Henry Hagnäs

What does success taste like?

A Bloodbath for 2010: the Smartphone market preview

Video: The Next 4 Billion with Tomi Ahonen

Reading less news, more facts

I don't do New Years resolutions because they hardly ever work and if they are good ideas you should start these projects when you get the idea and are in the mood. That said, if I made a resolution it would be to read less news and more facts this year. I actually began this project last year.

I used to have this link in my browser that opened up a massive list of different news-sites, based on the theory that if I read the news from enough sources I'd filter out some kind of objective truth about what is happening in the world. Of course this isn't what happens, most news comes from the same source anyway - the news site is just an aggregator nowadays so you should choose the one you feel will point out the news that is important to you. News are also sensational in nature so even if you know what events have occurred you won't get the whole story and no one bothers to get back to you if they are wrong or new information comes up.

Last summer, after a friend of mine extolled the virtues of "The Economist" I bought a couple of issues from the newsstand and took the time to read each issue, realizing that this was the kind of news I wanted. I wanted intelligent and non-sensational reporting about important issues but also with analysis and background. I'm now a subscriber and read every issue with care - usually it takes most of the week. That doesn't matter because the news is old anyway, the news has been chosen to be relevant even 1-2 weeks later and comes with the aforementioned analysis and background it needs.

I still want to know if something important has happened, and because of this I still read a few sites every day. I go the Helsingin Sanomat ( http://www.hs.fi ) which is our countries largest newspaper, they have a great website and good reporting. There I get finnish news and some of the most important international ones. I also skim either New York Times' website ( http://global.nytimes.com ) and/or the BBC News page ( http://news.bbc.co.uk ) for more international news. Last I go to TechMeme ( http://www.techmeme.com ) which collects the latest rumors and information in the tech and Internet-industry - mostly because that is one of my fields of interest.

That's a lot less than the nine (9!) sites that I used to skim/peruse before (BBC, HBL, Google News, NYT, Techmeme, Yle, HS, Der Spiegel and Reddit). I read the news sites by skimming instead of actually reading very many articles. Yes, I am a recovering procrastinator and information addict...

I have a few additional news flows too, I follow several twitter-feeds for both breaking news and news that become old faster or isn't important if I'm busy. I'm trying to cut down on those too because it's too easy to procrastinate and find some weird little tidbit fascinating when you should be doing something more important. Like study, or clean up your desk - like I had planned to today...
Anyway, the idea is that I want more intelligent and thoughtful news that is truly important instead of distracting pop news and also learn real things and not just little interesting tidbits. For that you need longer articles and longer deadlines for the writers. I also hope to learn more in-depth about fewer subjects so I'm not mistaken about the depth of my knowledge, its easy to read a few wikipedia-articles and think you are an expert but actually you don't even realize the depth of your ignorance.

Maybe you too could benefit from rethinking your news-reading habits?

Commercials with actual science

Randi speaks, positively, about Chemotherapy

James Randi, the Amazing Randi, magician and skeptic has recently been through a 6 month chemotherapy-treatment and would like to tell you that medicine does, in fact, improve and that chemotherapy isn't the bogeyman that it used to be. This is great news and good advice against other uninformed sources that might have you believe differently. Modern medicine works and continues to improve and I hope we will keep seeing Randi as active as ever for a long time to come!

The craft of Dice-making

Quantum of Solace

Just finished playing through the game based on the latest Bond-movie. Usually I don't make much note of the franchised games, they tend to be weird games that feel very odd (Latest Batman and Wolverine-games are said to be different too). QoS tickled my interest because a video-review (IGN I believe) said that it was based on the Call of Duty 4-engine and was surprisingly good if not a bit uneven. I found it for cheap, 12 euros, via huuto.net which is kind of like the local eBay over in Finland.

In short, the game is worth 12 euros and you too can probably find it cheap on sale or second hand. The gameplay is a slightly modified and less polished version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. There are less guns but better support for stealth attacks and hand to hand combat. You can also dodge behind cover, much like in Gears of War. The story is more Casino Royale than Quantum of Solace but thats only a good thing. The story and levels aren't as polished as COD4 but passable, some of them are uneven though. The COD4 gameplay is a lot of fun and if you are a fan of it and want new challenges the QOS should suit you. Personally I love COD4, both Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 but don't play games online so something with new maps is excellent. Took me 2 pretty long evenings to save the Bolivian's from drought, well worth the price.

Christmas travels and stories

Once again I have been out traveling around Finland. My grandmother is too old to travel so we had to come to her in Rovaniemi. Ended up traveling almost 2000 km's for Christmas:

I spent the Christmas with my own closest family, my grandmother and my brothers wife and her parents. Christmas is more of personal time when we put away our cameras but during the travels I took a bunch of pictures with my Nokia N900. Being online via 3G all (most) of the time meant I uploaded the pictures in real time and using Flickr's geotag-support could show where I was going. Friends on Twitter and Facebook in turn could comment (and make fun) of the travels. Here are the results, click on over to Flickr for the full on geotagged and mapped experience.

The pictures can be found plotted on a map here, courtesy of flickr's excellent support for geotags: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hagge/sets/72157622963535031/map/

My favorite present was not so much a present as an heirloom or inheritance:

Its my grandfather's "puukko" or actually "lapinleuku". It has been polished and sharpened at the Marttini factory so its ready for another lifetime of use. The lapinleuku is, as you can see, a large finnish knife but also an important tool in the North. As a child I sat in the car as my grandfather put a reindeer, injured in a car-crash (not ours, we stopped to help), down with this knife or a knife like it. It, and other knives like it (which my brother and sister got), have been his trusted companions in the wild when fishing and hunting in his beloved Lapland.

Pictures from my trip to Oslo

Finally getting around to post this, I spent a long first weekend of december in Oslo, Norway, visiting one of my very best friends. The weather wasn't the best but the trip was awesome nonetheless because it was more social in nature and I've seen Oslo before in a better light.

Here are some pictures taken during the trip, click to go to my flickr-page where I have described the pictures more in detail and commented on the stuff:

Pictures from a previous and much more sunny visit are also on flickr, here: