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before, but inserting all the movie details manually has proved too much work, and my collection listing is seriously out of date (meaning that with this lousy memory of mine, I am likely to start buying doubles at some point).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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Kolumni, Profile 2.09

October 28, 2009

Kolumni, Profile 2.09, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
(This column piece is in Finnish, but the main point is to set the ‘learning through games’ discourse in context, and challenge it by approaching games and play as an end in themselves, as autotelic phenomena.)
Kolumni: “Oppia Peleistä” (julkaistu: Profiili, 2/2009, s. 26-27)
Pelit ovat näinä päivinä näkyvästi otsikoissa: toisaalta [...]

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Gambling studies seminar, Helsinki

October 26, 2009

Gambling studies seminar, 26.10.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Pictured is Dr Per Binde, who was the opening speaker of the gambling/gaming studies seminar which takes place today in the University of Helsinki premises. The seminar is organised by Pelitoiminnan tutkimussäätiö (Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research), and you can find more, including the presentation abstracts from the [...]

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Windows 7 Ultimate & WD 1,5 TB disks

October 25, 2009

The weekend was too busy for this upgrade effort really, but at least I made a decent start:

getting rid of the old hard disks in my old workstation (they were getting too small for all this data)
making full transition to the official version of Windows 7 (I bought a boxed set of the Ultimate version)
migrating [...]

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Moccamaster

October 17, 2009

Moccamaster, 17.10.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.
I am gradually realising that best tools are often specialized. Take coffee machines, for example. I have tested various combo systems with espresso, regular coffee, cappuchino, whatever, and regularly they fail in some, often in all fronts. It is better to do one thing, well. In the picture we have [...]

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