It was sometime in late 2003 (December-ish) I last used a dial-up modem.

I initially ditched dial-up for ADSL in early 2001 (512k/384k), but in fall 2003 a faster ADSL option (8M/1M) was offered in my area and I signed up for it. And I also cancelled the old service at the same time. (During this time there wasn't a smooth way to switch DSL providers in Sweden. It was shortly thereafter that they worked out a consumer-friendly way of doing it). But there were significant delays in getting the new DSL service as it was pretty popular.

So I had to go back to dial-up for almost three months. I found a provider that offered a semi-flatrate (X minutes for Y money, thereafter Z money per minute [I don't remember the exact rates]). It got kind of expensive for my student budget. A $100-150+ USD equivalent extra cost per month was not insignificant. But in the end I got my faster ADSL connection and I was happy.

Then (1995): An awful Compaq Presario CDS522. 4 MB RAM. 66 MHz Intel 486SX2 (that's right... no floating point unit). 270 MB HDD. 14" built-in monitor of questionable quality... I was so happy I finally got a computer. But the happiness quickly faded away as I began to realize how bad the computer was. Upgraded the memory over a year later with 16 MB to a whopping total of 20 MB but the system still sucked overall. I had to cope with it for two years until I managed to replace it with a newer computer.

Now: 12 GB RAM. Intel Core i7 990X overclocked to 4.6 GHz. 480 GB SSD + 2 TB HDD. Starting to be a couple years old now but is still OK performance-wise.

In 1997. I bought a used GSM phone, think it was an Alcatel HC 400, and a pre-paid SIM for it. It was OK but there were some issues with it, such as the battery not having a perfect fit so the phone would occasionally switch off when having it in the pocket. I fairly quickly went on to other phones.

The most annoying phone I've had was a Philips Diga, circa 1998. There were many usability issues including that it was way too easy to accidentally call the emergency number.

The phone longest in use I've had was an Ericsson T65. I bought it in 2002 and used it until around 2008. Durable and good-enough feature set.

My morning commute from the suburbs to downtown Stockholm is 37 minutes when everything goes by the timetable. Usually it becomes about 40-45 minutes due to delays on the metro.

Broken down into components:

• 4 minutes walk from the apartment to the metro station platform.

• 25 minutes on the metro train.

• 8 minutes walk from the metro station platform to the office.

I neither love nor hate Firefox these days. For me it just has become somewhat irrelevant in the past years. Sure Firefox/Mozilla was instrumental in ending the dominance of Internet Explorer, but somewhere along the path it just ceased in general to have momentum of being awesome.

For me it was somewhere around Firefox 3.5-3.6 I stopped using Firefox as my main browser. I got fed of the entire browser freezing with multiple tabs open just because one of the tabs had content that started acting up, usually some heavy Javascript or Flash. So I tried out Chrome and really liked it, even though at the time there wasn't any ad blocking extension available for it.

My daily commute to work is by metro train (or subway or underground or what you want to call it).

The door-to-door time from my apartment in the southern suburbs of Stockholm to the workplace in central Stockholm is about 37 minutes, of which 25 minutes is on the metro train and the rest walking.

Motorcycle could possibly be the fastest reasonable choice as they are not as prone of getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Traveling by car would just be silly due to the traffic situation and availability of faster options.

A bicycle would also be a fairly reasonable choice for me as it would take about 45-50 minutes. Walking the whole distance is a bit over two hours.

I have two bicycles, a mountain bike (2008 Kona Hoss) and a hybrid bike (a low-cost mid-00s Biltema Yosemite Wapama). I use the Hoss mostly for exercising in the nearby nature reserve, but occasionally also for getting from A to B. During winter I use studded tires. I pretty much never use the Wapama these days, but if I were to use a bicycle to somewhere where I'd have to leave it outdoors then that bicycle would be the preferred choice.

I've been using one with Windows Phone 7 (Samsung Omnia 7) since November 2010.

Of which:

• 14 WPA2-Personal
• 4 WPA-Personal
• 1 WEP (which interestingly is named "virus collection"...)
• 0 Open

Measured speed: about 115 Mbit/s down, 11 Mbit/s up.

Cable; 100 Mbit/s down, 10 Mbit/s up. 399 SEK (~ $58 USD; €45 EUR) per month.

At home in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden

My latest electricity bill (Jun-Aug) had a cost of .23 USD / kWh including costs for transmission+distribution, and taxes. The usage was 742 kWh over 92 days. Apartment in Stockholm, Sweden. District heating.

And here I thought that from what I've heard so far that Earth had possibly some dust or at most some gravel at its L4 and L5 points. This discovery of a sizable asteroid there makes the Earth's L4/L5 points much more interesting. Hopefully there is even more to be found!

Bought the printer, an HP DeskJet 6980, about three years ago and its admin pages says it has printed 183 pages which seems fairly reasonable given my usage pattern of it.

It is now on its third black ink cartridge, and second colour ink cartridge. I've had at least one black cartridge dry up before it was used up.

Given the cartridge cost of 299 SEK for black and 399 SEK for colour, and excluding the cartridges that came with the printer, the post-printer-purchase supply cost per page so far ends up being 5.45 SEK / page, which is about 0.86 USD per page. Not exactly dirt cheap.

I haven't owned a television receiving unit for about five years, and before that it was several years when I only turned the TV on about once-twice per month.

I find the concept of a television schedule to be archaic. Why should I adapt my media consumption during my own free time to a fixed schedule when I could just watch things whenever, where ever, I want through the powers of the 'net instead?

Both at work and at home I have a stationary computer with two displays, and a laptop along them.

In both cases the center display is a 24" 1920x1200, and to the right is a smaller one (at home a 19" 1280x1024, at work a 19" 1440x900).

To the left is the laptop. At work a 15" 1680x1050. At home a 9" 1024x600 when I don't have the work laptop at home.