Pre-order Daniel Suarez' Daemon sequel Freedom™

I was concerned there for a while, when I didn't find a single bleep from Daniel Suarez online after his Google talk - hopefully no-one decided him too dangerous and silenced him, right?

Anyway, I have written a whole bunch of things about Suarez' revolutionary book "Daemon". Someone asked me what to read after being riveted to that book, and sure enough once a paradigm has been changed once, it doesn't change again with the sequel, but Freedom™ is looking promising anyhow. Maybe, just maybe it will do to privacy what Daemon did to IT security, I especially like the tagline "Everything is under control - everything".

If you haven't already heard the story of how Daemon went from self-published to Barnes & Nobles, read about it. Essentially Daniel is still kicking it and recently sent me an email about my wish to pre-order FreedomTM (seems he is still treating me well...). You can also pre-order it before the release on January 7, 2010. Before ordering, don't miss reading the preview chapter Suarez recently published on his homepage.

Finally, don't take my word for it, but check out what people are saying online about Daniel Suarez' books. (Update: I tried to do both twingly and twitter search widgets here, but the javascript just won't work, could someone tell me what's wrong with blogspot?)

Do check out my other posts about Daemon, and also see the awesome collection of bookmarks I have gathered.

PS. Don't buy anything by Dan Brown. Preferably also don't read it, but seriously don't buy it. He is evil™.

listentoblogs and blogbackupr - ingenious and lightweight mashup innovations anyone can use!

Still no time to blog lately, but I did take the time to try out the awesome idea listentoblogs. Eric Wahlforss, Henric Berggren and David Kjelkerud had a brilliantly simple idea, which they implemented largely during 24 hour (!) business camp - make a spoken mirror of the Internet and turn blogs into podcasts.

In the same way you can subscribe to a blog RSS feed (do subscribe to this blog while you're at it!), in listentoblogs you can subscribe to the podcast mirror of a blog. No need for tedious blog-reading you don't have time for, set the podcasts to play in the car, on the bus or when out walking.


There ought to be several types of people interested in recording and listening to podcast from listentoblogs, like blog owners wanting new visitors, drivers or factory workers - anyone spending a lot of time when they could listen to something but not read, blind people, friends of either of these groups or just someone wanting a bit of good karma. I think obviously listentoblogs should have way more users than it currently has, so if you don't find much you like there, don't be discouraged but go ahead and record something yourself! In the meantime, check out my recording or just press play here! :

I always know where my towel is! Almost... on Listen to Blogs

My second friend of the day is Jonas Lejon and his blogbackupr. It is also exactly what it sounds like, it will follow your blog, record and provide in various formats backup of the blog you can use in an emergency or maybe if you want to restore it somewhere else when switching blog locations.


Jonas is no less than a super-productive genius when it comes to web services, just check out the list of the sites' "friends". He runs many sites of various sizes like download11 (which you may have used but never known about) and tweetvalue but his recent most brilliantly rising star is bloggy.se or as it is soon launched internationally, cuzo.com. He is now mainly working on the Facebook / Google Friend Connect functions before launching the site - soon there will be an international, friendly and more flexible twitter which you can use with your Google or Facebook account, no other registration needed! Twitter has the size, but bloggy/cuzo is much nicer, It's gonna be awesome.

I had a dream: that I could read the hive mind

Last night I had a dream, actually a very pleasant one, that everyone had gone insane. Since it's just one of those little things which feel fine sharing with the world, I posted it through Ping.fm:


For several years I've been a huge fan of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life", an amazingly complex, surreal and beautifully rotoscoped movie essentially dealing with lucid dreaming. It made me curious and I figured "can I somehow read about what others are dreaming of?" Sure I can, I can even make a blog out of it! (credit to @twostoreys, @astoriaxattack, @bhl1, @meridianariel, @LivestockOne and @Suw for these dreams)


What cool things can you pick out of the hive mind?

Microblogging - because who has time to pause to summarize life?

You know it's funny, but it's really when I am the busiest my blogs look the most inactive. While some give advice on how to succeed with your blog and manage to blog daily, I honestly think that my friends have better things to do than churning through the useless crap I have stressed out, and if it was my calling in life to produce quality articles continuously - I would rather work for a newspaper and get paid for it. I'm happy with typing up the occasional strike of insight, even if that means the blog is quiet for a week or two.

But still, it's nice to allow acquaintances to "keep up with you", and that's what I've started to use microblogging for. My friend Christian thinks of microblogging as "too much hot air" and even though I disagree with him, I'll do anything to return his link love. Microblogging has really become what blogging couldn't be for me. I use ping.fm to post out to facebook, jaiku, twitter and some (because I don't want to choose, and it's not practical to visit them all manually), and then plug those services into EventBox which gives me essentially a strange chat room with comments from the lives of many of my online friends popping up while I'm at the computer. When I'm not by the computer, there's not really any stress to catch up either. I also can turn it of should I want to.

I'm a huge fan of our old IRC channel #basvrak and of course the Young Scientist's #fuf.org, and now I have the diffuse channel of the social internet as well. Splendid! So if you're curious about how I've been spending my holidays, why don't you have a look at unclecj.jaiku.com, twitter.com/unclecj or unclecj.bloggy.se, and maybe even get yourself an account there while you're at it!




There are loads of suggestions about how to put microblogging to it's best use, myself I like the concept of putting URLs on your thoughts and use especially Jaiku as a computerized, online public notebook, but everyone are free to invent their own habits. If you still think microblogging sounds strange, maybe you can take your time to check out the excellent video "twitter in plain english", explaining how "life [and microblogging] happens between blog posts". Now the thing I need to figure out is how to shake life into myloki for location, is there anyone out there who's actually gotten it to work?

Also, always remember, when you see an RSS icon ( ), click it to subscribe! Yes, that goes for the one on this blog as well. And while you're at it, if you haven't heard of Google Reader for keeping track of your blogs, you're gonna love me for suggesting it to you.

Go ahead and read more of my posts about microblogging, facebook or chat.

Now I would buy an iPhone! If only it had buttons...

Yesterday the lesser of two annual events in the Apple world took place - the Apple WWDC - World Wide Developers Conference keynote (the more significant one being the January Macworld Expo).

Apple are really amazing about being able to create a buzz about every little thing they are doing. They used to broadcast the conference keynote live, but nowadays (apparently not for technical reasons) they keep them for a while but bloggers provide both live text and commentary. The day afterward, the event is available over QuickTime.

Of course, yesterday's event was focused on the iPhone (and is of course in both DN.se and NyTeknik). Some have complained that the keynote provided little juicy news for developers in terms of hardware or development tools, but the biggest thing for me is the new 3G iPhone, with GPS capability and roughly half the price of the old iPhone. The deal is: 8GB 3G iPhone with GPS at $199 ^* ≈ 1990 EEK ≈ 1190 SEK ≈ 127 € ≈ "Twice as fast, half the price" (with significant coolness added). I am very very tempted at getting one now.

Still, the major hurdle I've learnt of the iPhone remains - it has no buttons... It was the most revolutionary thing with the iPhone, to use as much as possible of the device surface for adaptable buttons and display, great. Though, it also requires way too much attention to input, it gives no feedback to touch so it may be the worst example but - how can you SMS while drivingwalking for example?! I have inherited a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, and it may be subtle, but it has a lot of features you require of your phone! Finding contacts, forwarding SMSs or texting, it is really fast when you don't have to pay attention to what you're doing and can just let your fingers type away. So Apple, it's great that you have been trying to cater to enterprise users, now please figure out a way to work with the iPhone even with minimal attention, and it will really start selling.

The second most interesting bang from the WWDC is the wealth and variety of applications which seem to be coming for the iPhone. Sure, games are fun, but I am really keeping a keen eye on location aware and social mobile applications like Loopt or for that matter, my friend Peter's social picture messaging application MoYuMe (I recently found him in a video by some Latvian blogger). If you think the GSM phone, IM and SMS have changed the way people live and what they do, the scale of the mobile social revolution is breathtaking. Reactionaries object that who cares about all that social and mobile silliness, but remember they said the same about mobile phones and SMS. You heard it here first (well, unless you heard it somewhere else before), and for a head start of understanding the revolution, head over to our friends CommonCraft explaining Twitter in plain English:

(Update: In Sweden Telia and in Estonia EMT will be selling the iPhone 3G, and at least in Estonia you can pre-sign up already. I think EMT's ad is much cooler than Telia's press release at least)

(Update 2: Teliasonera has released it's price plans for the iPhone 3G:

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 18 months
iMini	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	299 SEK	1695+24·299 = 8871 SEK	3295+18·299 = 8677 SEK
iMidi	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	489 SEK	995+24·489 = 12731 SEK	2695+18·489 = 11497 SEK
iMaxi	1000 minutes, 1000 SMS, 1000 MB	859 SEK	1+24·859 = 20617 SEK	2195+18·859 = 17657 SEK

No surprise really, after the initial pretty useless buzz Apple released, $199^* has the asterisk so to say - the subscriptions you this time probably will be tied to in the store are pretty horrendous. I think a "3G-soap" as they are called in Stockholm, a 3G USB modem for the laptop costs roughly 500 SEK per month, and that's still less limited and a lot more versatile than what you can do with an iPhone and 250 MB.

Swedish wireless access prices are generally ridiculous compared to Estonian and I hope to see that EMT will be less scotch. Also, count on me writing a piece on how to forever get rid of the despited "high speed extreme use"-clauses in broadband contracts, also discussed in Swedish here)

(Update 3: Estonian EMT has released the iPhone 3G too now. If I understand the newsletter correctly the contracts are all 24 months, so it's not comparable to the 18 months column above. I was saying that I think traffic should be cheaper in Estonia, but instead it seems they simply do not provide any "maxi" plan, and charge a bit more than Telia does in Sweden.)

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 24 months
i550	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	550 EEK (= 329 SEK)	2670+24·550 = 15870 EEK (= 9486 SEK)	3960+24·550 = 17160 EEK (= 10257 SEK)
i890	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	890 EEK (= 532 SEK)	1490+24·890 = 22850 EEK (= 13658 SEK)	2780+24·890 = 24140 (= 14429 SEK)