On a forest trail
Beautiful, no?
Skiing across a lake
Off she goes
Now for sauna and sausages with friends
Skiing at Luukki, Espoo
On a forest trail
Beautiful, no?
Skiing across a lake
Off she goes
On a forest trail
Beautiful, no?
Skiing across a lake
Off she goes
Cross-country skiing in Lahti
The famous ski jumps
The trails we took
A view over the frozen lake Vesijärvi
A peek into the all-wooden Sibelius Hall. It’s supposed to have amazing acoustics.
We spent Monday skiing with friends.
Lifeblog on ‘Nokia’s Newest Smartphone’
Sascha Segan was very US centric when he said in his PC Magazine article:
The 6682 is the first phone to support the new release of Nokia’s
Lifeblog, so users can actually blog from their phone. It allows you to
post pictures, videos and text messages to an online timeline that you
can either keep private or publish for your friends.
He was inaccurate on one account – the Nokia 6682 is the first US phone to support the upcoming release of Lifeblog (the Nokia 6630, which will also support the upcoming release, is not a US phone). While we haven’t formally made it known, the next release of Lifeblog will be compatible with the Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681, and Nokia 6682 when they come out, and also compatible with the Nokia 6630, which has been on the market for a while now. We’ll announce when the software is available (soon, really!).
In the mean time, the current version of Lifeblog is compatible with the Nokia 6630, Nokia 6670, Nokia 7610, and the Nokia 6260. If you can’t find Lifeblog on your phone (it’s pre-installed on some), you can get it from the Nokia Lifeblog site. And if you are like me and can’t keep the phone numbers straight, there is a graphical guide to help you get the software you need.
And remember, the mobile software is free. If you want to do more and save more and browse more, then go out an buy the PC version of Lifeblog (29.95 €). More info on the Nokia Lifeblog site.
PS Carita is showing the Lifeblog on the Nokia 6682 with the Nokia 6682 team at the PMA show in Orlando. Great work guys!
Crossing an old border
This bridge sat across the border between East and West Berlin. I was told the bridge was unused during the whole time the wall was up. And I could see that it might have even had a section removed in the middle. It was an interesting feeling.
View from bridge onto the River Spee.
I thought the two hands coming together were clever.
On the east side is a remaining stretch of the wall. It looks like a simple wall without the guards and turrets and no-man’s-land.
I was in Berlin a few weeks ago. It was the first time back in over 20 years. While in Berlin, I felt foolish always asking questions about East and West, especially since the wall went down so long ago. But the Berliners were so understanding (thank you).
Berlin is special to me because it’s my father’s home town, which he left one scary evening, with his mother and sister and all they could carry, in June 1939. Ah, the stories he’s told me.
The last time I was in Berlin, it was with my dad. He told a lot about how Berlin used to be in his and his father’s time. Young as I was at the time of our visit, I understood why he acted in a guarded but sharp way when we visited East Berlin on a tour bus. To him, the wall had stolen so much of Berlin’s beauty for the East and he couldn’t put up with all the krap the East Berlin tour guide tried to pass off on us.
I laughed as my dad made the guide uncomfortable, poking holes in so much of what she said. But I don’t recall him ever speaking in German to her or revealing that he was from Berlin. She probably thought he was just an annoying American, not someone who had some stupid political gash cut through his hometown.
It actually meant something to me to walk through Brandenburg Tor. I hope he can come and walk through it himself, with me and my children. We all need to hear those City stories again and to cross that old border that people finally stood up and erased.
Funky something with highway rumble strips
By way of my friends at Youth Intelligence (I subscribe to their great Trend Central newsletter):
Musical Roads: In Japan, the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has
embedded grooves into sections of roads which boom a tune up through cars.
They’re in the process of planning different melodies for different locations,
picking songs that are somehow associated with the locale.
What a riot!
Maybe for the right-before-you-go-off-the-road rumble strip, they could have something like ‘Wake up little Suzie’ or ‘Hit the road Jack’ or something like that to shame to driver for veering off the road.
Easy peasy mobile video posting
Did I mention how easy it is to post a video from your phone (with Lifeblog, of course)?
To put you in a comparative frame of mind: normal video posting requires you to record the video with a DV recorder, transfer the video to your PC, cut out the clip, convert it into a web-friendly format, make a frame grab to show what the video is about, and then upload it to a video-friendly server.
Well, all I do is, shoot the video with my phone and then ‘Post to Web’ from Lifeblog. Like any post from Lifeblog, you can post multiple items, add captions to each item, and then send the link of the post to whomever you like (or open it yourself and tell yourself how clever you were).
A few comments on this procedure:
- TypePad does the work for me of getting the frame grab, formatting it, and serving it. Actually, I think Lifeblog is the only way to easily get video onto TypePad.
- TypePad leaves it in .3gpp format, so I can view it on my phone if I want to.
- You can use QuickTime (and RealPlayer, I think) to view .3gpp files from your browser.
- The video is not streamed. The user needs to click on it and it opens another window with the video (at least that’s what QuickTime does for me). Unfortunately, there is no clear indication that the item is an image or video, so I just make the caption saying something like ‘(click to play)’.
- Don’t forget to set your video recorder to 174×144 so you can get the biggest (or is it less small?) video.
- Note that the video is sent completely, so the longer the video, the longer the upload time over GPRS. Alternately, you could use Lifeblog to automatically transfer it to Lifeblog PC and just post from there over broadband. It’s roughly the same easy peasy procedure.
Here are two examples:
- One of mine on the joint Lifeblog-Wasabi blog.
- And one on Alvaro’s Sulfkultura blog.
Another view of Lifeblog – as a portfolio
I met a while back with Elizabeth Hartnell-Young. She’s an enthusiastic and amazing researcher who, as one of her interests, studies ePortfolios.
Link: Centre for Applied Educational Research – Staff – Elizabeth Hartnell-Young.
Elizabeth is leading a project using Lifeblog to explore identities and personal storytelling in social settings: school, home, leisure and so on
What I think is so cool about her is that we both were thinking along the same lines on what Lifeblog means to people as a story-telling tool. While I came up with that insight using the product day-in day-out, she realized it just from reading the product description (wow). I think others are picking up on her insight:
Link: Where am I at with ePortfolios?
Nokia’s Lifeblog
is one concept that may be useful. At the moment, the Lifeblog is
constructed to act mainly as an archive for various data that comes
through the phone (SMS, email, photos). The current version of Lifeblog
is able to organise the archive data so that it can be posted on to an
actual blog site.
This post talks about the different levels of a portfolio.
How do you use your Lifeblog? Do you just use Lifeblog mobile to view all your stuff in one place and share stuff? Do you use Lifeblog PC simply as a backup for all you mobile content? Do you annotate or modify or import stuff into your Lifeblog to make it more personal? Do you actually use Lifeblog to tell a story? Do you have more than one Lifeblog, each with a different story?