Skydiving video, recorded with Lumia 900

A slightly edited video of the jump, taken with the Lumia 900.


Sorry for the rotated view. The ad-hoc holder worked quite well.

Devaamo Summit 2012, day 2

Day 2, Thursday

The next was the proper summit day. On the walk to the New Factory I noticed this strange thingy that counts the amount of cyclist that have gone past it.

Tampere bike counter

OpenSource and TI

Qt5 on RaspberryPi (I can order mine tomorrow!)

The Qt5 on RaspeberryPi was a really awesome demonstration on QML and had the most awesome terminal I've ever seen :)

NFC Tag in lunch restaurant, the first I've ever seen live in Finland

OpenStreetMap and free Open Geodata are great opportunities / Pekka Sarkola

Then party, with Free (really) beer. Met some of the people I stalk/follow on twitter, that was nice.

Organizers are sexy :)

Thank you to the organizers, hope to see you next year (or at some other place)

Lyssna på x3m med gstreamer under Linux

A quick hint for sv_FI (or anyone else that knows Swedish) geeks that listen to Radio X3M:

gst-launch rtspsrc \
location=rtsp://stream.yle.mobi/yle/live/x3m.sdp latency=500 ! \
decodebin ! queue min-threshold-buffers=10 ! autoaudiosink


Enjoy :)

Devaamo summit 2012, day 1

It's a rare treat to have a FOSS/Opendata/etc related summit/conference in Finland so I was very happy that one was held in Tampere and that I could attend it. Devaamo Summit 2012.

Day one, Friday

I arrived on Friday, met a friend from the local hackerspace and followed the lightning talks. The most interesting of the was qmlweb, QML ported to the browser.

"ITS Factory – Open traffic interfaces for intelligent apps"

A hacked AK-47 (Wii) and a Duck Hunt remake, done by the 5w Tampere Hackerspace

Tieto, one of the sponsors, had a Tizen developers device on show. I played with it a bit. The device itself was very light, probalby explained by the lack of a GSM modem.

The UI/UX bit was fast and fluid, but lacked any kind of oooh-shiny-cool effect. But here's hoping...

Tizen developer device

Yep, it really is a Tizen device

I was a bit tired after the train and lightning talks so I walked to my hotel and relaxed for a while.

Then walked back to the New Factory area and did a "Dinner and a movie" by myself :) Watched Snow White & The Huntsman, it was ok but there was just that something missing from it.

Then to sleep!

OpenStreetMap, Google, Nokia and Bing maps

Vepsä, a tiny island in the Turku archipelago on different map services. There is an enormous difference on the amount of detail available. And on two services the island itself is missing, looks kinda silly checking in on Foursquare on Nokia devices.

Update (02.10.2012): Added screenshot from iOS 6 maps. It has at least the island in place, but not much more.

Vepsä on OpenStreetMap. Roads and trails.

Vepsä on Google. No details. But plenty of tiny islands.

But these two suck, and suck really bad. The complete island is missing.

Vepsä on Nokia maps, nowhere to be seen

Vepsä on Bing maps.. where is it ?

Apple maps in iOS 6 from iPad

Skydiving

On Sunday at about 10:40 we started driving to the Turku airport, where Skydive Turku (Skydive Turku - Turun Laskuvarjourheilijat ry) has the HQ. The tandem jump was done by their co-op partner, Skyxperience.

Leaving, not nervous at all.. no no

When we arrived we first went trough the competition details, this was a new thing for  them too.

On the way to the airport

On the way

If I hurt myself or die I get 20.000€ ! Awesome ;)

Then we both filled and signed  Vastuuvapatus forms (basically if drop-splat-and-die we are worth 20.000€ and can keep the pieces, yay ;)

Leila filling out her paper

Then we had a quick training on what to do, not that much as we more or less just hang from TheRealJumpper.

1. Bend feet backwards under the plane
2. Hand to the harness straps
3. When instruction gives a sign, spread hands

Easy enough :)

Up there, I'm I nuts or what ? :)

Then we changed clothes and put on the tandem-jump harness.

I have my harness on, ready to go!

One of the video guys took the Lumia 900 and made a ad-hoc harness for it. It worked, luckily the phone didn't drop off it. The video is great, unfortunately none of us noticed that it was placed in "height-screen" mode, so the video is recorded upside down in portrait mode :) I'll post it here as soon as I get it rotated.

The Lumia 900 strapped on ready to make a video. Real professional work there :)

After that I emptied my pockets and left all my stuff at their office. We walked over to the airfield to wait for the plane to land and pick us up.

Me and my jump partner

The climb took about 5-6 minutes I think, then we where up at about 4100m I think.

One of the camera men, Leila and her jumping parner

First out was a real jumper woman. Then it was our turn. At about this point, having my feet dangling outside the plane and I started to get really nervous and slightly scared. Not that I had much time to think about it, as the next second we where out!

Stepping out. About 4000 meters down. Turku airport ^

And here we go!

And safely on the ground.

Had to sit down for a while, my legs didn't like to support me :)

Leila just having jumped from the plane

An enormous Thank You to Nokia and Nokia Connects (especially Sarah for organizing everything) and to Skyxperience from me and Leila! Thank you very very much for this. I will definitely never forget this experience.

If you are the Turku or Helsinki region and looking for something to do (and have cash to burn) check out Skyxperice and Skydivie Turku (on Facebook).

Trying something new, Skydiving !

It was awesome! And horrible! But great! And scary! :D This was definitely something new.

Here we go!

More pictures and videos coming soon.

Trying Something New

When you read this I'm (and my girlfriend) most likely getting trained at Skyxperience to free-fall from 4000 meters for a minute or so and then gently touch down after dangling from a parachute for 5-10 minutes :)

In other words, my choice of trying something new is tandem parachute jumping, like this:


There will be someone recording the event so there will definately be a lot of pictures and video clips. I will also use the Lumia 900 to document the whole thing.

More Lumia 900 testing, phone.. but first, a microSIM

The Lumia 900 requires a microSIM and the only microSIM I have is in my main phone, the N9. Not that I get why it couldn't use a good-old miniSIM, the phone is Huge :)

When I had the Nokia 603 for testing it never occoured to me that I could have gotten a pre-paid service so I could have tested the phone features properly. You might wonder why, but I've never used pre-paid service, I've been using the same service provider since 1996 (my first mobile was a Nokia 2110) and usage of pre-paid is not that common here in Finland, afaik.

So, today I got a pre-paid service from Saunalahti, only 6,60€, a good choice if you ever need pre-paid service here in Finland and it even includes data service with a special price of only 0.66€/day on microSIM phones.

Try Something New thingy moved to Sunday

The weather for Saturday is so bad the it had to be moved to Sunday. Can't stand the waiting :)
Just thinking about it makes my feet go wobbly. Can you guess what I'm going to try?

The Lumia 900 arrived

DHL came with a Nokia Lumia 900 for me test and play with for the next two weeks, thanks to Nokia Connects. I will also use it to document the thingy on Saturday.

Bubblewrapped

A blue box

That contains another blue box

This box with some nice pictures and the Lumia 900 label

Inside the box we find the Nokia Lumia 900, USB cables and headphones, plus some quick guide papers. Oh, and a tool for opening the SIM cover. Must say that is a strange, design. I would definitely loose it quite fast with all the other junk I have at home.

Inside we find a good looking white Lumia 900

Protected inside plastic

Under the phone there is a SIM cover tool

The contents of the box

USB cable

A funny looking charger (I know it's the UK power plug style, still it looks funny to me :)

Basic in-ear headphones

A Quick guide and some more papers, who reads these anyway :)

Setting aside the fact that it's a WP phone, I have to admit that it does looks gorgeous! The N9 polycarbonate shell design is just perfect. You most likely know all the specs and stuff already but I'll repeat the basics just in case anyway.

• 1.4 Ghz single-core Snapdragon ARM CPU
• 512 MB RAM
• 16 GB internal flash
• 4.3" AMOLED ClearBlack display
• Carl Zeiss optics, 8 megapixel main camera, 1 megapixel front camera
• Single block polycarbonate body
• Windows Phone 7.5
• All the connection you could possibly need, 3G, 4G, Bluetooth, WiFI, USB
• 720p 30 fps video recording
• Read the full specs here

Nokia Lumia 900

Side by side comparison with the N9 and N950. The Lumia 900 is much larger than the N9. Even a bit too big for my taste, but I haven't really tried handling it that much yet. I usually have N950 and N9 in my pant pocket and they are just small enough to not feel uncomfortable. But lets see how it goes.

N9 looks tiny beside the Lumia 900

Lumia 900 much larger

It is also a tiny bit larger than the N950

Lumia 900 and Nokia N950.

Lumia 900 is a tiny bit wider than the N950, about the same height.

I'm at work right now, but I'll post some more when I get home and can play with the phone properly.