Officejet

HP Officejet Pro 8620
HP Officejet Pro 8620

Home office upgrade: our laser colour printer, Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050n was bought in summer 2009, more than 5 years ago. It had its fair share of driver problems, and connection problems in the home LAN. Recently the connection has mostly worked for the first print, but then some error mode would require rebooting the printer to get the next pages printed. The print cartridges were also expensive, and cheaper replacement ink cartridges proved to be leaky, and giving poor quality prints. It has been time to upgrade for a long time.

Our new workhorse is an office inkjet printer-scanner, one of the new generation of multifunctional devices that support multiple wired and wireless connections, including printing and scanning with email, saving scans directly to shared network drives, and printing from mobile and tablet devices. The model is called HP Officejet Pro 8620, and while not the latest or greatest in terms of advertised features, the reliable reputation of HP as a printer maker meant a lot in this case. The quality of inkjet printing was making me cautious a bit, but on the other hand, HP advertises that the printing costs of their Officejets are up to 50 % lower than the costs of laser printing. Based on tests, the “best” quality of printer is pretty decent on regular copy paper, though inkjet technology achieves its best results on special papers, or photo papers, of course.

The printer specs (in Finnish) are here: http://www8.hp.com/fi/fi/products/printers/product-detail.html?oid=5367615

ToDiGRA special issue: Physical and Digital in Games and Play

Spreading the word: we have now published the special issue of DiGRA “Transactions” journal (ToDiGRA), on Physical and Digital in Games and Play, many thanks to authors, reviewers and specially to my co-editors Anu Seisto and Katriina Heljakka:

Vol 1, No 3 (2014)

Special issue, chief editor Frans Mäyrä

Table of Contents

Special issue: Physical and Digital in Games and Play

Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue HTML PDF
Frans Mäyrä, Katriina Heljakka, Anu Seisto
Building Material: Exploring Playfulness of 3D Printers HTML PDF
Stephanie de Smale
Game Design in an Internet of Things HTML PDF
Paul Coulton, Dan Burnett, Adrian Gradinar, David Gullick, Emma Murphy
From the board to the streets: a case study of Local Property Trader HTML PDF
Mark Lochrie
SimCity and the Creative Class: Place, Urban Planning and the Pursuit of Happiness HTML PDF
Frederika A Eilers
“That’s not a secure area”– physical-digital sound links in commercial locative games HTML PDF
Inger Ekman
The Case for Computer-Augmented Games HTML PDF
Karl Bergström, Staffan Björk
The Roll of the Dice in Warhammer 40,000 HTML PDF
Marcus Carter

Link to the journal site: http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/issue/view/3

Three invited talks

I will be giving three invited talks on games and culture this week:

There is also a public video stream available online for the last seminar, accessible from the above linked seminar pages. See you at the seminar(s)!