What I have been doing for the past few months
Getting engaged, launching a web app, and a trip over Jostedalsbreen
Hi everyone,
Vacation time. Next week I will be hanging out with my youthhood friend Jonas and his girlfriend Lovisa, who is coming to Trondheim for the first time. The plan is to show them around town for a few days and then travel down towards Jotunheimen.
You see, where me and Jonas come from, it is a very flat landscape. I come from an industrial harbor city called Oskarshamn, in south east Sweden. It is surrounded by forest on the west side and sea on the east. My summer memories are always warm and sunny, mostly about bathing and playing with friends near the sea, jumping, throwing balls, and having a good time.
The first time I come to Norway, in 2012, I was awed by the wild nature. Me and my friend Anna drove from sweden up to northern Norway, and we were met with huge rivers, deep valleys and high mountains that crashed steeply into the sea. The roads were small and they curved and bowed to the terrain rather than just going through it. And the sun just never set.
We spent two weeks, visiting Tromsø and Lofoten, experiencing something totally new.
It was wild. And beautiful. Norway is so different from where I come from, like a different world.
I hope Jonas and Lovisa will have the same experience driving through Norway in the next few weeks.
Anyways.
Some of the things I’ve done since the last newsletter:
Gotten engaged with Vanja! I am so happy to have her in my life. Although I am not religious, I like the symbolic meaning behind getting married. It is a promise that we are in this thing together, and that we will deal with the good and bad of life together.
Launched a small webapp where you can calculate how much you can loan when buying your first residence. I posted about it on Reddit/r/Norge(LINK) and got 1700 visits and about 60 comments, which was really cool. The feedback was mixed, and the app have some flaws which I haven’t fixed yet.
I walked over Jostedalsbreen (“Jostedals Glacier”) with Vanja, Henrik and Ingrid on skis. A short summary: painfully heavy packs getting up and down the glacier, lots of mist and navigation with compass and GPS (fun), amazing scenery (the few times we saw it), and good company. The mountains in the west are large, steep and overbearing, and reminds oneself of our contrasting ephemeral existence. A really cool experience. I am currently writing a trip report on this that I will publish later.
Started a new project I currently call “Taulag”. The idea is an app that makes it easy to find other people for trips and outdoor activities such as climbing, skiing, hiking, and running. Kind of a posting board where you can make a post about what, where and when you want to go and do something. You can then browse these posts, filtering for different types of activities or locations. The reasoning behind this project is that right now most people use facebook groups for this, and these can be hard to find and use spontaneously if you are just travelling through an area or if you just want to explore different opportunities all over Norway. Also, having just one place to explore adventure opportunities with other people instead of relying on a buch of different facebook groups seems like a good idea. Sounds interesting? Let me know in the comments if this is something you would actually use. Also let me know if this is a stupid idea.
Renovating the house. Things are falling into place and we are seeing the finish line.
A small trip to Sylan, on the Swedish side, with Vanja and Martin.
At work I have been diving into the low-level world of the stm32 embedded platform and the industrual Ethernet protocol 10Base-T1L. I am using a Nucleo-H745xx board as a controller to interface with an EVAL-ADIN2111 board (which handles the 10Base-T1L communication) through SPI. We want to see how 10Base-T1L compares to protocols such as CAN or regular Ethernet for industrial uses. This was probably greek for most of you. I find it hard to explain to people what I do at work, and when I talk about these kind of things with non-technical people I am mostly met with a nod and a change of subject. 😂
Here is somethings I have been thinking about:
Exercise snacks
Exercise snacks are the small everyday opportunities for exercise that most people does not take advantage of. These “snacks” can be to just run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, biking to work, do some pushups or squats in your office, and so on. Everyone knows that sitting all day is not good for us, so just taking a break every hour to do something active can make a big difference in how our body feels after a day of work. Don’t just wait until you are at the gym to use your body.
Actually, a paper came out in 2022 related to this, titled Exercise Snacks: A Novel Strategy to Improve Cardiometabolic Health [1]. Here is the abstract:
We define exercise snacks as isolated ≤1-min bouts of vigorous exercise performed periodically throughout the day. We hypothesize that exercise snacks are a feasible, well-tolerated, and time-efficient approach to improve cardiorespiratory fitness and reduce the negative impact of sedentary behavior on cardiometabolic health. Efficacy has been demonstrated in small proof-of-concept studies. Additional research should investigate this novel physical activity strategy.
The point is: You don’t have to exercise a lot to get health benefits and feel better, you just have to move often.
So, I try to look for exercise snacks during the day. I take the stairs (sometimes run up), jog to the store, stretch in my office, and go to the gym at work for a break from work each day. 💪
Other studies related to this:
Applying an Exercise Snack-Based Health Promotion Strategy [2]
Sprint exercise snacks: a novel approach to increase aerobic fitness [3]
- Eric
References:
[1] Islam H, Gibala MJ, Little JP. Exercise Snacks: A Novel Strategy to Improve Cardiometabolic Health. Exerc Sport Sci Rev. 2022 Jan 1;50(1):31-37. doi: 10.1249/JES.0000000000000275. PMID: 34669625.
[2] Huang CH, Yen M. [Applying an Exercise Snack-Based Health Promotion Strategy]. Hu Li Za Zhi. 2023 Apr;70(2):78-83. Chinese. doi: 10.6224/JN.202304_70(2).10. PMID: 36942545.
[3] Little JP, Langley J, Lee M, Myette-Côté E, Jackson G, Durrer C, Gibala MJ, Jung ME. Sprint exercise snacks: a novel approach to increase aerobic fitness. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2019 May;119(5):1203-1212. doi: 10.1007/s00421-019-04110-z. Epub 2019 Mar 7. PMID: 30847639.