Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

I, too, have finally embraced the iPod, the iPod touch to be more specific. There was nothing particularly wrong with my old iRiver but the Touch is so much more.

I installed the new Google Maps application (January 2008 update) and pressed the cross hair target icon - it zoomed right in to the part of Helsinki where I was. How did it do that? It has no GPS. I know it can scan for surrounding WiFi networks and make an informed guess about its location based on this information, but I thought the WiFi location data was only available for North America. I walked to one end of the apartment and pressed the cross hair icon again while holding the iPod up in front of the window. Sure enough, the map scrolled slightly and the street outside the window became centered in the map. I then walked to the other end of the apartment and repeated the process. Again the map scrolled and the street in front of this window became centered on the map. Impressive. I can not even get GPS to work this well in front of a window in this apartment. And it takes a few seconds to find the location, not a few minutes as with the GPS in my Nokia.

It turns out that Skyhook, the company providing the WiFi positioning data to Apple do have data from Finland although mainly from Helsinki: www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/coverage.php

Finally, after having played around with the iPod for an hour, I connected my earphones and tried listening to music. The iPod can do a lot more than play music but it certainly has not lost its edge when it comes to this essential feature.

Yahoo's own software for automatic geotagging and Flickr uploading - ZoneTag - now (almost) works on any Nokia Series 60 version 3 phone, such as my Nokia E90.
It installs, starts, runs in the background and collects a log with cell info and GPS data (it does work with the built in GPS in the E90). The only problem is that when I try to start the camera from within ZoneTag (Take Picture) I get an "Error with Initialize Camera!" error message. And if I try to use the built in camera directly, ZoneTag does not pop up to ask if I want to upload the photo.
I partial work around is to keep ZoneTag running all the time and continuously collect positioning information and then upload the log to the ZoneTag site and match it with the photos I have manually taken and uploaded to Flickr. ZoneTag looks for timestamps in the log that matches timestamps in photo headers. This is no ideal solution and it also means the photos don't get tagged themselves, they only get location data added as meta data in Flickr.
When I asked about this problem, ZoneTag support told me they are aware of the problem and an updated version of the software that works correctly should be available soon.

I just snapped this photo and e-mailed it to Flickr along with the text you are now reading straight from the phone. The GPS coordinates for the photo where included automatically and stored in the EXIF header of the image before it left the phone.

Has Nokia finally got this right, have they finally made two of their applications (camera and gps) talk to each other? Unfortunately no. The solution is an application from a third party: Locr (www.locr.com).

The Locr application has been around for Nokia phones for some time and if you have tried it previously, you have probably been disappointed. Besides using its own camera application that did not work correctly with newer Nokia models, their software only included the coordinates in your photo if you uploaded the photo to the Locr web site - not if you uploaded it to any other site such as Flickr or simply moved it to your own computer.

The new version of Locr simply runs in the background. When you snap a photo using Nokia's own built in camera application, Locr silently starts the GPS in your phone and automatically includes the GPS coordinates inside each image in the EXIF header - the normal, standard way of doing it. This way, the coordinates are safely stored with each image if you move the image to your computer and services such as Flickr can automatically make use of the coordinates and place the image on a map if you e-mail or upload a photo to their site.

I now have a "server closet" where I keep my home server, terastation, switch, dsl modem, wifi station, ups and so on. In order to track the temperature inside the closet I ordered a "USB Thermometer" from usb.brando.com.hk. You just plug it into the USB port of a Windows computer and it will measure the ambient temperature.

The device arrived in an envelope within a few days together with a mini cd-r. That's right, not a factory made cd-rom but a normal burn-it-at-home cd-r with the software on it. And the software seems quite home made as well.

I read some review saying the device was "designed to be used in laboratories". Right.

You need two drivers to get it to work. First a USB-Serial -adapter and then a driver for the thermometer. It seems they use some old thermometer solution designed for serial-connection and simply put it on the same USB stick as a USB-to-Serial -adapter. But it works. And the temperature is very close to what my stand-alone thermometer says when placed nearby.

The software shows most of the captions in English and is capable of logging temperatures at different intervals - although only as a list on screen, not to a file. There is a "updata software" option in the software as well, but it is only a mailto: link to a suspicious looking address".

Not a great device but not very expensive either and it works. I just wish they had made logging to file available and used fewer colors in the user interface.

There are two alternative programs available for this device:

• TermoHID
• UTAC

Both of these are much better than the original one.

This is the first time I have seen a .eu top level domain (tld) in use and advertised. I remember how the European Union kept saying it was coming and that it would strengthen something something - but it kept being delayed and few seemed to care. I wonder how long it will take before I see another .eu domain.

This is an excellent product: it makes your camera do the things it should have been able to do when it came from the factory. The biggest problem with the Eye-Fi is the very fact that it is useful, that even the newest cameras lack the most basic wireless features.

Naysayers have written comments like "is it really that difficult to use a usb cable", "why would you want to publish straight from the camera" and "the WiFi range is too short and it is too slow".

Sure, if you intend to put your image trough photoshop first, it will not matter much if you have to use a card reader or usb cable as well. But sometimes - quite often actually - it's really nice to just press the shutter and know that the photo will be published and on-line automatically within 30 seconds.

The device itself is a engineering masterpiece. A Secure Digital (SD) card, the size of a stamp, that contains a normal 2 GB flash memory but also a small on board computer and a WiFi transmitter and antenna. Sure, with such a small antenna embedded in the card and the card placed deep inside the camera, the effective range suffers - but it still works. The other obvious drawback is the fact that you can not control the card while it is inside the camera as there is no user interface for it. There has also been concerns about speed and battery usage but I have not noticed any problems in these areas.

Everything else about this card, however, is a source for joy.

I have been "investing" in new hardware lately and the Buffalo TeraStation has been on my wish list ever since that very first model a few years ago.

Now I bought the "TeraStation Live" 2 TB version. The original TeraStation product line seems to have been split in two: the "Live" and the "Pro" versions. The main difference, besides the pro version being black and the live version not, is Active Directory support in the Pro version and UPnP AV / DLNA media streaming server integration in the Live version. Since I have no use for AD support, I got the Live version.

There are a number of similar NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices on the market now that connect using Gigabit Ethernet to your home network and uses four disks to give you RAID5 data redundancy where 25% of the capacity is used for checksums so even if one disk breaks, you do not lose any data.

I just noticed I have a free, high speed, internet connection. A nice surprise.

I am sitting in a meeting room at VTT Technical Research Center in Espoo, Finland, and my computer told me there was a WiFi network in the area. The name of the network is SparkNet. Could this be the same SparkNet that started out as a city wide network in Turku/Åbo as a cooperation between the universities in the city and the city itself.

Indeed it is, and my user name and password that I got when I started studying 14 years ago (ok, I have changed the password a few times since then) worked and I got access to this WiFi network here at VTT.

It turns out SparkNet now has close to 2.000 base stations in different cities around Finland, usually associated to universities and public facilities. The network is not free, but students at participating universities can use their own university accounts to gain access to SparkNet at any of the participating facilities. An interesting example of WiFi as a government financed basic infrastructure.

Ten years from now, will I join this army of middle aged men in grey suits, glasses and an incipient baldness - sitting trough hours of PowerPoint presentations filled with nothing but truisms? How much exposure to this is needed for conformity to take place? When will I too nod in approval as another man in a grey suit speaks of personalized ads in cell phones?

I bought a perspective correction lens for situations like this - but when I need it, all I have with me is my camera phone. I have seen photos of this building before and today I realized, by accident , that it is next to the hotel where I am currently staying. This building looks quite normal from the other side - which is the side facing the hotel.
Still, I am happy I at least had my cell phone camera at hand.