So instead I found an old axe and used it to clear the old trees fallen on the paths. By old axe I mean in good condition yet 2 generations behind; and although the head was of really good quality it kept coming off the handle. A practical ax expert would just tell you you have to know how to hang your own handle to the ax head.

Although that sounded attractive for about a microsecond or two, I just got myself a brand new Fiskars Chopping Axe which was really so much more efficient yet shorter and lighter. I got the 23.5-inch one, which is the closest to the old 25-inch one I had been using. It's a tad short, but the only other choice is a 28-inch, which is really too long.

I also had some fun with the Craftsman Lawn Mower 917.288700 and did some maintenance on it, simple stuff like changing the oil and all the oil/gas/air filters.

The older Craftsman Tractor 917.256544 was out of commission but after removing the mower and adding a new battery that now makes a working tractor and I can attach it to my dumping cart.

The other thing I did was explore the 250 or so acres of forest, trying to match the deed description (in perch and rod units, no less) and I ended up with some nice tracks on Google Earth.

My main tool was mostly MyTracks, to record the tracks and upload them to Google Earth but eventually I also ended up writing my own Android Bearing app to compute the compass bearing between two marked points.

It's the first time I actually play with a GPS. On one hand it was nice as it actually worked fairly well it the medium-dense forest; on the other hand the precision wasn't that impressive -- the GPS generally indicated 8 or 16 meters for accuracy but it did not update fast enough when walking. Also the integrated compass on the phone was incredibly noisy with the reading typically fluctuating -/+ 10 degrees.

Finally I got quite a lot more done, including many many hours spent reading the vast content of TV Tropes, working on my Android apps ([Bearing|] obviously, but Timeriffic, Brighteriffic and Flashlight got translated to French too and had many other improvements, without even mentionning Nerdkill) and much more.

Overall what made the biggest difference was having a real 24-hour almost-instant internet connection instead of a 33K modem line. In that regard, I must say the ARC booster antenna was incredibly good when combined with the aging Kyocera KPC650. Bandwidth ranged from 70/40 KB/s (down/up) down to 3 KB/s (in rain at night, it's really that weather sensitive) with a typical average speed of 15 KB/s when I was generally getting no signal at all without the booster antenna. I guess being in the middle of a forest, behind a hill and out of the official zone coverage doesn't help :-) The signal strength indicator was around -100 dBm without the antenna and up to -80 dBm with it.