I fell in love with chrome cast a year or so ago... after having spent almost two decades trying to build a "digital stereo system" (followed by a HTPC system, followed by a media center...). Chromecast has the benefit of "just working" without any hands on required. But it has some snags. So to try to remedy them I got myself a Nexus Player. And here are some quick reflections after having owned a Nexus Player for a month or two...

When I was a child I received an amazing Lego Technics set http://brickset.com/sets/8860-1. It instantly became my favourite toy above all others. But in the instructions booklet there was another... bigger... cooler... more awesome... which became the dream...

Yaay! The blog is finally (after presumably months of disarray) back online. I got fed up with wordpress and rewriting headaches so I swapped to something which does not reply on rewrite rules, php or similar old technologies. Now I am using Pelican which is a static blog generator.

It is pretty nice and I really like making things "for real" where as before you almost had to rely on some fancy theme to get your layout. Now pelican is not without its issues and it is absolutely not a convenient platform as the runtime requires a bit of tinkering to get up. And more importantly editing an article is pretty tedious as you need to find the file open it in notepad and then regenerate the entire site.

This years birthday cake was a Hello Kitty inspired cake (not licensed by Sanrio). It turned our rather nice and I though it was time to summarize the cakes we have done thus far through out the years. The whole cake obsession started for Evelinas first birthday where we did a three story strawberry cake.

Might sounds like a strange title since Vietnam is by no means a part of China but we decided to take a vacation from our vacation and head over to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. The first part of this trip has already been chronicled in the first trip report: Trip to China: Dong Xing, Part 1 <http://www.medin.name/blog/2013/03/14/trip-to-china-dong-xing-part-1/> and later parts will be published in a bit.

This will be a rather lengthy post about my travels in China. I was planning to blog regularly whilst in China but the internet situation made that difficult (also I was on vacation and being lazy). This first edition is about the first week or so we spent in DongXing before heading down into Vietnam and onward to Shenzhen which will come in the later editions.

Sometimes I am actually not working with my computer. Usually this happens during summer when I am having what other people call vacation. This year I spent parts of the summer helping my mother fix up her house.

I have been quite for a few weeks, and that is not just because I have been lazy. No in fact I have been extremely busy and will probably be for the foreseeable future. But I shall try to squeeze out some time to write the odd blog post in the new few weeks at least. So why have I been busy you ask?

I moved all my photos over to my Synology NAS (which I really enjoy) just to discover that it would take months to index all photos. So I started to look for options and while most people managed to increase the speed a bit by reducing the quality of the thumbnails I figured why not utilize some of the CPU power I have at home?

So I ended up using my Linux box to do the thumbnailing for me instead which reduced the time to thumbnail 30.000 photos down to hours.