Where the Wild Things Are

December 14, 2009

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

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Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

December 13, 2009

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 [...]

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Ubuntu under a virtual machine

December 12, 2009

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 [...]

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Gamelab at Facebook, Twitter

December 6, 2009

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! :-)

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New faucets

November 27, 2009

27.11.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This is probably the least sexy topic for techno-blogging like, ever, but here we go. Our old faucets were having rather bad leaks over the tables and over the floors, I was getting water to my head from the shower while trying to fill a bucket with water from the faucet [...]

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DVD collectors’ databases found missing

November 22, 2009

I have been using some DVD collection software before, but inserting all the movie details manually has proved too much work, and my collection listing is seriously out of date (meaning that with this lousy memory of mine, I am likely to start buying doubles at some point). A practical solution would be to use [...]

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Future Play and GIIP: new research projects

November 20, 2009

Some news: our team has been awarded with funding from Tekes Verso programme to two new games research projects. The other one is GIIP (Games Industry Innovation Processes), which aims to survey and strengthen the state of innovation processes in Finnish games industry. This project is part of the TDP (Transformation of Digital Play) research [...]

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Canon EF 70-200 mm L

November 7, 2009

My old Sigma tele-zoom lens is pretty useless nowadays, particularly in cold (the mechanism gets stuck, and you cannot zoom even by using force). I went shopping, and got a Canon EF 70-200 mm L — my very first L class lens. This is the cheapest of line, and does not have an image stabilizer, [...]

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Bird table in the night

November 6, 2009

Lumiyö / Night with snow, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
These days you can find pretty nice bird tables, like this little house we have now in our front yard. It was originally designed to be hung from a string, but it was pretty easy to hack into a suitable stick. So, now we have a regular [...]

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Windows 7 sleep problems

November 1, 2009

The sleep state problems that I have previously blogged about in Windows Vista appear to haunt the OS even in its new incarnation. It appears that the default behavior of Windows 7 (as set up in Redmond) is to enable ‘wake from sleep’ in all peripherals, including network card, mouse and keyboard. And for some reason [...]

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