frans goes blog

Nokia N95 8 GB and the era of ultraportables

Along with some new research projects where we look into the service distribution models of games, my new primary work phone has changed into Nokia N95 8GB model. So far I have been mostly satisfied; and in contrast to E70, this time it is possible to connect my Sony DR-BT50 headphones to the mobile phone (N95 supports A2DP over Bluetooth). N95 is also a decent media player and it is possible to listen to mp3 music and watch videos. Internet browser has improved and social media sites like YouTube and Flickr are taken in with some special consideration – image upload from the camera application to Flickr is now just one click away.

Games are still perhaps the biggest question mark of the upgraded N-Gage brand. I am not particularly enthusiastic about rally or sports games, and those feature visible in the opening portfolio. More games should be arriving soon, including pet simulation (Dogz), more pets simulation (Sims 2 Pets), golf, yet another Worms and Snakes, plus action: Brothers in Arms, ONE. The service in itself looks interesting, with player profiles, buddy lists and other social service basics in place.

All in all, it is surprising how powerful contemporary mobile phones already are. Yet, the usability of Nokia OS is still seriously behind e.g. that of Apple iPhone. Where you just want to have one thing to happen, N95 will still ask you verifications for this and that, get stuck in dialogues or wait for input from softkeys, where iPhone would automatically just have started the default action. But I have not yet used iPhone for anything beyond most casual first impression, so a more thorough comparison needs to wait for later. (Timetable for 3G iPhone launch, anyone?)

I must admit I am so text oriented user, that the biggest drawback of N95 for me is that it does not have a QWERTY keyboard. The size is compact for that reason, of course, but this means that I still need to carry two devices with me always.

The happy note is that ultraportable laptops like Asus Eee PC, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC and other UMPC and upscale/next gen PDAs are blooming and a gadget freak will have happy times ahead. (Asus Eee PC 900 review here: http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/04/asus-eee-pc-900-video-review.html)

Doctor Okell's Wondrous Beer Translation

Sometimes the automated translation services produce something useful, and sometimes not. This is actually more of amusement value, so it fits nicely with Vappu celebrations. Reading the back label of my beer bottle, I noticed something a bit odd. E.g.: “Contains Malted Barley” is translated into Finnish as “Hillitä ohra maltalainen” (roughly: “moderating barley that lives in Malta”), “Best before: See bottle Neck” is “Parhaiten aiemmin: Hiippakunta pullottaa halailla” (roughly: “Used to be best: the diocese [sic!] bottles with cuddles”). The little text up right that you probably cannot read from the image says “Brewed in the Isle of Man”, which is translated following the same excellent logic as “Oluenpanija kotona The Isle of Man luona” (roughly: “The beer brewer is at home with The Isle of Man near/with”).

Hilarious — thank you very much, Dr Okell’s!

Happy vappu

Lemmenpyssyt
Originally uploaded by FransBadger

Happy vappu 2008, everyone. Here the band, Lemmenpyssyt (“love guns”) performs their Motörhead-style Vappu-opening gig in the University of Tampere outdoors amphitheater; the party sponsored annually by TATTE.

Jyväskylä

Today, the final meetings of this week — in Jyväskylä this time. Plans for future collaboration in games research among the Alliance universities. Interesting and promising stuff, but now: it is weekend, and time to enjoy some free time, and spring weather

Not travelling

I have made few somewhat painful personal decisions and radically cut down the amount of international travel I do. Travelling might be something we are told we have to do, that our careers require it, and that internationalisation or globalisation even dictates that we should be flying around the globe all the time, busily collaborating with everyone else. But why? Don’t we really have any communicational tools that we could use to cut down this insane waste of time, energy — both human energy and precious reserves of natural energy, turning it into carbon dioxide? I think we can do better. I was supposed to present game studies papers in two important conferences, CHI 2008 in Italy, and Crossroads conference of cultural studies in Jamaica. It was a real pity, but I decided not to go. Continue reading “Not travelling”

Speaking in ITK

Today I am speaking in ITK (interactive technology in education) conference in Hämeenlinna. An event with nice atmosphere and idyllic location in Aulanko, it is always pleasure to visit. Topic of my speech concerns my new book of game studies (see www.gamestudiesbook.net).

Using Gravatars in WP2.5

Edit: this site should now support gravatar images, and I recommend going to http://gravatar.com/ and registering a character/image to your email address. This helps identifying people who comment and participate in blogosphere discussions.

I have updated the software running this blog into WordPress 2.5 which brings along some nice, behind the scenes enhancements. One thing that could also show here in the user side is Gravatar support: it adds ‘global avatar’ images next to your comments automatically. But there is still something wrong with this, or I just could not get it to work. I tried editing comments.php with these sets of instructions, but I would only get empty ‘default gravatar’ images:

Spring seminar 2008

Breaking the Magic Circle seminar is well underway, and the first three sessions take place today, more to follow tomorrow. Another intense two-day period, meeting of minds, exchange of ideas. Great! (You can see the two commentators, Simon Niedenthal and Markus Montola in the front row.) More: http://breakingmagiccircle.wordpress.com/

Edit: the seminar was an obvious success — many thanks to you all. Lets see what kind of publications will spawn out of it; meanwhile, we agreed to have presentation slides and photos available tagged with ‘breakingmagiccircle’. See: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/breakingmagiccircle
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/breakingmagiccircle/

Updating Gamestudiesbook.net

My original plan was to update the companion website of my textbook — Gamestudiesbook.net — daily, until I’d be satisfied of reaching representative coverage of this field. In reality most of the days have been so packed, I have just collapsed to bed (and got up again around 5–6 am). But I have now build a new schedule, where I focus all updates of one week to one evening/morning. That way, I should have my plan fulfilled by the end of this Spring term. Lets see how this works out.

DYI: home sensor networks

This is probably the most tightly budgeted version of moving towards a home sensor network. After comparing few real IP network solutions (and after testing one in our research project), I decided to stay away from them and rely on cheap consumer electronics to do those individual tasks that we need. Thus, to measure temperatures and moistures from various parts of our house, I got a weather centre from Clas Ohlson (a Nordic electronics chain) and few extra wireless sensor units. This particular model (UPM, model number 36-2384) can take four external sensors, all equipped with temperature and humidity sensors. And how to know what is the temperature in sauna? Clas Ohlson comes to help, again. Just pick up a wireless pair of oven thermometers (model number 34-6723), and there you go. And you have various alarm functions build in, too. But no centralised controls, full log files, remote controlling or other such sweet IT things, of course.