technology – Page 33 – frans goes blog

entertaible: electronic gaming and traditional board games

Combining physical and digital worlds is one of the major trends in games evolution currently, and you can see it happening in the physical gaming, movement sensing and location aware mobile gaming, for example. One of the things that we have been researching in the IPerG EU games project is combining board games with digital layers or functionalities (in work package headed by Interactive Institute in Sweden), and it was interesting to have a look at the ‘Entertaible’ concept by Philips. See: the project home page, and a video.

bill and conan making fools of themselves at the CES

Bill Gates’ CES keynote is being reported as giving out the message that the way to success in the future for software companies like Microsoft is to make software more like video games. But actually, if you watch the actual video recording of the performance, you will get a very curious, awkward kind of Conan O’Brian show, coupled with somewhat out-of-place Bill, and some of the most bug-ridden demos for some time shown in public. Hilarious!

the sony e-ink reader

Many interesting things for a gadget freak in the CES this year, again; I just want to point out that Sony is bringing out an E-Ink reader, with a USB connection for downloading and reading websites, JPEGs or PDFs in its completely flicker-free, paper-like screen; see Live From CES: The Sony Reader – by Gizmodo. Now, lets just have it half the thickness, with colour-enabled screen, and double the battery life…

non-interactive interactive media, part 1

Like many others (I suspect) I have a secret love: media that does not want my attention or require that I actively use it. On the other hand, I also love the increased possibilities and opportunities provided by the latest information and communication technologies.

There is so much to say about this paradox, and how symptomatic it actually is, but here is just one link in this mini-series, dedicated to non-interactive “interactive media”: the RSS-capable screensaver by Microsoft. There are others, of course, but this was actually easy to install (a plus for us stressed out media people), and despite that this MSN Screensaver is still in Beta, it seems to work. You just set up your favourite RSS feeds, delete all MSN content feeds it attempts to serve you, make sure that the screensaver image folder points to somewhere you actually feel comfortable watching at (it will preinstall a series of pretty landscape photos), and voilá: you can rest your eyes and brain by staring at the semi-transparent info screens, all filled by mostly useless news clippings, sailing by. (There is weather information, too. But no Tampere, Finland; only Helsinki, and for some reason also Nivala and Mynämäki…)

new year’s backup promises

You might as well start making the new year’s promises already. Since my server started losing connection to the main disk drive, I have got some creeps. All electronics will fail, sooner or later, and always in a bad day. So, why not promising to better your ways, and regularly back up your data? Finally today I got around to getting a USB 2.0 disk drive (‘Fujitsu-Siemens Storagebird XL’, a 250 GB model with a funny name). Now, Windows XP contains a backup utility (‘Backup’, ditto), the only trick is to get it automatically do the thing. You can take a look at how this is made in this article at the Microsoft site. The test run seemed to go fine, but the real test involves being able to recover some of that data too, I guess…

[Edit: Of course it did not work without some trouble. This time, the Windows Scheduler encountered the notorious ‘keyset does not exist’ error. Or, the scheduled backups just quietly did not happen. Luckily, at least the scheduler keyset issue can be fixed, see this link: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_21317289.html]

microsoft's vision of the future

On the BBC’s Click Online site, you can find this fun snippet on Microsoft’s vision of the future. Some of these concepts actually sound useful (“Whereabouts Clock”, your basic social context awareness tool), but some are just plain silly. Interactive bowl?

w-zero3 or communicator?

Gizmodo ran a short story about this new smartphone, nicely named W-Zero3, which appears (with its large screen, full qwerty keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera – plus Wi-Fi, bluetooth and all the other usual communications stuff – as a worthy competitor for the Nokia Communicator line. Only question: will it come to Europe (and will I get mine with a Finnish keyboard). Make a guess…

context/presence in mobile

The geek site Gizmodo ran this Airtime story on presence applications in mobile phones. Worth checking out also if you are interested in location-aware / pervasive games, like some.

tv trip, thunderbird config

Another night in a hotel. At some point it was actually fun to be in a (relatively) clean room, where someone else takes care of your laundry. But the anonymity and rootlessness finally gets you. I am supposed to talk about games and simulation in national television (MTV3 morning show) tomorrow, and for those five minutes it was necessary to make two two-hour train trips, and spend a night in a hotel. (Added irony, BBC World show ‘Business Traveller’ just displays images captured from Rovaniemi, my old home town at the Arctic Circle. Things and people displaced, in a complex dance of matter and some mind.)

I am currently trying out Mozilla Thunderbird as the default email program at my work laptop. After years of working with MS Outlook, the simple act of transferring my contacts, mails and filtering rules into this other program is not so simple. Thunderbird crashed almost at the very start. After sacrificing perhaps 95 % of my correspondence archives (I still count on having a backup copy at my home PC), I got this Mozilla thing running. It has its benefits, I admit: it is not as heavy as that enourmous bloatware of Outlook, and it mostly does well those things you expect from a mail program. But there are some stupidities, too. Everyone with a laptop inevitably will also have to use several outgoing mail servers (SMTP). There appears to be no drop-down menu in the compose new message window that would allow you to select among those you have; there is only the tortuous process of going into the advanced mail account settings – and you have to do this every time you move from context to another! I am currently looking into Thunderbird add-ons (extensions), whether someone in this happy family of open-source software would have come up with a solution to this issue. But during the Tampere-Pasila train travel, Thunderbird was having numerous hiccups (endlessly trying to copy all sent messages into ‘Sent’ folder, without success, perhaps because of the breaky GPRS connection, even if it should be able to work off-line perfectly – and I even do not want to have outgoing messages copied into the Sent folder: I want them in those project folders I originally started to write that reply message!)

This is perhaps again one of those boring techno-rambles, sorry; but for a person whose work is extremely dependent on online tools, and email most of all, the decision over the email program is something that will have a major impact later on.

wi-fi ixus and communicator for the road?

Now this would be a nice combo for mobile blogging and other on-the-road work: the forthcoming Nokia 9300i Communicator has built-in Wi-Fi, and so has Canon Ixus. Together it should be a travelling dream combo, one with nice full keyboard, broad range of functionalities, good picture quality, and strong communication capabilities. But then again, the cost is rather steep: both of them together would make more than 1000 euros, oh dear…

Another dream: to have smart web service platform that could actually be relied to keep e.g. the links working, or removing them if needed. Just spent a couple of hours in fixing some obvious mistakes in the links of these 160+ blog notes.