In Hardware: pre-announcing my iPhone 5s review

In the words of someone at Apple: Never pre-announce anything not yet here. But it will be here soonish and I will write about it.

Most excited about:

1. The camera
2. The camera
3. Did I mention... the camera?
4. Also the speed of it will be a nice improvement over my current model (4 ouch!)

My number one use case for the iPhone is definitely reading, followed by shooting pictures, and then writing. I'm sure that reading will be an improvement with a bigger screen. I know the camera will be and I'm very excited about the low-light performance. I don't know about it being better for writing, simply because I find it very uncomfortable to write on the bigger iPad screen. So we will see about the later.

In any case very excited!

In Food: Have a burger at Sävel in Helsinki, Finland

In short: good, friendly service, order at the bar, British pub vibe, great sekection of ales and beer, with recommendations for every meal on the menu, and the burgers have just the right mix of substance and sogginess, accompanied by done seriously hot chillie fries. A good place for a simply good burger in Heldinki! Check out their site here: http://www.kallionsavel.fi/

In Food: Sfäär Restaurant in Tallinn, Estonia

Don't miss this one (http://www.sfaar.ee/) if you're there! I think it's actually in some ways a better restaurant than Chef & Sommelier in Helsinki (my review: http://favourits.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-food-chef-sommelier-in-helsinki.html?m=0), but also a fitting complement to it.  Yesterday, we ate white fish & paste made out of Jerusalem artichoke, and another paste made out of carrots and (perhaps) honey, which was amazing and very similar to a course served at C & S, as well as another dish consisting of pork, gratin, and baked apple in a delicious plum sauce. All noted for inspired future home cooking! 

Truth be told, C & S served all excellent courses, and his just happened to be a competing one, but if you, like us, go to both Helsinki & Tallinn on your trip, don't miss visiting both restaurants. 

In Places: Fabian Hotel in Helsinki, Finland

I'm going to expand my reviews to hotels as well, as they play an important role in my appreciation of places. This is the latest one, but I'll also try to add past nice ones in Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon, Portugal, that I stayed at. Today, Hotel Fabian (http://m.hotelfabian.fi/en/index.html).

Location: the hotel is a little off centre, but everything in Helsinki is walking distance. Cab ride to the bus station the next morning was about 15 euro. 

Service: very friendly, they helped us with navigating the airco in the room, booked our restaurant, and were all smiles. 

Room: roomy, comfortable matras, quiet (On the 4th floor and ignoring the stormy weather), good bathroom facilities, free wifi. 

Breakfast: according my French girlfriend, the breakfast was the best of all hotels so far. I wouldn't go that far, but it was all organic, ranged from lots of cheeses, charcuterie, and salmon to choose from, to plenty of sweet options, from croissants and cakes to fruit salads and different types of cereal. The smoothies and coffees to go were a nice surprise. 

Clearly, my passion lies with food, which I don't choose at every hotel as an option, but in terms of overal comfort I would give this hotel an 8/10. 

In Food: Chef & Sommelier Restaurant in Helsinki, Finland

I like restaurants where the menu consists solely of individual ingredients and you don't quite know the outcome. Typically someone (skilled) comes up to you and says: "I got these two ingredients and I will use them to make something special for you." That's what C & S (http://chefetsommelier.fi/en/) was like. 

The four-course menu, which can also be three- to nine-course was selected from a handwritten menu and was presented in a two-ingredient format. I won't bother recounting the exact ingredients, except that it was predominantly root-based, fitting the autum season. They change the menu every 8 weeks, but it wouldn't surprise me that if I came back tomorrow, my two-ingredient dish would look and taste different. It's the mystery that I love, along with the unique combinations, and the excellent service, without it feeling to rigid or posh. 

I will mention one dish though that was entirely special, because it was a traditional dish assembled from entirely different ingredients. It resembled pasta with parmeggiano, but it was arctic turnip rasped into a thick pasta shape, cooked, and sprinkled with sage. Rich in flavours and very, very good (I wish I could reproduce it at home, but like my lobster cappuccino in Iceland (review: http://favourits.blogspot.com/2013/09/in-food-lobster-cappuccino-at-fririk-v.html?m=0) I probably never will...).

Great place to visit in Finland!

In Web: Could you escape a little planet?

File this XKCD research under valuable information for explaining kids the difference between The Little Prince and real life (hint: there is none):

"The escape velocity at the surface would be about 5 meters per second. That's slower than a sprint, but still pretty fast. As a rule of thumb, if you can't dunk a basketball, you wouldn't be able to escape by jumping straight up."

In Food: Leek - Sesame Soup at Gartine, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Ok, Gartine is probably my favourite place in the Netherlands right now, let alone Amsterdam. Amazing, delicate brunch, amazing, delicious high-tea, best jam that you can buy all around. Today, I had a Leek - Sesame soup for high tea, which was … too die for. It had a creamy texture with very subtle green flavours. 

So, I tried to replicate it. It wasn't a success, in the sense of it being the same, but for an experiment, it was still pretty good. Here's my recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 leeks, the white and light green parts washed & chopped
• about 4 large potatoes
• a thumb of ginger (you can omit this, it's too strong a flavour)
• 4 cloves of garlic
• slightly more than a teaspoon of dill
• (lemon) salt & pepper
• vegetable bouillon about 2 cups
• ca. 1/5 cup (2 table spoons) of sesame seeds
• half a cup of cream - semi-skimmed
• a table spoon of mustard

Steps:

1. I started with frying the leeks in the pan, for about 2 min, or until they turned very slightly brown
2. I then added the potatoes, (skip the) ginger, garlic, dill, salt, pepper, and bouillon.
3. Let the whole thing simmer for ca. 20 min or until the potato is tender enough
4. After 20 min, add the sesame seeds and cream (I actually fried the sesame seeds just prior to this, without oil, in a pan)
5. I added the mustard for flavour
6. Food process the whole thing, but not too strong, make it rough in texture.

Voila. It was delicious, would've been better without the ginger, but I'm happy with the attempt. PS, did I mention that you should visit Gartine? :)

In Software: Moves for iOS & Android (FREE, but it's not all good)

"The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You." ~ Chase Jarvis

I think that most of us smartphone owners probably heard that saying somewhere. Smartphones are amazing devices, whose computing power parallels the ones that made the second Star Wars trilogy, and cameras that are getting, to some extent, closer to professional cameras. But there is another trend that we need to bite into with these devices, the health and fitness market. We humans do not move enough. We sit too much for 8 hours a day and probably mornings and evenings too.

Smartphones have the advantage that they are always with you. Yes, you can buy Nike+ devices to attach to your shoes (...), various wristbands, and belt attachments, but the smartphone, our music player and Facebook crack all in one, is usually always there.

And so is Moves, which has been on iOS for some time now and was recently released on Android. Moves is free (I never get these business models) and tracks every kind of movement you make, as long as it's horizontal and not vertical (my climbing is not counted).

It comes with a number of features:

• it tracks running, biking, walking, and (public) transport (it's occasionally tricked by roller blading as public transport as well...)
• it uses Maps, which means that you can tell it when a destination was the gym (good!) or the McDonalds (bad!)
• it can show you distance, time, and calories burned
• it can send you daily, weekly, and monthly (?) notifications about how well you did, including new records
• I believe that it plugs in with other apps, which must be its business model, but I don't use them...

It just has one caveat, which is the new automatic updates on iOS 7. Because when you update Moves, it turns itself off. So you need to start the app again. But how do you know that Moves has been updated? You don't really, which is why I asked the developers to create custom notifications and/or just send me an email if the app is updated. Still awaiting that answer which is caveat 2: customer service must always be responsive, else it alienates users. So please join me in waking Moves up about this issue!

All that said, incredibly useful if you want to know how much you bike every day, how much you walked on your city trip, how much you ran on your weekly run, etc. It is your companion for Movement!

In Movies: Elysium

What I liked about this movie:
It was reminiscent of Neill Blomkamp's earlier movie, District 9, which was one of my favourite movies in 2009. Elements that were shared were the look of the technology, the darkness & chaos, which Blomkamp seems to be attracted to or inspired by. I also loved the character of Sharlto Copley, South African actor that has a Mad Max vibe to him in this movie. Well, the whole movie has a strong Mad Max vibe to it... Visually, another good note were the contrasts between Earth and Elysium, albeit it felt very 2-dimensional, there was not much subtlety to these differences.

I liked both the action, the comedy, and the flow of the story, which kept me engaged throughout, more so than Pacific Rim did for instance.

What I disliked (SPOILERS):
As noted, the 2-dimensionality was a bit problem, I thought. This was prevalent both for the characters and their motivations, and the overarching issues and reasons for why they existed. Unanswered questions include:

• Why did Elysium exist and why were they segregated from Earth?
• What were the reasons for Jodie Foster's character to stage the coup? There was some indication about her wanting to protect her family/way of life, but also just a psycho attitude to things.
• Just the general origin part of things was lacking.

Regarding origin, you can perhaps argue that this is just Neill Blomkamp's style; he didn't present much of an origin for the aliens in District 9, it felt more like a slice out of life / the madness. I remember feeling like I really wanted a sequel out of District 9, and for this one I could use a prequel or director's cut with more insight. 

Overall:

I like Science Fiction and consider this one B+ category in this genre. SciFi is about presenting a future scenario, an alternative scenario, or a logic to it. Arguably that last part is optional; if all things were easy, we'd behaving flying cars and reporting ourselves into space stations left and right...

In Movies: Pacific Rim

This movie is a slightly lesser guilty pleasure than watching the Fast & Furious series (I'm only watching it for the cars...). There are so many fun, visual elements to it, accompanied by a plot that feels quite light, maybe purposefully to let the story flow more freely.

Visually, there are so many influences that shine through. From whatever inspired the monsters--a combination of Godzilla and Alien perhaps--to the remote controlled robots--power rangers, very Japanese in any case :) ?--to the scenery--very Blade Runnerish, which is one of my favourite movies of all time.

I did not find the plot particularly captivating, but I loved the visuals, seeing scenes that looked straight out of Blade Runner, and found the characters somewhat deeper than they could've been. There is some corniness there--it sometimes felt like he had to make situations and people complex just to perhaps make us feel more connected to the characters.

I think that it's particularly challenging to have the human element compete with giant robots and monsters. But the movie achieved just that. I felt connected to the characters, I felt the romance, the pain, the competition throughout. While I can't stress enough that the plot was my least favourite element, as a whole this movie flowed just right and kept me engaged.

Well worth a watch, for Guillermo Del Toro fans, lovers of Blade Runner, lovers of oversized robots fighting oversized beasts from hell, for those that like dystopian science fiction, etc..

In TV shows: The Brilliance of Breaking Bad

So I'm here to talk about what makes Breaking Bad great, which is hard to put into words. I can easily say that the final episode was satisfying. I'm not left to wonder about loose ends, we know where we stand in regards to Walt, Skyler, Jesse, Saul, etc. We even know where we stand in terms of Heisenberg, which was quite an accomplishment. If you compare this to the Wire, another crime show, the ending was less satisfying because it's all a game that happens over and over again. There's only one Heisenberg.

But what was it that made the storyline work throughout these 5 seasons? Was it the acting, the story lines, the emotional touch stones? This show struggled at the beginning, but it got great during season 3, when Heisenberg became associated with Gus Fring and any clever plots Walter White came up with before to get out of trouble, just went into overdrive. The show got exciting then, because the incredible dangers the characters dealt with, because of the money that Heisenberg was making and the effect this had on his personal life. We had a love-hate relationship with it all, much like you have with an addictive drug.

Season 4 was pure drama and chaos and it was entirely amazing. Season 5 was Breaking Bad's version of winding down the story, which from as high as Heisenberg rose, was of course a very dramatic way to close story lines off.

Without giving away spoilers, the finale zipped it all up in a neat body bag and left me entirely satisfied with closing that chapter of my life. I don't need to see more Breaking Bad, but I'm sure glad to have spent time watching it.

In Movies: Blue Jasmine

I can't say that I loved this movie, but I certainly appreciate the skill of the director and the actors. I especially liked the moral of the story, which is a mix of.... HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE? IF SO, READ ON, IF NOT, DON'T. 

... A mix centered around webs of lies and how different people survive by them. Jasmine, clinging onto her past. Baldwin's character, to take advantage of others and Jasmine. Jasmine's sister, because of her self-confidence. Baldwin, aka M. (I can't spoil that), tells the greatest lies of them all, measured by their impact. Jasmine's sister is the opposite, hers are white lies to make her reality work for her. Jasmine makes me wonder if lies are a type of disease.

So, perhaps no wonder that I didn't love this movie. It is, like many good movies, something to watch only once and perhaps take a lesson from it. It had a strong impact, that's why it's here.

In Food: Flan di Zucca (Pumpkin Flan) at La Zucca Restaurant in Venice,Italy

This is an incredibly hard dish to make. The most difficult is the texture--this is my perhaps 7th attempt at making it and I got it wrong two times.

Tip 1: Don't use the food processor before cooking it. You can ruin the texture and taste by doing that. Tonight's version looked like scrambled eggs. At other times, because the pieces of pumpkin I chop are too large, before I mash it with a fork, the outcome is more of a post-bombardment-like flattened mess, though it does taste a LOT better!

Tip 2: Spicing. So far, I think you can make it with either nutmeg & mint, or with anise. Either however has drastically different flavouring outcomes. 

The biggest deal is the uncertainty, caused by the many Italian interpretations of this recipe out there, and the many possible Google translate errors causing you to mistake butter of cream or nutmeg for youdontwanttoknow...

So, why is this one of my favourites? It's simply an amazing texture and taste (when you get it right). I would recommend using this recipe, which uses nutmeg & mint, but perhaps switching it up with anise if you want a different flavour (though I wouldn't recommend food processing it before).

It's never going to look as good as what I had in Venice, I would definitely recommend visiting the La Zucca Restaurant for the authentic taste, not to mention all the other vegetarian food they make.