technology – Page 37 – frans goes blog

wiki opened

This is mostly for playing purposes, but: feel free to take a look and even contibute something if you fancy so – I just opened my Wiki in: http://www.unet.fi/OpenWiki/

[Edit: this had to be closed later, because of wiki spammers.]

The pictures I took in San Francisco/GDC are finally online: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2005-03-GDC_San_Francisco/ — While working on them, I was overall disappointed both to the technical quality and also to the quality of them as photography. Travel photos are probably generally one of the lowest species among their kind, but still there should be some reason behind every picture one takes, and that idea should be communicated through the image. A mass of blurry, unrecognizable shots has no value whatsoever.

Partially as a reaction to this, I revisited the reasons behind my interest into photography. I bought my first “systems camera” in 1980, if my memory serves me. There is one bookshelf filled with photos, mostly in collage-like album books from those active years (1980-1997). After that, other interests have taken precedence. A good photograph, like any other activity if well done, takes time. I remember spending hours after hours training my drawing skills, then those of photography, then spending most of time writing; and the quality of output has indeed some kind of correlation with that investment. It really is simple like that.

It is Good Friday today, and enjoying the day off, we drove into south, then walking a bit around Nokia. I took a quick series of black-and-white photos around Nokia’s church and Hinttala museum: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2005-03-b_white/ (shot number nine is Laura’s, btw.)

Canon IXUS v3 that I used does not have much of a zoom, and its possibilities for manually configuring the image settings are rather limited. But, as you can see even from these scaled-down images, a 3-megabyte CCD and DIGIC processor does rather nice work on conveying the textures and shades when you have proper daylight and can use the ISO 100 setting.

Currently, I am considering of upgrading either into Canon EOS 300D or 350D, since my old EF lenses would work with those bodies. The reviews I have read seem promising, too:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos300d/
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/canoneos350d/

Any comments or user experiences of those, or competitive models are most welcome.

demons in machines

Today, I changed my ADSL router from a Telewell to a Zyxel. The aim is to get rid of the network breakdowns; I heard that several Telewell models have been plagued by a disorder where they jam after some days of sustained connection. Zyxel should not show those symptoms, or so I was told by a support person at Saunalahti, my ISP. The minor operation lead into 4-5 hour reconfiguration of my LAN, firewall and Wi-Fi settings, but now everything seems to be working again. Oh dear. There would have been some important matters to take care for during this weekend, but now it is probably too late for those. But weekends should be reserved for relaxation, at least in the traditional society, prior to this current liquidation of work-leisure distinction. But managed to see Constantine (the movie) finally. Comic book adaptations used to be terrible, but as with X-Men, I find myself rather enjoying this, as that sort of entertainment on the demonic it is. Well, back to writing some horror history stuff for a Finnish book project.

happiness is

Just got a secure and stable Wi-Fi connection working from the laptop in my bed. Even in slight flu (post-travel), I recognize the feeling: this is happiness. 🙂

soft that works (mostly)

The Pinnacle Studio 9 that I chose as the editing tool finally actually worked better than I had thought. The only immediate shortcoming was the lack of dolby digital sound encoding (it pays c. ten dollars extra). I spent some frustrating moments with the dvds I had burned before I realised that the software only outputs dvd audio sound. But having a digital video editing tool that you can essentially learn to use in c. half-an-hour is certainly good achievement. It even promises to support streaming video formats, lets see… Seasons’ Greetings to everyone! I will be going some way towards south, but tonight we enjoy white Christmas here in Tampere.

lifetrain

Leaving Helsinki station. New to mobile blogging, I make now notes in train, too. This is actually my second try, Picoblogger crashed earlier somewhere near Hämeenlinna. As the phone keyboard makes going slow, this teaches you to save often. *sigh* Life as a train of meeting rooms…

Moblog with PicoBlogger.

playthings

Ok, after returning the Sony, I spent this night tweaking a Philips dvp720sa. And installing this Picoblogger into my Nokia 6600. — And it seems that the damned thing actually works! 🙂

Moblog with PicoBlogger.

buying time xmax

I thought I had got a good deal when I bought the Sony NS355 DVD player today well under 100 euros, but when I was back at home I realised this thing did not have any s-video connector. Call me picky, but I will not take composite video when there can be s-video and digital audio quality available (or take s-video when there is the DVI option, as with my next television, *sigh*). Happily, they offer a return policy.

The operation actually started with the annual pre-Christmas shopping & spending spree, where I first acquired the LotR/RotK extended edition dvd, then started experimenting with the Dolby Digital and DTS sound formats this release supports (ok, I was also spending some good time all teary-eyed with the actual masterpiece as well). After starting to think about those damned scratches in my Buffy second season collector’s disks (another *sigh*) I then proceeded to make backup copies of some films. And there it became obvious that my old Thomson DTH 5000X does not support any format of DVD-/+R/RW recordings. Its error correction and file format support could also be better. But: this Sony was not the solution, I have to try something else. Panasonic, Toshiba and Philips are currently strong candidates.

Various types of MP3 players are also something that I’ve been reviewing with interest, and it seems that iPod is still the strongest one there is, at least if design and ease-of-use are important for you. It is just pity that Amazon.com is not delivering into Europe; they claim it is for manufacturer’s guarantee reasons, but I suspect that European market is split off for other reasons…

DiGRA 2004 Financial Assembly was also passed, with some interesting discussions. I took some photos in the Other Players Conference in ITU/Copenhagen, and they should be available now here.

home from a mixed reality castle trip

I have just got home from a series of connecting flights (and taxis and bus trips) that were needed in order to transmit me from Castle Birlinghoven, Germany to Tampere. We had really interesting and intense week in launching a major new European games initiative. Titled IPerG, it stands for “Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming” and it aims to understand the future of digital games as more physical and “surrounding” experiences. While it is easy to come up with examples of location aware mobile game concepts or games based on gesture recognition or some other sensor technologies, it is much harder to define what is a “pervasive game”, what are the guidelines for designing those things, and how to evaluate the quality of pervasive game play experience. Heading the work-package on those issues, our Tampere team will have to work hard in the next three and a half years (yep, it is a major research project) to come up with some answers. (There is a temporary website.)

While I was away, there was some glitch in my home network (or, in the ISP side), and there was about three thousand mails in line (most of them spam, of course). Luckily, it seems that the unet.fi server was not affected.

evening news: toys, tech and games entering the academia

Some kind Anonymous reminded me that there is the Gizmodo blog on tech toys — thanks, I should have remembered that, of course. My world would be much more dull without its always stimulating series of posts where the latest Apple Powerbook meets Sega’s “Near Me”, the robotic cat (link).

There was a note on Grand Text Auto that pointed me to a GameSpot article on academics and computer games (link). If you are interested in learning particularly about work and thought of Janet Murray (Georgia Tech) or Gonzalo Frasca (IT University Copenhagen) then you do well by checking this piece.

Ok, I have to write some words of introduction to our game studies Masters’ Course students now. See you again later!