Κάθε Κυριακή το Athénée προσφέρει μπραντς σε έναν από τους πλέον ιστορικούς χώρους της Αθήνας. Vintage αισθητική αναμειγνύεται με μοντέρνα στοιχεία.

Τα πιάτα ήταν προσεγμένα και γευστικά και συνοδεύονταν από εξαιρετικό καφέ.

Πολύ όμορφος χώρος με ωραία ατμόσφαιρα και εξαιρετική live μουσική. Νόστιμα πιάτα.

Το σέρβις χρειάζεται δουλειά ακόμη (μας έφεραν άλλο μπουκάλι κρασί από αυτό που είχαμε παραγγείλει χωρίς καν να μας ρωτήσουν) αλλά στο ερωτημα εάν θα ξαναπηγαίναμε, η απάντηση είναι «ναι!»

Βράδυ Σαββάτου με φίλους στο Hervé. Fine dining γεύσεις, με ωραία ατμόσφαιρα.

Στο κέντρο του εστιατορίου υπάρχει ανοιχτή κουζίνα και περιμετρικά αυτής μπάρα με περιορισμένες θέσεις, απ’οπου μπορεί κανεις να παρακολουθήσει όλη τη διαδικασία «στησίματος» ενός πιάτου.

Προσφέρεται μόνο μενού degustation και υπάρχει επιλογή wine pairing. Τα πιάτα αν και εντυπωσιακά σε εικόνα, γευστικά δεν μας ενθουσίασαν.

Το wine pairing το βρήκαμε μέτριο και σίγουρα όχι αντάξιο του κόστους του.

Αγαπάμε Ourse όπου απολαμβάνουμε την πιο ωραία - μακράν- St. Honoré που έχουμε δοκιμάσει! Έξτρα τσαχπινιά η αλμυρή καραμέλα στη βάση του γλυκού!

Must try!

Ένα από τα αγαπημένα μας ιταλικά βρίσκεται στη Γλυφάδα.

Το Peccati di gola είναι μια ζεστή ναπολιτάνικη τρατορία με παραδοσιακές αλλά και πιο μοντέρνες γεύσεις.

Μετά από πολλές επισκέψεις έχουμε καταλήξει στο εξής τελετουργικό:

It looks like climate change is a thing and  it is changing alright.

In Greece every year now we experience heavy snow in southern places in February or March. It became our thing while it was not so much. Anyway…

Will try to go out and shoot a bit if possible.

Το Travolta είναι ένα εστιατόριο που ενδείκνυται στους λάτρεις των θαλασσινών.

Χώρος που θυμίζει παλιά ελληνική ταβέρνα, πλην όμως προσεγμένη. Πέρα από κλασικά, προσφέρονται και πιο «μοντέρνα» πιάτα, όπως το φαγκρι sashimi που δοκιμάσαμε το οποίο ήταν εξαιρετικό! Συνέχισαμε με φάβα συνοδευόμενη με καπνιστό χέλι, τσιπούρα φρικασέ και καλαμάρι κοντοσούβλι με μελάνι σουπιάς.

Όλα πεντανόστιμα, αυθεντικά. Μια επίσκεψη που αξίζει να κάνετε!

Start of December we visited a winery.

I have been to distilleries and breweries but wine making has not made me drunk yet.

Arriving at such facilities makes you aware of how much vines are needed for wine.

Αγαπημένη στάση για γλυκό στα βόρεια το εργαστήριο του Δημήτρη Οικονομίδη. Τα δημιουργήματα του σεφ είναι γλυκά-γλυπτά με εξαιρετικό μινιμαλιστικό σχεδιασμό και απαλές γευσεις.

Αυτή τη φορά δοκιμάσαμε Gâteau St. Honoré και τάρτα με τροπικά φρούτα (μάνγκο, ανανά και passion fruit). Η τάρτα ήταν ευχάριστη και δροσερή με καλή ισσοροπία. Το St. Honoré ήταν τεχνικά τέλειο και επίσης ισσοροπημένο.

Η μόνη μας παρατήρηση είναι ότι θα θέλαμε κάτι να μας ρίξει από αυτή την ισορροπία και να μας πιάσει απροετοίμαστους.

Στο Ovio πήγαμε σε αναζήτηση ενός καλού ιταλικού. Ο χώρος είναι μικρός και όμορφος με λίγα τραπέζια. Ξεχωρίζει το τραπέζι δύο ατόμων στο μπαλκονάκι, ζητήστε το.

Φάγαμε μία ευχάριστη πίτσα με ωραία υλικά ωστόσο με πολύ ζυμάρι, γεγονός που δε την κατατάσσει στις αγαπημένες μας.

Η καρμπονάρα με τρούφα είναι από τα signature πιάτα του εστιατορίου και αξίζει να τη δοκιμάσετε. Κάποια κομμάτια του guanciale ήταν στεγνά, το συνολικό αποτέλεσμα όμως ικανοποιητικό.

Εξαιρετικό πιάτο η crème brulée με παγωτό mango και βασιλικό. Πολλές ετικέτες ιταλικών και ελληνικών κρασιών.

While in love or alone, Milos is a place to enjoy the sand and sun. Bellow are some musts from my visit. I will not bore you with the unpleasant or meh experiences. Only with the great and there were many.

Sea

First order of business about a week before your trip, book a boat toor. Before you book watch the weather for the best possible date in terms of wind. meteo.gr is a great site for that.

The trip we took was with Volcano boat and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. You spend a lot of time at unreachable by car beaches and they get you local treats between stops. During the end you do snorkeling at Kleftiko with the help of experienced divers.

On the snowiest day of the forever sunbathed Athens suburbia, I watch a boy cry about sand in his shoes.

Little dude and his parents made the beach with masks and all the riches to enjoy the rare phenomenon. A pair of girls watch their dog joyfully jump around the kid.

They nod at us as we smile at the adorable affair.

We recently ditched Wordpress for the company site and built something with Jekyll just to make it faster and simplify our tools.

We wanted to host on Github pages to up the simplicity. However having the site be multilingual is a hard requirement for us and Github pages does not support it.

So we rolled our own solution.

It all started with HEY. There was so much buzz around it. It is made from the company behind Basecamp 3. I use Basecamp and it is great so I decided to try it.

It offers a two week trial which is more than enough to judge if an email service for $100/year is worth the trouble.

One of the terrors of staying home for the coronavirus is the lack of outside leisure time.

You may work remotely by day if you can, but when the night comes you need something to accompany that whiskey, wine or beer glass. Don’t need to mention that alcohol in any other form is unacceptable.

With that in mind I present the following books, movies and drinks, optimized for well… staying inside.

Just a week before my trip to Sifnos I discovered that a Total Lunar eclipse would take place on my second day there. So I planed to take a picture. Or two. Probably around 40. You will see how I got to this number, how I planned this shoot and how everything was thrown away.

However the research and tools used may prove useful to other people.

All pictures in this post are mine unless noted otherwise.

So, the eclipse was on July 27, 2018 from 21.30 to 24.30 UTC+3.

As I rise above the ground somewhere in the centre of Athens, my phone starts chiming hard. It’s the third call from Dimitra reminding me once again that I am late. I figure it is time to answer.

“Morning! I am steps away… I just need to find the entrance.”

“Hurry up! It’s almost our turn at the queue”, she mumbles.

It is the fourth year that the Open House project takes place in Athens. Open House is an institution for the promotion of architecture. The public is kindly invited to explore and understand the value of architecture and naturally one must respond to such invitation. Sunday’s adventure involves exploring private and public spaces through Athens that participate in the initiative with architectural tours. Hooray!

So here I am. A guy who teases his architect friends for not being real engineers in a ipso facto architectural event wandering why it seems like he is heading to a building he ignores every time he comes around. It is the yellow building by the Panepistimio metro station which turns out to be the Ralli residence.

I know this is exactly the time o’ clock that every doofus tries to submerge you in their wise minds by sharing a tip or two about productivity and life advice but bear with me. I read a couple of good posts doing exactly that from friends and I figured that I might as well throw my bullshit free brilliance out there.

I am powering through one of the most intense periods of my life so far. I have multiple high maintenance and difficult projects, none of which can be left behind. The world feels like a racetrack made of ice and I have to run, which I like. But if I slip things are going to get nasty. That means, efficiency is key and the hunt for that peak effectiveness has showed me some dos and don’ts.

Don’ t read too much stuff like this online

It is probably a waste of time and you are as likely to follow this as you were to follow the previous identical article you read yesterday.

Among the ridiculous projects I have had out in the open, the most long running one is called perispomeni.club. It is a dead simple, tiny linux machine inspired by Paul Ford’s tilde.club. People respectfully use together that machine in their shared quest to learn and build awesome web pages.

However it was a surprise when one of the users sent me a private email with a security concern.

Here I must mention that the pattern you can spot when reading this and my previous post is purely coincidental. I will stop with the email fanfare, I promise. On with the email:

From bob
>Subject: Strange connection or only my imagination?
Hey Tasos
I have noticed a very strange connection to your server from various ip address which are also listed in block ip for previous abouse pages you should check:
121.18.238.104
59.63.188.3
Both are from china, they connect to your server port on 22 but strangely they do not show up as user.
Cheers

Some time ago I got that email.

FROM: Francisco May
>TO: Tasos
>SUBJECT: Re: i await your urgent respond

Hi Tasos,

Compliment of the day, am happy to hear from you again, I am Ms. May Ann Francisco, a staff of the PNB — Philippine National Bank — Pasay City. here in the Philippines. I have a project for you, Is it confidential to discuss here? Well, my percentage is good for an offer but before I begin with you, are you comfortable being an international partner to a project?.

I will await for your response before I give you more vital details on this project. Your response to my email will be kept confidential.

Regards,
Ms. May Ann Francisco

May Ann knows my name and somehow it’ s not our first dance. Probably this is a legit offer but it would be wise to investigate. I am intrigued so I respond.

FROM: Tasos
>TO: Francisco May
>SUBJECT: Re: i await your urgent respond

Hi there May,

Being an international partner to a project is a lifelong dream of mine. As long as it is legal I am all for it!

Please tell me more and what I have to do. Note that I can’t visit Pasay City for now so all our communications must be done through here.

Best regards,
Tasos Sangiotis

We are all in constant search of the perfect chat app. Myself, I thought I had things settled with my beloved Facebook Messenger. Little did I know it would break my heart.

Messenger was a minor player in my text life till recently. I was happy with Telegram back then. Telegram is the perfect app. Not the perfect chat app. The perfect app. Stable, fast, very good native apps for phones AND computers, bots, etc. Everything that Telegram implements is well thought through and stable on release. The problem is that Telegram is not something that most of my friends would bother to meet. So in my quest for a minimalistic communications strategy, Telegram had to go.

So here I am searching on what to use next. I evaluated WhatsApp, Viber and even Signal. Every one of those had huge deal breakers. Poor gif support was the main one and the second was poor clients. The only one that was convenient and feature full was Facebook Messenger. And the best part, is that everyone has it on their phones since Facebook made it mandatory if you want to use it’ s chat function on your mobile device to annoy people on the go.

Because annoying on the go is like a cherished dream for most, today except from email if one must have an app for sending text around, this app would be Facebook Messenger. That reality caries a certain responsibility for Facebook. It is the same responsibility that Google has to fulfill when they provide email apps (I did not mention Apple because everyone knows their email apps are rubbish). Let’s see how these two great entities compare when they deal with their responsibilities.

Recently a bunch of equipment made its way to my workbench and I’m invigorated! So I figured it’s high time we continued our trip.

The vertical take-off and landing aircraft I am building, will use a quadcopter or X8 (like a quadcopter with double motors) configuration to successfully justify the vertical part of it’s title.

Quadcopters you are likely familiar with. If not, the word derives from the words Quadrotor Helicopter. They are more commercial than ever and you can buy them really easy. In movies they are being used more and more and if you are into YouTube or Instagram, all the big stars have one (or many).

Anyway, it’ s that contraption:

I have not said anything about it here but my thesis is about a VTOL aircraft. That stands for Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft. If this is nonsense to you, don’t worry. You can just watch Jeremy Clarkson explain it in TopGear fashion in the video bellow.

Basically it combines a copter and a plane allowing to take off and land without the need for an airstrip like a copter but cruise at the speed of a plane providing autonomy. It’s a rad concept.

But how does one design and build a thing like that?

Remember when my camera had the worst swim ever?

Well, I figured I could use the old film camera my grandfather bought on one of his trips. It is a Pentax camera from the 60s, very advanced for it’s age and relatively new as they mostly used it for family pictures. It has only manual controls, it looks cool and I could learn a thing or two from the absence of any automation.

So I picked up a film cartridge from Kodak and threw the camera in my backpack before a daytrip to Patras where I had some chores to run for my thesis.

OK, Marvel Entertainment, LLC or whatever your full name is. What you are doing to music, it has to… Continue!

I just finished the latest Marvel superhero series. It’s about the indestructible black man named Luke Cage. He lives in Harlem, NY and wants to be left alone but personal reasons convince him to fight the mafia leaving me once again astonished by the selection of music made by the producers.

On that note (when you see it), I want to make a recap of the music Marvel brought to my attention. Some of this was really new to me and some of this was really old to me. I will give you the link for the song that stuck in your head and you couldn’t Shazam but first let’s get some things straight for the uninitiated.

It all started with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Awesome Mix Vol 1:

Today I got the news. Maria is officially dead.

Maria was my camera. I changed the name to Maria from CAMERA #1 about a week ago when she was baptised in the waters of Naxos. By accident of course.

What's in a name, really?

A photo posted by Ryan Hudson (@ryankhudson) on Jul 24, 2016 at 3:28pm PDT

I was watching Citizenfour the other day so you may understand my confusion.

I can say that I am privacy aware. On a high level, I understand how things work. I use a different strong password for everything, I have a GPG key and I opt for using open source services that make security a priority.

However I still use services that are not so privacy centric. I use Facebook and nearly all Google Services (Search, Gmail, Drive, Photos, etc.). These two alone can show you everything about me.

According to Edward Snowden’s revelations everything is busted. Dropbox, Google, Apple. You are not safe.

On the road

Simos beach

Simos is a the biggest beach in Elafonisos. It consists of Big Simos and Small Simos. There is sand everywhere and the water is mesmerising.

Just yesterday I finished reading The Martian. I wont lie, this book is not for eveyone but I really liked it.

Mark Whitney, an engineer and botanist, was left on Mars by accident and he has to survive some years since he has even a chance to get back to Earth.

While he is at the same time the luckiest and unluckiest person on Mars he manages to crack jokes all the time.

It was a rough and fast week. From the announcement of the Greek referendum to the announcement of the final and big No.

That was little time to think about many things for me and for everyone.

However the million (Euro?) question was the following:

That was me checking twitter two nights ago while getting ready for an exam.

I jumped from my study and fired up the TV.

Alexis Tsipras announced that there will be a referendum next Sunday on whether to accept a deal made by the three institutions or not.

The government asked people to answer no while not explaining what that means. Most experts however agree that this will lead to a Grexit.

This is a response to “Is College Dead? Class From A Student’s Perspective” and it was originally posted on Medium__.

As you have learned by now, college is not a must to start a business. There are people who own successful businesses and have not finished high-school. They learned by experience what you have learned in class (and in life).

That goes both ways. The fact that someone finishes college does not mean he/she is entitled to a great job. Education is actually slowly but steadily evolving. More and more companies are getting into that game and also students demand it. This evolution though is slow for the better I believe. Imagine if a whole system that involves students, professors, staff, companies and governments changed every year. There would be chaos. It is better to change small stuff in a slow and reliable manner than to jump to the newer trend all the time. The same happens with law by the way.

There is actually a say:

Google’s project Soli is the future of wearable interaction.

Project Soli is basically a miniaturised radar implementation of the LEAP Motion sensor.

It can track precise finger gestures and at the same time is very compact as there is no combination of cameras and IR sensors.

I recently watched The Gambler movie.

I liked it but most I liked the music!

Enjoy! :)

Women contribute massively in all technological fields. They are an active part of the engineering community.

But they should contribute more.

Why they don’t? Because of numbers.

Jessie is not a person.

Jessie is the new stable release of Debian. And maybe it will get Debian to be my Linux operating system of choice.

As you may know I use a MacBook Air and I am happy with OS X.

Recently we had the chance to show some kids what Electrical and Computer Science Engineers do and challenge them to tackle a problem in their school.

And boy that was awesome!

I am a board member at the IEEE Student Branch of the University of Patrasand with some other members we decided to implement an IEEE program called TISP. And we believe we nailed it!

We contacted a lyceum close to our uni. They heard us and they decided they would like to work with us.

I’ve been a competition Ju Jitsu athlete for my entire life until the combination of an injury and the start of my University life pointed that I will never be in my full game again while studying Electrical Engineering.

If sports and mostly the competition did not exist I would not have been the individual I am today.

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources,for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership.

This is one of the most important and motivating TED talks I’ve seen.

I promise, it worths your time:

I’ve been in a mode of getting more stable and reliable in the last months but when I saw this 3 or 4 days ago, it was like the random thoughts in my head strengthen and got in order. I try to avoid the emergency brake in any situation. Of course it fails some times but the rest of them are very satisfying.

Change is hard and you are never gonna feel like it. The more you force yourself, the more you are going to feel like it.

How can a country afford to be so unready all the time?

I am talking about Greece. We were the centre of the world for a while some days ago for the 4 month bailout extension we got in February. And of course for our controversial Minister of Economics, Mr. Varoufakis.

As for a little context, Greek people voted for a Greece in Euro and out of the crisis minus the austerity. Maybe it is a fool’s quest, maybe not.

ICP Sensors are nice!

The last two days I was frustrated with an ICP (Integrated CircuitPiezoelectric) vibration sensor not working.

There were glimpses of uptime but it was just that. Glimpses…

I literally wrote the title at the start of the Apple Watch announcement at Apple’s “Spring Forward” event. It was “The new MacBook is awesome”.

Then I changed it.

I am not an Apple fanboy by any means. I bought my 13” MacBook Air at the end of 2012 because it was the best computer for the money and my needs at the time of buy.

The world nowadays works in teams and as you may know I’ ve been involved in many teams around this time.

This team can be a startup, a group, a hackerspace or even you and your friends. When some people do something together they are a team. And a good team acts like a good piece of machinery.

Working in teams is hard but also very efficient. If a team is managed correctly, many extraordinary things can be done.

This is what I’ve understood about being in teams and learning from my mistakes and others’.

There is a new breach boy in town and this time is called ShellShock.

Researchers claim that it is a lot worst than Heardbleed.

It is a Bash bug that allows almost anyone to execute commands to a remote machine.

For more about that here.

I hate mess… So I like remote solutions!

One thing that bothers me is the USB cable that I always have connected on my computer. On it’s other end, lies a 1TB Hard Drive that stores my Time Machine backup.

From time to time I stream movies via Plex from the same hard disk. That’s because I don’t want to store movies on my low capacity Macbook Air.

Since I got my Chromecast, Plex has gone to the top of my “Useful Software” list as it supports Chromecast and I can stream the Movies without connecting a HDMI cable.

I just got my hands on my long waited Spark Core!

It is a tiny Arduino board with a built in WiFi module. Besides that and the obvious possibilities of the Core, there is an API making it possible for the Core to talk to the internet.

Let’s say I want to check the status of the Hackerspace of Patras (0 or 1).

This simple bash script that runs on my computer does just that:

After a couple of months around this project it reached a stage where maybe it is not super stable but it is usable and pretty ok for my needs.

It provides:

• UI that is simple and I like.
• Ability to commit a new post through Github API.
• Keeps a draft.
• A list of the user’s posts.
• Ability to edit previous posts.

Here are some screenshots:

From Wikipedia:

Mr. Freeman is a Russian animated web series named after its main character. The series appeared on YouTube on September 21, 2009 and got considerable popularity in Runet. The main content of the series is monologues which in a harsh manner criticize the lifestyle of modern everyman. As of August 16, 2012 there are 19 episodes published. The total number of views is more than 35 million.

I discovered Mr. Freeman by this video last year which I saved on my Favourites list on Youtube. Today as I was cleaning up this list, I rediscovered it and felt like sharing.

You may say you are not that guy for whom he is talking about but chances are you have a lot in common. Agreeing or not with him and his opinion of you there is sure some food for thought in his words.

OMGUbuntu! had an article recently about the well known text editor Sublime Text 2.

This editor is fantastic! It can be customised in any way you imagine to fit your needs and taste. There is also a great community that builds plugins and you can build your own pretty easily. It also support some great features and you can see a demonstration at their homepage. Please go! I can wait!

You saw it? Good!