NL30 - Of shinobis and reading

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #30, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I had dinner at Shinobi on Thursday night. This is a Japanese restaurant near Kamppi in Helsinki. The restaurant has two sections:

1. Shokudo - the eat and drink section
2. Izakaya - the bar and snacks section

We had booked a table in Shokudo section. The restaurant has a unique sharing menu, wherein every item was supposed to be shared between two members.

The menu was not structured in a three-course meal fashion. Instead we started with sashimi and spicy edamame, followed by scallops and this wonderful crispy rice topped with avocado. The tofu was the best tofu I've ever had. I don't like tofu. It tastes weird, paneer is usually better. But man this tofu was so good.

For desserts, half the table got the chocolate cake, and the other half Lemon cake. I was in the lemon cake half. It was great. Everything was great here. The food, the service, the ambiance.

I will definitely visit again.

/five things to share this week

1. Apple announced the new iPad mini. Built for Apple Intelligence. Which, OK. I will be getting an iPad this winter. Not sure which. This is a good upgrade though. It gets the A17 Pro chip (Not M series). WiFi 6E. And support for Apple Pencil Pro.
2. Amazon announced new kindles. The Colorsoft has a colour screen, which means beautiful book covers on display. The Paperwhite was also updated with a larger screen and higher refresh rates. I want to get something to read on. I prefer actual physical books. But I also read technical books sometimes from O'Reilly. I need something for that. Unless Kindle allows running these apps, it has very limited usability for me at present.
3. Superstitious users and the FreeBSD logo. This made me chuckle.
4. The web I want vs the one we have and Use RSS to read stuff.
5. How to tax billionaires. The problem is all of us dream that one day we would be billionaires and when that day comes, we would not want to be taxed either. But that day would never come. Governments that we vote for, should have the power and money to invest in welfare.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.