It's alive.... again.

Having a blog and not updating it is like.....mm..... having a blog and not updating it.

You know, I'm normally not that kind of person that writes everything down and instantly let's people know what I think and wonder. All this new social-media thing and blogs are kind of new twist to my personality. Tweeting, writing and showing my pics takes an extra effort for me. I guess I have taken intentionally a little break from all of these activities. So during spring and summer there hasn't been that much activity on my blog and tweets. Lot has been going on though.

Another thing that I feel bad about is photography. I haven't taken out my 5DMKII as much as I should have. But now comes the autumn and I hope that it inspires me to carry my camera with me more.

But I will post few pics from this summer as soon as I export those from Lightroom. Right now I'm lying in my bed, having a flu. Not that swine one, just a good old regular one.

HDR

It's hard to do good looking HDR when you have moving stuff, like water and trees waving in the wind + I know that this is too candy and over saturated :)

This is made out of 3 exposures and tone mapped to 8-bit JPEG

Steam!

I was lucky to have my camera with me on Saturday evening. Melting ice and cold weather made a nice looking phenomenon over water. Here are few photos from old dockyard area in Helsinki.

Not really an update

Sorry about my super poor blogging frequency. I know I've been lazy. But in meantime you can go check out rest of my photos in Gallery.

- Tommy  

ps. Right now I'm using Mobile Me gallery for my photos. I do like it, it's easy and pretty ok looking, but I'm sure that I can do better. Any suggestions?

Lapland

Here are few first photos from trip in Lapland. Still processing rest of the stack.
One minor problem that I’m having with 5D MKII is that RAW file sizes are huge and my iMac is sometimes in serious trouble with Lightroom. But I guess that's just a happy problem.

-Tommy

Pictures

Few last days has been either super sunny or total gray in Finland. When you compine snow into those two ultimate ends, it's pretty hard to take good photos.

Here are few most recent shots from me:

-Tommy

New iPod Shuffle released

Apple quietly released a new iPod Shuffle. This time design looks like a pack of gum. This new music-gadget is nearly half of the size from the previous model (smaller than a AA battery). Data size is 4GB and it has controls now on the earbud cord. Cool new feature about this next gen is text to speech. It tells you for example playlist name, artist and track names. With that akward robotic voice, I guess.

I love when companies are using fancy marketing words to describe product and it's features. "shuffle features a gorgeous new aluminum design.....stainless steel clip that makes it ultra-wearable". Ultra-wearable! "Hey, your iPod is So Ultra-wearable!"

Features:

• Price 85€ (in Finland)
• 4GB
• Silver or black, stainless steel clip
• Controls on earbud line
• Text to speech -artist and track names
• 10 hours of playback

Photos that makes you wanna think about holiday

Amazing pictures from people and machines at work. Most of the photos are from industrial related. But I guess me sitting with my laptop and writing e-mails isn't the most intressing scenery to shoot.

Check it out!

At work - The Big Picture - Boston.com

-Tommy

Few pictures from today

It was a cold weather today or I just had a terrible gear on. Either way, here's few snaps:











-Tommy

Got coins? I really need to go.......

Yet another good example how to get ticket price lowest possible; charge for everything else.

Ryanair's new ultimate stupidity plan which makes people on the plain pay for their toilet usage. Airline's chier executive suggested that airline may charge passengers £1 to use its toilets. “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in future,” he told to BBC. “We are always at Ryanair looking at ways of constantly lowering the cost of air travel to make it affordable and easier for all passengers to fly with us.”

For me it is ok to cut every unnecessary options away so that the actual ticket is priced lower. But this is a basic human need and looks like Ryanair is again putting their profit before the comfort of its customers. Ryanair's previous hassle caused upset people when it announced plans to close check-in desks and raise baggage charges.

There's too much What if -situations. What if I don't have coins and I Really need to go, what if I don't have coins and my baby needs a clean diaper, an so on....

Hey Ryanair, you can sell prepaid -cards with preloaded value for taking dump. I why not make it a membership -card. Or better yet, a Membershit -card.

Tommy

Windows running on Symbian devices

Someone has too much time in their hands. One young Polish guy has installed Windows 3.1 on Nokia N95. It is not native installation, it runs through the Symbian version of DOSbox.

Developer said that this same can be done to Windows 95. Only limitation would be poor resultion of N95.

Link to story (Gizmodo.com)

Tommy

Barry Schwartz on TED

TED has once again really fantastic and interesting presentations about technology and the world we live in. On one previous post I mentioned presentation about siftables, a playing blocks with "intelligence".  From these latest 18 minutes long presentations I also really enjoyed Barry Schwartz's talk about practical wisdom, rules and incentives. It gave me lot's to think about my behavior in work environment and in free time.  

Here is a direct link to that presentation

Tommy

If you don't know what TED is, see www.ted.com for more info. 

Africa's paradise. Wait, what?! No

Zimbabwe is one those unfortunate countries that are able to get everything horribly wrong. Facts and figures about it's latest development are amazing, In a very bad bad way. Majority of people in the world are blaming corrupted and badly managed Mugabe's regime. And I think that they are not terribly wrong. You just cannot believe the things you are reading and seeing from news about Zimbabwe.

Few examples of things gone miserably (lately):

- Life expectancy has dropped since 1990 from around 60 to 36 (male) and 34 (female).
- Puplic health care has more or less collapsed with many of hospitals been shut down
- Total of 1,8 million are living with HIV (total population 13,2 million)
- Infant mortality rate is 81 death from every 1,000 birth
- Huge colera outbrake in Dec 2008 due to infrastucture collapsion
- 60 % of wildlife has died because of the deforestration
- Tourism has decreased steadily after 1990's

But let's look at their economy (or lack of it). That is also one little bummer. They had steady economic growth throughout 80's (after indepence) and 90's and everything seemed to be going, well, not So bad (if you don't count massagres, HIV outbreaks, corruption etc.). After year 2000 everything basically went down the drain. One example was that weird land redistribution, which gradually turned their farming industry from export to net import.

Economy hitted rock bottom in year 2008, when Zimbabwe' s Inflation rate was so high that they put even Germany's 1923 hyperinflation to shame. Germany's peak was December 1923 when exchange rate was 4,200,000,000,000 Marks to 1 US dollar. 1 pound bread cost back then 1 billion marks. Inflation rate meant that prices doubled every two days.

But Zimbabwe's figures were even more staggering. They had their "all-in" in July 2008 when inflation rate was around 231,000,000 %. The average prices doubled in 1,3 days. They added zeros to their currency (ZWD) faster than Facebook was increasing their user count. Today, after wild ride in 2008 their own money is basically a fragile memory. It still circulates alongside foreign currencies but it's value is cut in half every two days against U.S. dollar.

Tommy

Ps. Number 1 spot in hyperinflation is still in Hungary's hands. They messed their currency between 1945-1946. Prices doubled every 15,6 hours. Highest denomination was 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengő. The value of their currency was adjust daily by radio announcement. People were literally sweeping cash to sewer in streets.

Winter is still on....

I have great plans for year 2009 and most of these are related to my (and others around me) mental and physical well-being (Maybe more detailes about those in later posts). But one particular resolution for this year is to take more photographs. That's one thing that I really like but sadly my excuses are limiting my hobby. I always come up with one and not go out for a walk with my camera.

This time of year it's coldness. I pretty much hate cold part of our winters where everything is just stone cold and most of the time it's pitch-dark. Now it's getting better everyday as we move along towards summer. Colours, nature and animals (yeah, all of them. Our neighborhood has one squirrel) are coming to life and so then there is tons of more stuff to shoot. With camera that is.

Back to my resolution. One reason why I wan't to take more picture is that I just bought a new Canon 5D MarkII. So that put's a little pressure on me when it comes down to ROI of this camera body. Not that I have to compromise my artistic vision but still... :D

Here are few pictures from 2009

Tommy

Windows mobile @ GSMA

On Monday at GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer provided a (typical enthusiastic) presentation about mobile industry and Microsoft's latest creations. Like predicted, Microsoft unveiled latest version of the their Windows Mobile Operating system along with few long waited features to their mobile stack.

New Windows Mobile 6.5 will have new interface with more finger friendly user experience. WM 6.5 is promised to be better at navigation and more user centric. Microsoft is heavily in touch screen phones but promises to improve usability also in smart phones with no touch screen capability. (Are there any left?)

My Phone is a new service from Microsoft (It's in invitation-only beta at this stage). With My Phone you can back up your mobile data to a web-service. For example pictures, contacts, appointments, SMS and other things. If you happen to lose your phone, data would be easy restorable from the web. In addition, My Phone let's you upload your pictures and videos automatically to the service.

In addition, Microsoft launched a Windows marketplace for mobile applications. This will be a place for Windows mobile users to search and purchase mobile applications to their mobile phones. It will be preinstalled to Windows Mobile 6.5 phones and will be usable with Live ID. Developers can release their applications through this service after a little security and compatibility check from Microsoft.

More information on Microsoft press release

Tommy

Sony releases stupid new piece of s**it

Hah! Hilarious video about Sonys new high-tech piece of s**t that doesn't even fu**ing work.

Click to see Onion Networks video

You got to love "Jim Vergadulas" comment: "I can't wait to get home and spend my whole fu**ing night to figure this goddamn thing out" :)

Tommy

Dude, where's my computer?

These days organizations are losing their computers like there's no tomorrow. We have been reading about those dear Brits that have lost basically everything that has sensitive infromation. Computers, discs, data, you name it, they've lost it. This time it's no other than Los Alamos Nation Laboratory (www.lanl.gov) in New Mexico.

They have admitted a loss of 67 computers and of those 13 went missing past year. Adding to those missing computers one BlackBerry is also not with it's right owner. This BlackBerry was lost in "sensitive foreign country". And I'm thinking that they don't mean Sweden.

More information about this case in Pogo.org site

Tommy

Are they coming?

On Sunday 15th, during a marathon event in Austin, Texas, guy named Eddie Carcia was able to capture a video from a fire ball roaming through the sky. People were calling local police office reporting meteor-like white tailed fireball landing somewhere in the area.

Video from that fireball (Youtube)

There's no need to bring your tinfoil-hat out yet because this was propably a debris from two satellites that collided over Siperia last week. The collision produced huge amount of space debris. It wasn't no little-hit-in-minimum-speed -type of collision. The satellites collided at 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per second, producing 500 to 600 pieces of space debris, NASA said.

Story from CNN.com

Tommy

Bring out the Sun!

Samsung will unveil their latest gadgets in MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona. One of those will be their solar-powered mobile phone named Blue Earth. This phone is going to have integrated solar panel on the back, touch-screen on the front and it is made from recycled plastic bottles.

It is not clear how much battery life you will get from solar-panels but the phone will have "normal" charger included also. So power from our yellow ball will not totally eliminate a need for electric from plugs. One nice extra feature on this phone will be pedometer. It calculates for example how much carbon do you save when you are walking instead of driving a car.

It seems that Samsung is taking lead (at least this round) in this fierce battle of green-gadgetry. If Blue Earth works properly we might see some competitive products pretty soon. But hey, I thought I saw first solar-powered batteries even in Nokia 16xx in late 90´s. I'm pretty sure that they didn't worked as well as people wished for but it showed that those can be made. And that was 10+ years ago! So come on, it is quite hard to believe that building a efficent and working solar-powered phone is impossible job!! Look how other things in technology are developed in ten years. We even have multitouch computer and phones that has fart application. Think about that!

Source by clicking this link

Tommy

Ps. In Finland, solar-panels! Hah. One day charging and 1,5 minutes of talk-time. Sweet.

I'm a PC and I'm cute

When it comes down to advertising you cannot underestimate a power of over-cute-and-cuddly children. In most cases when companies use children in ad's I would like to punch myself in the face. But this one... Microsoft is doing their I'm a PC campaign and now it's time for little 4,5 years old girl to give it a go. 

Check out Rookies in microsoft.com

Pretty pointless but cute.

Tommy

 

Siftables

Talking about new and cool things. Check out Siftables! MIT grad Student David Merrill is showing their invention in TED conference. It's a computerized block that can do bunch of stuff. You do music with them, you can play word games and well, I guess that sky's the limit what you can do with those. 

TED webpage with video

My thoughts: 

Next generation aka our kids are going to have loads of new and exiting stuff on their hands! Think about cool new technologies and gadgets, interactive games (maybe working ones this time) and tens of different ways to stay indoors. But I think we (maybe future parents) are responsible for kicking them outdoors every once in a while. I want to see our kids still enjoying playing with friends (IRL), riding bikes, swimming and climbing trees and all those things that we did when we grew up. 4 hours of internet and 4 h of Xbox per day cannot do you good in the long run. :)

When we are 60, our kids can teach us how to use latest communication technologies (I hope teleporting is invented by then) and we can teach them how throw massive hit to your friends face with perfect shaped snowball. And after that shake hands and still be friends. In real life. 

Tommy

See your own evolution

Yesterday was birthday Charles Darwin, happy belated birthday sir! Honoring him you can go back in time to see yourself as an early human. 

Upload your picture and have look. 

Comment on my own morph:  Beautiful!

Tommy

ps. More info about Darwin's theory of evolution

Just saying hi to world!

Nice! Having went through this process of creating blog template that satisfies me even slightly, colors, boxes and all the other things to get this party started. Now, when it's basically ready for me to do what ever is supposed to do here, total block. Can't figure out anything to write.... Hah. 

Well, this is good start for me. So just to let you know, I will be writing here about stuff that I see, that affects me, that I like etc. Mostly technology, business, politics, internet memes and so on. And hey, you cannot forget cats, Those little things run the interweb nowadays I guess! 

Tommy

ps. Sorry about my english, not native :)