I have published a short article in Finnish, titled “Kehittyvän pelikulttuurin kahdet kasvot” at the Finnish Cultural Foundation/Pirkanmaa web site, discussing the cultural potentials and frustrations that we face in digital gaming field today. Link: http://www.skr.fi/default.asp?docId=18253.
Author: frans
Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, esp. Digital Culture and Game Studies in the Tampere University, Finland. Occasional photographer and gardener.
IR11 Online Fantasy Panel
I will be presenting today some of my analyses of the cultures of fantasy gaming in Internet Research Association’s conference (IR11) in Gothenburg. Together with Sebastian Deterding, Ashley Hinck and Ulrika Bennerstedt we will have a panel session titled “Fantasy and the Net”, based on our short papers. My own piece is titled “Aporias in Gaming Fantasy” where I look at some of the elements that complicate perception of fantasy as straightforward fulfilment of desires, and also point towards complexities in the construction of identity for ‘fantasy gamer’. Link to IR11 pages: http://ir11.aoir.org/
Yearbook 2010 / Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja
Here is some information about the new Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies 2010 (English abstracts available in the downloadable PDFs, linked below):
Pelitutkimuksessa ajankohtaista etenkin rahapelitutkimus
Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2010 on ilmestynyt sähköisenä osoitteessa
http://www.pelitutkimus.fi/vuosikirja-2010
Vuosikirjassa tarkastellaan jälleen niin digitaalisen pelaamisen historiaa,
nykytilannetta kuin tulevaisuuttakin.
Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja on vertaisarvioitu, avoin tiedejulkaisu. Continue reading “Yearbook 2010 / Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja”
Light and strong
There are many things online apps, netbooks or tablets are enough, but when you need to do multimedia editing, gaming and publishing work while on the go, there are actually not so many alternatives. A thin, light yet powerful laptop computer is something that many professionals develop almost a symbiotic relationship with. I try to keep my eye on the developments on this field, so here are some links (to Finnish publisher pages, for my own convenience mostly) about some of the most important representatives of this species.
- I am using a Sony Vaio Z series laptop as my main workhorse, and the new models have features that continue to improve it – I have yet to find something that really rivals the “Z”: http://www.sony.fi/product/vn-z-series
- Macbook Pros are very pretty devices indeed. Pity they are a bit too heavy for real, ultraportable category (and Macbook Air, on the other hand, does not have the required multimedia and gaming power). OS X is not the optimum for gaming purposes either, but you can always multi-boot. Link: http://www.apple.com/fi/macbookpro/
- Lenovo ThinkPad X301 used to be the business users optimum model in the ultralight category – but I am not sure whether this model is available any more from Lenovo, or what is its current successor?
- Fujitsu LifeBook S760 Premium is an interesting model from a company that usually makes less inspiring devices: http://fi.ts.fujitsu.com/offers/notebooks/lifebook_s760.html
- Others: There are several manufacturers that are not so well represented over here in Finland, but which have competitive models in this category. For example: Toshiba (with their Portégé 700 line), Alienware (which has the interesting ultraportable M11x line) – also Asus, Dell, Samsung and several others have improved their lines, but I have not yet found immediate competitors to the aforementioned. HP has copied much of the Macbook Pro design into their Envy line, while being more budget oriented (one review of Envy 14 is here: http://reviews.cnet.com/hp-envy-14-review).
The best of all? The jury is still out, but personally I have been happy with the Vaio Z series and would probably stick with it, if I’d need to choose a new portable gaming/workstation right now.
Frans Mäyrä Daily
One of the clear strengths of social media lies in its capabilities for filtering – sometimes dubbed ‘collective intelligence’ by a fancy name. Wisdom of the crowds helps in finding those golden nuggets among all that chaff. One of the most useful tools (apart from Flipboard for iPad, which is sort of half-way there) is the Paper.li web-based service which builds a news-site style layout of the most popular materials that have been circulating among your Twitter contacts during the last 24 hours. Rather than trying to follow the buzzing stream around the clock and checking out everything personally, it is now possible to see what were the ‘trending topics’ that were recently shared and discussed in the network. This is still an ‘alpha’ release, but already rather usable and worth testing out. Here is link to “Frans Mäyrä Daily”: http://paper.li/fransmayra
Solution to the iPad wifi issues?
As a somewhat sad and ridiculous conclusion, it seems that the most certain way to get iPad to connect via wifi to Internet is to replace your current router with a new one — made by Apple, of course. I ran out of options with my Belkin N+ Wireless Router, at least. It was possible to open the network and leave it totally unprotected – iPad accepted it only then – but I did not prefer to have it set up that way. So, Cupertino, here we go again (AirPort Express works fine with iPad & iPhone, of course). This must be part of Apple’s not-so-secret plan of world domination?
iPeng repeat issue
I love iPeng, the plugin and versatile iPhone remote app for Squeezebox players – the extensive range of features comes with with the price, though. iPeng is not the most simple of players. It took me some time another day to debug a little problem, for example: iPeng appeared to be stuck on repeat. Songs I added were included in the playlist, but player would not move forward. A single song would only repeat. It took some time to find where the repeat setting was: you needed to tap once the play (cover view) screen, after which further settings would be revealed, including a symbol for controlling repeat settings. Repeat to off, and the problem was solved. – An example of more ‘expert’ style app/interface design than what I consider desirable today — great to have this level of control, on the other hand (after you have done your homework).
Studying AllWay Sync logs
After failing on various tools to keep the necessary files synced over the different devices me and my family are using, I am nowadays the happy customer of AllWay Sync, which provides both automatic and manual sync opportunities, and powerful filters that are useful for e.g. excluding those thumbnails and other app or OS-dependent database files from the automated syncs. It also keeps nice log files so you can follow what is happening and where in your networks. Lately, I have noticed that video and photo files still figure in the logs in their usual style, but music folders only occasionally sync the album cover files (subject to updates in different music clients). This is due to the Spotify Premium account: there is no longer need to get CDs or do mp3 file downloads – pretty much all music I have time for is there, and then there are also all those (net) radios and podcasts. Times are a-changing..
iPad has been praised for its accessibil…
iPad has been praised for its accessibility, proven by even a toddler can immediatelly get it, and enjoy using it. The downside: if there are children in the house, it is not possible to use iPad for anything else. They will do anything to get their hands on it.
Typing Finnish in iPad
Finnish is one of the languages that are not happy with the basic, US centric ASCII character set: in order to make sense, we need also all those fancy umlauts, also known as “ääkköset”.
It is currently possible to get umlauts and accented characters by pressing and holding certain US keys in iPad, but typing anything but a single sentence that way is too much work. There is also a “Finnish Keyboard” app published for the device, but that has a non-standard keyboard layout and it does not integrate with the other apps, making it waste of money.
The system I have found to work best is to install and use iPhone rather than iPad apps for writing Finnish in iPad. For some reason the full Finnish keyboard emerges when you launch the iPhone app – probably the iOS of iPad has also the iPhone software libraries (necessary for running those iPhone apps in native mode), and the Scandinavian languages are supported in iPhone so – voilà – there you have the Finnish keyboard in iPad. It is a good idea to press that “2X” button at lower right corner to have more comfortable writing room. WriteRoom is currently my favourite app for those writing works; it is simple, focused on distraction-free typing and has sync to online service (at http://www.simpletext.ws) that does its job for importing text to PC.
According to tech news, iOS 4.2 should arrive in November and bring support to new languages, so supposedly true iPad text editors such as Pages will get their Finnish keyboard layouts later this year. Meanwhile, the iPhone app workaround appears to be the best solution I have found.
frans goes blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.