Samsung N220, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

After a longish, administration-overkill-caused break, a short notice. I finally got fed up of my Acer Aspire One (A110, the 512 MB model), as it was pretty impossible to do anything except the very basic html–surfing, even Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition was almost unbearably slow. After considering the options, I took the new Samsung N220 netbook model; it is a pretty basic system with Intel’s Atom N450 processor, 1 GB central memory and 250 GB disk. The positive sides are on the rather sturdy construction (they even claim the keyboard is ’spill-proof’ and can take some liquid on top of it — I have not tested this). Keyboard feel is nice and the non-reflective 10,1″, led-backlighted display is also ok. The batter is advertised to enable 12 hour non-stop use, but to my experience if you do anything except hold the system on dark, quiet idle mode (the golden standard of battery testers, obviously), you will get something like 7-8 hours of battery life. That is also pretty good; if you plug the system in at the evenings, there is no need to load system during even a full working day. And this is with the standard battery, rather than an extended life battery.

A couple of minor irritations. One of the reasons I picked this particular system was its advertised dual-OS configuration: it has the Windows 7 Starter (I like it) and an “Instant-On” option called HyperSpace, which is actually a slim, stripped-down Linux version (see e.g. this story). This is supposedly fast, simple and substantially more energy efficient than Windows, which all might be true. However, I am not able to use it since it does not allow using Finnish keyboard layout (how silly, they ship this preconfigured with such keyboards that are not yet supported by the OS). It might get an update at some point, but for now, I need to stick to Windows.

Another irritation strikes even while I write this text, every few seconds. On their web pages, Samsung advertises N220 by boasting about its “strategically placed keys ensure that you’ll experience fewer errors – and faster typing”. All well, except the European N220 model actually has its “arrow bracket” (<>) key placed at an non-standard position next to the right shift key, which is made smaller than normal. This means that every time I try to have a capital letter, I will get < << plus a small letter. Oh well, need to just retrain my fingers…

And finally, if you decide to get N220, try disabling “One-Finger Scrolling” — it was just causing trouble by trying to scroll when I was trying to move the mouse/touchpad pointer. It has Two-Finger Scrolling (multi-touch gesture), if you want to use the touchpad for scrolling.

In February 4th, I will be doing a lecture visit to Potsdam, who are running an interesting Digarec lecture series. My title is “The Dual Structure: Experiencing Digital Games in the Intersection of Gameplay and Media” and you can find an abstract of it from here:

http://www.digarec.de/2010/01/25/digarec-lecture-february-4-2010-with-frans-mayra/#more-911

There should be materials and even a video recording or transcript available online later, so check it out some time after the lecture. [Edit: fixed couple of typos in 6th of February, 2010.]

Tangent EVO E4, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I have been using my old trusty JBL LX2 speakers in my home theater and continue to be happy — the soundscape and overall quality of sound they produce is nice. I have a identical second pair that I have been using as the rear speakers, bolted to the concrete walls using a Vogel’s mounting system. All well, except that LX2 is a rather large and heavy speaker to be fixed in a small cellar room — and the old walls appear to have rather soft material in places so the bolts stated to give up. I had to take LX2s down and use some epoxy style padding to fix the wall (yikes!) and then hammer drill the wall mounts back into place. After that, I was too tired to do much searching for the actual speakers (nice prioritization, isn’t it?), so I just walked to a local Musta Pörssi and bought the first pair that looked like the size, weight and design that I — and my old walls — could handle. I walked out with a shiny white pair of Tangent EVO E4, which was not perhaps not such a bad choice after all. There are not too many speakers in the same form factor and price range (this was c. 150 euros per pair) that can deliver much better sound — or at least that is my impression after some googling around now. My amplifier is an old Yamaha (RX-V630RDS) which can handle DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 so mostly the rear speakers are only used for the effects channel in movies. I have a small collection of Super Audio CDs among which even smaller number make use of the multichannel surround feature. I have now been testing the E4s with LX2s with Peter Gabriel’s UP as a surround Super Audio CD version, and while it is clear that they do not pack the punch that my wall mounted, rear LXs were capable of, I should be able to live with this arrangement. They deliver rather crispy, clear audio and the bass area is not as direction sensitive in any case as the treble area. — And an added plus: I am no longer in similar danger of hitting my head to a massive rear channel speaker while writing these blog notes. :-)

I have mostly loved working with my Vaio Z31WN — it is clearly the best laptop I have used so far — but there is a small annoyance that keeps disturbing the work flow daily: Sony did not include PageUp and PageDown keys in their keyboard layout, even while there would have been space enough for that. You need to use two hands: the other to press and hold FN key at the down left corner of the keyboard, and simultaneously press either up or down arrow. As browsing documents using PgUp/PgDown keys is one of the very basic and standard activities that you do on a PC, it is important that you can do it using only one hand, preferably on easily accessible, corner positioned keys. (Some tap or swipe gesture on a touch screen device, or dedicated buttons on the sides of eBook reader or something like that would work, too, but that is different from a standard PC laptop.) But the two-hand style of Sony does not work at all, really. And doing regular scrolling with the touchpad or arrow keys only will just strain your eyes, during a longer working session.

I have been installing and trying out various keyboard remappers in order to move/copy FN key functionality to e.g. right Control/Alternate Menu key, but it seems that these FN keys are often handled at hardware level in a way that is not open to an OS level remap/registry hack. That is no good at all. No single key solution have appeared so far. The second best that I am using now is to use Spacebar / Shift-Spacebar to reproduce PageUp/Down functionalities while on a browser window. Not perfect, but at least a single hand solution is possible using those keys. Any better ideas, anyone?

There have been several recent (and not so recent) improvements in Picasa web service that Google owns, making it serious challenger to Flickr, which I have long used. (See a list from here.) There is also a cost issue: the Pro account of Flickr is $25 per year (unlimited uploads, unlimited storage), but you can get 20 GB of disk space from Google/Picasa with $5 per year. Rather than cost, it is really the privacy controls that start to concern me more and more as the kids grow up. Picasa web albums makes it a bit easier to share private photo albums (you just enter email addresses and send the invitation link). This, and other reasons have led me to consider migrating my photo galleries from Flickr to Picasa. As I have several deep integrations set up (particularly all photos in this blog actually reside in Flickr), it is questionable whether this transition really makes sense. On the other hand, I hate being tied to any single service, without ability to change service provider when needed. Flickr has not been particularly dynamic in coming up with new functionalities recently. Yet, integration with my mobile camera phones and mail systems is something that works well with Flickr, and I am not sure how such things would appear under Picasa/Google. But we will see. I am using the holiday period to do some tests, experimenting first with the free Migratr tool to backup and transfer all my Flickr photos into the Picasa account. It appears a bit buggy/easy to crash, but lets hope for the best. It is interesting to see how the transfer works out, and having backups in several places is a good idea in any case.

Planet Pandora in Avatar (2009)

I just saw Avatar (dir. & written by James Cameron), in 3D, and I must say I am impressed. Not necessarily deeply moved like some other great films I have seen, but impressed as in made to think about cinema and the role it will have for us in the future.

Many people who have written about Avatar have started by dropping a long list of other movies it has borrowed from; my take would be Avatar is “Aliens meets Dances with Wolves meets Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” style of movie. But there is enough originality in this particular blend that the intertextual or -medial reference listings do not make justice to its real essence.

Looking at the film through the thick and rather dark 3D goggles, I felt the basic scenario built around the avatar technology of the movie was sort of metaphor for my own situation: the medium was there, both opening me an opportunity to reach into this alternate reality, and keeping me forever at a distance from it, at the same time.

It is easy to criticize the plot of the movie, or the characters as superficial – they are sort of cartoon elements, or maybe it would be more appropriate to talk about a fairy story in this case. But I felt the actual main character was the alien planet Pandora the film was built to introduce to us. It is easily the most beautiful place I have ever seen, taking all Natural Geographic documents or BBC nature documentaries to a whole new level. Flying over it, running through it, all the action sequences of the film felt like yet another excuse to show us yet another amazing aspect of this great world. (Cameron has promised to make two more films located in the same world, if this one will be successful, so there might be more of that in the making.)

Some older theories of ‘film’ are based on the idea that light from something original has touched the material medium so that it will carrying with it the ‘aura’ or true significance from the moment of its making. Digital medium has not this same status, but I think Avatar will be remembered as the film that finally made it inevitably clear that digital media has reached beyond the artificial. It has truly become ‘Second Nature’ to us, capable of capturing such richness in points of view and diversity in the expression, that analogue mediums will have very precise, stylized roles reserved for them in the future.

As the Natural Geographic documentary of the Second Nature, Avatar also underlines how much care and resources it takes to truly respect the material universe if one wants to show it properly. I think there was a whole department of artists mentioned in the end titles working on every element of nature, from water to fire to plants, animals and inanimate nature. I am really eagerly waiting for the blu-ray release to get rid of the endless battle scenes, and really be able to immerse myself in the exquisite details like the designs of grass or hey, or ferns, or the little amoeba like seeds from the Life Tree, floating in the air. There must be loads of extras coming from a mega-production like this one.

As Science Fiction, Avatar is sort of mixed bag. The technology does not really hold water (where is the lag in the telepresence tech? On what kind of crude Cartesian ideas the neural link is based on?); even while the machinery and physics look satisfyingly “hard SF” on the surface, there is also a strong aspect of Sword & Sorcery style fantasy in the film. Oh yeah, and quite a lot of dragons, too. But all this is fine for me, I enjoy both chocolate as well as strawberry in the same cup of ice-cream, thank you very much. This is just entertainment, after all.

At the same time, I left the theatre feeling good about some of the direction big-budget entertainment is taking with Avatar. The movie was built on old and proven formulas of war and romance, but it will also introduce millions of people watching it to some simple (and a bit mystified) version of ecosystem thinking, which is good and valuable thing in itself. I have loved Japanese anime long time for this kind of reasons. E.g. Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli is one work carrying similar kind of spiritual and ecological message, while being considerably more complex in its moral and ethical themes than Avatar. Another computer generated anime I mentioned before, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Square, 2001) is also useful point of comparison, not only because of the huge leap computer animation has taken in less than a decade, but on terms of its emphasis on the futility of military actions in global conflicts. But again, Avatar is considerably less convincing as a pacifist movie, it takes too much relish on its Cowboys versus Indians, Hiawatha style narrative focused on driving home the ‘noble savage’ and Gaia the world-soul myths.

So: hardly a masterpiece movie, but enormously entertaining and really worth watching in 3D. Seeing this, it is hard to believe that there would be cinematic spectacles that would not be released also in 3D in a few years time.

Everyone seems to be talking about Cameron’s Avatar these days, but I am actually waiting even more this film to get over here:

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

Another new piece of software that I have been testing lately has been the new free Beta version of Lightroom 3:

For the development of this latest release, we’ve focused on what we believe are the fundamental priorities of our customers: performance and image quality. Lightroom has been rebuilt from its core to provide a performance architecture that meets the needs of photographers today and into the future. The raw processing engine has also received an overhaul in order to ensure that you’re maximizing the potential in your images in terms of sharpening and noise reduction. And, a number of other new areas have also had new features added and enhanced. Like any beta, Lightroom 3 beta is unfinished, which means some of the features we have planned are not in this release, and some of the features in the beta are not yet complete.

I am not sure which parts of the new Lightroom are still not complete, and which are related to the supposed performance and image quality improvements, but according to my experience this Beta version is really slow! Every time you navigate from image to image, it takes several seconds to get a sharp preview. I think at this point the lack of performance really makes this tool pretty useless. The built in previews of Windows 7, and the Windows Live Photo Gallery are fast, and then you can open the shot into Photoshop if you need to get into serious editing. Maybe I am missing something, but what is the real benefit of paying for software like Lightroom?

VMware Player running Ubuntu under Windows 7

This is a system you are most probably already using, if you are akin to test driving various operating systems and software combos: VMware Player is a free virtualization software tool that can be easily applied to set up different, “virtual PCs” inside a single OS installation. Very useful, if you do not want to mess up your primary system each time a new interesting tool or OS comes available. I followed these instructions to set up Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala to run as a virtual machine inside my Windows 7 workstation. Seems to run just fine.

Gamelab meets social media

We are adopting a more active role in our utilization of social media networking tools in order to distribute information and awareness of what is going at the Game Research Lab at the University of Tampere. You can now both follow us in Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/UTAgamelab) and in Twitter (https://twitter.com/UTAgamelab). See you around! :-)