Spending some of this beautiful and peaceful Sunday going thru the websphere (there is some noise of Nintendogs training here nearby, though…) and noticed that there is this story of future Nokia concepts, so if you are interested in the mobile/smart media, see the phonemag.com’s series of stories.
Edit: here is the direct link to the concept exhibition: http://www.designawards.nl/eng/index.asp?&audio=1
A laptop is a very personal thing, for anyone who spends a lot of time carrying it around, starting at its screen and relying it to connect to the world as we know it. My old Fujitsu S-series Lifebook had taken more than three years’ of beating before it started to fall apart to my hands during last six months or so. So it was time to get another one, a task that I usually enjoy (toys, toys, toys), but as I knew how much of my life depends on this damned thing I carry around with me, and what kind of hell it can be when it is not doing things it is supposed to be doing, the selection process became a long, slow and painful one.
To cut the long story short, I made all sorts of compromises, and ended up with an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T43, with a 1GB memory expansion, 15″screen, 80GB disk, and a docking station. Rather than going for optimal design or gaming performance, I had to get a workhorse which would handle all those travel miles, endless meeting rooms, airport wi-fis, and survive couple of thumps while on the road. So, an overall reliability in design, plus battery life and business performance were the emphasis areas. A fun website dontbuyjunk.com at least seems to think I’ve made the right choice within those parameters, in the “mainstream” category.
There are some hiccups, though. We have not been able to get the integrated fingerprint reader working yet so far. There is some kind of security chip inside this machine, but I am not carrying state secrets and need not strong encryption for the hard disk, but being able to replace the login passwords with a slip of my finger sounds like a nice concept. But the security client is having “initialization error day”. Or something.
This is also rather loud. I am not sure why the fan needs to be so busy: when I am having only a Word and few browser windows open, the CPU usage rarely goes above 4 %. But perhaps it is a feature.
Compared to the S-series ultra-light, this is also of course quite a lot heavier. But I am very happy with the keyboard, screen, and battery life (with the extra long-life add-on). And those are after all much of the user experience, how you interface with the services your machine is able to offer you. (My fingers are still automatically going into all the Fujitsu key-map places, damn.)
There are discussions and opinions focusing on the recent release of details about the controller for the Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution console; see e.g. the story in IGN.com. At first sight, having a two-hand, bluetooth controller which can “detect up, down, left and right motion, and also translate forward and backward depth” … while “controller’s sensors also recognize twisting, rotating and tilting movements” sounds really interesting – especially when combined with some force-feedback functionalities. While working with interaction and interface research, it has become accustomed to expect all kinds of “rich” modalities being explored, but the games industry has remained rather conservative on the traditional gamepad. (Not withstanding the various, mostly Japanese dance mat games, or the web camera games for devices like Sony PS2 & EyeToy.) It will be great to see how this feature (with new add-ons) will be exploited by the games developers.
Interested in experimental mobile game development? You might check out this Gizmodo story about Python and Flash for Series 60 mobile phones: see the link.
The Big Brother, the pinnacle of peeping television, has finally arrived to Finland. Even if you try to escape from the channel, there are still the street-side adverts, and they are even selling candy with the BB brand in every store. The Internet is of course filled with sleazy web camera content, but when a major broadcaster goes to all the effort needed for a Big Brother style operation, is just makes you feel dirty. Industrialized prostitution barely disguised, anyone?
In contrast, YLE, the national broadcast network is on strike today. What they have — five channels, and nothing on? The issue being of course that they are laying off jobs at the same time it seems reasonable to invest into new concert hall and digital networks. Go figure.
We have now both of the new hand consoles, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP in our lab. PSP is one flashy gadget, I must admit. I was particularly charmed by the networking capabilities; it even logged into my Wi-Fi network, and scaled web pages more or less effortlessly into its browser window. More complex scripts do not seem to work, though. And, did I mention: it plays some games, too. (Still waiting most for that Nintendogs for our DS, though. Those cute, cute puppies.)
Here is the PSP website, if you are interested.
Digital Photography Review has a story of the new Canon EOS 5D, which is a 12.8 megapixel system aimed to photo professionals; see story. I wouldn’t turn it down either, but at €3459, it seems that I am nowhere in the target group for this baby.
After installing the new Google Desktop Search (Version 2 Beta) to my “mediaserver” machine at home (that is, the one with the better display and larger hard drives) today, I was served by the Sidebar application. It is one of those “all-in-one” applications that might be useful, or then they just take extra desktop space and you end up deleting them fast. I am not sure which camp this one belongs to; by default it displays a slideshow of all my image files (and others from the web), and the Weather part only gives you US locations, which is pretty lame. At the same time, there are several “Advanced Features” that are promising — and also a bit spooky. It monitors the pages I surf, the newscasts, RSS/Atom feeds I subscribe to, and displays new titles automatically in the sidebar. Well, we’ll see — have to test this more. One thing is sure: this is symptom of us being now in the always-connected, broadband age and era. One can also become addicted and just stare at this, semi-adapted stuff endlessly being refreshed from the wells (and junkyards) of the net.
The first “What’s Hot” recommendation I clicked and viewed was this Aeon Flux SF movie trailer. Nice; more futuristic Kung Fu action and recycled storylines? But right on target: I might go and see the flick.
There was another electricity power cut in our area early this morning – my UPS woke me up with its pitiable beeping. The power was away perhaps for an hour, don’t know for sure (fell asleep again). These things are real pain, particularly as my ADSL box (Zyxel) is not linked to UPS (a compatibility problem with the AC adaptor power connectors), and after waking up, Zyxel decided to assign my server a new internal IP address. Nice, I only had to reassign all my NAT conversions and firewall settings, after I had figured out something was wrong in the first place.
There must be a more stable world coming up for our multi-server, connected homes – someday?
Saw the Spielberg-Cruise War of the Worlds yesterday, btw. I rather enjoyed it: it succeeds in bringing a sci-fi war into the realistically chaotic street-level, rather than giving the classic “president, scientists, army and other heroes” serving. But but. I suppose there are only so many Tom Cruise films the universe can hold. We are probably getting near the End of Days.
Digitalization of television became a major national project in Finland some years ago, when a decision was made to abandon all analogue tv transmissions, and provide only digital broadcast content. There were reasons of ‘cost efficiency’ (=money) behind the decision, but also the general techno-utopian spirit of our country is behind the whole Lets Be the Top Information Society in the World thing, or at least that is what I suspect.
Even as a self-admitted technophile, I have postponed the transfer into digi-tv to this point because of the ridiculous quality (or lack of it) digital set-top boxes provided. When television, the supreme and ubiquitous media terminal gets stuck every half-an-hour, when even switching channel can take 15 seconds, all subtitling is missing or erronous, it was very hard to believe in the future of this whole thing.
The latest generation of boxes finally seems to have crossed the boundary where they are “usable enough”, “stable enough” and the genuine benefits of digitalization become apparent (primarily the better quality of image and sound, combined with an accessible electonic programme guide and hard-disk recording). I got mine yesterday – Topfield TF5100PVRc model – and currently I am mostly satisfied. But the basic situation remains, complex broadcast-networked & computer-like systems are released in ‘beta’, the various national “standards”, networks and programs create a mess, which is resolved (or not) piecemeal, as users act as beta-testers, report the endless bugs and firmware updates fix something – and possibly introduce new bugs.
Link: the Finnish DVD Plaza Topfield TF5100PVRt May04 Bug report thread.
My ISP, Saunalahti, did us all a favour and upgraded (with no extra cost) customer connections to higher speed combos. All nice, except the upgrade messed up with the way my (and many others) ADSL router (Zyxel Prestige 660 series) behaves. So, my first holiday week has been spent in summer flu, calling Saunalahti customer service half a dozen times, trying to get the connection working so that I could do some urgent jobs to the new DiGRA site. Oh well – at least the weekend looks nice (and I have the Half-Life 2
collectors edition also installed 😉
frans goes blog 
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