Category Archives: Technology

Like buses

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Blog posts are like British buses, you get none for a few days and then a whole bunch come along at once. I tested the surround sound speaker placement with Aliens, just flipping to some scenes I knew would have full 5.1 sound going on – and – it’s another notch better than it had been!

The sound is even more full and truly surrounds us, even though we’re sitting pretty close to the rear speakers, I’ve angled them in slightly so that we’re in the direction of the cone of sound they give out. Very, very pleased with them now. The stands will have to do – I may try and find something to cause them to lean back a little. I adjusted the heads a little and got them tighter so they don’t droop, but the stands themselves still lean into the room.

We both did our 30 minutes of Wii fit today. I wasn’t going to bother because my shoulder really does hurt a great deal, but seeing Grete doing it made it seem easier, and I stuck to low impact, lower body stuff (so lots of skiing, stepping, snowboarding, etc.) Another win for the Wii, having so much choice means you can work around the bits you broke the day before, yay.

Speakers II

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Both the rear speakers are attached to the stands (these ones btw) and they don’t look too bad. The speakers are quite big and the stands lean into the room because the carpet is higher at the skirting board, but otherwise I’m quite pleased. They are obvious, but not in the way they have been for the past couple of weeks (i.e. sitting on the arm of the sofa and the windowsill) and the sound they emit is definitely behind our heads, which is an improvement.

Now we need to find a fun movie to watch with lots of 5.1 ‘special effects’ that come in from the back.

Maybe Aliens.

Rear speaker stands …

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weeeeeee my rear speaker stands have just arrived. Fingers crossed they’re ok. Decided on stands in the end, rather than trying to fit the speakers on the wall. Hopefully it’s the right move.

If they’re any good, may get some for the front speakers too.

We’ll see.

And that reminds me

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We got rid of the old Xbox, I can’t remember if I blogged about this or not, but it was haunted. Yes, our xbox was haunted. We were quietly and happily sitting watching TV a few weeks ago and the xbox spat the CD tray out. For no reason. Clearly demonic activity in my opinion. We took the remote control widget thing out in case the evil spirits were using that as a conduit into the xbox circuits but it made no difference. We turned it on, off, everything to try and rid it of the possessing spirits, but no matter what we did, as long as it had power, it randomly spat the tray out.

We finally disconnected the thing from the mains.

But I do wonder if the entire electrical system in the house is possessed.

Grete will probably kill me when she reads this.

Unless the xbox demon gets me first.

Anyway, none of that is why I started this blog entry, we dumped the xbox (or will do, it’s in our ‘to go to the recycling tip’ pile), but we kept the controllers and the remote control widget. Along with half a dozen xbox games and a pile of PC games we don’t play we took them along to Game Station and traded them in for credit against the stuff we bought and already blogged about. So that was cool.

Sunday

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A week at work after a two week break and already I’m struggling to demonstrate any serious enthusiasm, ah well. Been a bit of a week, had various amounts of unexpected cash (Council Tax and a refund from British Gas) and ended up buying a surround sound system and a Nintendo Wii (obviously, it would have been more sensible to put the money away for the future, but then, who knows what the future will hold).

We’re late to the party with the Wii, but it doesn’t mean we can’t Rock Out! We got Guitar Hero III and it’s just really, really good fun! Despite the fact that I know it’s nothing like playing the guitar for real, it makes me want to play the guitar! I have to say, the Wii Fit surprised me, I hate exercise for the sake of it, but the Wii Fit certainly makes some parts of the process easier. Whether it’s the feedback, the tracking, the score system, the games, or something else I’m not sure yet, and I’m not sure how long the novelty will last and if we’ll use it once we’re past that stage, but it’s certainly been used more than any single piece of exercise equipment we’ve ever bought (which I admit, is a short list). I was firmly in the it’s a gimmick camp until I spoke to a few people and that was certainly fully dispelled when we got one. So fingers crossed.

It’s a long time since I sat down and played a computer game that wasn’t a MMOG of some kind, for 4 hours straight, which I did with Guitar Hero this morning. The Wii really is inclusive, it’s almost impossible to watch your spouse playing tennis without the urge to jump up and challenge them to a game. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick up a bunch of second hand games which are fun to play, I guess I need to start reading some reviews.

I still have to actually get the rear speakers for the surround sound stuff mounted, I’m taking it gradually because I don’t want to screw it up. Still not entirely certain what the best way to deal with the speaker cabling is, it’s not easy (possible) to lift our carpet and hide them, but we’re lucky with furniture placement. The main area of concern will be running the cable around the fireplace.

Cooking has been mostly successful, despite the mood issues that working for a living brings. Managed to cook more often than not this week rather than eating frozen pizza or (the admittedly better-than-they-used-to-be) ready meals. I need to find some more meals we can make in a single pan, like stews or rice/paste based dishes. We both really enjoy those kinds of meals, and they’re easy enough to make and freeze, and generally tend to be lower on fat than the other options. Also by making sure we choose the right accompaniment we can keep the GI low.

Made the entire week without eating bacon in the mornings, watched what I ate during the days. More of the same next week. Grete says it really does help her, which in turn gives me more incentive to keep it going. Fingers crossed there as well (running out of fingers).

My sister’s holiday caravan has been flooded somewhere in the North East of England (last night). They weren’t in it at the time (although they only didn’t go because the rain was bad, otherwise they might have been, but then it wouldn’t have flooded maybe). They’re checking insurance details today and the insurers are visiting the caravan park tomorrow so we’ll know more then about what is covered and how much they need to pay out. The kids love that place so I hope they get enough to cover any damage and repairs.

How do you start a holy war?

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Simple, discuss the preferences and features of audio visual products with audio visual geeks. You can make the war truly epic if you make sure you focus on issues which actually have no entirely objective foundation.

I have for some months now been wondering about getting a Blu-ray player, maybe a PlayStation 3, maybe a stand-alone Blu-ray device. Basically, ever since Blu-ray won the hi-def competition I’ve been considering the options. Obviously, I can’t actually afford a stand-alone Blu-ray player or PS3 but hey, that shouldn’t stop me pondering endlessly about them. Initially the PS3 looked like a good deal, there weren’t many Blu-ray devices cheaper than the PS3 (on the face of it) and you got a games console to boot. Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to afford any games, but still, the feature was there. Then two or three weeks ago I found a Blu-ray player (Sony) on Amazon for under £250, and the reviews seemed pretty positive. I guess since winning the format war, the demand is going up and hence prices are coming down. Add to that some checks on the PS3, where I discovered you have to start buying remote controls, etc. before it’s truly useable and the PS3 idea faded in the face of the newly reduced price Blu-ray devices.

In the background to all of this I had also been musing about getting surround sound. I’d balked at the idea of an all-in-one (DVD + Tuner + Speakers) because of the reduced number of input options and because we already had a DVD player we were perfectly happy with, but in reality had no where near the money required to buy separates.

I was reading through reviews of everything I could find, including the cheap Blu-ray player on Amazon, when I found a review from a guy in a similar position to me. He had a newish LCD TV, no Blu-ray, no surround sound. He bought a Blu-ray player and basically said ‘the picture is stunning, but because I’m still listening through the LCD TV speakers, the sound is shit and the movie experience is ruined’.

That decided it for me really. We’ve got something like 150 movies already and a surround sound system would greatly improve the enjoyment we get from those films, where-as Blu-ray would a) only really improve new movies that we could afford to go Blu-ray for and b) would still sound crap. Some more reading around and I realised that if we went for one of the new all-in-one systems, we’d also be getting an upscaling DVD player. Now upscaling doesn’t give you anywhere near the kind of image you see with true HD sources, but still, it does slightly improve the perceived quality of the image from regular DVD’s and would provide something our current DVD doesn’t provide.

So I was doomed from that instant, further checking showed me an all-in-one system for around £200 which was getting decent reviews (Samsung based) and had two pretty small rear speakers (more on that in a bit) which is essential considering the layout of the lounge. We popped to PC World to ‘just have a look at some systems’ and ended up coming home with the Samsung. Unpacking it and cabling it up (temporary speaker locations) took most of the night, but we still managed to watch a film and it totally, utterly, entirely blows away the experience of watching them with the TV speakers.

Forget speaker locations, the cost, or the quality of the system, compared to a regular LCD TV the sound is just amazing. It’s all around the room and the base is intestine-jigglingly good. We are so pleased with it. I fear our next door neighbours hate us more than ever, but we’ve promised ourselves we’ll go around and ask them how loud it is. Sometime real soon now[tm].

And so, on to the final point. If I was to admit where the centre and front two speakers were, the entire world of AV geeks would storm my house and re-model our lounge. However, there’s not much choice based on where the TV fits and where the walls are. They will just have to go where they have gone. The rear speakers I do have two options, neither of which will make the AV geeks happy but there you go.

Our sofa is against the back wall of the lounge. I can either hang the speakers on the wall above the sofa pointing into the lounge ‘past’ our heads as it were (so both pointing the same way), or I can hang them on the side walls of the lounge facing each other and directly at the sofa.

Which one is going to be best? The manual suggests pointing them at each other if you can’t have them located some distance behind the listener (which we can’t), but I’m wondering now if above us pointing into the room would be better or to the side pointing at us (and each other).

Any comments from anyone with a surround sound system in a non-optimally shaped room?

Who ya gonna call?

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From http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604788/ghostbusters-is-first-film-to-be-released-on-usb-stick.html,

Are you the USB keymaster? You could be soon if you pick up PNY’s new 2GB USB flashdrive, which comes with Ghostbusters pre-loaded. While the music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, the movie business is still relying on discs, but that may change following this partnership between PNY and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

You can pick them up from Argos apparently for £30. That seems like an awful lot of money to shell out for a movie you can buy on DVD and rip to your PC yourself for about £1.

New version of Picasa!

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I see there’s a new version of Picasa out (beta v3) which has the feature I’ve really been wanting – the ability to sync albums from the picasa software to the picasaweb website. Previously you had to just upload photo’s, and if you changed them, scrap the web copy and re-upload them. Now it looks like you can create a local album, and upload it, and then if you add / change photo’s in the album you just resync with the web copy, which is going to be very nice.

I just wish Picasa would pick some kind of standard for storing captions inside PNG files, instead of leaving them as totally separate in the picasa.ini file (it stores captions in the EXIF data for JPG files, but there’s no clear standard for doing so with PNG’s). I stopped converting my scans into JPG’s when storage became so cheap, I’d much rather keep them as PNG’s because you never know what you’re going to do with them in a few years. Hopefully it’ll make it into a later release.

If you’ve got a lot of photo’s and don’t use any software to manage them I can’t praise Picasa enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s really easy to use and I love the way you can make ‘edits’ to the photographs and the actual image file remains unchanged (unless you want to comit the changes) and the edits are stored as procedures somewhere else. Just great IMO.

Update:
UK Version is here http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe