frans

iPad unpacking

iPad unpacking, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Here are the very first impressions: yes, Apple has created a very cool and smart device in iPad. I want one for myself (typing this with our gamelab iPad), even while I am not sure what I would be really using it for. Yet. The real power of this thing is in the user experience; it it so futuristic it feels like entering into sci-fi — and for me that is not a bad thing.

The UI logic is pretty much that of iPhone, the size makes huge difference though. The bright window into media, combined with the intuitiveness of touch, plus the fact that iPad is very fast, makes common tasks feel a bit magical.

There are the obvious downsides, too. Not having flash makes no sense to me at all. This thing would be the killer Facebook gaming device. Now, apparently Apple is trying to kill flash and make eveyone develop native iPhone OS apps. Shame on them. Also, the virtual keyboard is pretty ok, but it is not something that is intended for serious typing tasks. This is mostly a rich media plaything.

Together with rest of the UTA Gamelab folks we will continue to test iPad, but currently there is the technical limitation that there appears to be no way to get paid iPad apps (games, nor books, or movies) for testing. iPad apps are not yet available in the Finnish iTunes, and you need a US credit card or bank account to be able to buy from the US iTunes/App Store. Damn. Need to continue testing the free sample apps then.

Games Research Methods Seminar

Today was the first day of the Games Research Methods Seminar — loads of stimulating papers, and critical and inspiring discussions. There will also be publication project (or two) coming up based on this event, so: watch this space. More: http://gamesmethods.wordpress.com/

iPhone OS 4 and the Game Center

An interesting development in the Apple front: they published today the key features of upcoming iPhone OS 4: multitasking (more power to the user), iAd system for monetization (more money to the developer), and Game Center (friend invites – here we go, Facebook apps). Nice to see how this will work out. – Oh yes, and our Apple iPad should arrive from the States tomorrow (thanks, Lori!), so going to the extended touch screen experience will also be interesting. The version 4 OS will not be arriving to iPad sooner than next autumn, but I will be installing one to my iPhone 3GS in the summer, though.

Jane McGonical: Game us a better reality

This TED video is definitely worth sharing. Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher, makes a bold and entertaining claim that we actually need to play more online games to solve the world problems. Not convinced? Maybe you need to hear what she has to say:

Going back to Outlook

After several more or less happy years with Thunderbird as my default email program, I have now made the move “back” — I am now using MS Outlook. There were some mysterious crashing problems with Thunderbird: after the latest 3.x.x update, the damned program would not close without crashing. But the ultimate reason was support for synchronization and compatibility. Outlook calendar is “better” from my perspective, due to the support it receives from third parties: it is easier to make it sync with my various mobile devices and online calendars. There was the Lightning extension for Thunderbird, but even together, they just could not compete with the flexibility and range of features in Outlook (I am using Office 2007).

One obvious issue, though, that I have found out in Outlook. It does not include option to send automatically a “blind carbon-copy” (bcc) to a message of your choice — this is something that I need, because of the multiple email systems that need to keep in sync). I tried various solutions to come around this, including installing and editing some Visual Basic code, but to no functional result. There were several commercial add-ons that promised to do the job, but really: paying 20-30 dollars/euros just to get auto-bcc feature? Finally I did find this free component, Alan McGrath’s AutoBCC:

http://www.mcgrathtechnology.com/addins

This seems to work. You input the bcc: address into Tools > Options > AutoBCC settings (and it does not appear in the actual bcc field of your message that confused me a bit), but it seems to send the bcc copy nevertheless just fine. Hope it will work for you, too.

Dropbox issue deletes all files [daily bug]

Another favourite entry to the daily bug series (I did find out about this the hard way few days ago):

Dropbox.com is an excellent ‘cloud service’ for online file storage, synchronization between different devices and OSs, and sharing, but I have to warn about a particular issue. If you relocate (e.g. move to another drive or partition) the default My Documents folder of Windows, and your Dropbox resides inside it, it will (or at least that is what happened in my case) break the link to the service, the partially unlinked device effectively sending a message that you have suddenly deleted all your files! What is worse, is that Dropbox will then proceed to delete all your files also from all the other machines where you have Dropbox installed — the moment you switch the computer on, and it gets connected to the service it starts the deleting process and does not stop until the very last of your precious files is gone. Yikes.

I managed to work around by taking the remaining copy at the original machine that got partially unlinked (the files still were in that one device), making a copy to a USB stick, and then using it to restore the files on another (fully linked machine). As to getting the “partially unlinked” computer back in line, I received these instructions from Dropbox Support, which appeared to do the job:

Please save and quit all programs that access files in the Dropbox folder.

1) Click the Dropbox tray/menu bar icon, then click ‘Preferences’
2) Click the ‘Unlink’ button
3) Afterward, your Dropbox will prompt you to re-register. Click ‘Existing user’
4) Enter your account info.
5) Complete the rest of the process.
6) You will asked if you want to choose the location of the Dropbox folder. If you moved your folder then you want to give Dropbox the new location. Otherwise, let Dropbox do it.
– Select the folder that CONTAINS the Dropbox folder, not the Dropbox folder itself.
– “D:\” (correct) vs “D:\My Dropbox” (incorrect)
7) When Dropbox finds your Dropbox folder, you want to yes to merging your existing Dropbox folder.

If your Dropbox was already in sync, it should only take a little while for the indexing to finish. Any files that need to be synced will sync now.

Note that it would still have been possible to restore the deleted files also from Dropbox web interface, but since more than 3000 files were lost, I was not interested to go through them manually. This most [must] be what the Dark Side of Cloud Computing will look like…

iPhone 3GS battery issue [daily bug]

Starting a new series under my ‘technology’ category: the daily bug. At least lately it seems that there has been some major bug in some device or service emerging about every day.

Today’s bug: the iPhone 3GS ‘battery issue’. What happens is that a fully charged iPhone goes fine until c. 70-80 % of battery, then suddenly it jumps down to c. 20 %, and then goes fast down from that, 15 %, 10 % … and soon it will switch itself off, and is not able to wake up any more. But: if you plug it in, it takes a few seconds for it to “find itself” again, and suddenly, the battery meter is back at 80 % level again!

I think this issue started appearing after the recent 3.1.3 firmware fix that Apple pushed to iPhone users — which was actually advertised to “fix iPhone battery issue”! Did the opposite to me… There are some reports of similar experiences in the net (see e.g. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10449664-233.html & http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/10/iphone-3-1-3-firmware-issues-widely-reported-iphone-battery-life-issues-itunes-playlist-syncing-problems-–-are-you-affected/ among others.

Samsung N220

Samsung N220, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

After a longish, administration-overkill-caused break, a short notice. I finally got fed up of my Acer Aspire One (A110, the 512 MB model), as it was pretty impossible to do anything except the very basic html–surfing, even Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition was almost unbearably slow. After considering the options, I took the new Samsung N220 netbook model; it is a pretty basic system with Intel’s Atom N450 processor, 1 GB central memory and 250 GB disk. The positive sides are on the rather sturdy construction (they even claim the keyboard is ‘spill-proof’ and can take some liquid on top of it — I have not tested this). Keyboard feel is nice and the non-reflective 10,1″, led-backlighted display is also ok. The battery is advertised to enable 12 hour non-stop use, but to my experience if you do anything except hold the system on dark, quiet idle mode (the golden standard of battery testers, obviously), you will get something like 7-8 hours of battery life. That is also pretty good; if you plug the system in at the evenings, there is no need to load system during even a full working day. And this is with the standard battery, rather than an extended life battery.

A couple of minor irritations. One of the reasons I picked this particular system was its advertised dual-OS configuration: it has the Windows 7 Starter (I like it) and an “Instant-On” option called HyperSpace, which is actually a slim, stripped-down Linux version (see e.g. this story). This is supposedly fast, simple and substantially more energy efficient than Windows, which all might be true. However, I am not able to use it since it does not allow using Finnish keyboard layout (how silly, they ship this preconfigured with such keyboards that are not yet supported by the OS). It might get an update at some point, but for now, I need to stick to Windows.

Another irritation strikes even while I write this text, every few seconds. On their web pages, Samsung advertises N220 by boasting about its “strategically placed keys ensure that you’ll experience fewer errors – and faster typing”. All well, except the European N220 model actually has its “arrow bracket” (<>) key placed at an non-standard position next to the right shift key, which is made smaller than normal. This means that every time I try to have a capital letter, I will get < << plus a small letter. Oh well, need to just retrain my fingers…

And finally, if you decide to get N220, try disabling “One-Finger Scrolling” — it was just causing trouble by trying to scroll when I was trying to move the mouse/touchpad pointer. It has Two-Finger Scrolling (multi-touch gesture), if you want to use the touchpad for scrolling.

Digarec lecture visit

In February 4th, I will be doing a lecture visit to Potsdam, who are running an interesting Digarec lecture series. My title is “The Dual Structure: Experiencing Digital Games in the Intersection of Gameplay and Media” and you can find an abstract of it from here:

http://www.digarec.de/2010/01/25/digarec-lecture-february-4-2010-with-frans-mayra/#more-911

There should be materials and even a video recording or transcript available online later, so check it out some time after the lecture. [Edit: fixed couple of typos in 6th of February, 2010.]

Tangent EVO E4 as a rear speaker

Tangent EVO E4, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I have been using my old trusty JBL LX2 speakers in my home theater and continue to be happy — the soundscape and overall quality of sound they produce is nice. I have a identical second pair that I have been using as the rear speakers, bolted to the concrete walls using a Vogel’s mounting system. All well, except that LX2 is a rather large and heavy speaker to be fixed in a small cellar room — and the old walls appear to have rather soft material in places so the bolts stated to give up. I had to take LX2s down and use some epoxy style padding to fix the wall (yikes!) and then hammer drill the wall mounts back into place. After that, I was too tired to do much searching for the actual speakers (nice prioritization, isn’t it?), so I just walked to a local Musta Pörssi and bought the first pair that looked like the size, weight and design that I — and my old walls — could handle. I walked out with a shiny white pair of Tangent EVO E4, which was not perhaps not such a bad choice after all. There are not too many speakers in the same form factor and price range (this was c. 150 euros per pair) that can deliver much better sound — or at least that is my impression after some googling around now. My amplifier is an old Yamaha (RX-V630RDS) which can handle DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 so mostly the rear speakers are only used for the effects channel in movies. I have a small collection of Super Audio CDs among which even smaller number make use of the multichannel surround feature. I have now been testing the E4s with LX2s with Peter Gabriel’s UP as a surround Super Audio CD version, and while it is clear that they do not pack the punch that my wall mounted, rear LXs were capable of, I should be able to live with this arrangement. They deliver rather crispy, clear audio and the bass area is not as direction sensitive in any case as the treble area. — And an added plus: I am no longer in similar danger of hitting my head to a massive rear channel speaker while writing these blog notes. 🙂