I’ve been driving around in the car of my dreams since November now, a beautiful red Tesla Model S. But driving electric presents some challenges, at least until the infrastructure gets to a point where you don’t have to think about where to charge anymore. One of the ultimate tests for us was if we could use the car to get to our cabin in the mountains, at Skramstadsætra, and back, without any major problems. Last weekend we finally put the car to the test!

So, why was this a challenge? Well, first of all, the distance from our house to where we park the car in the mountain near our cabin is 187km. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? The stated range of the Model S is 480km, although we all know that’s under pretty optimal conditions. But so far, it doesn’t sound like much of a challenge at all. But then consider this: we have no way to charge the car up there. The parking lot does not have any electrical power. Our cabin does not have electrical power (and is also about a 30min trip on skis from the parking lot during winter). Actually, there are no available chargers anywhere in the area. Ok, so, fine, that just means we have to make the roundtrip on a single charge. 187*2 = 374, which is still well within the stated range, so all should be fine, right? Next detail: we’re in Norway. Norway isn’t exactly flat. So it’s not just the last part of going up the hill to the parking lot that is going to put a strain on the battery, it’s the entire trip of basically going up and down mostly all the time.

Well, challenge set! So we charged up the battery to 100%. The typical range when we started our trip was 396km (which was, kind of disappointingly, lower than we had expected, but this range calculation might be influenced by our daily driving, I’m not sure). We put the car in range mode to save some energy on the climate control (although the car still kept a good climate) and set off. Luckily, our skis fit inside the car, so no range would be lost to having to mount a roof rack

On our way there, we didn’t really think all that much about economizing energy. We felt pretty confident that we would be able to get far enough back towards Oslo that we would be able to reach a charger if need be. But we still drove far more economically than usual, not pushing the car’s limits on the highway, and trying to flow with the terrain and not speed past slow going cars. The last bit up the hill of course sucked a lot of range from the battery, but we figured we might recover some of that going back down again. The verdict when we parked the car: 198km of range left. Ok, so we had used pretty much exactly half of it. Confident that it would not be a problem getting back, we put the car in energy saving mode (hoping it wouldn’t consume much energy just standing there), took our skis and went up to the cabin.

There was quite a lot of snow up there!

Two days later, before heading back to the car, we checked the app and were disappointed to see that two days parked in not very cold, but still sub zero temperatures at night had decreased the range to 175km. We debated pre-heating the car to get the battery warmed up and thus be able to regenerate more on the way down, but we weren’t sure if it would be worth it overall, so we didn’t. Instead we noted the address of the nearest chargers compatible with the Model S, one 142km away, and one 166km away (yes, we really were in a charger desert. There is one closer, at 43km away, but that is Chademo, which there isn’t an adapter for yet). As we started going down the hill, with almost no regenerative capabilities, we were lacking 9km of range to get home. However, we decided to make it a challenge and try to get home without having to recharge. We set the navigation to our home address so we could keep track of the distance left and compare that to the estimated range left, and started slowly going down the hill in order to regenerate as much as possible with a cold battery. To our surprise, as we were nearing the bottom of the hill, the range had actually gone up to 180km, possibly due to a warmer battery recuperating some energy. So in a very short time, the range and the distance left to travel was getting closer to each other. Once on the main road we just kept to the speed limit, which was going to be between 60km/h and 80km/h for the most part until we reached the highway nearer to Oslo. We had tried the cruise control for a bit going the other way, but quickly decided that I was doing a better job at conserving energy

We took great pleasure in seeing that the difference between the range left and the distance left kept increasing, and started to really believe we wouldn’t have to stop to recharge. But we also knew that once we reached the highway, we would have to go below the speed limit of 100km/h to be sure to reach all the way. Since we also live on a hill in Oslo, we needed some slack to get all the way there too

On the highway we found a truck that was doing an average speed of about 90km/h and decided to just stick behind it (at a safe distance of course). It was a bit painful to be in a sports car and not zip by trucks and other slow-going cars, and even more painful to be passed by another Model S, but it was also fun to see that we were succeeding in our challenge.

The result? We parked the car with 44km of range left! The roundtrip on one charge was a success. The car passed the test We never felt any of this infamous range anxiety, we only felt more and more confidence that the car was up to the challenge, and it wasn’t like we had to drive super slowly either. Just a little bit under the speed limit on the highway. We also never turned off the heating, or the internet radio or anything else. In overall lost time on a 2 hour trip, it was probably 10 minutes, much less than we would have had to stop for a charge if we had been going faster. Average energy used for the entire trip was 167 Wh/km, although it was significantly less for the return trip only. The average for the last 50km said 140 Wh/km when we parked. Plus, the car is such a breeze to drive, whether I’m treating it as a sports car, or an electrical car in need of range conserving gentle handling. I love my car

One particular feature of Sailfish is the use of ambiences. Now, the thing about these ambiences is that they have rather peculiar dimensions, compared to what you’d normally set as a wallpaper on your phone. In fact, the ambience has to be 540×1600 pixels. Not a lot of wallpapers out there with that dimension now, are there? The factory ambiences that were installed on the phone are nice, but kind of boring. I haven’t found anything else interesting out there either, it’s all mostly abstract pictures/art. Time for something more geeky!

So here it is, my home-made Super Mario ambience for Jolla. I just downloaded an almost empty background image from New Super Mario Bros (I think it’s from the Wii version…), stretched the sky a bit and added some underground (to reach the 1600 pixels high, and make the main image be visible on the lock screen). Then I found some other elements (beanstalk, Mario, enemies, coins) to put in there and placed them around to create a nice little scene.  What I like most about this now is that you can only see the Star coin when pulling down the top menu. If you like Mario and want a fun ambience for your Jolla, feel free to download this one. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I’m in no way a photoshop guru (actually, it’s made with Gimp). And yes, there may be some scaling of certain elements that is off. Still, it looks good on the phone

Turns out installing a compatible VLC was a bit harder than expected. Of course, everything is usually a bit harder than expected when you run Gentoo Linux. After many reinstalls of different versions of VLC and gradually adding more USE flags, I finally found a combination that worked. Apparently, Knots uses a telnet interface in VLC that they have abandoned. In VLC 1.1.x it was still available with the format “oldtelnet” (which Knots supported using if configured to use with VLC 1.1.x), but no such luck with VLC 2.x. Maybe it’s still in there, I don’t know, but it must be under a different name if it is. So, in the unlikely event that somebody else out there is trying to use Knots in Gentoo Linux and is struggling with this, here is the final VLC install:
media-video/vlc-1.1.13 USE="X ffmpeg gcrypt httpd lua mmx mp3 ncurses ogg qt4 sqlite sse theora vlm vorbis xcb xml"
The USE flags of note here that I had to add for it to work are httpd, lua, xml and vlm.

After that, it was just a matter of getting my phone on the correct WLAN (for some reason, it kept choosing the one named “linksys” belonging to a neighbour :P), and turn off the silent profile on the phone (for some reason, Knots didn’t make i single sound when the phone was in the silent profile, even though the inbuilt music player couldn’t care less about that, oh well. Just caused me some confusion). I should maybe note, however, that even though Knots worked fine, it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. A few features I missed were the possibility to just add everything to the playlist, and then shuffle said playlist. I had to settle for either the “random” feature, which just selected a (not very large) number of songs randomly from the library, or add some songs matching a search to a playlist, but then they couldn’t be shuffled. I just ended up using the “random” feature, and just go and select a new set of random songs every time it stopped.

Nokia are putting large emphasis on the swiping motion that is central to the navigation in this phone. The specs are also quite good, and seeing this device has kept me drooling over images, videos and specs all day. I’m afraid that the wait will be long though, since they have not given a release date yet.

So why am I drooling over this? Isn’t Meego dying? Is it too little too late? I don’t think so. Meego is definitely not dying, but there is some uncertainty about the future of Meego in phones. Nokia’s partnering with Microsoft, and the lack of support from other phone manufacturers is of concern, but I believe that if this phone sells well, then the future of Meego as a smartphone OS, and not just a neetbook/tablet/infotainment OS will be bright. And I think this phone can sell well. I mean, look at it, it’s gorgeous! And after seeing this, I don’t care how many windows phones Nokia are going to make a year, as long as they release a powerful beauty like this with Meego every other year or so And hopefully, other phone manufacturers will come along too, making Meego a strong competitor to Android.

Oh, and engadget has a number of nice videos to check out.

But I’m not sure I dear to get my hopes up until there’s an actual official statement about this.

After seeing the price point of the 3DS, I decided to wait until it either dropped in price or someone gave it to me for my birthday (or christmas). However, when I saw it at Manchester airport for £150, I just couldn’t help myself (that’s the equivalent of approximately 40-50% discount compared to norwegian prices!).  I have yet to purchase any 3D games, but there are plenty of places where you can test the 3D effects on the 3DS without plugging in any games. So what’s the verdict? Well, there’s no doubt it works. I can clearly see the 3D effect. However, it does hurt my eyes. I haven’t gone to see any recent 3D movies, so I can’t compare it to that, but I have difficulty seeing myself using the 3D effect for long periods at a time. Luckily, it can be turned off. And the slider for adjusting the 3D effects works well, at the lowest setting, my eyes don’t hurt as much as at the highest setting I’ll come back with more insight after actually trying some games. But for now, I’ll just take my 3DS around to see if some Miis come to visit me Oh, and btw, WPA2 works! Hooray! (No, I don’t own a DSi, I’m upgrading from a DS Lite).