Mother's Day

Above you see (some of) Ingela's gifts for Mothers Day 2011.
The greenhouse got finished around noon today and we celebrated it in there with a glass of bubbly.
The cake has a story of its own. Some weeks ago we were watching the Swedish version of "Master Chef" and that cake was one of tests in the semifinals and I (silly me...) opened my big mouth and said something like "that doesn't seem so complicated, I'll make you one for Mother's Day..."
Well... it's a Schwarzwald Cake (Black Forest Cake) or at least a Swedish version and it wasn't that easy...
But it was yummy anyhow although I'm certainly not anything close to a Master Chef. :)

It has been a warm and sunny day,  Ingela's mother visited us, we grilled salmon and vegetables and enjoyed my cake as a dessert.
Hope you are all well out there!

Alive and a new project

Well... blogging is not my preference no:1 nowadays but a life sign now and then won't harm I think.
The winter seems endless this year, we have had bouts of snow and outbreaks of cold lately, last Tuesday morning the temperature was down to -17 C when I left for work. A lot of ships are stuck in the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia and the icebreakers are working 24/7
But the light is back, the sun is rising a little bit more every day and we have temperatures exceeding 0 C regulary every afternoon when it's not cloudy.
The return of the sun brings inspiration and that Pete Townshend vinyl I found last month triggered me to bring out my moms old record player from the garage into the house and take a look at it as my old turntable left the  house along with Lukas last year.

The record player-tuner-amplifier combo is a HEA Stereo 3040 FM from 1974 and the interesting part is the turntable itself, a Lenco L78, made in Switzerland, built like a tank and virtually indestructable, the platter itself weighs close to 4 kg and the rubber mat close to 1 kg! There is an overdimensioned squirrel cage shielded pole motor inside, big enough to rotate a big hammer drill. The tonearm is not any top of the line SME or Decca but it is not far from those. In the headshell sits a decent cartridge from Pickering, a XV-15/625E

Said and done, I gave it a test drive some weeks ago, the turntable worked OK but the sound was unbalanced, faint and crappy.

As the amplifier specified as 2x15 Watt RMS at 8 ohm is a typical solution for the seventies it was not hard to track down the problems, some dried out electrolytic capacitors had to be changed, the idle current and voltage symmetry to be adjusted. As the final touch I changed the 6" woofers in the speaker boxes to new ones with huge magnets and converted the boxes to bass reflex boxes.

Now there is sound enough... :)

This is going to be an intermediate solution though, the Lenco L78 is going to be tweaked and tuned to perform even better and will get a new solid undercarriage and the amplifier will be disposed off and replaced with a tube amplifier, maybe a single ended class A solution 2x20w using KT 88:s or Russian GU 50:s 

When all this is going to happen is another issue...

UFO:s spotted or how I learned to clean the sensor

A while ago Ingela started to complain about some Unidentified Flying Objects that showed up in her pictures taken with the D300 every once in a while. Upon investigating the causes I found out that the cause must be dust specs on the sensor. Well not on the sensor itself, but on top of the IR and Low-Pass filter on top of the sensor.
I searched for a clean brush, put the camera in sensor cleaning mode and started sweeping the filter.
Well... I got rid of the original dust specs, but introduced a lot of new ones instead.. Aarggh!
After 30 minutes of sweeping my dust-tracking photo looked like this:

It looks terrible, doesnt' it? The picture is created by photographing an even grey surface at close distance with a zoom lens zoomed to 200 mm and manually focused to infinity and at the smallest possible aperture, in this case f: 32.

In real life, the only dust specs you can spot were the two big ones in the upper-mid part of the picture and they would start to emerge at apertures above f:11 and the smaller spots at f:16 to f:22.

Photographing could continue with some limitations like apertures below f:11, if possible, and arranging pictures so that even surfaces like walls or the sky would not coincide with the dirtiest parts.

In the meantime I ordered some cleaning equipment from here: Micro-tools in Germany (yes this stuff can be found in Finland as well, but at twice the price) and found this eminent website: www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com where one can find all the information one needs to successfully clean one's sensor.

When the stuff arrived I went to work with good confidence and after two rounds of sweeping using "the Wet Method"  my dust picture looks like this:

Great improvement indeed. The remaining dust specs seen in the picture are so small that they will hardly show up in any picture unless the aperture is smaller than f:22 and they happen to coincide with an even surface.

When I started to search for dust in the D300 I found out that the Dust Removing (shaking the filter at start and shut down) feature was shut off and has so been since we bought this camera! It is now turned on! :)

We have been suffering low temperatures for the last two weeks, but today it is slightly above zero! Yay!

Pete as a decoration piece

It seems that Ingela and I have differing views of how to use Pete Townshends album "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes"...:)

It all started last Sunday when Lukas and I went to the yearly vinyl record fair in Vasa. I was browsing through a big box of unsorted albums, 3 EUR each, when I bumped into this album in a very good condition, removing the record out of the inner sleeve I couldn't find any scratches whatsoever. To me it seemed unused. 

So I immediately bought it of course. This bargain spurred my thoughts onward to start searching for "White City" but I spent another 1 1/2 hours searching for that one without luck.

When I came home and showed the record to Ingela she immediately snatched it out of my hands, thanked me for this nice piece of decoration and installed on a shelf in her office!

Well, I must admit that it looks very good there alongside withe the quotation from "Baba O'Riley".

The inner sleeve containing the record is though stored in my collection of vinyls. :)

In the meantime we have got a lot more of this bloody white stuff we love so much... Not!

Well it makes the surroundings brighter and is rather decorative as you see. But when you have to clean your driveway repeatedly and it makes your biking rough you get tired of the stuff.

The picture is shot across the street from our kitchen window last Sunday.

And the temperature plunged down to -23 C again today.

The tealights are keeping us warm and cosy though!

Snowday

Arrggh...! This is what we woke up to this morning.

Mother nature decided to suddenly dump another 12 inches of snow upon us overnight.

No biking today. Ingela gave me a lift to work after we had worked for 1/2 hour to clear our driveway and get the car out of the garage.

Photo of our front entrance by Ingela

Our R&R son Lukas is 20 today!

He was born the very same day that George Bush Sr. launched operation Desert Storm .

Happy Birthday!

...and A Happy New Year!

Photo by Ingela

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everybody in Blogland! We installed our Christmas tree some days ago, and all the gifts are there waiting.
-26 degrees C this morning and a crisp and clear day.



My mom would have turned 90 today

My mom was born this day in 1920. She died June 21, 2009.
The society changed rapidly during her lifetime, she was born when there was no radio, no TV, the first telephones had been installed in the village, everybody walked or used horse carriage, some bicycles there were  but that was all. The boats were propelled by sails or by rowing, no electricity (the village was connected to the national grid after I was born!) the water had to be carried in, no central heating... the list of what we take for granted nowadays could be a mile long.
She saw the modern society grow into what it is today, with its' pros and cons, she saw the WW2, she saw the man walk on the moon. She saw it all...

Let me...

...introduce you to Woodrose, a new local band that has been practicing together this autumn and made their first performance in the beginning of November at a private party in a small venue not far from here.


This live version of "You Oughta Know" is one of the best I've found on the YouTube.
Er.. I may be slightly biased because my son, Lukas, is in the band, together with my prototype amplifier and 4x12 speaker cabinet... :)
He is on rhytm guitar and also alternating on vocals:

The winter is embracing Europe, we got some more snow yesterday and it was -21 C when I left for work this morning.

I am not hibernating...

...though I haven't updated my blog since September. I have just been straight out busy!
I started a greenhouse project in September as I told in my latest updates, There was a lot of old windows stored at my moms' house and I brought them here instead of scrapping them. I built a frame on a solid foundation made of 10 cm of concrete with frost insulation below and it is now standing there covered with plastic tarps, waiting for the spring to come when I will install the renovated and painted windows. Pictures of the progress below:

Then Ingela decided to throw out the old table from the living room and ordered a new one from me according to her own specifications:

For the moment I'm upgrading Ingelas computer because all this heavy blogging and picture editing is taking its toll on the old one. The new one will include an energy saving Xeon L3426 4-core Hyperthreading CPU, an energy saving graphics adapter Radeon HD5450 from ATI, 2x 500 GB silent WD Caviar Green in fail-safe RAID1 configuration, silent fans (the CPU has no fan at all...) and a silent PSU. On top of this 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate with a virtual XP to take care of old software that would not work in a 64-bit Windows 7 environment.    

In the meantime we have got an outbreak of winter here, the temperature has plunged to -8 C in the beginning of last week and at the end of this week it will go there again. 10 cm of snow on the ground.

Update:

Yes, I'm alive and well but seriously occupied for the moment. I've been excavating a part of our garden and built a foundation for a greenhouse to be completed next spring. The major ingredients in this project is a lot of old windows that were scrapped and stored in the woodshed when the house where I grew up was renovated 1967.
Take a look at Ingelas' blog of today 9.28
http://alegniinoffice.blogspot.com/2010/09/vad-hander-i-potatislandet.html

Hans

We got married 20 years ago today!

As you see, we are still very happy!
:)

Ingela is forty-something today!

Hip Hip Hooray!

Back in the salt mines...

...since last Monday. A few days at work and you feel like you need another vacation immediately!

I will round off my vacation pics here with me on top of my shed, finishing the new roof:

In Björköby there is a local museum located in an old house where you can have a look at old traditional furniture, tools and clothes etc. and in the old barn there is a motor, vehicles and machines museum showing all kinds of old boat engines, motorcycles, mopeds etc. and suddenly there, in the midst of the old boat engines, there is a manual petrol (gas) pump that once was used at the local shop. That pump, once used for two-stroke petrol, gave me some nice flashbacks of my teenage years:

 

There were two of those pumps - one for 4% mixture and one for 5%. The shop closed at 1 PM on Saturdays and one of the ladies behind the counter was a grumpy "old girl" and did not like young moped and motor cycle riders much... She had a habit of rolling in those pumps back into the storage at about 15 minutes to 1 PM and lock the doors. Of course we then showed up at 10 minutes to 1 to fill up our mopeds and motorbikes for the weekend... :D

And of course some mandatory pictures of sunsets and the rising moon:

Have a nice weekend everybody, we are going to our summer house because the weather forecast is OK and there will be faint winds so I can do a little fishing.

Our baby boy is 18 today!

Our very own entertainer and in-house loon Ian is 18 today! Congratulations and I hope you will continue to share your positive energy forever!

Dad

A piece of my radio history

This "undressed" Luxor make, model "Harmony" emerged from deep inside a junkbox today when we emptied the last part of my old home. The last part to be cleaned and emptied was my old HAM-shack, a small room in the southwest corner of the new wing that was built in 1967.

That radio was the first radio in the house and bought in 1953. AM only, no FM.

 

This is not the radio that introduced R&B and R&R in my life but it made it even more possible to sort out signals out of noise after a lot of tweaking and modifying. My first own radio was a Philips receiver from the late thirties, but I was too young to start some excessive tweaking on that radio. This one, on the other hand, was put to severe surgery and tweaking during the autumn 1965 and onward. It even served as my first real HAM-radio receiver after I got my beginners license in 1969 because the shortwave band also included the "shipping band" and the 80 m. amateur band.

Digging deeper into the junk box I found the dial that used to sit on top of the frame. If you take an extra look you will find some blue markings on the MW-part, they were there in order to enable fast look-up of the loudest offshore stations (aka Pirate-Radio stations) on the MW-band: from left: Radio 390, Radio London aka BigL, Radio Caroline North and Radio Veronica.

It looked at me and said "Plug in the earphones!" before I threw it down into the container for metal and electronic scrap at the city dump at 2:30 PM today....

Farewell old home...

I sold the place where I was born yesterday. 

In the picture above, taken in the beginning of July 1961, you can see me standing in front of the house looking at the airplane cruising back and forth over the village that day.

Hand-colored aerial b&w photos of your house and surroundings was a kind of status thing back then.

This picture has been hanging on the wall in the kitchen since then.

This is how I want to remember it. At summertime I moved into the attic into a small room that is hidden behind the porch in this picture. In the mid sixties I had strung a longwire antenna from my window in the attic to the end of the barn in order to get the best possible reception of Radio London aka "Big L", Radio Caroline and all the other offshore stations. Later on I connected a homebrew AM-transmitter to that antenna and started my own Pirate Radio. :)

The house was build by my paternal grandparents in 1912 and in the picture it is more or less in the same shape as it was back then. The tin roof was installed after WW2.

The house was later renovated and expanded, the porch was torn down and replaced with an extension of the same height and width as the rest of the house, containing a bathroom, sauna and a big hall. The house was then painted yellow.

After my mom died last year it has been empty and waiting for a new owner to take care of it and restore it to todays' standards. We have moved out and sold the most of the furniture, some pieces to remember the place by has been moved to our house and to our summer house. There is still a lot of junk to be moved to the dump and the new owner is moving in this very moment.

Yesterday I handed over the keys to the new owner and also a piece of my heart...

Bye, bye house and may your days be forever happy!

Hans

Five days in London, day 2

Hi there, It's been a while since I installed some stuff from our trip to London in April here, I have been occupied with a lot of other stuff and things to do in the meantime.

Most of the photos are shot with a tiny little Olympus FE-240, 7 MPix camera at "Everything Automatic."
Some of the pics I took with this camera are relly good after some tweaking in Photoscape

Anyway, day two started with a trip to St John's Wood where we walked down to Abbey Road to do the walk of the Beatles on their Abbey Road cover.
We were not alone there doing the same thing...

When we where finnished walking across Abbey Roead we took off to Buckingham Palace:

Exhausted by the Pomps And Circumstances we decided to take off to Notting Hill:

We rounded off the day by meeting Ingelas sister Anne and her husband Matt at Piccadilly Cicus and then going for a little scenic tour by bus.

To be continued...