technology – Page 16 – frans goes blog

Nokia N8

The official specs for N8, the first Symbian 3 device are now out. They have also produced a series of YouTube videos that you can access for this ‘media wall’ by clicking (let the video first load until the menu):

It is still a bit early to say what the actual use experience will be, but I hope they have managed to get the UI and user experience into more simplified and streamlined mode in this version — the tech itself is pretty impressive as that is the traditional forte (mobile media codecs & engineering) of Nokia, not so much the UX, unfortunately.

iPad unpacking

iPad unpacking, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Here are the very first impressions: yes, Apple has created a very cool and smart device in iPad. I want one for myself (typing this with our gamelab iPad), even while I am not sure what I would be really using it for. Yet. The real power of this thing is in the user experience; it it so futuristic it feels like entering into sci-fi — and for me that is not a bad thing.

The UI logic is pretty much that of iPhone, the size makes huge difference though. The bright window into media, combined with the intuitiveness of touch, plus the fact that iPad is very fast, makes common tasks feel a bit magical.

There are the obvious downsides, too. Not having flash makes no sense to me at all. This thing would be the killer Facebook gaming device. Now, apparently Apple is trying to kill flash and make eveyone develop native iPhone OS apps. Shame on them. Also, the virtual keyboard is pretty ok, but it is not something that is intended for serious typing tasks. This is mostly a rich media plaything.

Together with rest of the UTA Gamelab folks we will continue to test iPad, but currently there is the technical limitation that there appears to be no way to get paid iPad apps (games, nor books, or movies) for testing. iPad apps are not yet available in the Finnish iTunes, and you need a US credit card or bank account to be able to buy from the US iTunes/App Store. Damn. Need to continue testing the free sample apps then.

iPhone OS 4 and the Game Center

An interesting development in the Apple front: they published today the key features of upcoming iPhone OS 4: multitasking (more power to the user), iAd system for monetization (more money to the developer), and Game Center (friend invites – here we go, Facebook apps). Nice to see how this will work out. – Oh yes, and our Apple iPad should arrive from the States tomorrow (thanks, Lori!), so going to the extended touch screen experience will also be interesting. The version 4 OS will not be arriving to iPad sooner than next autumn, but I will be installing one to my iPhone 3GS in the summer, though.

Going back to Outlook

After several more or less happy years with Thunderbird as my default email program, I have now made the move “back” — I am now using MS Outlook. There were some mysterious crashing problems with Thunderbird: after the latest 3.x.x update, the damned program would not close without crashing. But the ultimate reason was support for synchronization and compatibility. Outlook calendar is “better” from my perspective, due to the support it receives from third parties: it is easier to make it sync with my various mobile devices and online calendars. There was the Lightning extension for Thunderbird, but even together, they just could not compete with the flexibility and range of features in Outlook (I am using Office 2007).

One obvious issue, though, that I have found out in Outlook. It does not include option to send automatically a “blind carbon-copy” (bcc) to a message of your choice — this is something that I need, because of the multiple email systems that need to keep in sync). I tried various solutions to come around this, including installing and editing some Visual Basic code, but to no functional result. There were several commercial add-ons that promised to do the job, but really: paying 20-30 dollars/euros just to get auto-bcc feature? Finally I did find this free component, Alan McGrath’s AutoBCC:

http://www.mcgrathtechnology.com/addins

This seems to work. You input the bcc: address into Tools > Options > AutoBCC settings (and it does not appear in the actual bcc field of your message that confused me a bit), but it seems to send the bcc copy nevertheless just fine. Hope it will work for you, too.

Dropbox issue deletes all files [daily bug]

Another favourite entry to the daily bug series (I did find out about this the hard way few days ago):

Dropbox.com is an excellent ‘cloud service’ for online file storage, synchronization between different devices and OSs, and sharing, but I have to warn about a particular issue. If you relocate (e.g. move to another drive or partition) the default My Documents folder of Windows, and your Dropbox resides inside it, it will (or at least that is what happened in my case) break the link to the service, the partially unlinked device effectively sending a message that you have suddenly deleted all your files! What is worse, is that Dropbox will then proceed to delete all your files also from all the other machines where you have Dropbox installed — the moment you switch the computer on, and it gets connected to the service it starts the deleting process and does not stop until the very last of your precious files is gone. Yikes.

I managed to work around by taking the remaining copy at the original machine that got partially unlinked (the files still were in that one device), making a copy to a USB stick, and then using it to restore the files on another (fully linked machine). As to getting the “partially unlinked” computer back in line, I received these instructions from Dropbox Support, which appeared to do the job:

Please save and quit all programs that access files in the Dropbox folder.

1) Click the Dropbox tray/menu bar icon, then click ‘Preferences’
2) Click the ‘Unlink’ button
3) Afterward, your Dropbox will prompt you to re-register. Click ‘Existing user’
4) Enter your account info.
5) Complete the rest of the process.
6) You will asked if you want to choose the location of the Dropbox folder. If you moved your folder then you want to give Dropbox the new location. Otherwise, let Dropbox do it.
– Select the folder that CONTAINS the Dropbox folder, not the Dropbox folder itself.
– “D:\” (correct) vs “D:\My Dropbox” (incorrect)
7) When Dropbox finds your Dropbox folder, you want to yes to merging your existing Dropbox folder.

If your Dropbox was already in sync, it should only take a little while for the indexing to finish. Any files that need to be synced will sync now.

Note that it would still have been possible to restore the deleted files also from Dropbox web interface, but since more than 3000 files were lost, I was not interested to go through them manually. This most [must] be what the Dark Side of Cloud Computing will look like…

iPhone 3GS battery issue [daily bug]

Starting a new series under my ‘technology’ category: the daily bug. At least lately it seems that there has been some major bug in some device or service emerging about every day.

Today’s bug: the iPhone 3GS ‘battery issue’. What happens is that a fully charged iPhone goes fine until c. 70-80 % of battery, then suddenly it jumps down to c. 20 %, and then goes fast down from that, 15 %, 10 % … and soon it will switch itself off, and is not able to wake up any more. But: if you plug it in, it takes a few seconds for it to “find itself” again, and suddenly, the battery meter is back at 80 % level again!

I think this issue started appearing after the recent 3.1.3 firmware fix that Apple pushed to iPhone users — which was actually advertised to “fix iPhone battery issue”! Did the opposite to me… There are some reports of similar experiences in the net (see e.g. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10449664-233.html & http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/10/iphone-3-1-3-firmware-issues-widely-reported-iphone-battery-life-issues-itunes-playlist-syncing-problems-–-are-you-affected/ among others.

Samsung N220

Samsung N220, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

After a longish, administration-overkill-caused break, a short notice. I finally got fed up of my Acer Aspire One (A110, the 512 MB model), as it was pretty impossible to do anything except the very basic html–surfing, even Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition was almost unbearably slow. After considering the options, I took the new Samsung N220 netbook model; it is a pretty basic system with Intel’s Atom N450 processor, 1 GB central memory and 250 GB disk. The positive sides are on the rather sturdy construction (they even claim the keyboard is ‘spill-proof’ and can take some liquid on top of it — I have not tested this). Keyboard feel is nice and the non-reflective 10,1″, led-backlighted display is also ok. The battery is advertised to enable 12 hour non-stop use, but to my experience if you do anything except hold the system on dark, quiet idle mode (the golden standard of battery testers, obviously), you will get something like 7-8 hours of battery life. That is also pretty good; if you plug the system in at the evenings, there is no need to load system during even a full working day. And this is with the standard battery, rather than an extended life battery.

A couple of minor irritations. One of the reasons I picked this particular system was its advertised dual-OS configuration: it has the Windows 7 Starter (I like it) and an “Instant-On” option called HyperSpace, which is actually a slim, stripped-down Linux version (see e.g. this story). This is supposedly fast, simple and substantially more energy efficient than Windows, which all might be true. However, I am not able to use it since it does not allow using Finnish keyboard layout (how silly, they ship this preconfigured with such keyboards that are not yet supported by the OS). It might get an update at some point, but for now, I need to stick to Windows.

Another irritation strikes even while I write this text, every few seconds. On their web pages, Samsung advertises N220 by boasting about its “strategically placed keys ensure that you’ll experience fewer errors – and faster typing”. All well, except the European N220 model actually has its “arrow bracket” (<>) key placed at an non-standard position next to the right shift key, which is made smaller than normal. This means that every time I try to have a capital letter, I will get < << plus a small letter. Oh well, need to just retrain my fingers…

And finally, if you decide to get N220, try disabling “One-Finger Scrolling” — it was just causing trouble by trying to scroll when I was trying to move the mouse/touchpad pointer. It has Two-Finger Scrolling (multi-touch gesture), if you want to use the touchpad for scrolling.

On (Not) Remapping FN key in Vaio Z series

I have mostly loved working with my Vaio Z31WN — it is clearly the best laptop I have used so far — but there is a small annoyance that keeps disturbing the work flow daily: Sony did not include PageUp and PageDown keys in their keyboard layout, even while there would have been space enough for that. You need to use two hands: the other to press and hold FN key at the down left corner of the keyboard, and simultaneously press either up or down arrow. As browsing documents using PgUp/PgDown keys is one of the very basic and standard activities that you do on a PC, it is important that you can do it using only one hand, preferably on easily accessible, corner positioned keys. (Some tap or swipe gesture on a touch screen device, or dedicated buttons on the sides of eBook reader or something like that would work, too, but that is different from a standard PC laptop.) But the two-hand style of Sony does not work at all, really. And doing regular scrolling with the touchpad or arrow keys only will just strain your eyes, during a longer working session.

I have been installing and trying out various keyboard remappers in order to move/copy FN key functionality to e.g. right Control/Alternate Menu key, but it seems that these FN keys are often handled at hardware level in a way that is not open to an OS level remap/registry hack. That is no good at all. No single key solution have appeared so far. The second best that I am using now is to use Spacebar / Shift-Spacebar to reproduce PageUp/Down functionalities while on a browser window. Not perfect, but at least a single hand solution is possible using those keys. Any better ideas, anyone?

Considering migrating from Flickr to Picasa

There have been several recent (and not so recent) improvements in Picasa web service that Google owns, making it serious challenger to Flickr, which I have long used. (See a list from here.) There is also a cost issue: the Pro account of Flickr is $25 per year (unlimited uploads, unlimited storage), but you can get 20 GB of disk space from Google/Picasa with $5 per year. Rather than cost, it is really the privacy controls that start to concern me more and more as the kids grow up. Picasa web albums makes it a bit easier to share private photo albums (you just enter email addresses and send the invitation link). This, and other reasons have led me to consider migrating my photo galleries from Flickr to Picasa. As I have several deep integrations set up (particularly all photos in this blog actually reside in Flickr), it is questionable whether this transition really makes sense. On the other hand, I hate being tied to any single service, without ability to change service provider when needed. Flickr has not been particularly dynamic in coming up with new functionalities recently. Yet, integration with my mobile camera phones and mail systems is something that works well with Flickr, and I am not sure how such things would appear under Picasa/Google. But we will see. I am using the holiday period to do some tests, experimenting first with the free Migratr tool to backup and transfer all my Flickr photos into the Picasa account. It appears a bit buggy/easy to crash, but lets hope for the best. It is interesting to see how the transfer works out, and having backups in several places is a good idea in any case.

Avatar: The Second Nature?

Planet Pandora in Avatar (2009)

I just saw Avatar (dir. & written by James Cameron), in 3D, and I must say I am impressed. Not necessarily deeply moved like some other great films I have seen, but impressed as in made to think about cinema and the role it will have for us in the future.

Many people who have written about Avatar have started by dropping a long list of other movies it has borrowed from; my take would be Avatar is “Aliens meets Dances with Wolves meets Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” style of movie. But there is enough originality in this particular blend that the intertextual or -medial reference listings do not make justice to its real essence.

Looking at the film through the thick and rather dark 3D goggles, I felt the basic scenario built around the avatar technology of the movie was sort of metaphor for my own situation Continue reading “Avatar: The Second Nature?”