mobile blog notes
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/
I have been playing with some mobile tools in my kitchen and living room (the mobile weekend of a family man, I know). The camera phone that I am mostly using, Nokia N95 8GB, just got a new firmware, V 31.0.015, which brought along some nice additional or enhanced features. These include better integration to online photo sharing services. I am using Flickr, and now it is just one click away to share a photo through the default Internet service provider. Also, I noticed that the phone screen automatically tilts to vertical/horisontal (this sensor tech might have been in the previous firmware, too, I am not sure). In the background I am running Location Tagger, which captures the GPS coordinates into the photos’ metadata in a format Flickr can also read. You need to be close to a window for this to work indoors, of course. The app can cache the location data, though, which is handy. I have also Fring now running in the background, which is a mobile instant messenger program that is able to tap into Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and SIP Internet phone services, to start with. The downside now is that there is always something “interesting” going on in the damned device, so I might turn this off at some point. But the always-connected, automatically location tagging camera is something that I’d like to see in my SLR/main system, too, to look into the future.
Today’s seminar is titled “Tiedon paikat” (Places/Sites of Knowledge); it is organised by the Tampere Centre for Cultural Studies. More information here: http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tacs/uutinen.php?item=32873
and here: http://tacs.wordpress.com/
Pictured are the seminar chair, professor Mikko Lehtonen, and the first speaker, Andrew Nestingen from the University of Washington.
Our two-year research project that looked into design and evaluation methodologies of casual, multiplayer and mobile games (also considering money gaming issues) has now finished; today the good folks at Winter Assembly event provided us the rooms to feature the results from research. Pictured is project manager Janne Paavilainen; other speakers included Annakaisa Kultima, Petri Ikonen, Jussi Holopainen and Jussi Laakkonen. The final research report will be published online (forthcoming during this spring). Links:
Edit: here are some camera-phone photos I took in the event: [link].
Today takes place (in Telakka restaurant, Tampere) the games researcher meeting organised by DiGRA Finland, Games as Services research project, Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies and Neogames centre. Pictured is Olli Sotamaa and some of the other, c. 30 participants. Much interesting talk and good company!
Today I started my morning by delivering a keynote on Digital Games Literacy (in Finnish) in the national didactics symposium (a conference of Finnish learning researchers and teacher trainers). Pictured is professor Bernadette Baker, who spoke about multiple senses of ‘subject’ and how to reform the teacher – child – content relationships. The full programme is here: http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/okl/ad2009/ohjelma.html.
I have finally updated to Office 2007, and learning its tricks takes its time. One nice feature I noticed was that it allows you to register your own blog and publish blog notes directly from within Word. Here is link to the instructions: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA101640211033.aspx. They do not mention it there, but for WordPress you should choose MetaWeblog API (not Atom) for it to work. If you can see a picture below, then it also supports upload of pictures:
Ok, it supports photo uploads, but it does not scale photos. And it is not also possible to set the categories / tags from Word, as far as I can see. But nice to get this much, at least.
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 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.)
This is not the most ultra-light, or most powerful option, but hopefully T500 will be the reliable compromise.
frans goes blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.