as our next holiday will involve some hiking, we thought it would be a good training to do some hiking. also we could test our shoes and see how good they fit and if we get blisters. so why not hike in tyrol, like... the gratlspitz, for example. a nice three hour hike, there and back. and so we started our ramble with nina's dad at a small car park near the "holzalm". it was a pretty hot day, with lots of sunshine. so i was rather happy when the track went through a cool wood, because with all the heavy camera equipment, it gets pretty strenuous after some time. the ascend to the cross on the summit took as a little more than one and a half hours, but we made it and so far we were pretty good, only my right heel hurt, getting rubbed raw in the shoe. on the summit nina's dad suddenly said he had to leave to run some errands, and he will take the path we came from, because it is the fastest one. but for the scenic tour he recommended a different path to us. so he gave us instructions how to go and where to take turns; all easy, all good, very simple. just that it was not simple, not good, and not easy. turns out nina's dad was pretty wrong, his instructions were misleading, and his estimation how long it will take us to get to the holzalm again were also a long way off. two and a half hours later, as opposed to the given estimation by nina's dad of one and a half hour, we arrived at the rendezvous, very tired, very thirsty, very hungry (and a bit angry). my heel was chafed pretty bad by the time we arrived. luckily at the holzalm we could rest, drink and have a delicious escalope. so we found out two things today: firstly, i need other shoes. i think i will get some good proper hiking shoes, and secondly, never trust nina's father when he gives any estimation.

i bought myself a new mobile phone, to replace my good four-year-old "sony ericsson xperia pro" (the one with the great slide out keyboard). i chose to buy the "samsung galaxy s5 mini". first thing of course was to get rid of samsung's touchwiz and the super bloated rom with all the (for me) useless pre-installed and on-boot-launched stuff i will never ever need. i really enjoyed the clean cyanogenmod i had installed on my old phone - and that is what i wanted for the new phone too. but it turned out there is no easy way to install it as there is not even a stable release for my phone. but, fortunately there is an unofficial cm-12.1 build for the "kminilte", which is cyanogenmod's build name for my phone. lots of thanks go out to "hennymcc", who did the work on this release. it was also his howto that i followed to get my phone the shiny new android operating system called "lollipop". unfortunately the instructions did not work out of the box for me (oh, surprise). when trying to flash the recovery image, i always got this message: turned out, using twrp-recovery with a special kminilte-build, as described in this howto from "techbeasts", provided the correct way and recovery image ("twrp_kminilte-build3.tar") to get it working for me - hooray. happy, happy me. but some things still had to be fixed, like mounting the external sdcard in read-write mode to store data there. so i used the adb shell to remount "/system" via great thing is, cyanogenmod 12.1 comes preinstalled with a "vim" editor, so it was a pleasantly easy thing to add the line with the "sdcard_rw" gid to "/system/etc/permission/platform.xml" with my editor of choice. so the final content for the "WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" permissions was after a reboot, my phone was able to write to the external sd-card. wonderful. another thing that does not work for me, was to encrypt "/data". maybe i will be able to fix that soon, or maybe it simply is just broken in the unofficial build i used. another thing i also would have loved to use was the fingerprint scanner without storing information in some big company's cloud storage, as samsung might have done that with the touchwiz implementation of the scanner. or maybe not. who knows what they really store. so far i am really happy, yet i miss the slide out keyboard, which was really an awesome feature of my old xperia pro. but the galaxy s5 mini has gorilla-glass and is IP67 certified, which means it is dust- ("dust tight") and waterproof ("immersion up to one metre for at least 30 minutes"), which actually should make it a good outdoor phone too. good bye, good old xperia pro, welcome new galaxy s5 mini.