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This story on boing boing points to an editorial at Forbes about modern cities. Worth a read!

I especially liked Cory’s Snitchtown. I have serious issues with surveillance these days, and Snitchtown mirrors my thoughts 100%.

Stockholm’s subway stations are lined with cameras. I counted around 20 cameras at my station. I wonder what they do with all that footage? Wouldn’t it have been wiser to invest that money in a few more security guards to patrol the subway at night?

I personally don’t feel any safer with these cameras. And the subway is still a shithole on Friday and Saturday evening when the drunk masses come out to play.

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Technorati Tags: surveillance

Lately I’ve been feeling that I am losing my geekyness somewhat.

I am no longer entranced by shiny gadgets, and I no longer crave the latest mobile phone just because it has a cool camera.

Until December I had a really el-cheapo Siemens A52 which I bought for 300kr without abonnemang, and it was my ex-gf’s fault (HI!) that I ended up buying a much more expensive Panasonic X700 for Xmas…. She asked my advice on phones, and I searched, I saw, I clicked, I payed.

Now I am thinking of selling it. I could use the cash for other stuff, and frankly, I hardly use the features of the phone at all. The only feature I do use sometimes is the ability to read e-books. Seems hardly worth the expense however.

I’ve also ungeeked myself to such an extent that I don’t even have a VGA cable anymore. Sure, there are some odd cables hanging in what used to be a server room, now a storage room, but still, it feels empty.
In a way, I miss that, but I really don’t know where I stand right now. I like technology, but maybe I’ve just outgrown the need to buy gadgets unless I really feel the need for the featureset.

It’s probably just that I am poor right now, that’s all. I mean, fuck, I wouldn’t mind getting a new PC for playing games and tinkering in Linux, but instead I’ll be spending the money in Japan. I obviously decided on Japan so you can see what I feel is more important, still I wouldn’t mind.

In any case, I just feel that my geekyness is in somewhat of a limbo. Sometimes it feels that I am artificially maintaining it, and sometimes I feel I want to immerse myself in Binary numbers and make love to blinking lights (preferably blue ones).

To let you understand how disconnected I have become.. I can summarize the number of electrical items I believe will accompany me to Japan:
1. My camera
2. iPod Shuffle (mainly as a memory card for pictures I might need to store on it)
3. My electrical razor (although I might not even take that, depends on space)

So ungeeky indeed.

While I’ve been thinking about this topic for quite some time, I decided to post it today, after looking at this. Enjoy.

BBB (BredbandsBolaget), a Swedish ISP which delivers 10mbit lan connections and some VDSLs into peoples homes, recently added a new service to their lineup. 100Mbit/s.

Everyone thought: WOW GOOD GOD! 100mbit will blow my brain away (just like in that Powermac G5 commercial a while ago).

Unfortunately, corporate stupidity which makes that company loose money all the time, will make them loose some more. The 100Mbit/s service has a 300gb transfer limit per month. Anything above that will cost you 200kr per 100gb. 200kr is about 25 amerikanski dollars.
If you do not pay, you are reduced to a measly 128Kbit/s.
We said it was stupid from the start, but bigmac decided to give it a try.

After about 16 hours of activation, my server with DC++ running on it, had reached 160gb of outgoing traffic. Bigmac’s own DC machine had about 100gb.

Meaning, in less then a day we almost filled our quota. Something that made bigmac cancel his 100Mbit/s line before the day was over.

I wonder who they think will order that 100mbit service? I mean, seriously, anyone who wants 100mbit is a download maniac, but if they fill up their quota in one day, what’s the point?
In that case I’d rather pay 50% less and get 10Mbit/s without any limits.

Of course, I am still sitting with stinky Cable Internet… Lucky for me, I at least have 8Mbit/1Mbit. I remember when I could only have 512Kbit/128Kbit…

I dream of a Lan Party where everyone has a laptop with a wireless connection.
I dream of only having power cables to worry about. (I would not complain without those either)
I dream of being able to arrange an event like that with 10 or so people, and we can all indulge in countless destructive battles of StarCraft. (or some Battlefield… hehe)

Wouldn’t it be cool? 10 people, 10 Powerbooks, No Cables. Bliss.

Today I was at an informal gathering of a few bloggers in Stockholm, on the roof café at Kulturhuset. The man behind the initiative was Joi Ito. Joi turned out to be a nice guy, down to earth and filled with interesting ideas (this was no surprise to anyone who has been following his blog, of course). The other people who attended (Maya, Per, Max, Ludovic, Erik, Jon, Kim, David and Roine) were also really cool and we discussed a lot of interesting issues on both large and small scales.

Well, Max is only 6 months old so he mostly kept quiet throughout the entire thing.
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Technology is great. I am sitting in a car on my way to Göteborg with bigmac, to pick up a boat he is importing from the USA. During the trip I decided to do some work on our new super-secret SMS service, and using my trusty T610 and a GRPS connection, I was able to make code modifications and upload them back to the ftp server. Smokin. Technology still never ceases to amaze me. Oh and this blog was also conducted while driving at 150km/h. I think I am getting queesy. Must look at road.

Click on the picture to see a wonderful example of technology at work. Maybe I’ll actually have to pay for GRPS traffic this month.