Details about the Kolinpolku Trail in Finnland

Intro:
Earlier this year, in April 2011, I walked the Kolinpolku Trail in Finnland together with a friend of mine. Prior to that, I tried to find some detailed information about this pretty awesome but almost unknown trail near Joensuu and I had to realize that there are no informative websites in english. Therefore, I’d like to provide you some details about the Kolinpolku trail and it’s surroundings.

Trail:
The Kolinpolku trail is about 63 km long and runs directly through the Koli National Park. Officially, the trail starts at the gas station north-east of Joensuu called Uuro. However, you can also start walking directly from the airport as we did. You can reach the gas station within one day from the airport but you should try to find a suitable path for walking – we walked random trails by using the GPS.

After the official starting point, the trail is pretty well marked and, as stated also on other websites, it’s almost impossible to get lost. However, there are some places where the marks are harder to find so you should always ask yourself “where did I see the last mark?”. If you can’t answer the question, go back to find one. I’d say that you don’t need a map, but a GPS for emergency cases could perhaps be useful. We heard a story of a couple who got lost on the trail before it has been marked as it is today. Especially in early summer/winter (yes, also late April) you will eventually find plenty of snow making the search for marks a rough job.

Above, I uploaded the high-resolution overview map of Joensuu and the north-east region. There, you can also find Uuro where the starting point for the Kolinpolku is located. Below, you find a typical picture of the trail – almost the complete trail runs on paths like this one:

Distances:
As mentioned above, the trail is officially 63 km long. On the map below which you can also find at the Uuro gas station, the trail is 70 km long. Anyway, it is separated into 6 different stages:

1. Uuro –> Urkkalampi: 20 km
2. Urkkalampi –> Hautajärvi: 10 km
3. Hautajärvi –> Ahvenlampi: 8 km
4. Ahvenlampi –> Kiviniemi: 5 km
5. Kiviniemi –> Ryläys: 10 km
6. Ryläys –> Koli: 10 km

If you wonna do the trail without a map/GPS etc., you’ll find marks like this one each 5 to 10 km:

Huts:
After each stage, you’ll find pretty awesome huts on the trail each one equipped with plenty of wood and several sleeping opportunities. At the time of year we’ve been there, no other trekkers were on the trail making the whole trip a place of peace and silence. I don’t know what happens if you do the trail during summer season, but I hope/guess this will hardly change. Here is a foto of a typical hut (Urkkalampi):

Inside one of these huts:

Starting Point Uuro:
The gas station at Uuro looks like this and sells all kinds of food, drinks and gas. At the time of walking (April 2011), the gas station does not sell any kind of camping gas etc.

The GPS coordinates for the gas station are:     N62 42.902 E29 51.282
On Google Maps: here

Urkkalampi Wilderness Trail:
Near the Urkkalampi hut, you have the chance to leave the Kolinpolku for some hours and do a wilderness/nature round trip enjoying the beautiful nature. You find a map below:

The GPS coordinates of Urkkalampi are:     N62 49.985 E30 00.563

Endpoint Koli:
We first thought that Koli is a small village or even a town – in fact it isn’t. It’s just a hotel on the top of the mountain providing an awesome view almost till Russia. Furthermore, the region is pretty prepared for tourism and contains a lot of paths, places etc. In winter, the place seems to be totally crowded with people coming for skiing. You can find a high-resolution map of the area around Koli below.

If you don’t wonna spend your night in the (expensive??) hotel, you can stay at a camping site just 15 minutes down the mountain – GPS coordinates:    N63 06.184 E29 47.507

Food/Water:
You can easily get water from the lakes and rivers on the trail. We did the same and we are still alive. The last chance to get food is the gas station in Uuro or you better go to the supermarket in Joensuu. At the hotel in Koli you can buy some snacks or you go directly to the restaurant, enjoy a cold beer and a beautiful view.

References:
As I mentioned earlier, as far as I know, there aren’t any comprehensive websites providing detailed information about the Kolinpolku trail. However, I did find some sites which where quite helpful.

http://www.vaellus.info/eng_inbrief.php
http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vaellus.info%2Freittitarkennus.php%3Fid%3D0410081015253FC1
http://s339.photobucket.com/albums/n475/mukamuki/kolinpolku09/?start=all
http://www.outdoors.fi/destinations/nationalparks/koli/trails/Pages/Default.aspx

How To Legally “Cheat” (!?) on Bahn.de?

Actually, what I describe here is not a real “cheat” at all, but perhaps this information could be useful to some of you.

Well, the Deutsche Bahn (DB – www.bahn.de) did quite a bad job during the last weeks – if you ask me. I travelled a lot during the last days and weeks and each time, the DB did not keep its word. In addition, the prices for tickets are still very high which makes the whole situation even worse.

So I tried to figure out how my travel-stress-level could be reduced by, for instance, reducing the amount of changing trains but still having the same price. So let’s start …

Let’s assume we want to travel from Stuttgart to Cologne on monday, 3rd January 2011.

These are the trains which are currently available. The prices you see are the special prices – ordinary tickets are much more expensive. However, we want to get a special price without changing trains at all! Actually, there is a tiny trick which reduces the amount of changing trains to zero and sometimes even reduces the price for a ticket. If you go into the details of one train, you can adjust the time you have for changing trains.

If you increasse the amount of time you wonna wait to 25, 30 or even 40 minutes, something strange happens:

Now they offer you a direct train without the need for changing trains. However, this train is not listed as a normal train with special prices (see first image above). Additionally, you “only” have to pay 68,- Euros … which is 3,- Euros less than the other offer. I used this method now quite often to get direct trains without the need for changing any train and I considered this method as quite useful. The prices for the ticket is often reduced or stays the same but you can enter the train at your starting point and leave it at your destination which is more comfortable than switching two or even tree times.

Anyway, perhaps this is not a new thing for anyone but I was wondering why the system does not show me the “better” train (image 3) at the very first beginning?

Common Errors in English Usage

Interesting and helpful webpage I guess – especially for me.

Awesome App – Mediathek for Mac

This application is awesome – downloading stuff from several mediatheks can easily be done. If you for instance like the german “Tatort”, you can download the series by just clicking one button. Searching is also possible …

Privacynow.tv – nice!

On http://privacynow.tv you can watch some nicely made videos concerning IT security and privacy. Generally, these videos are made for people not very related to any IT stuff … but check it out yourselves.

HITB 2010 Material online

Check out the material here.

European Online Scholarship Database

Interesting database: http://www.scholarshipportal.eu/

More information in german is available here.

Pcap Files for Several Protocols Available for Download

Under pcapr.net/home you can download, view and edit uploaded packet information of almost 3000 different pcap files. If you login (get a free login from bugmenot.com), you can also browse the packets online.

Additionally, all the files are put into various categories. The guys of this application did a great job, if you ask me, and hence this project should be supported.

Free Computer Forensic Tools

Again a brief post on interesting forensic stuff:

The table below lists a selection of free software which may be of use to professional computer forensic practitioners. It is the end user’s responsibility to check the licensing agreements of each one before use.

Howto: Sniffing VoIP with Wireshark

Most of the information given in this tutorial should be already known but it provides a complete overview of the power of wireshark.

On this document, we have shown how to install Wireshark and X-Lite, capture and understand basic SIP exchange, difference between SIP and RTP, capture and saving of voice as well as capture of DTMF signals.

Furthermore, this page lists several interesting tools in the field of VoIP security.

Mount Raw Hard Disk (dd) Images As VMDK Virtual Disks – raw2vmdk

In June 2010 darknet already wrote about this nice toolkit which could be pretty interesting for forensic investigations:

raw2vmdk is written in Java and is designed to be OS independent, simple and flexible. It creates an appropriately structured VMDK file that refers to the raw image, which can then be mounted by VMware, VirtualBox or any other virtualization platform supporting the VMDK disk format, as if it were an actual virtual drive. Thus preserving space and allowing for very fast deployment.

Check out the website and download the toolkit here.

Dropbox and Truecrypt with Mac and Linux – no problem at all

I made some tests with Dropbox and Truecrypt and in fact it works pretty well (If you wonna test Dropbox, use this link – both of us will get 250 MB more ). The most important thing for a successful usage is the special setting in Truecrypt: “Preserve modification time of file containers”. For further information, read this blog post (german). Honestly I have to add that the client applications are available for all well known OS and I didn’t experience any problems yet. I use the clients on Linux and Mac OS.

Btw., the guys of Dropbox are apparently hiring:

Sounds nice. Whiskey Fridays, Starcraft2 in the office … Get more information here.

Helpful Website for Hiking and Cycling

This could be a helpful website for finding suitable hiking and cycling trips around the world – but the main focus is Europe: http://www.outdooractive.com/de/touren/

Howto find out complex LaTeX symbols fast and easily?

The answer is: You draw them!

The web application is called “Detexify²“ and provides an easy drawing feature. Afterwards, the application tries to detect the symbol you draw and returns several propositions:

Awesome!

Wonna waste your time? New Tower Defence :-)

Attention!! You can easily get addicted to this tower defence! So please use with caution.

Cursed Treasure: Don’t Touch My Gems!

Google Talk on Blackhat spam SEO

Provided by zscaler:

Reverse Image Searching – Scary Feature!

tineye.com is a website with a pretty scary feature: It allows users to search for images reversely. Honestly, I used several pictures of friends available on the net and !!pretty!! scary results came out. “Bild Dir Deine Meinung”.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.

Open Source Digital Forensics

Nice:

The Open Source Digital Forensics site is a reference for the use of open source software in digital investigations (a.k.a. digital forensics, computer forensics, incident response). Open source tools may have a legal benefit over closed source tools because they have a documented procedure and allow the investigator to verify that a tool does what it claims.

More on IT security conference ranking

Find more useful information about the ranking of IT security conferences here. I already blogged about “ranking” in general an also IT conference ranking once.

Promising Password Cracker – Hashcat

Guys, have a deep look at this password cracker: hashcat.

You can choose between a normal and a OpenCL-supported version and apparently the authors have done a very nice work. Comparisons with other crackers, nice documentation, multi-threading, lots of different algorithms etc … well done! If you wonna see some videos, check them out here.