Trying to catch some sleep in an airport hotel: engaged in a curious form of travel, that of airport meetings. I am pushing the use of Skype or videoconferencing instead, but I guess that kind of change of culture still requires some rise in the oil price before it becomes dominant. (Edit: for some reason this message had originally got truncated somewhere on the road between my phone, carrier networks, Flickr and my WordPress server…)
Month: February 2008
Oulu
During a short Spring break (traditionally there is something called “Skiing Holidays” in Finland) we visited Oulu — a nice town (I have actually born there), but the weather was a bit cold and windy during the weekend. In the picture we are walking around in Sunday morning and trying to find a place where we could get in, to get some warmth, but everything was actually closed until 12 noon. Rauno’s party was though great, and very warm.
Freezing sunrise
After couple of days of Northern wind and freezing temperatures, we noticed a really beautiful sunrise today while going to baby swimming in Nokia Eden Spa. It is damned how you never have your camera with you when you need it (these are pale shadows, really, taken with my E70 camera phone).
Speaking about horror in tv
Today Inari Uusimäki called me and I agreed to participate in next ‘K-rappu’, a culturally oriented television show in YLE1 channel. I will be talking about horror, possibly also in terms of games, but mostly from a general cultural semiotic perspective, so stay tuned: the show will go live at 19:20 in Tuesday, 19th of February. Link: http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/krappu/k_rappu
Internet censorship in Finland
There is an escalating row currently in Finnish blogosphere and media about Internet censorship: there is now a special law in Finland which allows police to create secret lists of materials that they deem ‘inappropriate’ with some criteria and other, and ISPs are required to block access to those addresses. The law was pushed through with arguments of blocking child pornography, but now it seems that also other kinds of pages, or entire domains, are being blocked, and police declines to give any information about the censorship lists, or publicly defend their decisions. You can read more in Finnish from blogs of Jyrki J.J. Kasvi, an MP, and Petteri Järvinen, an IT author, who comment on the blocking of access to activist Matti Nikki’s anti-censorship site. An issue of fundamental rights, and I hope there will be more serious discussion about the overall ethical problematics of censorship after this.
Operating the operating systems
!– @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>I have been using now a pretty eclectic mix of different OSes (what’s the plural of OS in any case?) for some while now, on a daily basis. My ThinkPad laptop deals with the business matters with its Windows XP Professional, in home I edit videos and photos mainly using a Windows Vista Home Premium edition gaming PC, the home media and web server is based on Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS server edition, the living room Mac Mini is OS X Tiger, and there is also Laura’s XP Home Edition desktop upstairs, oh yes, and the Vista thing in basement can also multi-boot into an Ubuntu 7.10 desktop edition (and then there are all those gaming devices with their native operating systems). And all of those different packets of code have their problems, all of them. Too many problems to even start blogging about them. But there are individual strengths, too. Continue reading “Operating the operating systems”
Read eBooks, save the planet
There is apparently something called ‘Read an eBook Week’ being celebrated during the first week of March (talking about festivities I did not know existed). A real eBook would require a real ePaper/eInk solution, and unfortunately those are not yet at our hands (even if Amazon Kindle and its kind are making fast progress). But there are actually some worthwhile points to support literature to go ‘e’; see:
http://epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2008/02/30-benefits-of-ebooks.html
Future Play proceedings in ACM library
You might be interested in taking a look; the Future Play 2007 conference proceedings have been published online in the ACM digital library:
[click here]
However, this is yet another closed, pay-to-view repository, so the Pervasive Games in Ludic Society paper by Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola and myself might be locked in there for some. Lets see if it is possible to upload an authors’ version somewhere for open access.
New MA in the news
I noticed that at least Digitoday has written a short piece about our new Hypermedia-Information Studies MA; see this link (in Finnish).
Eye-Fi firmware upgrade worries
I am not sure if others are experiencing this, but after the recent February firmware pushed to users by Eye-Fi Inc., our photo uploads have started to fail: “Receive interrupted” are the frequent error messages. It looks they introduced something called “smart boost” in this upgrade, maybe that is the culprit. It appears to use your PC as some kind of cache, and since the Eye-Fi Manager software here is installed to a Vista machine, there might be compatibility issue. Dunno — weird they broke the product/service.
See: http://www.eye.fi/blog/2008/01/31/new-eye-fi-smart-boost-upgrade-and-ritz-camera-news-at-pma-08/
Edit (Feb 8, 2008): I have reached the helpdesk of Eye-Fi and continue to look into the source of this issue. My current suspect is that the new firmware does something a bit differently, in a manner that disagrees particularly with the DD-WRT firmware that I am using in my LinkSys WRT54G router (a Linux based, open source project). Currently with the Fonero Wi-Fi router I am able to reach much more reliable results. Will continue trying and testing… (Btw, if you are interested in tweaking DD-WRT, check out this post: http://lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php.)
frans goes blog 