One of the big turn-offs for us Europeans in Apple’s iPhone has been its lack of 3G support. Rumors have been strong for some time now, and now Apple WWDC keynote has made 3G iPhone official. GPS positioning is also included, good battery life. Comparison to other smart phones promises better browsing experiences. It should arrive to stores in July 11. (Thanks Gizmodo for a nice live coverage and the pics.)
You might have noticed this already, but a reminder: [player] conference has now its program online:
Today I will be participating in “Seminar on quantitative research in virtual economies” taking place in HIIT, Espoo. Vili Lehdonvirta here is opening the seminar. Link to the program: http://www.virtual-economy.org/blog/seminar_on_quantitative_resear
A new digital set-top box: Maximum T-8000 CX-CI (the old Topfield started to be a bit unreliable and out-of-date). This new one has more powerful processor (=faster in certain areas), more HDD, HDMI output and an ethernet connector to the LAN. Minuses so far: no automatic search programming from EPG (this was a TAP add-on in Topfield, hopefully something similar will be developed for Maximum, too) — and an irritating bug: if recording starts when the box is in stand-by, the recording will work ok, but the box will remain unresponsive until you exit the recording. Thus, it is best to keep it turned on all the time and not use stand-by (great, no power save benefits). Otherwise a decent box. More: http://www.5wwwww5.com/maximum/index.php?mforum=maximum
(Summer starts in flu; sneezing and updating gamestudiesbook.net.)
As I wrote earlier in my post about Dr Okell’s Wondrous Beer Translation, I am great fan of machine translations — they sort of underline our close and affectionate relationship with information technology, and the current (rather cute) state of artificial infan… I mean intelligence. This time I dedicate my love to a sidebar widget provided by Google, titled “Lempiä lainausmerkit hänen”. I suppose the original title has something to do with memorable quotes about love, but the machine translates ‘quotes’ with the Finnish word for ‘quotation marks’, and also the actual content of these “quotation marks” follows the same, delightful logic:
This is so cute — just think about it: the machine even has translated ‘Honoré’ as ‘kunnioittaa’ (meaning ‘respects’). *smileysmiley* Link to widget’s page:
http://www.google.fi/ig/directory?url=charles447.googlepages.com/love.xml
Edit: the original de Balzac quote is probably this: “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”
(Pictured Marja Tiura, and the neck of Jyrki J.J. Kasvi.)
Today I am participating in a seminar organised by the Futures Committee of Finnish Parliament, focusing on the challenges of urbanisation, globalisation and civilization (Sivistys ja metropolit). I want to remind the participants about the need for comprehensive understanding (deep in thinking about the past, as well as the present and the future), also creating intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue that facilitates flexibility and innovation in small as well as in larger scale. Fantasy is one measurement: how much imagination we are willing to accept in our everyday? Arts and crafts is another: do we allow ‘everyman’ (everywoman, everychild) to be creative? Questions for our future…
This appears to be a somewhat common problem among the users of Vista/Windows Movie Maker, and I did not find any help, so here is our solution.
Our system uses Vista Home Premium, the Movie Maker was version 6.0.6000.16386. Video clips (mpg) were produced by Sony DCR-SR52 camera.
Today I am taking part in the ‘Digiaika talteen’ seminar in the Finnish National Library in Helsinki. At the beginning of this year, a new law came into operation, concerning archiving digital cultural heritage. New kinds of ‘cultural materials’ have existed since the development of first computers, and exponentially when the Internet started connecting people using these digital technologies. We have actually lived sort of ‘digital dark Middle-Ages’ in terms of archiving, since so much of the early history of digital texts, images, games, web pages and other forms of digital expression have already been lost. Now there is at least a law that dictates how everyone, who publishes something in Finnish that is made available to public, is obliged to collaborate with the archivists to provide permanent copies into the National Audiovisual Archive (the old SEA, the movie archive). The job is huge; one estimate is that 50 million pages with c. 2–3 terabytes of data will be gathered in two automatic annual searches.
Today I am speaking in the Levels game seminar in Jyväskylä. Featured here in the picture is Marko Siitonen, who talked about teamplay and leadership, in the context of learning taking place within MMOs. More: http://www.levels08.com/
frans goes blog 
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