24.08.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Photo from today’s press conference that announced the collaboration agreement between Nokia Research and University of Tampere. The idea is to expand the research collaboration into interesting new fields and strengthen existing collaboration areas, such as Human-Computer Interaction and Games Research. Pictured is professor Roope Raisamo (speaking), Rector Kaija Holli and Laboratory Director (NRC) Jyri Huopaniemi (sitting).
21.08.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
The second lion to our family, the little brother was born to Luka today, at five minutes past seven in the evening. Long waited, the birth was finally quick (albeit not painless, like these things tend to go). Happy? Yes. Tired? Very. Now we just stare at his little round face, and try to understand.
I have been having bad luck before with various companies, but this is now getting epidemic — are all of these delays explained by the economic recession, of some other such factor? For example, I pre-ordered my iPhone 3GS from Sonera (the exclusive carrier in Finland) already late June, I think — and was promised a delivery in July 31st. Then I received a call from Sonera telling that it will arrive in 5th of August instead. Then nothing happened. I have been calling Sonera and Verkkokauppa.com where I should be getting the phone delivered, but no-one have been able to give any sort of estimate for when the phones could really become available.
The delay was particularly nasty for me, as I had ordered my previous mobile subscription to be closed at July 31st, and then needed to get to Sonera to have a new subscription opened, without the phone yet available. I had also scheduled some work with analysing iPhone apps for August, but now it seems that I need to get my hands on an iPod Touch in order to be able to do that work. Damn, such delays are irritating in an already too busy schedule.
On another front, we are still waiting for two armchairs we ordered from Asko more than four weeks ago (the delivery promise was 2-4 weeks). No contact to the customer, no explanation. Is Finland just the country of bad customer service, or is this universal?
It looks this book is now out: Digital Cityscapes – Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces (Peter Lang Publishers, de Souza e Silva & Sutko, eds.) discusses location-based, hybrid-reality and pervasive games, featuring contributions from me and Petri Lankoski, as well as Hannamari Saarenpää from our lab, among others.
More information:
Got finally a camera today that can produce HD (720p) video clips. Testing the low-light characteristics of Canon PowerShot SX200 IX in the shot below: night time, HD and imported directly from .MOV into Youtube — the you can see that auto exposure creates lots of grain. Still some nice sky tones. (Click the “go full screen” symbol below, in the low right corner of the player.)
There will be a couple of more experiments posted into my profile later. My first impressions of this small camera are positive. It is surprising to see how versatile system this kind of pocket camera can today be. Digital photography has gone long way, at least as far as technology is concerned.
I attached a mobile DVB-T television reveiver to the top of my coffee maker couple of days ago. The idea is that I need not switch on my big screen TV in the living room in order to see the morning news while getting my mocha. Nice, but there is no built-in antenna plug anywhere in our kitchen, and I had to “hide” a terrestial digital television antenna also to the coffee corner. Decorative mistake, I was told… (Maximum TV-710 CX receiver: was 99 euros in the local Kodin Ykkönen store.)
Setting up my docking station at home, I ended up with terrible headache: staring at the tiny, super-sharp screen of Vaio Z31 from a distance is not something you want to do for several hours. Time to get a proper, bigger external display for the upstairs working den.
Looking at some reviews, and comparing prices, I ended up with Samsung SyncMaster 2494HS. It is a 24-inch, Full HD screen that appears to have been packed with a rather nice LCD panel. The ergonomics are not quite perfect: the “simple stand” it was shipped with has no up–down or rotation adjustments. Luckily, the small stand appears to fit my table and height. The touch-sensitive buttons are painful to use, and Samsung ships some software tools with the display, which supposedly make it possible to adjust the settings with mouse from GUI. Unfortunately the “MagicTune” only gave errors when I tried installing it. There is a restricted number of video cards it works with, and the nVidia 9300M that my Vaio is using is not one of the supported ones. No luck. But the image quality is great (you need to set the 1080p resolution for 50Hz though, not 60Hz like the instruction says). But finally there is enough real estate in the screen that you can actually get two A4 pages next to each other and continue working. Perfect!
I have been using now for some time software called Dropbox to keep my various workstations, servers and laptops in sync, and to share some content with colleagues. The system works surprisingly well, and is totally silent and quick, just doing the file synchronization job fast and invisibly in the background.
The free account has 2GB limit, so this is only for keeping the files from the most recent projects up to date. Some materials still need to be backed up manually. Most importantly, this is not yet the tool I need for keeping my music as well as the photo and video albums backed up. There must be a reliable, fast and quiet real-time synchronizing tool somewhere, I just have not yet found it.
One of the benefits of Dropbox service is that they support different OSes, so I can finally have my Linux laptop all the time synced with my Windows boxes. For the photo and video file masses I do not need such cross-OS compatibility, I only need to keep Vista, Win7 and Windows Server 2008 in sync there.
My new installation of WordPress in Windows Server 2008 seems mostly working just fine. The most irritating remaining problem is the media/image upload part where image resizing is not working: you only get the option of full size images, and e.g. thumbnails are just greyed out. The folder read/write properties seem ok, and GD extension in PHP is installed; my info.php says:
Continue reading “GD/PHP issue in WordPress/Windows Server 2008”
Couple of years ago I wrote about our first lawnmower, a Stiga Collector model. In couple of summers I have managed to break the thing several times (I always run it against stones), until it felt not worth paying for repairs any more. Also, it had become apparent that the collector part was not really necessary for us — bio-clipping is really enough (like Eki then already commented). Our new model is hopefully simple and durable machine: a Klippo Excellent S GCV model. It has a solid aluminium base and motor built by Honda. To be ready for those stones, I asked it to be installed with a Blade Plate system: six small blades that cut the grass at different levels and which are hopefully more resistant against stones (or, more likely, breaking in a manner that makes repairs a bit cheaper). Lets see. The ultimate goal is to have a smaller lawn in any case.
frans goes blog 
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