frans

Canon EF 70-200 mm L

My old Sigma tele-zoom lens is pretty useless nowadays, particularly in cold (the mechanism gets stuck, and you cannot zoom even by using force). I went shopping, and got a Canon EF 70-200 mm L — my very first L class lens. This is the cheapest of line, and does not have an image stabilizer, for example. But it should produce much better images than my old one, the aperture should be enough for daylight at least, and the usability is a huge upgrade to my old Sigma. A review is here: http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-70-200mm-f-4.0-L-USM-Lens-Review.aspx.

Bird table in the night

Lumiyö / Night with snow, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

These days you can find pretty nice bird tables, like this little house we have now in our front yard. It was originally designed to be hung from a string, but it was pretty easy to hack into a suitable stick. So, now we have a regular show going on, with five pheasant, a flock of small birds and a squirrel fighting over the nuts and seeds.

Quiet at the night time, though. The photo was taken at the point when the snowfall had turned into light rain (of water), using my trusty old Canon EOS 350D (exposure time 3,2 seconds, I was using a Manfrotto stand), and I admit a serious graving of 7D with its environmental sealing and advanced autofocus point selection system… (More here: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos7d/ )

Windows 7 sleep problems

The sleep state problems that I have previously blogged about in Windows Vista appear to haunt the OS even in its new incarnation. It appears that the default behavior of Windows 7 (as set up in Redmond) is to enable ‘wake from sleep’ in all peripherals, including network card, mouse and keyboard. And for some reason all these peripherals send up some kind of signals that wake up the OS pretty much the very moment is has put itself to sleep state. Most irritating, making ‘sleep’ in Windows 7 totally useless. It took me a week or two to find out all the different devices that were sending the wake up signals, and disable them in the Device Manager > device properties. Here is a tip: you can save much time by going to ‘cmd’ prompt, and writing there ‘powercfg -DEVICEQUERY wake_armed‘. That should give you a list of the potential culprits for the sleep problems. Read more e.g. from here: http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/fix-windows-vista7-sleep-mode-from-waking-up-by-itself.html

Kolumni, Profile 2.09

Kolumni, Profile 2.09, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

(This column piece is in Finnish, but the main point is to set the ‘learning through games’ discourse in context, and challenge it by approaching games and play as an end in themselves, as autotelic phenomena.)

Kolumni: “Oppia Peleistä” (julkaistu: Profiili, 2/2009, s. 26-27)

Pelit ovat näinä päivinä näkyvästi otsikoissa: toisaalta hehkutetaan peliteollisuuden saavutuksia ja pelimyyntilukuja, jotka tuntuvat uhmaavan taantumankin vaikutuksia. Toisaalta pelit helposti nousevat otsikoihin myös silloin kun haetaan syitä nuorison henkiseen pahoinvointiin tai fyysisen kunnon rappioon. Harvemmin pysähdytään pohtimaan, mitä pelaaminen itse asiassa nykyihmiselle merkitsee. Mitä pelatessa oppii? Continue reading “Kolumni, Profile 2.09”

Gambling studies seminar, Helsinki

Gambling studies seminar, 26.10.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Pictured is Dr Per Binde, who was the opening speaker of the gambling/gaming studies seminar which takes place today in the University of Helsinki premises. The seminar is organised by Pelitoiminnan tutkimussäätiö (Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research), and you can find more, including the presentation abstracts from the web page:

http://www.pelisaatio.fi/ajankohtaista/20/

Windows 7 Ultimate & WD 1,5 TB disks

The weekend was too busy for this upgrade effort really, but at least I made a decent start:

getting rid of the old hard disks in my old workstation (they were getting too small for all this data)
making full transition to the official version of Windows 7 (I bought a boxed set of the Ultimate version)
migrating all my data to the new, 1,5 TB main disk (Western Digital Caviar Green, I bought two of these)
setting up an identical disk to my Windows Server 2008 system (the unet.fi main machine)
setting up some kind of mirroring or synchronization scheme to make data in the workstation and server identical.

The two last steps are the ones I did not have time to do this weekend. Maybe this is a good thing, I need to do further research on the Windows 7 backup and synchronization options. I would really wish for a LAN sync version of Dropbox, but I think that version is not out of beta yet. Any tips for keeping really big data piles backed up & in sync at your home network?

Moccamaster

Moccamaster, 17.10.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I am gradually realising that best tools are often specialized. Take coffee machines, for example. I have tested various combo systems with espresso, regular coffee, cappuchino, whatever, and regularly they fail in some, often in all fronts. It is better to do one thing, well. In the picture we have our new Moccamaster KBG 741 AO. It makes coffee. The light-roasted variety at least tasted rather good. Continuing the tests.

Games as Services: Many still prefer having game with a box

The Games as Services research project (Pelit palveluiksi) studies the impact of online distribution and publication to game industry, game design and player experiences. Recently some new results were published, pointing out how online gaming and game playing in general has become more acceptable among wider audiences. On the other hand, one finding of the study was that many (60 %) of the respondents still preferred to have a physical product of the game at hand. Link to more information (in Finnish): http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/infim/tutkimuskeskus/ajankohtaista.html?id=39949.

The Beatles: Rock Band in INFIM opening party

091020091295, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I just had to blog this photo, playing the Beatles as the Rock Band version was just so much fun in the opening party of our new department (INFIM) and research centre (TRIM — Tampere Research Center of Information and Media). — You can probably see Timo Nummenmaa as Ringo (drums), and Olli Sotamaa doing the Lennon/McCartney parts (singing, guitar).

New study: more than half of the Finns play digital games at least once a month

Our new survey, Player Barometer 2009, provides comprehensive information about all types of game playing in Finland. The study is freely available as a Finnish language PDF download from here — and it also includes a short English abstract.