Photos of our recent trip to Iceland with Sarah’s folks to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary are now on-line.
One thing that doesn’t come across in the Þingvellir and Gullfoss photos is just how cold it was that day. The harsh wind made for a bone-numbing wind-chill factor that had to be experienced to be appreciated.
It’s a shame the camera doesn’t have a temperature sensor, because then it could write that detail into the EXIF header of the photos.
I mentioned the other day that the KPN explicitly forbids the use of its flat-fee Surf & Mail mobile Internet package for VoIP services in its fair use policy.
Nevertheless, I’ve put it to the test and can reveal that they’ve currently taken no technical measures to stop you from using VoIP. It remains to be seen how long I can continue to use their 3G UMTS data network to conduct my voice calls, but until they ask me to stop, I’m going to arrogantly flout their terms and conditions.
What’s the advantage of doing this?
Well, calls are much cheaper this way. Using my Internet provider, XS4ALL, I can make calls from my mobile phone against XS4ALL’s VoIP tariff. I then pay KPN’s flat-fee €9.95 per month for Surf & Mail, plus whatever XS4ALL charges for the VoIP call. That effectively means I can use my mobile phone anywhere in the Netherlands to call any number within the EU or the US for next to nothing, just one or two cents a minute.
It gets better, though. By requesting a second (free) VoIP phone number from XS4ALL, I can now get free calls from our home phone to my mobile and vice versa, because XS4ALL charges nothing for calls between its subscribers, which also includes one subscriber’s calls to himself using multiple phone numbers.
Normal calls to mobile phones, however, are still around 15 cents per minute, whether or not I use my KPN Mobiel subscription. In fact, they’re still slightly cheaper if I use my standard voice subscription, so VoIP doesn’t help here. The same applies, obviously, if I need to check my standard voicemail or call KPN’s customer service.
The only disadvantage (apart from the fact that I’m breaking the rules laid down by the supplier of my data network, the KPN), is that I have to maintain an open data connection to be able to receive VoIP calls on my mobile phone. That’s not good for the battery, but it’s a small inconvenience compared to the benefits.
Obviously, as VoIP grows in popularity and more mobile phones become capable of conducting VoIP calls (either over GPRS, UMTS or WiFi), more people are going to see the advantages and the KPN is going to have to take active steps to stop people from using its data network to conduct voice calls.
Until then, however, I don’t feel obligated to comply with a clearly anti-competitive clause in the fair use policy.
After purchasing my new mobile phone on 9th November, it finally rang for the first time on Friday, 23rd November; that’s a full two weeks later.
Oh yeah, it was a telemarketer on the line.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how to solve the problem of the Nokia 9500 complaining about an untrusted (self-signed) certificate when picking up one’s mail over SSL/TLS.
Well, the E90 suffers from the same problem and, again, there’s no way to elect to permanently (until its expiry) trust the untrusted certificate at the time it is presented.
As with the 9500, there is a solution, but it’s rather more convoluted. You can’t just add a new certificate as you could with the 9500. Instead, you have to create a certificate authority (CA) and use that to sign your mail server’s certificate. Then, instead of registering the mail server certificate with the phone, you register the CA’s certificate. The phone will then trust any certificate that has been signed by the CA.
The procedure is more or less the same for any Symbian S60-based phone and, happily, someone else has done all the legwork.
Follow this procedure and, once again, untrusted certificate warnings will be a thing of the past.
If you have a Nokia N95, see Jules’ comment below for how to add the CA’s certificate after transferring it to your phone.
We returned home to the Netherlands today.
It was a rude awakening; literally. Icelandair have this repugnant policy of making their Amsterdam flights — all of them — take off at 07:50. There’s simply no other option.
Keflavík airport is a good long way from Reykjavík and would be prohibitively expensive by taxi, so that necessitates taking the bus. It’s never that simple, of course. One is first picked up at one’s hotel by a minibus, which takes you to the BSI bus terminal. From there, you and your luggage are offloaded onto a coach, which makes the trip to Keflavík via Hafnarfjöður.
The upshot of all of this is a 04:30 wake-up call for a 05:00 minibus pick-up. You can only imagine how much fun this is, especially with a dozy toddler who — like the rest of us — wants nothing better than to keep sleeping.
Seriously, if there were a reason to boycott Iceland, the national airline’s inhumane timetable is a compelling one.
But enough of that.
Our last day in Reykjavík was spent very lazily. The weather was lovely, more of the clarity and sunshine we’d enjoyed on Sunday. I can’t believe how little rain we had on this trip. It all came on the first two days in the capital at the very start of the trip.
After breakfast in the deserted nightclub ambience of Café Oliver, we completed the considerable bureaucracy of filling in our tax refund forms and collecting the monies due to us.
The rest of the day is already somewhat of a blur. Sarah and Eloïse went back to the hotel at one point and I went on a whistle-stop tour of my favourite 101 areas to take some photographs.
After picking the girls up at the hotel, we went to Kaffitár for coffee and cake and ended up killing a lot of time there. I’ve been a bit mean about Kaffitár recently, calling it a bit like Starbucks, but the coffee is 1000% better. Their Da Vinci and Jöklakaffi coffees are especially good and the cakes are tasty, too, but not as good as at Mokka.
We then spent some time at the hotel before enjoying a simple dinner at Hressó. Afterwards, I went to buy a final couple of CDs, plus a photography book by Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson, an Icelandic photographer whose work I really admire.
Sarah had done most of the packing, so there wasn’t much else left to do except try to get a few hours of sleep before the dreaded early morning haul back to Amsterdam.
We made it back to the house around 13:00, with just enough time to dump the bags and get Eloïse ready for peuterspeelzaal. Amsterdam is a balmy 12° and feels very warm after Reykjavík.
It’s nice to be home, in the sense that we have a lovely home and it’s full of familiar things. However, transport that same home to Reykjavík and I’d have been happy to stay. With its vibrant music and café scene, absence of crowding, beautiful women and beautiful nature just beyond one’s doorstep, it’s a uniquely appealing place.
I really must dig in and learn some Icelandic. I can understand more written Icelandic after every trip, but decoding the verbal language is still a non-starter. I watch acrobats and contortionists with the same admiration I have for native speakers of the Icelandic language. They make sounds with their mouth that just don’t sound possible for a normal human-being.
It’s intriguing to ponder what might have happened if I’d been able to afford a trip to Iceland back in my early twenties, instead of a trip to Amsterdam. I might easily have ended up falling in love with the country, staying, finding a job, meeting a girl, etc. One small decision that I might easily have made would have sent my life down a completely different path to the one I actually took.
It’s disconcerting to realise how much of one’s life is due to chance. Most of everything I hold dear today is the result of mostly arbitrary decisions with far-reaching, but unforeseen consequences. It makes one stop to ponder the infinite number of alternate scenarios one could so easily, yet equally unwittingly, have set in motion.
Given that knowledge, that life could have had a million different faces, how can one ever know that the path one chose was the right one? Belief in such a concept is flawed, of course. Just as I am today unaware of other blissful or agonising futures that I could have catalysed, transposed into those futures, I would be equally ignorant of the things I hold dear to me in the life I lead today.
The freedom to ponder such things is perhaps what sets apart my generation and those after mine from those of our predecessors. Not so long ago, most people didn’t question the purpose or destination of their life; they simply fell in line with what was mapped out for them by their family, environment, social status, etc.
Today, however, we have more freedom than ever before to create the life we want for ourselves. From my perspective, it just takes imagination, courage, a sense of romance (with life as well as people), a certain amount of recklessness, an appreciation of the poetry and beauty in things, the absence of a close family and circle of friends, and — perhaps most importantly — the inability to attain a lasting sense of purpose.
Given those ingredients, drifting and dreaming is a natural state of existence. It makes for an interesting life, though at times an anything but enviable one. Sometimes I envy the boys and girls from the village who went to school, became postmen and shop assistants, married each other, bought a house in the village and had children that they sent to the village school.
Clarity of purpose is an enviable quality for one who has rarely sensed any, though in some ways I am perhaps now closer than at any other point in the last 20 years.
Still, it continues to prickle my senses to fantasise about just one of my other lives in those innumerable parallel universes, where I speak fluent Icelandic to my Icelandic children, girlfriend and friends, play in a couple of bands, write for the local newspaper, pen fiction for a hobby, etc.
It could have happened, I tell you.
