open life

Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years

It always makes me happy to hear from Joe. He wrote something new: How mobile phones can replace a broken economy: The Mobile Manifesto:

When we talk about trouble with the economy, we’ve been overlooking an astounding opportunity. Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years. If you care about the planet, if you care about your kids, if you care about other people, this is something to pay attention to.

While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible.

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Some questions and answers

> Hope you are doing fine... At the outset, I am V Kumara Swamy, a journalist > with The Telegraph, Calcutta, India... I am doing a story on the concept of > couch surfing and your friend Thomas Goorden recommended your name while > responding to my queries on the same.

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Alta - Helsinki - Tallinn - Riga

Sorry about all the detail. The last post has been a while now and I want to write it down while it's fresh. I can always rewrite it later when I'll work on my book. We tried leaving Alta for Tromso, but after 2,5 hours of a lot of cars and none stopping we decided to just head south. It took another 1,5 hour before someone stopped. For the shortest ride of our trip, 2 km only, but it was encouraging, especially thanks to the strawberries we got from the young woman who picked us up.

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Amsterdam - Hamburg - Stockholm

We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so. It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien's front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck.

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Ding dong in the Bijlmer

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Amsterdam

open life

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Last.fm social music revolution

I signed up at Last.fm in 2005. I never really used it a lot. Until recently, when I got slightly bored by soma.fm (still great though!). I found out Last.fm is streaming tons of music. A bit like pandora.com, but way better. And it seems they have everything, ranging from Aphex Twin, to the Beatles, your local punk band, Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen, anything. It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever).

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moving

Last week I realized that I couldn't remember when exactly I had not been going out at night. Amsterdam is great. So many people to meet and spend time with. Last Thursday I met up with Niels Fermont, whom I hadn't really seen the last 12 years or so and whom I found on Hyves a while back. It was great to bring back memories from primary school. We had a very tasty dinner. Unfortunately I suspect the forest mushroom pie to have ruined my digestive system up until today. So I wasn't able to head down to FOSDEM in Brussels.

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First week in Amsterdam

In the beginning of November Robin asked me if I'd somehow be interested in renting a place in Amsterdam. I had been thinking of moving to Amsterdam after Trento, but I considered his question a bit preposterous. Fortunately he rented the place himself and now we're room mates! During my years abroad I sometimes considered Amsterdam the only place left to live in the Netherlands. Going around here on foot and by bike I learn to appreciate my own country again. The bikes are amazing, transport is so efficient (if you don't go by car).

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Federating Social Networks in Amsterdam

Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam... The workshop was interesting. I didn't attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g.

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Nokia N810

I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It's running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn't traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit.

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