Category: media

media, culture and society

Olli Sotamaa's PhD videos

I used my mobile phone to take some videos from Olli’s PhD defence yesterday, as well as from the karonkka party afterwards. A great event, many thanks for professor Aphra Kerr on probing questions and insightful discussions — and the evening party afterwards was also excellent: warm-hearted speeches, delicious food, drinks, music, colleagues and friends gathered together for a special day. Congratulations to Olli once again!

Pelitieto.net

Julkistus [Our Finnish language online course on games literacy basics is now released]:

Pelitiedon peruskurssi julkistettu: http://pelitieto.net/

Erityisesti opettajille suunnattu verkkosivusto digitaalisista peleistä ja pelikulttuureista on julkistettu tänään Hämeenlinnan ITK-konferenssissa. Sivusto sisältää tietoa niin pelien ja pelaamisen historiasta kuin tarkemmin suosituimpiin pelilajityyppeihin perehdyttäviä osioita. Itseopiskeluun ja täydennyskoulutuskäyttöön soveltuva verkkosivusto vastaa tarpeeseen: nuorten ja vanhempien välille kasvanut digitaalinen pelikuilu on jo vuosia kaivannut myös koululaitoksen reagointia, mihin Pelitieto.net tarjoaa nyt osaltaan työvälineitä.

Lisätietoa: professori Frans Mäyrä, frans.mayra@uta.fi / puh. 050 336 7650
Tampereen yliopisto, informaatiotutkimuksen ja interaktiivisen median laitos (INFIM)
Game Research Lab: http://gamelab.uta.fi

Kirjastoon! Award to Ilkka Mäkinen/INFIM

I am today talking in the Kirjasto ON seminar in Helsinki, and was pleasantly surprised as the seminar was opened by an award ceremony where Ilkka Mäkinen, docent of library history and colleague from our INFIM department was given applause for his long history in the study of libraries and teaching of library professionals. Congrats! Ilkka’s home page: http://www.uta.fi/~liilma/

Microsoft envisions the future

It is always (well, almost always) fun to see how people illustrate the future; and usually we can learn a lot by studying the past future visions. Microsoft has a bit more money than most of us, and can thus create rather fancy futuristic videos:

Some of these things appear rather likely, incremental evolutions from the present paradigms of interactive and augmented computing. Some were a bit unclear to me — what was the point, how that was supposed to work. And in general, the feeling was a bit similar to after watching Minority Report — fascinated, but also a bit put off, in classic dystopian style.

Moving to Windows 7

During weekend, I invested my two free hours to install the Windows 7 Beta (talk about leisure time, there). I was pleasantly surprised that the first public beta already seems so ready. I think that if I can get all my utility programs to run under it, I will probably move directly away from Vista (too many issues in that OS version still). The multiboot Win7/Vista/Ubuntu needed some tweaking — nice instructions are e.g. here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1035999

Windows 7, Beta 1
Windows 7, Beta 1

Vista no longer able to access CD or DVD drive

I suddenly had a weird problem with Vista today, that took some valuable time (more sensibly otherwise spent) to fix — here is a quick note if you face something similar. If a CD extracting program (e.g. CDex or similar) starts to complain about a missing ‘wnaspi32.dll’, check whether you are able to see the DVD/CD station in My Computer at all. If not, then you might have a corrupted Windows Registry (yikes!) But the fix to that is actually pretty simple: I followed these Microsoft instructions (the manual version) that relate to Windows XP, but the “delete UpperFilters entry” trick seemed to fix also my Vista Home Premium 32bit just fine. Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/en-us

Planet Earth in HD

There are only few Full HD television series or movies I have got so far, and the king of them all currently is the four-disc Blu-Ray box of Planet Earth series by BBC. To a friend of nature documentaries, the selection of ‘spectacular’ animal species and situations (starting with the amazing Emperor Penguins guarding their single egg through the Antarctic winter), but the use of moving, flying cameras and HD video makes the planet really come to you in a way I have not experienced in any other visual media before. It is pity though that the localised version on sale here in Finland does not include the great Finnish language narrations that were prepared when the series was broadcast on the air by YLE, the national broadcast corporation. I really like and respect David Attenborough, but while we watch these with our family, it would be nicer to have Finnish audio, rather than the subtitles over the HD image. Particularly as the subtitles these disks carry have much inferior translations than what YLE used in their broadcast versions. I have wondered even before why BBC/2 entertain does not use the expertise of YLE when putting DVD versions of their series on sale here in Finland, and in this HD version the use of subtitles only is even a worse choice. I also truly miss the making-of documentary and the extra three “Planet Earth: The Future” episodes (those were included in the DVD release but omitted from the Blu-Ray box.) The series itself, nevertheless, is mind-blowing, and will truly fullfil its promise to show us our planet as we have never seen it before.bbc_planet_earth_blu-ray-box

Expressing with the ExpressMusic 5800



Santa brought Laura a new mobile, the Nokia “Tube” (ExpressMusic 5800) model. One can be of various minds about touch-screens itself (it is very hard to touch-type sms messages with those, to start with), but the phone itself appears pretty ok. Its strengths and weaknesses are both related to the Series 60 (5th Edition) OS/UI it inherits from other Nokia smart phones. It is flexible and perhaps even logical to a certain degree, and you can freely use whatever operator you prefer, and add Symbian/S60 software to your heart’s content. On the other hand, the OS is only partially customized for touch-UI use: you are required to open menus and select additional commands, rather than just picking from touch-optimized icons or lists. So: it is so-and-so, but still nice to see more competition arriving to the field iPhone has dominated this far.

Nokia Email with Gmail

Nokia Email
Nokia Email

Nokia released their Symbian-optimised email service, and I wanted to have a look and test-run it in my N95 8GB. The user interface is pretty nice and software integrated well with my Gmail account. But I think they have some issues with this version yet, though. The constant ‘bling’ noise of new email arriving soon got irritating and I could not find any way to switch it off. Then I decided to turn off the application, and it promised to close itself — but the ‘bling-bling’ still continued! I tried restarting the phone. No help: ‘bling!’ It had restarted itself automatically and started to download email again. Stop, please! I tweaked the settings: set the account, all folders to ‘no synchronization’, the software start to ‘manual’. No help: ‘bling, bling, bling!’ Finally I managed to uninstall the damn thing and finally: silence. Nice try Nokia, but: I’d actually prefer to stay in control of my email downloads, from now on. Link: http://email.nokia.com/ (Image courtesy of GISuser.com.)

Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book video tour

Another excellent example of the expanding field of old-media — new media synergy, and art of storytelling making use of the new opportunities of Internet video: Neil Gaiman putting online his reading of the entire new young readers’ novel (whoever and whatever age we, those readers, indeed are) The Graveyard Book. Go to: http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx

Edit: this appears to be the note number 600 of my blog, by the way. Cheers!