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Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.
This must take the record for the trippiest data-centre build anywhere, ever: It's an old nuclear bunker 30 metres below central Stockholm, and its new conversion for one of Sweden's biggest ISPs has made it truly 007-worthy. Check it: it has simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls, there're German submarine engines rigged as emergency backup generators, plus there's 1.5 megawatts of cooling for the servers. Oh, and it can survive a hydrogen bomb attack.
A priest has resigned from his parish after being caught viewing web porn in his computer at work. While I'm sure God doesn't give a damn about porn--no matter how close it is to heaven--or the weaknesses of this priest, the church's IT staff and the archbishop weren't so amused when they discovered that his porn surfing antics had infected all the computers parish network.
This unique "Spark" lamp concept comes from the far away land of Sweden where the government is planning to install smart energy meters on new homes. The meters are designed to keep track of energy consumption and relay that data over the internet for customers. The lamp uses Wi-Fi to tap into that data and changes colours for a 3-second interval to indicate how current levels of consumption match up to the monthly goal.
Back in 2006, Oscar Diös heard there was a dead Boeing 747-200 built in 1976 on one of the runways at Arlanda Airport, the largest international airport in Sweden, north of Stockholm. It was once owned by a Swedish company called Transjet, who used it to fly muslim pilgrims to Mecca, as well as doing charter flights around the world until it was grounded for "organisational problems" in 2002. The noble Jumbo was in a bad state, but Oscar saw the possibilities right away. Probably after way too many glasses of akvavit that day, Diös thought he had the perfect idea: to buy the 747 and convert it into a low-cost hotel.
If you enjoy observing and controlling the minutiae of your daily life, down to how much CO2 your last shower emitted, consider moving to Sweden and taking part of the Manodo project. Nordic start-up Manodo has created the ultimate smart home gadget, which tells you everything you'll ever want to know (and maybe some things you don't) about the resources you're consuming.
The most famous story to come out of Sweden in 2007—besides the death of celebrated cinema pioneer Ingmar Bergman, who I thought was already dead—was the 40-gigabit internet connection of the septuagenarian Sigbritt Löthberg. Giz reader speculation that she was going to "host her knitting circle as an HD interactive webconference" was close: in fact she used the hot-as-hell connection to dry her laundry.
Most of us would never need an electrocardiogram embedded into our mobile phones to monitor our hearts, but most of us aren't recovering from a heart attack. For those people that are, this Swedish invention that turns any old mobile into a monitor that can automatically call a doctor or the hospital if your heart explodes is something they'd pay loads and loads of Swedish kronas for. Or meatballs. We think they're pretty much interchangeable. [The Inquirer]
We received half a dozen tips earlier today from our Svenska readers talking about "Gizmondo coming back." The story went from a vague November 2007 quote by ex-convict Carl Freer into a morning Internet craze, all fuelled by a flash animation in a domain registered through an anonymous service. A bit of fact checking, with the help of a few Swedish journalist friends and whois, reveals that the rumours of a Gizmondo reappearance may have been greatly exaggerated. Actually, there's probably enough material to completely smash them.
Extensive studies conducted by universities in the US and Sweden show that a certain dose of radio frequency before bedtime causes insomnia. While there is plenty of number crunching yet to come to determine the exact relationships between exposure to 884MHz RF and loss of sleep, the key message from one of the scientists was this: "If you feel you have trouble sleeping, you should think about not talking on a mobile phone right before you go to bed."
