Status 2024-02-25

Since it's been a school holiday P and I took the week off from work and travelled a little with #3.

We just got back from a tour of Hälsingland in the southern part of Northern Sweden. We went by train to Ljusdal, spent a few days at the only hotel available, then to Hudiksvall by bus and a few more days at another hotel. Then the train back to Malmö.

We went from 9C and spring flowers in Malmö to -16C and snow in just 8 hours on a train. We travelled almost straight north at 200 km/h almost the entire time, so I guess that explains it.

The Stadshotellet Ljusdal hotel doesn't even have HTTPS on their web page and it doesn't look very updated but they're still very much open. The adjoining Janus Bistro & Lounge has the same problem but is also open. And very popular, at least on a Saturday night!

The chefs at Janus very kindly made a special order for me even on a busy Saturday night! It was so nice that we visited again later.

A lot of people were dressed to eleven, especially the ladies, so I guess this is where it happens in Ljusdal. I'm glad I at least changed into a shirt. I stayed around for a while after dinner just people watching while nursing a Lagavulin.

Another day we visited La Banca Deli & Winebar with my dad. They had even better food, but we were kind of late and had to rush the meal quite a lot. They seemed to a have a very well stocked wine cellar. Not the kind of place I would have expected in Ljusdal.

I had to ask about it but the hotel has a sauna and they will turn it on for you if you ask about it. Not very well kept, but it's a sauna!

In Hudiksvall we lived at Quality Hotel Statt, incidentally the same place where I attended my very first ball. I guess that entire event would be nice to write about some other time. The sauna at Statt was much better. They even had a small pool! I don't really get the point of such a small pool, but there it was.

We had a wonderful meal at the new Modisten 4 restaurant in Hudiksvall. Several vegan and soy free items on the menu! I got a very well-made Old Fashioned, too. This place was also full of well dressed women. Men were a tiny minority. Very odd.

While visiting dad's I got to browse a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. I found some surprises, like me at 14 answering questions in a local newspaper about the school holiday we just celebrated (Sportlovet, literally "the sports holiday", which is on different weeks in different parts of the country.):

I say that I don't mind what week the holiday is held. If it's too cold I could always ski at the Easter holiday instead and spend this holiday watching cable TV. What I didn't say is that I was mostly glued to my computer anyway. I guess I didn't want to come across as too much of a nerd in the local paper. Ha! Too late!

The context is the Ericsson factory in Delsbo which closed down in 1985. It made traditional telephone switches but was closed when the computer-controlled AXE switch which was built in another factory took over as the Ericsson switch product.

Here's a desk from an office in the factory:

I know those terminals from my summer jobs at Ericsson Cables in Hudiksvall. They had this terrible function that mechanically locked the keyboard when the mainframe didn't accept your input.

There's an interesting project trying to revive an Alfaskop terminal and connect it to the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator:

https://github.com/MattisLind/alfaskop_emu/

For nostalgic reasons I visited the Hudiksvall city library. The librarians used to know me well. They were usually friendly and often helped me get interlibrary loans from strange places, like the State telecom company's R&D library or university libraries.

It doesn't seem the computer literature has grown much, if at all, since my days. This is the complete collectiion:

I was quite surprised to find Tord Jöran Hallberg's IT-gryning, a book about the Swedish computer history! I've corresponded with Tord Jöran and a bunch of other old men with technical questions about the Datasaab computers. Sadly he's gone now, as are many of the others I used to keep in touch with.

I installed the router I bought in dad's flat. Luckily the ISP had installed the media converter, so it was just a matter of plugging it in, associate something with the wifi and check that it worked. And it did on the first try!

Spent two days installing apps, transferring stuff from the Android phone and showing and explaining the iPad and the web to dad. He asked interested and good questions, like what the difference between an app and a web site is. Sometimes there isn't really much of a difference (think PWA), so it's a very good question.

The mouse I bought turned out to be very confusing, even to me, so that returned with me.

The Satechi X1 keyboard seemed to work fine, even for dad's old fingers. Even the touch screen worked better than on the old Android! The Android phone wouldn't recognize his fingers at all. Even with the better touch sensors it's still easier with a stylus.

We never figured out how to pair his hearing aid. Of course neither of us knew anything about the model of the hearing aid and there was no manual.

A strange thing was that we tried a audio call with Signal but he couldn't hear me very well. I, on the other hand, could hear myself quite well from two rooms away with closed doors! I guess getting him some headphones might help, but strangely he could hear the voices on a streaming app quite well!

The built-in Tips app and the User Guide in the iPad is decent but could have better navigation and better guidance for something totally new to the iPad and most electronic gadgets.

The home button was big enough but the sleep/on-off button wasn't, so it was a little hard to actually turn on and off the iPad. He's leaving it on most of the time. Let's see what happens to the battery.

I'm still not sure I did the right thing with the Dad Computer turning into an iPad, but what are the realistic options?