My fresh travel video from the island of Corfu is available now on Vimeo. Enjoy, and give it a heart.

First time in my life I did a huge mistake when planning my and Stanisla's travels. Original plan was for me to arrive from San Francisco, sleep, and us together take off to the Stansted airport, and to the warm island of Corfu. What I didn't accounted for is timeshift. Turned out time flies twice as fast when travel from west to east, and I ended up totally missing the flight.

Situation was quickly fixed in a way that I’d get a 6am flight from Gatwick, and Stanisla would take the original flight and be waiting for me at the sea resort. This worked pretty well, and soon I was receiving keys for the rented car at the airport of Corfu from the local guy also named Alexander. My highly jetlagged brain noticed that the car I'm getting is somewhat of a different brand from what I booked - but Alexander assured me that yes, it is a different car, but the same price class.

It's been 2 years since I gave up my car, and probably 5 years since I drove a stick. Corfu island landscape features steep hills, sea, cliffs, lots of villages and one large(ish) town. I only had troubles driving in town - it was my Finnish mode that was letting people safely cross the streets, which was something of a revelation to local drivers - on many occasions they signalled me that I should indeed just drive over pedestrians and stop annoying other drivers waiting behind. In addition there were quite a few very steep serpentines, and so there was general speed limit imposed for the whole island at 60 kmh. Which was pretty much ignored by the locals who tried to accelerate to a maximum speed on any straight part of road.

Having a car on Corfu is a must. End of April is so-called low season, and public transport is a rare breed. Our week in the end of April and beginning of March was a little strange, since many places were very quiet, beaches empty, but all spots were open and happy to feed you and provide drinks. Corfu might not be a cheap place, but the food was extremely good.

Each day we would pick a place on a map and start driving, with mandatory stops at bakeries, olive wood workshops and pharmacies - Stanisla got a nasty cold prior to the trip. Road ads were promoting a local "British GP" you can visit right here on the island, but it wasn't clear if he'd accept Stanisla's NHS card. In the end one of the pharmacies sold a nuclear cough mixture with bee propolis, which was highly effective and had the most awful taste at the same time.

Cruising the island was actually fun. It used to be part of ancient Greece, Venice, Great Britain, France, Germany and once again Greece. Venetians built a castle which proved to be great engineering feat and major pain for the Ottoman empire trying to conquer the island over the course of some 200 years. Castle stood, and Ottomans fled the island (after some mandatory pillaging). It is also featured by Gerald Durrell in his book "My family and other animals" - he pretty much grew up on here, and Durrell family house is still a local attraction near Kalami beach.

One particular place was especially magnificent - Old Perithia is a 14th century built village, now abandoned. It is off the sea, hiding between mountains, not easily reachable even by car. Only the most persistent tourist will get there (or maybe once again it was just a low season thing). Some say it was built during the Venetian rule and features details of Venetian engineering. It is actually not that abandoned - there are 3 taverns that will feed you, and some houses actually being bought and restored. Ever wanted to own a 14th century Venetian house?

On one occasion we travelled to a small town of Palaiokastritsa. We arrived early, thanks to me being jet lagged for the good first half of the week. Thankfully there was this local version of coffee - Greek coffee. It was strong, tasty and I’d consume it in double shots. One of the advertised sights in Palaiokastritsa were sea caves, reachable by boat. We ended up taking a boat trip, and that was easily one of the highlights for the whole trip. Beardy captain of the light boat with me, Stanisla, other couple and 2 small kids guided our vessel straight into what looked like an open sea. From time to time captain would start praying to the Saint Spyridon, then switching to singing in Greek. Waves were high, sea was very blue, and caves were rather small and insignificant.

Air, smells and food were somewhat magical on the island. Contrast is especially huge when travelling from a large city where tomato tastes like nothing, and in many occasions you try to pretend that you don't need air. On the first day after my arrival, we took a small trip to the closest village - Pelekas - to find some breakfast. Being vegetarian is not a problem by the way - you will have to skip local souvlaki dishes, but the rest is very much vegetarian and highly enjoyable. In a local tavern of Pelekas village they brought us tzatziki, olives, salad, toasts with tomatoes, dolmades and they also insisted on potato chips. My god, these were most delicious chips in my entire life.

Local guidebook highly recommended to try ginger beer. During the British rule they started doing ginger beer on the island, and never stopped after that. Current incarnation of the drink is a pure perfection - unique taste, with a gentle bitiness and soothing effect that goes straight to your brain. My quest now is to find it here in London.

I've been using Fastmail for a bit, and it's amazing how fast webmail can be. Simple, nothing extra, shortcuts throughout the app. Current incarnation of Gmail feels like behemoth - takes ages to get it all loaded.

Also Fastmail is not free. Are you ok being a product? Somehow it feels that dedicated paid service will always beat free ad-powered one. Fastmail comes with a number of different price points, and what's best - they accept bitcoins. I'm paying with bitcoins for my VPN provider, domains, and now - email provider. A little bit of privacy here and there.

What about second factor authentication? Fastmail natively supports Yubikey generated one time passwords. Plug the key and press a button.

There is a little bit of setup if you want to integrate Fastmail with a custom domain. Receiving mail is easy - just get your MX records for the domain in place. Sending email is slightly trickier. In a modern world of email there is lots of spam. To combat this issue, email providers came up with a technology called DKIM or Domain Keys Identified Mail. It is basically HTTPS in the world of email - a way of signing each email message with an authorized signature, which can be checked by receiving server and sent to spam folder in case of failure. Fastmail got you covered there too - they provide a signature which you add to a special TXT domain record. After that your custom domain is all set.

Drop me a line on hello@alexsavin.me if you feel like it.

And yeah, I was not paid by Fastmail. Quite the opposite.

London is a fantastic place to be, with one huge downside - there are far too many interesting things to do and places to be than you could ever manage. One skill becomes particularly handy - ability to balance work, hobbies, family and friends. This balance seems essential to enjoy life. Let’s see how I did last week.

Events

We did two events with Red Badger. First was React London meetup, part of Digital Shoreditch fest. Unlike previous few events that were hosted at Facebook Euston offices, this one was at Cargo club in the heart of Shoreditch. The place was practically under the railroad, and each time a train would pass on top of the club, you’d get a true underground feeling. It seems that many attendees thought the same, and despite some AV related hiccups we got a nice praise for the event.

Couple of talks to watch:

• BabelJS by author himself Sebastian McKenzie
• React & WebGL - Peter O’Shaughnessy talks on his experiences integrating ThreeJS with React

Another event was hosted at Red Badger HQ. Again part of DS, this one was titled Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Check out recording of the live broadcast with brilliant presentations by our UX director Joe Dollar-Smirnov, head of design Sari Griffiths and developer Dominik Piatek.

Film

My Helsinki Timescapes film is now available on Vimeo in its full HD glory. Took me about one year to complete, mainly because it was filmed and processed in native stereoscopic 3D. A unique project for Helsinki, was premiered in Germany as part of Beyond 3D fest in autumn 2013. This year they are once again accepting entries, and my goal is to get back - this time with London Timescapes short film, currently in post production. Might as well release HD 2D version on Vimeo once the moment is right.

Another idea we discussed with Dominik Piatek, who is currently composing music for London Timescapes film, is to make a virtual reality experience out of the film. Desperately need to get my paws onto some VR goggles - there are lots of teases but currently nothing actually available in shops. Maybe next year.

Podcast

Last Friday me, Robbie and Roisi recorded 17th episode of Radio Badger podcast. Expect it out this week - probably Friday. Talking about recent trips to California, Estonian e-residenship, Apple Watch, Bitcoin pizza day, as well as getting live first impressions on Firefox OS phone.

Meanwhile episode 16 is available for listening.

Hardware corner

Received a reference phone with Firefox OS onboard. The phone is codenamed Flame, features 2 SIM card slots, 2 cameras, dual core CPU, 1Gb of RAM, and in general very nice looking for an entry level phone. Also it features quite a few controversial ideas, now implemented and ready to be probed. Firefox OS runs all of the UI on top of Gecko rendering engine - in other words, everything you see on the screen is run inside Firefox browser. I’m still getting my way around it, yesterday flashed latest nightly build of Firefox OS 3.0, and going to use it as my main phone for a week. Expect lots of intimate details in a blog.

Writing

Got published in Red Badger blog with my recap on O’Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco. Trends on web dev, Internet and how it all looks like from sunny California.

Chemicals

Successfully finished second roll of 35mm film, and ordered kit of Kodak T-Max chemicals for developing. If all goes well, will book some lab time at the local dark room. Yeah, assuming that nothing goes wrong with films during development. There are at least two shops in London where you can get everything you need for analog film printing (that I know of) - Silver Print at Elephant and Castle, and West End Cameras in Euston. Latter is just 10 min on bike from our office, and I was buying my fibre based photo paper there last time. Convenient.

This week

Podcast editing, Firefox OS instead of iPhone, monthly company day, and a hackathon with a chance of winning tickets to Mombasa. Should be fun.

I've been away for some time. First week was in California, second on the island of Corfu, and for the next two weeks I was surviving the London flu. It was one resilient bug. Nevertheless, I'm back to blogging, and hopefully podcasting next week.

San Francisco was pretty cool, although windy and cold. Despite that I managed to burn my face on both days when I wasn't in the basement of the Mariott hotel, where O'Reilly Fluent conference was happening. By far this was the most epic conference I've attended. 5 simultaneous tracks of web dev related talks, plus ongoing meetups and exhibition of hardware. O'Reilly being a publishing house also brought a number of book authors, who were signing and giving books away for those lucky enough to get into the queue early. On the last day of the trip I managed to get out of the city and traveled to Mountain View and Palo Alto. Googleplex, check.

Arrival to Corfu island was accompanied with 10 hours of jet lag and very little sleep. End of April is still low season on the island, and so we were spending time in a quiet neighborhood of Glyfada beach, pretty much deserted for the most part. We rented a car and were cruising the island for the next week, discovering places and eating lots of local food. I almost forgot how tasty tomato can be. Even potato chips were somehow delicious, especially combined with local tzatziki. Another thing not everybody might appreciate - local made ginger beer on Corfu is absolutely gorgeous.

Flu part was mostly boring. On the second week of suffering I decided that it's time to finally register myself as a patient in a local surgery. That's something you have to do in person, during office hours of weekdays. My plan was to arrive with filled forms, and ask for medical help. Registration part went without a hitch, as for the actual help they told me to call next morning. Which I did, got appointment and made my inaugural visit to the local GP. She pretty much ignored my complaints on excruciating cough, checked my weight and height, listened to me breathing and concluded that this is indeed a virus, and I'll get better all by myself.

On a film front - California trip video is edited and available for watching. Expect lots of hyperlapses.

Signing off.

####Read

• If you ever wondered what airport security equipment can do to analog unprocessed film - Kodak got you covered

X-ray equipment used to inspect carry-on baggage uses a very low level of x-radiation that will not cause noticeable damage to most films. However, baggage that is checked (loaded on the planes as cargo) often goes through equipment with higher energy X rays.

• 70 maps that explain America. Or how to stop worrying and accept fact that most of the population on Earth are immigrants.
• Thoughts on Keybase.io service. Check the comments too. All in all, keybase.io is a very interesting step for the (cryptic) world of PGP encryption towards normal people.

####Watch

• Inside Abbey Road studios - Google interactive tour on the legendary place in London
• Blade Runner or real life? Project by BFI together with special screenings of the film.
• SUNDAYS - sci-fi short film and proof of concept for the potential feature. I'd love to see that feature.

####Listen

• Codes that Changed the World - BBC Radio 4 project on history of programming languages
• Fresh episode of Radio Badger podcast. Talks by me, Viktor Charypar and Robbie McCorkell on F8, aerospace grade tungsten, React Native, VR, basic income and Formula E in London.

####Personal notes

• Had a session in a local darkroom. Managed to process two rolls of 35mm film and print few frames. That's my first time back in a darkroom in probably 20 years or so. Also revived my 500px account and uploaded scans of the prints there. 500px seems to evolved quite nicely, and offers much friendlier UI compared to the modern incarnation of Flickr for art pictures.
• As mentioned earlier, I started using Keybase.io service. My public key can be found here in case you want to send me encrypted email or something. I've also added PGP signature to all my emails now.
• Attending O'Reilly Fluent Conference next week. Will have few days to get around San Francisco. Happy to meet new people, so feel free to ping me.