anything technology related, not fitting into other categories
Merry Christmas
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Day of opening presents, day of warmth and joy. Merry Christmas, everyone! (My blog and other services are finally back online, after 29 days of life with temporary solutions — a nice present also this, thanks to my new ISP WlanNet: 8mb/1mb adsl this time 🙂
The first Wii experiences have been predominantly positive: the physical play style and basic sensory technology actually seem to work well. The remaining troubles have been either technical limitations or user errors. I will explain here one of my own from the latter category, so that others with same issue might get help quicker than I did.
Wii manual explains how to connect your controller (“Wiimote”) with the console by pressing the sync button simultaneously both in the remote and in the console. The trick is to press both buttons only once; somewhere I had got an idea that you need to keep those two buttons pressed down until the controller tells it has synced. That is wrong, and a bad idea. I ended up spending one or two hours pressing buttons for minutes without successful synchronization. The Wii console was of course inaccessible for all that time, which was not very happy situation — I was already calling help lines and was ready to send my brand new console back and order a new one.
Laura saved my day by pointing out that both two controllers sync perfectly if I just stop my futile attempts in keeping the sync buttons pressed down, and just press them once. Oh dear.
Another irritation is the lack of S video or component video cable from Wii (coming to Europe some time next year; out of stock in Japan). And I cannot get Dolby Surround sound out into my amplifier, even when both console and game (Zelda) advertise to support surround. But Wii Sports was really enjoyable, even sweaty. And Zelda Twilight Princess has the right kind of magic in it. It actually reminds me from both WoW, Fable and Beyond Good and Evil, which are among my favourites as far as contemporary RPG style adventures are concerned.
I have been trying to tie in all the various areas of digital media, games and online services where I have invested portions of my digital identity. One step to such a direction would be to have a working photography–blog integration, that I have been trying to achieve by installing FAlbum (by RandomByte). As you should currently see from the main page of this blog, the “Random Photos” sidebar element should now work (“Recent Images” function did not really work; it seemed to skip most of my photos). And in the /photos/ sub-page also rest of the Flickr integration is otherwise functional, but the WordPress theme that I have breaks apart — the stylesheet does not work, and the FAlbum installation instructions do not exist for fHeaven template that I have based my design upon. Take a look at:
falbum:installation_instructions [RandomByte]
Flickr Tag Cloud for all my photos
(the Scandinavian characters break down, for some reason…)
Now this is actually rather fun: as a an indication of games becoming the vernacular of Media Era, read/play this Dethroner spoof on adventure gaming books (remember them?) and ongoing HDTV discussions.
http://dethroner.com/index.php/2006/11/28/choose-your-own-adventure-the-cave-of-hdtv/
(Gizmodo, thanks for the link)
This is one of those areas where much interesting is going on: using mobile devices to keep track and share your life with your friends, coworkers and family. Several interesting applications and services are in the works, most of them still in beta, though. I have been particularly looking at these: Merkitys-Meaning, Context Watcher, Jaiku. As more people subscribe into these, the context information becomes more useful and interesting. I tried to install Merkitys-Meaning because of its integration into Flickr, but currently it cannot be signed into my E70 mobile (Symbian 60 3rd edition not yet supported, should be in January). Meanwhile, I continue testing Flickr integration into WordPress (attempted also the del.icio.us integrator plugin, but that did not work).
There were some serious problems with the network settings of unet.fi server — hopefully this temporary connection will work for now. I have ordered a new, business ADSL connection from a small local ISP (WLANnet), hopefully I can actually get from some service from them (knocking wood). But since they need to order the copper connection from Elisa, it can take three weeks before this transition happens.
A new publication has come out in the Human Technology journal, summarising the key findings and methodological conclusions from our three-year-long Morphome project, funded by the Academy of Finland. As the external evaluators for Academy recently gave their estimates of all work done within the Proact Programme, they gave credit to our work, claiming that “design research should be a key aspect of human-centered computing research” and that “the kinds of work represented by this project should be supported in the future. This group, in the brief time of their project, became a leader in that regard. The Academy should consider supporting this and like-minded projects in the future at levels appropriate for sustained work.” Now that is what I call nice feedback, indeed! 🙂 You can yourself download our article from this address: http://www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/current/abstracts/mayra-et-al06.html
Open content production is an important part of digital culture and participatory media culture. This night, I watched Elephants Dream, which is an international collaborative production (coordinated from the Netherlands, some Finns also in the core team). The movie is just 10 minutes and more of a technological proof of concept production-wise, rather than a landmark in any artistic sense (mostly this can be taken as a humoristic homage to the Matrix movies). But to have this kind of tools available in the open source is of course a really promising development.
deep pockets
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Work phone, personal phone, iPod, Tom Tom navigator — it is just obvious that in these days of mobile technology, one of the most important things you need are deep pockets? (A test shot with Canon S3 IS.)
I have recently updated my dear DVD movie collection pages (maintained with Collectorz.com Movie Collector software, handy for its Internet database integration search functions), and the public index is here:
http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/movies/
Having some kind of search in this folder is important when I try to check some details of my collection while on the road, but it appears that search is not easy, at least, not in this case. I have attempted using some javascript search functions, and then moved to use the Google search, which almost always works, more or less. But now, for some reason, this folder remains outside Google’s index (even if their robots should reach it just fine), or then there is something else wrong in my search page…
Edit: I worked with the Movie Collector and the Aqua Frames template a bit more, and now the javascript version of search is working. There remains some issues with the template, though.
frans goes blog 
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