrated Computational Environment (parallel visualisation), DAWNSci (data analysis), OpenChrom (chromatography), and OpenFlow (geology visualisation).

For a stream of conference photos, check out the flickr group.

The main conference began on Tuesday with a workshop on automated GUI testing based on Jubula. My personal highlights of the conference sessions on the following days were

  • ’10 platforms in 30 minutes’ where Jonas Helming live-coded 10 GUIs on different platforms based on EMF Forms. The paper print-out even got delivered by micro-quadrocopter! 😀
  • The presentation of openHAB (home automation bus) as the center of an Eclipse based SmartHome.
  • The keynote ‘Innovation Begins at Home’ by Andy Stanford-Clark who automated his home early on and created the Twittering Isle of Wight Ferries.
  • Ian Craggs providing an overview of the currently available embedded implementations of MQTT and MQTT-SN which just last week were accepted as OASIS standards.
  • A live demonstration of Docker providing a very flexible infrastructure for Eclipse RT applications. I recently had the chance to try out Docker and it is really amazing. If you are looking for a lightweight and highly flexible alternative to virtualization on Linux, try this!
  • Last but not least, Gordon Williams‘  and Tracy Miranda‘s introduction to the Espruino JavaScript embedded platform. It consists of an ARM based micro-controller running Gordon’s open source JavaScript interpreter and a web-based IDE. When Gordon integrated Espruino with the Eclipse Orion web-IDE, he could not access the serial port because of access rights limitations of the web-browser. As a work around he turned to generally available interface of web-applications, the audio out- and input! By adding a simple circuit and an orion plugin, he was actually able to use a normal audio jack as serial interface to the microcontroller! Now this totally reminds me of the Acoustic couplers of the good old days when the nets still made hissing sounds 🙂

All in all, with the great conference food, the entertainment with Circus Eclipse and the rock-band Cool Down, and the great speakers and participants, this is an event I am already looking forward to in 2015!

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What happened since May

June

Preparing for the move. With some resistance from the cat 😉 we managed to sell of a large portion of our furniture and also my car.
Gustav doesn't want to sell the bed. My old Yaris Improvised Wardrobe

Watching finn.no for a place to move to, we found a beautiful house in the forest at the outskirts of Trondheim. With the support of Expat Mid-Norway we got some more photos and quickly settled the contract.
House - view from driveway House - view from garden House - entry

July

13th: Farewell party at Café Hofgut Oberfeld
Farewell Cake Farewell Party at Hofgut Oberfeld

22nd: Doctor Exam
It's done! Snacks for everyone A ride in the 'Dr Wagen'

23th: The moving company picks up our boxes, 24th: Cleaning the flat, 25th: Flight to Trondheim
All our boxes are packed The Moving Truck Flight to Trondheim

August

We moved into our new home and explored our new surroundings. A small step for our cat but a giant leap for the mice in the area 😉 After searching for nearly a month, we found a nice used 4wd car.
Our boxes arrived Cat set free Bird not so free
Hiking and skiing trails right behind our house The view from Gråkallen My new car

September

I started working at MARINTEK in the SIMA team. The Norwegian Marine Technology Research Institute is located directly underneath the TV tower of Trondheim, Tyholt. In the SIMA team, we develop a workbench for the simulation of maritime applications. Various physics engines are integrated under the same hood and are made easily accessible to the user.
In the spare time, we went on exploring our new home and cleaned out an old shed on the property to make space for our bicycles.
Tyholt, near MARINTEK Cleaning out the shed Camping at Skjellbreia

October

For heating in winter we decided to use the fireplace more often and ordered some wood. The wood got delivered just in time for the first snow this year. 🙂 With snow all around us, it was definitely time to switch to winter tires.
The firewood got delivered The first snow this year The first snow this year
Time to switch to winter tires Beatiful sunrise on the way to the office Hiking in the snow

Now

Just got back from Eclipse Con Europe 2013 in Ludwigsburg, which I combined with visiting my mum, grandma (she turned 94!) and dad.
So far for now, we are looking forward to winter and plenty of snow! 🙂