blogging from iceland during the Raflost festival. Reykjavik is cool (in both senses of the word). We're building artsy stuff with people from very different backgrounds. It's fun and a valuable experience. You can't get much further than putting dancers and nerds work on the same project :)

I'm now following a lecture. Can't stop playing with processing...

ok. so. update. i was accepted to study at the university iberoamericana in mexico city next autumn. i'm signed in as a graphical design student even though my "application" mentioned interest areas as industrial and spacial design.. doesn't really matter - i guess i can move rather freely between departments.

the bigger issue is the need to learn spanish in advance. i was planning on taking a course in spain during the summer, but many people directed me to a more better approach of taking a course before the school starts in mexico city, so now i'm hunting for a course there. at least i'll save the airline tickets and won't pollute, but i would've wanted to visit spain as well.. some day..

in addition to this i needed to buy myself a laptop since the macbook pro i'm now using is from my work. so i got myself a eee 1000he.

only comes with XP, so the first things after i got the wireless up was a visit to www.getfirefox.com and then www.ubuntu.com. the new 9.04 netmix runs really nicely here.

the size, keyboard and battery life are really nice. flash is such a resource hog that some more highres flash sites are slow. otherwise all seems ok. the price is less than 400e so i don't have to be extra careful with it either (good thing in mexico city..).

the idea to buy this i got after our lovely visit to berlin with aino. almost bought a samsung x360 instead, but then came to my senses.. macs are good too, but something is driving me away from them.. maybe it's the fact that i have deal with them everyday in work/school. anyway berlin was excellent. i'll have to write a post on it once i have time to implement map embedding in this blog..

Silently we (me and Jari Suominen from Medialab) released PENALTI - a fun ball racing game that uses the accelerometer available on many symbian (s60) phones. The idea started from mlab's Rapid Mobile Prototyping workshop and was fueled by Nokia Forum Game Development challenge.

We did a few days of intensive coding and submitted our game. Didn't win the whole thing, but we were the best in TaiK (dunno, if anyone else participated :) ). Prize? A Nokia 5800 phone. Suits me fine, since my trustworthy ericsson is falling apart and the N95's from mlab don't suit my style. I'll just use it until I get my hands on an android phone..

Thanks to the symbian effort of making installations as hard as possible, you'll need to do some work to get penalti working. Mostly just installing a few extra applications. Get the game and the instructions from the site.

Found from Stack Overflow

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone." The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do" replies the balloonist, "But how'd you know?"

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

After a few days of tinkering and a few days of waiting for the right parts to arrive I've finally managed to connect an Arduino board to a Nokia N800 internet tablet. First steps towards the Mlab robot.. I was really happy to find out how hackable the internet tablets are! Although there are numerous tutorials around the web, I'll put a short description of what I did before I forget:

Steps to connect N800 to Arduino

1. update N800 to OS2008
2. install rootsh to gain super-user access
3. install USB Control (enable Chinook Extras repository)
4. enable host mode through usb control
5. get a female type A-female type A USB connector. You might need to solder your USB-USBmini cable a bit if it's only slave mode. I bought one cheap from and it seems to work both ways out of the box. I guess you can also use an external power source if you don't want to solder your cable(?).
6. get kernel modules for USB Serial communication and FTDI chips from http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/modules-rx-34-2.6.21.0.tar.gz

7. unpack and install kernel modules as root with

   insmod usbserial.ko

   insmod ftdi_sio.ko

8. plug in your arduino

Extra: Python testing

1. get PySerial and install it. You can also just copy the python module from some *nix computer (I just copied mine from my linux box)

2. run this:

   import serial
   
   ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600)
   
   while 1:
   
       print ser.readline()
   

you should see whatever your arduino chip is printing.

Voilá! You have a connected a very flexible development board with a very hacker friendly, touchscreen enabled linux computer! Think of the possibilities :)