IGU.fi

The summer has finally arrived and, with it, the possibility for a quick weekend getaway to the summer cottage. The promise of spending a lazy afternoon by the grill, watching the sizzling steaks accompanied with a ice cold beer in your hand, is very tempting – but it also means leaving behind most of the gadgets and the high-speed internet access.

That means: no surfing the web, no catching up of the latest TV-series on SurfTheChannel or Hulu, no listening to Pandora, Grooveshark, Finetunes, last.fm or any shoutcast web radio station (in essence, being without your cave).. While an iPhone or a Nokia N800 would give some relief to this issue, it only works as long as one stays within the coverage of a 3G network. In our case, the summer cottage is just far enough from the nearest city that we’re left with a spotty 2G network (not even EDGE!) and a painfully slow data connection. The cottage doesn’t have a telephone wiring either, so ADSL is out of the question.

For this summer, I sweared that I’d find a way to get decent internet connection, and luckily 2009 is the year when Digita is rolling out their Flash-OFDM based network (on the old NMT-450 band) nationwide, giving me the access to a decent 1M/s down, 500KB/s up wireless connection!

I got my subscription and hardware from Airnet, taking advantage of their summer sales. The package comes with a TeleWell router that can handle ADSL, 3G, Flash-OFDM and WLAN connections on top of the normal ethernet and USB connections to a computer. Not suprisingly, Qualcomm’s PCMCIA card was the weapon of choice for the Flash-OFDM connection (F-OFDM was developed by Flarion which is now owned by Qualcomm), and although the card comes with its own tiny antenna, the Airnet package comes with a proper 7db antenna (with a magnetic base for car installations!). The cool thing is that I could set the router to use the 3G connection, and in case I go outside the network coverage, it can automatically switch to a backup connection like F-OFDM (and I guess in theory it would work from ADSL->3G->F-OFDM if needed).

Other things still missing include: a decent TV (for the inevitable House, HIMYM, TBBT, etc. fix, served by Tvix or Popcorn Hour), a sound system for TV and music (probably a NAD all-in-one paired with some decent speakers) and a second hand Playstation 2 / Xbox for those perfect never-ending weekends with good friends.

I’ve been catching up on my RSS feeds and just checked the latest post from Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose discussing their top 5 favorite books of all time.

I found couple of the recommendations interesting and decided to purchase them online and it turns out that I definitely wasn’t the only one. Check out the recommended books on the right side bar!

I’ve been using Adlibris quite a bit recently and it has almost completely replaced Amazon.com for my book purchasing needs. If you live in Finland, Sweden, Denmark or Norway I highly recommend giving Adlibris a try.

I’m constantly amazed with Twitter and how fast it is being adopted. Not just by individuals but companies too, though so far it’s the “web 2.0″ type establishments that seem to be active. It used to be the same thing with blogs, starting with early-adopter-individuals and ending up with most of today’s most respected companies having a blog (of some sort) to ‘interface with the public’.

Now it seems that the traditional types are also waking up to the twitter-mania. I had a first hand experience of this just earlier this week. My frustrated tweet on the difficulties in choosing the best pocket size HD camcorder was noticed by two of the three companies whose products I had been considering to buy. First I get a reply tweet from @KodakCB giving me a link to a face-off review of two of the models and soon after that @vadovideocams sends a tweet on possible online shops that carry the Creative Vado HD and ship to Finland. @vadovideocams even made the effort to search eBay for a good deal on Vado!

Maybe this is a glimpse of the future? Perhaps one day you can get the latest reviews and recommendations from @Audi and @BMW when it is time to renew the lease on your company car – and surely @Lego and @Hasbro will give me great ideas on what to buy my toddler when it’s time to do some Christmas shopping.

Riding on the fame of twitter’s Fail Whale comes GrooveShark’s own 404-page with a adorable panda mascot and a tongue-firmly-in-cheek apology.

Here’s a kid that thinks that MySpace is more important his family and friends. When his bigger brother suggests that he would mess with his account (or perhaps just write a message to him) he completely loses his mind. Note: the language is NSFW.

It’s a feature that’s been requested time and time again and finally someone got it done.

You can download or order the sw to be sent to your phone directly via joiku.com