David Fredh : Blog and Pictures

This is a post regarding the subject that has been discussed widely here in Sweden since the Pirate Bay Trial. We also recently got a new anti piracy law, IPRED (After the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive proposed by the European Union). IPRED made it easier to aquire persional information about users that are suspected pirates.

This law change was not popular. Weeks of debates helped the Swedish Pirate Party to get one of Sweden’s seats in the European Parliament. We also could se decreasing internet traffic and fewer pirates. People got scared and maybe didn’t want to take the risk.

“It’s obvious that those who are using file-sharing have been scared and moved somewhere else, like streaming music sites,” said Daniel Johansson, a researcher at KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm. (source)

They recently have proposed similar laws in Great Britain. It will be very interesting to follow if the result will be the same there.

This is my opinion: Music … could … be free! But let the authors/artists or the music industry decide the details! Read the rest of this entry »

The Economist started a really interesting discussion.. . again… when they said that we are heading against the end of free lunch – again. The free services around you will be changed to other business models (paid or freemium) due to the financial crisis according to the economist.

Some services have changed their business models from completely free to “cheap”. Last.fm is one example. They changed to a freemium-model recently. I hope that they will survive. It’s a huge difference between free and “cheap”. Last.fm is competing between a big number of music services with free content (iMeem, iLike, Spotify…) and of course they are loosing visitors by charging them… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time again for new versions of our web browsers. Last time the focus was on speed.. . This time the focus is on speed as well as better compatibility to web-standards (for example the ACID3-test).

I have been reading a lot of comparisons between the new web-browsers but most of them have forgotten one player, Opera.

Tested: Chrome vs IE8 vs Firefox 3.1 vs Safari 4

Which Is The Best Browser: IE8, Chrome, Safari Or Firefox 3.1

Opera released its alpha for the upcoming version 10 a while ago and it had a few interesting features. Higher speed of course but also 100% score of the ACID3 test. Recently Opera also announced another interesting feature, the Turbo mode Read the rest of this entry »

Being an application designer cannot be easy.

They need to make the application powerful but also easy to use. It should fit all needs and different types of users. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi again!

I have been thinking a lot about preparing a list like this. When i started to use a Linux based netbook i suddenlly realised that this kind of list does not exist.  Yes. .. .now…..

My main OS is MacOSX for private usage. I use Windows XP at work and have Linux Ubuntu installed in my Netbook. My goal is to give you a complete guide of applications for the all thre operating systems that has the same functionality and is needed for your daily computer usage. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to wrap up the year 2008. It has been a year of change with Obama, Olympic games and fincancial crisis.

• It is also the year when Yahoo said no to Microsoft.
• iPhone really rocked it’s way into the market and changed the focus from Hardware design into Software. The application store now contains more than 10000 applications which is very unique and the os and ui is beautiful. The first iPhone competitors has been released from other vendors and they seems really cool.
• The commercial breakthrough for mobile internet. 3 Sweden has announced that they will gear up to 21mbit during Q2 2009.
• Small cheap $400-notebooks (so called netbooks) got really popular since Intel finally released it’s power effective atom CPU’s.
• The small and cheep netbooks (above) originally came with linux (or a linux-option). Linux had to step back in favor of old Windows XP (Microsoft’s joker-card).

Maybe 2008 was the year when Technology finally became trendy? It’s not about the phone, it’s about the possibilities and user experience. It’s not about having the internet in your computer, it’s about how!

So, finally, what about 2009? Read the rest of this entry »

• Do you have more than two computers? Maybe one at work and one at home.
• Do you use your USB memory a lot?
• Do you send e-mails to yourself?
• Do you think it’s hard to send large files by e-mail?

If you answer yes on one/several of the questions above, then dropbox is definitely something for you. Read the rest of this entry »

After text, images, music and video it’s now the TV that will move to the internet. The latest free software in the category is LiveStation from Microsoft. It’s a great, free software that exactly does what it needs to. With this slim piece of software you can watch a number of tv-channels free of charge. For example, I have been watching BBC without any breaks on a quite bad internet-line.

Example of channels available:

• Al Jazeera
• BBC
• CNN
• MTV
• Discovery

It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I think it’s worth a try.

I had the privelidge to be included in the Spotify early beta test phase (Thanks Filip) and i must say that Spotify is one of the gratest applications i have tested, ever!

Did I say it was swedish?

Spotify is entering the group of listen-to-streaming-free-music. There is a lot of competing solutions as last.fm, pandora, web-radio, podcasts and so on. Great services, but all with one problem: You cannot choose the song yourself.

Spotify is basically an iTunes ripoff but with a huge music-library that you can use directly. You can create playlists, search for new music, listen to webradio etc. Everything is fast and seamless. It’s almost like all the music is on your local computer.

There are 3 different ways to subscribe to spotify. Free, 1-day and premium. Free is free, but with commercial between the songs. You can pay for one day or monthly to skip the commercial.

I only have 1 minus point. The most of the music is old, and no new album that i have checked has been added. Maybe this is something that will be changed now when the application is released as a public beta.

Give it a try at: www.spotify.com