media – Page 6 – frans goes blog

Magic Trackpad on Vaio

I have chronic wrist pains, like too many other active computer users, and I have been testing various mouse replacements in order to alter the movements that cause repetitive strain. Laptops and touchscreen devices are nice since they allow for more flexibility in manipulation, and also since you need not reach far looking for the mouse. Touch interface gestures are also powerful and after you have got used to them, a regular mouse starts to feel awkward and a bit antiquated.

The Apple hardware is often of high quality, but I do not like the restrictions of the Mac OS. Today I have been experimenting with connecting the Apple Magic Touchpad with my Sony Vaio Z series computer. Extracting and installing the required drivers to Windows is a bit tricky, but not too complicated (see the instructions here), and after that, the bluetooth trackpad appears to be working just fine. The sensitivity and feel of Magic Touchpad is great; however, you do not get the full set of multitouch gestures you could use on Mac OS X. But even with the limited single, and two-finger gestures this is a very nice peripheral, and great for example in home theatre use – I would not want to use a regular mouse while browsing and clicking through content while lying on a couch.

ZTE Blade battery

I have been using the Chinese, entry/economy-level android phone ZTE Blade as my main work phone (all my actual work phones are Nokia ones, and broken in various ways, this was a free side-offering to my iPad data plan from Saunalahti). I have been pretty happy with the small, light-weight smartphone — proving that the latest and greatest is not needed for every need (I carry my personal iPhone for most media needs), but now we have a problem. I have kept the Blade pugged into a charger every night, but suddently the battery has started dying out really fast, and even after hours of charging, the battery can be at 10-20 percent level.

I have tried out the battery reset/calibration instructions, see e.g. here:

http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-blade-modaco-com/323487/battery-recalibration-protip/

I do not seem to get the battery reset to work in the way it should; maybe the battery is just almost dead, maybe there is something wrong in the phone’s electronics, don’t know. Probably it would be possible to get the phone fixed by the professionals, but I am not sure if it is worth it. There are some pretty serious usability problems due to the inprecise touch screen and sub-standard processor — ZTE Blade is successful enough to convince you that Android is interesting and viable as an OS and a software ecosystem, but this might be the time to have another work phone. Maybe Samsung, like the new Galaxy S II? My actual needs require the phone to have a fast and responsive keyboard (a good virtual one might do as well), reliable phone and calendar functions (both my contacts and calendar are Google-synchronized) and email are the things that me, like I guess most business users value in their work phones. But it would be nice to be able to access the application sphere that I am actually researching using also the same device I use for daily communications. Currently it is my personal iPhone where I run all the games, read my Twitter and Facebook streams and do the Foursquare check-ins. I had installed all those apps to the Blade, too, but it was too uncomfortable and unresponsive to actually be usable as a rich media/gaming mobile internet device. But I suppose the best current Android devices are up for the challenge?

VanderMeer on Finnish SF and Fantasy

Jeff VanderMeer and his wife Ann made recently a visit to Finland and talked with the members of SF/speculative fiction community/fandom members around here. The results are documented in a highly interesting series of blog posts, well worth checking out:

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/05/finnish-sf-and-fantasy-an-established-community-a-surge-of-talent.html

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/05/finnish-science-fiction-and-fantasy-johanna-sinisalo-hannu-rajaniemi-and-moomins.html

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/05/05/the-finnish-sffantasy-community-an-interview-with-tero-ykspetaja/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/05/07/finnish-fiction-viivi-hyvonen-on-the-monkey-and-the-new-moon/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/05/09/finnish-fiction-an-interview-with-anne-leinonen/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/05/12/finnish-fiction-saara-henrikssons-cool-concept-moby-doll/

Great stuff!

CloudMagic, with offline search

Another interesting tool/service: CloudMagic is a Chrome/Firefox browser plugin that provides enhanced search functionality in Gmail, Google Docs and Contacts. With the latest release they also added the ability to do searches offline, which is a great benefit if you rely on Google services a lot, and also travel. I have not tested the offline side yet, but the search seems to work fine, even though it might take some time to do the indexing, if you have massive amounts of mail. Download from the main page: http://cloudmagic.com/. The release details: http://blog.cloudmagic.com/category/releases/.

Updates in Articles

I decided to let go of the idea of using the Articles page as a work-in-progress writing platform (I never seemed to find that extra time to work on those article drafts). Instead, I have now included links to some recent published articles by myself and those co-authored with others in to this page (https://fransmayra.fi/articles/). There is a longer list available here: http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/publications.html

Flip Phone futures

This is a really cool video and vision for future, worth sharing:

What is being creative? from Kristian Larsen on Vimeo.

LinkStation, TwonkyMedia, and PS3 video streaming

After getting LinkStation Duo 2TB NAS as the backup disk for our home network, I realised that it also had a built-in, DLNA compliant media server. Since we had hundreds of video clips and thousands of photos, this sounded like a great opportunity to get all those family memories to the Sony Bravia TV screen. But: nothing is so simple, in these days of IT and media “standards”. Far too large part of this weekend has been spent trying to get different parts of this new media equation to communicate with each other. A firmware update to the LinkStation produced almost usable Twonkymedia server setup (the shipped version of Twonkymedia was apparently uncompatible with the NAS firmware, making it useless). I say “almost”, since it seems that some media player clients are able to access something from this media server, some nothing. E.g. Windows Media Player in Win7 seems to show parts of the disk media contents, and you can navigate the folders. In the Sony Bravia built-in media browser you can see a few videos, but not navigate the folder structure. The best results come from using PlayStation3, where the folder navigation seems to work fine, and quite a few video files play ok. Unsurprisingly, it was those older videos we had shot with a Sony video camera that play fine in PS3, but when the videos turned into those recorded with Canon cameras, they became “unknown data”. I explored various conversion options, if I’d take the leap and produce a converted version of all those HD video files, but the video and audio codecs and file formats are a real jungle. I hoped in vain there would a single-button solution that would make the suitable conversion possible, without all that “muxing” and “demuxing” that the real digital video people seem to be doing all the time. Late at night, I finally found some kind of solution that seems to work: if you install the latest version of Windows Live Movie Maker (I also installed Expression Encoder 4, just to be sure), you can save imported Canon MOV files into various types of WMV files – and finally the “Save Movie … for Burn into DVD” option produced a file that successfully streamed from LinkStation’s TwonkyMedia server to the PS3, displaying both video and audio. The result is not comparable to the HD original, but it is the best conversion method that I could find that is almost at “single-button” level of simplicity. Hopefully someone can find something even more simple — and better quality? For a regular consumer, the entire DLNA “standardization” appears almost like a joke — I have installed and tested numerous media servers, and tried to access them from a variety of clients and players, and none had actually worked like they should. The era of interoperability is not yet here.

2010 in review (blog stats)

WordPress.com is appararently automatically generating this kind of status reports at the start of a new year of blogging:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 64 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 762 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 11mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was December 21st with 241 views. The most popular post that day was The most amazing 450 page presentation ever.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were onegiantmedia.com, networkedblogs.com, unet.fi, uta.fi, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for baby snow leopard, ipeng spotify, dr-bt50, digiscoping, and baby snow leopards.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The most amazing 450 page presentation ever December 2010

Enable Remote Desktop Connection on Vista Home Premium August 2007
593 comments

meeting with a baby snow leopard August 2006
8 comments

iPeng. iPhone. Spotify. And Squeezebox. August 2010
5 comments

Samsung N220 March 2010
14 comments

First three MSc theses of Interactive Media

Year 2010 has been a truly busy one (I cannot really understand that it is almost over and that we soon will be living 2011 already). Apart from all the research activities (some of which we try to mention in gamelab.uta.fi), and the usual upheaval in university administration, law and organization (we are no longer part of the Finnish government), this year will go down in history as the one when the first graduates of Interactive Media finished their studies. Here are the names and the titles of the first three pro gradu theses that we accepted this fall:

Henrik Saari, Itsensä esittäminen Facebookissa: eri-ikäisten käyttäjien käsitykset ja kokemukset verkostopalvelussa esiintymisestä (PDF link)
Eva Leppänen, A study of views of Facebook users on the role of haptics in social network systems
Matti Linna, Trotting the Globe: Evaluating and Categorizing Playful User Experiences of Google Earth

Congratulations to everyone – three very good and interesting works!

Imaginary Japan book

Another interesting book, this one available for download from http://iipc.utu.fi/imaginaryjapan/ – Imaginary Japan: Japanese Fantasy in Contemporary Popular Culture. Edited by Eija Niskanen (University of Helsinki). Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2010. This includes also a short article by myself, titled “Japanese Fantasy and the East-West Dialectic”; direct link to PDF is: http://iipc.utu.fi/imaginaryjapan/Mayra.pdf.