I will be leaving later today for my 3rd Camino de Santiago, the longest one at just over 1000 km. This time it’s the via de la Plata (silver way) from Sevilla (Seville) to Santiago de Compostela. It will take about 35 to 40 days to cover the distance.

Why do I keep doing this? For that I will probably need to write a book …

I will still be updating my other blog My Camino de Santiago via moblog or twitter for the next month and a half. No promises on update frequency as it all depends on the cellular cost and connection, and maybe if I am lucky some free wifi in some of the bigger towns along the way.

Straydog signing off here until sometime in mid June…

• Inflatable Toast Mattress - Archie McPhee

  Hmmm.. Nice and toasty, the mattress I mean. A bit exp. though.

• The History of Adidas and Puma

  Didn’t know they were siblings.

• The End of the Internet?

  Predating the end of the world?

• Anatomy of an Ikea product

  Deboehmler said many, including the company’s chair and sofa products, are named after Swedish towns. "So when you’re driving around in Sweden," she laughed, "you suddenly see this town name that’s a sofa."

• YouTube - Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles

  Fake? (The music from the bottles)

• Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice

  Hmmm… This Twitter thingy is getting to be quite useful.

• Frustration

  Nice Gif.

• WTFCNN?

  An entire blog dedicated to CNN’s ridiculous headlines.

(via The Herald Tribune)

Seven Spanish mothers from a rural town of Seradilla del Arroyo in Spain trying to repeat the Calendar Girls gig has backfire and now they owe the printer nearly $16,000.

I guess Erotic Calendars aren’t the easy money-making scheme you’d think they’d be. Or maybe they should smile a bit more?

Images from a Spanish site. (NSFW, but no nudity)

A funny narrative by Cookie Monster.

…..

Me know there something wrong with me, but who in Sesame Street doesn’t suffer from mental disease or psychological disorder? They don’t call the vampire with math fetish monster, and me pretty sure he undead and drinks blood. No one calls Grover monster, despite frequent delusional episodes and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And the obnoxious red Grover—oh, what his name?—Elmo! Yes, Elmo live all day in imaginary world and no one call him monster. No, they think he cute. And Big Bird! Don’t get me started on Big Bird! He unnaturally gigantic talking canary! How is that not monster? Snuffleupagus not supposed to exist—woolly mammoths extinct. His very existence monstrous. Me least like monster. Me maybe have unhealthy obsession, but me no monster.

…..

(Source: McSweeney)

Play this video to torture someone you don’t like. My brain is still fried after watching this.

• Cup causing a stir among tea drinkers - Telegraph

  Great design, a mug that can stir liquid by itself.

• Rich and Poor: The Life of People in China | Funtasticus.com

  Powerful images.

• BBC NEWS | Health | Masturbation ‘cuts cancer risk’

  Something positive on masturbation?

• YouTube - Tricia Walsh Smith

  A YouTube divorce, what next?

• E-Crypts | Japan Probe

  QR Codes used for graves in Japan. Hmmm…

This sucks!

(Warning: video and sound gets out of sync as the documentary progresses)

• Clips: Unlike Zuckerberg, CollegeHumor parodies Steve Jobs on purpose

  Sorry, but that is exactly how I thought about Apple.

• Flat Chested

  Are they in fashion now? As they say, "more than a handful and you risk a sprain".

• Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film | The Onion

  Is the Iron Man’s trailer so elaborate that it has given the whole movie plot away, hence the Onion’s parody.

• Discovering Porn (On Your Boyfriend’s Computer)

  Busted!

• Seed: Suspending Life

  Interesting piece on oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.

It’s sad that Russell Beatie is giving up on Mowser, a tools that strips away unnecessary data and making it mobile friendly. His blog is one that I started reading years ago, until he decided to spend more time pursuing other project, including Mowser.

I guess it is tough providing a free service on your own when there are already other players with deeper pockets doing it.

One is Skweezer which has been around for some time.

The newer and bigger player of course is Google, with an excessively simple screen (sans logo).

The best part about these tools is that after you have type in the URL and the mobile page is rendered, you just need to bookmark the result link and in the future you won’t have to enter the url again.

So which tool is better? I use this current blog for the test and here are the results (Skweezer followed by the Google).

Skweezer’s rendering of my blog seems to be the best. No embedded videos (of course) but the all images and links are there. The images (up to 444 pixels wide) were not resized. There is probably a limit before Skweezer will resize the image but I have not found it yet.

Google actually broke the page down into 3 sub pages (faster loading time and less scrolling on the mobile device).  However, some of the images are missing. They are either bugs or probably images beyond a certain size will be truncated.

I’ll stick to Skweezer for the time being as missing data (images) are more of a concern for me.

Of course the best method for the mobile web is still to have a dedicated mobile site. For this Google seems to be ahead of the curve with many of their services available on the smaller mobile screen (with Orkut http://m.orkut.com missing).

I’ve been the mobile web more these days especially after getting a wifi-capable Nokia e61i.

Who says mobile web is dead? It’s just the beginning.