media – Page 10 – frans goes blog

Bored of Verdana

Staring at this blog numerous times per day, I am starting to feel it needs another facelift at some point. But since I do not have the time to start tweaking with the WPress theme frameworks, child themes etc., I just try a minor tweak — changing the typeface and the character spacing a bit towards more spacey and readable (I wish) format. Any comments?

Delayed deliveries

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?

Digital Cityscapes book out

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:

Peter Lang page here: http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vID=310532&vLang=E&vHR=1&vUR=2&vUUR=1
Amazon.com page here: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Cityscapes-Merging-Playspaces-Formations/dp/1433105322/
Facebook fan page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Digital-Cityscapes-Merging-Digital-and-Urban-Playspaces/138270712577

Plugged-in coffee

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.)

Going for big screen

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!

Dropboxing

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.

GD/PHP issue in WordPress/Windows Server 2008

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”

Sony MDR-EX85LP/BLK

I have written before about the Sony wireless, bluetooth headphones I can use with an adapter with my old trusty iPod. Bluetooth stereo works also fine with my new work laptop (Vaio Z31), which was a bit surprising (e.g. with Lenovo the sound was snapping/breaking; must be related to the way bluetooth stereo works for Sony). But wireless headphones do not fit every use and opportunity. You can try to use them with your mobile phone (Nokia N95 and Sony do not work together particularly well, though). But a radio, or some other sound source requires good old wired headphone. I have few of them, like “The Plug” by Koss, but I did find the in-ear-canal, tube-structure painful. They were also dropping out of my ears, and I got tired of cutting the soft isolation material to the odd shapes of my ear canals. I finally found Sony model that appears like a nice compromise between the real high-end and the cheap end: Sony MDR-EX85LP. I like the construction of these in-ear plugs, they fit very well and the isolation is also rather good (even while you can still hear something when you are called upon by your family members…) These ones have also decent sound: rather neutral and balanced in both treble and bass areas. Nothing spectacular, but these are, after all, sub-60 euro headphones. Koss Porta Pro are still the best-sounding travelling headphones I’ve got. (You can get these Sony’s also as a white version.)

Building media room ventilation

This is probably the ugliest cooler casing ever, but when finished and properly installed, it should help with the fresh air flow to my media room in cellar. (Built around SilverStone FM121 cooler fan, some wooden and aluminium parts added, fitted together with liberal use of Super Epoxy…)

IT in the garden

Lying in our garden swing, I can currently see six wifi access points — that’s urban nature for you! 🙂 Comparing LCD screen and paper (Luontokuva magazine), it is clear that traditional paper is still far superior when reading anything outside. The screen in AA1 is very good, but still very pale in sunlight. Wonder if e-ink/ebook reader screen would make a real difference to the benefit of IT? At the moment — closing this webtop and app is the best way to relax, so: enjoy the summer, everyone!