Below Belief » General http://www.belowbelief.com Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:29:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Plastiki completes Pacific Ocean crossing http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/plastiki-completes-pacific-ocean-crossing/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/plastiki-completes-pacific-ocean-crossing/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:29:32 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/plastiki-completes-pacific-ocean-crossing/ Sailboat made using 12,500 recycled plastic bottles reaches Australia after four-month voyage to highlight recycling and marine litter • How it all began
• Interview: David de Rothschild

A sailboat largely constructed from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles docked in Sydney harbour on Monday, after four difficult months crossing the Pacific Ocean in a bid to raise awareness about the perils of plastic waste.

The crew of the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran that weathered fierce ocean storms during its 8,000 nautical-mile journey, left San Francisco on March 20, stopping along the way at various South Pacific island nations including Kiribati and Samoa.

“This is the hardest part of the journey so far – getting it in!” expedition leader David de Rothschild yelled from the boat as the crew struggled to manoeuvre the tough-to-steer vessel into port outside the Australian National Maritime Museum.

De Rothschild, a descendant of the well-known British banking family, said: “It has been an extraordinary adventure.”

De Rothschild, 31, said the idea for the journey came to him after he read a United Nations report in 2006 that revealed how plastic waste was seriously threatening the world’s oceans, and considered that recycling plastic to build a boat could highlight the problem – and a solution. The Plastiki, named after the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, is fully recyclable and is powered by solar panels and wind turbines.

The boat is almost entirely made up of bottles, which are held together with an organic glue made of sugar cane and cashews, but includes other materials too. The mast, for instance, is a recycled aluminum irrigation pipe.

According to the UN Environment Programme, more than 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are now floating on every square kilometre of the world’s oceans. Around 8m items of marine litter are thought to enter the oceans and seas every day, about 5m (63%) of which are solid waste thrown overboard or lost from ships. 100,000 turtles and marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales and seals, are killed by plastic marine litter every year around the world.

“The journey of the Plastiki is a journey from trash to triumph,” said Jeffrey Bleich, the US ambassador to Australia, who greeted the team after they docked.

During their 128-day journey, the six-member crew lived in a cabin of just 20 feet by 15 feet (6 meters by 4.5 meters), took saltwater showers, and survived on a diet of dehydrated and canned food, supplemented with the occasional vegetable from their small on-board garden.

Along the way, they fought giant ocean swells, 62-knot (70mph) winds, temperatures up to 38C and torn sails. The crew briefly stopped in Queensland last week, after battling a brutal storm off the Australian coast.

Skipper Jo Royle also had the particular challenge of being the only woman on board. “I’m definitely looking forward to a glass of wine and a giggle with my girlfriends,” she said.

Vern Moen, the Plastiki’s filmmaker, missed the birth of his first child though he managed to watch the delivery on a grainy Skype connection. He met his son for the first time after docking in Sydney. “It was very, very surreal to show up on a dock and it’s like, ‘Here’s your kid,” he said.

Although the team had originally hoped to recycle the Plastiki, de Rothschild said they are now thinking of keeping it intact, and using it as a way of enlightening people to the power of recycling.

“There were many times when people looked at us and said: ‘You’re crazy,’” de Rothschild said. “I think it drove us on to say: ‘Anything’s possible.’”

Recycling
Waste
Oceans
Plastic bags
Pollution

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/26/plastiki-recycled-boat-arri…

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]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/plastiki-completes-pacific-ocean-crossing/feed/ 0 NSFW: Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/nsfw-sorry-airbnb-hipsters-i%e2%80%99ll-take-health-and-safety-over-the-cult-of-disruption/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/nsfw-sorry-airbnb-hipsters-i%e2%80%99ll-take-health-and-safety-over-the-cult-of-disruption/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:29:26 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/nsfw-sorry-airbnb-hipsters-i%e2%80%99ll-take-health-and-safety-over-the-cult-of-disruption/ Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley doesn’t need you and your stupid dead trees! And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels! But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these). As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.” Yeah! Except, no. Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living. In the past thirty years I’ve stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. Call me old-fashioned. In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they’re forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves. And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB. Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek’s budget travel blog “Hundreds of New Yorkers, like others nationwide, have been making a few extra dollars by using sites such as AirBnB, Crashpadder, Roomorama, and Craigslist to sublet pullout sofas, living rooms, and whole apartments. But that may end soon. This week, New York state senators vote on a bill that would make it illegal for any homeowner or renter to sublet for less than a month.” And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com “We have received over 300 letters from New Yorkers who depend on renting by the night to make ends meet. As everyone knows, NYC is financially a challenging place to live – especially in a down economy. The consequences of this generalised bill will negatively impact thousands of New Yorkers more than by the small number of illegal hotels’.” Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of “illegal hotels” and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that’s the big story here. Except it’s really not. For a start, there’s an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that “the city is not going to knock on doors,”; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do. And yet, commentators like Masnick and O’Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of “Disruption” – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can’t help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.” They simply can’t contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is “to interrupt or impede progress”, rather than the opposite. Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs. If AirBnB et al are so smart then they’ll figure out a way to thrive in New York’s new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality,  then it’s time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man. CrunchBase Information

AirBnB

Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information

Craigslist

Information provided by CrunchBase

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wX8lnTl7Pro/

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]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/nsfw-sorry-airbnb-hipsters-i%e2%80%99ll-take-health-and-safety-over-the-cult-of-disruption/feed/ 0 Tim is envious of Jean being out in the bush http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/tim-is-envious-of-jean-being-out-in-the-bush/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/tim-is-envious-of-jean-being-out-in-the-bush/#comments Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:56:39 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/tim-is-envious-of-jean-being-out-in-the-bush/
Jean says he’s “somewhere special” at a camp in the Serengeti today.

Wayo Africa

(but we’re going there soon…)

]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/07/tim-is-envious-of-jean-being-out-in-the-bush/feed/ 0 Goodbye Andrew Harris http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/goodbye-andrew-harris/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/goodbye-andrew-harris/#comments Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:32:23 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/goodbye-andrew-harris/

Two weeks ago, our much loved COO Andrew Harris passed away after a long and valiant fight with cancer.

S and I attended his funeral in Austin, Texas. More than 300 people were present and although it was highly emotional (his two daughters and wife all read letters they’d written to Andrew – incredible), I left feeling inspired by a man who lived every day like it was his last and loved life – never taking anything too seriously. He was only 53.

I wanted to make a post here with some of my memories and a short letter to Andrew.


Dear Andrew

I regret never having actually told you how much I respected you as a person and a boss. I put that down to being British, like you.  I’ve learned more than I realised from you over the last 5 years (can’t believe it’s that long) – and those lessons will be valuable to me for the rest of my life. You told me that HomeAway was the kind of company that a person comes across only once in their life; how grateful then am I that I also came across you. Thanks for being generous, patient, understanding, fair, funny, serious, light-hearted, firm and for setting a great example in how to be the kind of leader that people want to follow. I am inspired by you to live every day as if it were my last and to seize every opportunity that I find.

There is an “Andrew Harris”-shaped hole in my life – you will be missed.

Much love

T

And here are some memories of my relationship with Andrew:

I first met Andrew when he came to London for six months to become the interim MD for Holiday-Rentals, taking over from the two founders who were leaving. He was initially taken aback by the office location in Acton (not a great part of town) as he had misunderstood Brian and thought the office was in a much leafier part of West London.

The first couple of weeks were probably the hardest for him – he had to try to deal with the two founders during their tense handover. I remember him being impatient, and meeting with them separately to try to tease out their valuable knowledge. My relationship with him was to try to bring him up to speed on the business, the technology and the general operations. One of my first meetings was a cry for his help as I had much too much on my plate after the handover and needed his help to prioritise. His no-nonsense approach was perfect at that time.

I think at first, he saw the HR opportunity as just one to spend a bit of time in his native England, catching up with his great friends here, and just running the business as an interesting aside. But I’m glad to say that over the next few months the business got under his skin and he became much more focussed on it – eventually returning to the US to become COO at a critical time – and becoming the “backbone” of Homeaway soon after.

In the office in London he was famous for talking to everyone – walking the office and making sure everyone felt included. I think his down-to-earth and practical advice plus his inspirational competitive drive was just what we needed after a period of instability after the acquisition.

Andrew was very generous to me – inviting me over to his house in Austin (and his friends houses too when they were having a party and I was in Austin). He took me water-skiing behind his boat, out to dinner with his wife, and to a Boeing 747 simulator experience when in London.


I always knew that Andrew would support me when I needed his help. and back me up when I was out on a limb. And that he would expect the best from me.

I will remember him for his “grilled fish” – he always was very proud of the grilled fish he used to eat regularly at lunch time – always watching his diet because of his illness. He was especially keen always to say that his wife, Lisa, had prepared it lovingly each morning. I knew from talking to her she got up early every morning to grill it freshly and loved making it for him – to keep him healthy. He was so in love with Lisa and showed it.

Andrew’s fairly unique style of writing one line emails was always a talking point. Emails from Andrew with a single one line question could generate hours of work to respond to them – but you knew you had to reply. He had a clever way of running through his sent items monitoring for emails he’d sent but never got a reply on – and woe betide anyone who failed to. We often found similar one-liners had been dispatched (individually) to several people involved in a particular issue – and it was the differences between the responses that would often lead Andrew to identify the root cause of any problem. He liked to manage by dipping in like this, overruling the hierarchy and getting to the heart of the issue always. In the HR office, we had a competition to see who could get the “shortest” one line email from Andrew. Close contenders were “When?” or “No” but it was eventually won by Adrian Land who got a simple but effective “?”.

The “eye of Sauron” – Andrew had a habit of picking on an area of the business and focussing on it intently for a few weeks – almost ignoring the rest – to the point where he had got to the bottom of the issues, understood it, fixed the problems and could move on. Being “under the eye” as we called it, if your part of the business was being “inspected” was an intense experience, especially for the manager in charge. You could expect Andrew to come to your team meetings, talk to your staff, dig his nose in and tell you all the bad stuff that was happening and demand action. Once you’d been through the experience, things were in better shape,.

“Tim, my boy!” – is how he always greeted me, bellowing loudly, hand outstretched, like I was his long-lost son.

“….sensational” – is his favourite way of saying something was really good – and he said it with such passion and force.

The modification of words with “-ola” at the end – as in “Let’s spend some cash-ola” was a favourite – he is entertaining with his choice of words – and livened up any budget meeting.

Andrew has been a fantastic inspiration to me – I’ve never worked directly for him, but he’s the kind of boss I know I work best for and I am privileged indeed to have spent time working with him and learning from him.

I loved his “boyishness” – he was never too old to drive a fast car fast, always had a spring in his step and a plan for some trouble he was going to cause. He never had all the answers (or pretended to), but was open and honest about the way forward, always knowing there was one. He was sensible on the one hand, competitive and ambitious on the other.

He was the kind of leader you just want to follow. I loved meaning something to him and being respected by him. He made me feel valued.

I loved that he was grumpy, cynical (he said he loved people who were cynical and worried about the negatives – it showed they were passionate, he said), despairing sometimes of the daily grind and of meetings. He was hard to please, but happy when pleased.

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]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/goodbye-andrew-harris/feed/ 0 New shed – finally pictures http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/new-shed-finally-pictures/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/new-shed-finally-pictures/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:30:19 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/new-shed-finally-pictures/

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]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/06/new-shed-finally-pictures/feed/ 1 Boring backups? http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/04/boring-backups/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/04/boring-backups/#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:17:57 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/?p=1105 Backups are one of those things that are dull and boring – until you lose some work and wish you’d treated the topic with more respect…

Since moving from a “one laptop” situation with an external HDD as my “backup solution” to a world where I now have a work laptop (PC), a play laptop (Mac), a girlfriends’ laptop (Mac) and a Media Center box (Linux), all of which contain a subset of the overall superset of valuable files, I figured it was high time to do something more significant about securing that value.

I was all for building my own RAID-array of backup disks, but I was reading up about it and suddenly it dawned on me that a cheaper, more effective and generally less hassle-alternative was to use an online backup service.

There are actually lots of these which have sprung up out of the “cloud computing” movement. The general gist is you sign up with an online service and create an account and then you run a piece of client software on your machine which sends backup data over the internet where it is recorded safely (offsite, securely with guarantees about it’s safety). If you need to restore a file, you can do so via the same client software (running on a different machine if you have a disaster).

Not all the services are created equal and there are a few features I realised would be great – that made my choice a bit more complicated.

I settled on a service called SpiderOak (spideroak.com) because it has the following features:

  • You can backup from multiple (as many as you want) into the same account
    (this is important so I cover the superset of files)~
  • This has the nice benefit that, for once, all the files end up in the same place (the backup server) where there is enough space for them all to live. And what this lets you do is “sync” some of the folders on ALL or some of your machines. eg I have a photo library which goes back seven or eight years. I don’t have room to store the entire archive on any one of my machines, but for convenience I’d love to have all “this year’s” pictures synchronised. So when S takes some photos and puts them on her Mac, I’d love to be able to see them on mine… make sense? So with SpiderOak once you’ve backed up all the related files, you can “Sync” them together in a fairly flexible way and it will do it’s best to keep those unrelated folders on different machines containing the same files – regardless of which machine added them.
  • “Zero-knowledge” – this means that the files are encrypted on each machine and sent to the backup server encrypted. It means the files are “safe” and even the staff at spideroak can’t see the files or names of files in the backup. It’s a nice privacy feature which makes online backup as attractive as having your own.
  • compression: they compress all your files such that the space they actually take up (which is what you get charged for) is a lot less than the space they occupied on their native machines. This makes it cost effective.
  • version maintenance – unlike some of the other solutions, SpiderOak retains every version of every file you backup in the future. Even if you delete a file on one or more machines, it moves it into a deleted files folder where it can be retrieved at any time in the future. This means screw ups or corrupted files are still retrievable from the backup.

So, anyway, I selected this product and bought 200Gb of space. SpiderOak sell space in blocks of 100Gb for $10 per month – but I managed to get my 200Gb for $150 for the full year by paying in advance and using the discount code: “spring” to get a 25% discount. Whether I need 200Gb or not (I suspect I do) remains to be seen.

So let’s say it costs me £100 to backup everything for a full year – that compares favourably to the cost and hassle of setting up a truly redundant, large backup system at home which might require an investment of £500-£600 and a lot of hassle, not to mention the fact that it still wouldn’t be “offsite”.

The first challenge in making this all work with SpiderOak is the “first backup”. My superset of files – including photos, music, movies and documents is > 400Gb and over a poor ADSL connection with an upload speed of maybe 50kb/s at the best of times, this represents a long process – many weeks.

Luckily the SpiderOak client seems pretty resilient and I now have the thing running on all of the machines in the network, slowly dumping their contents into the backup service. It’s going to take a while.

All very usable and clean so far though.

I can’t do much more yet (with the sync feature) until the backups have completed – because you need the folders and files to exist on the server before you can set up a sync. But I’ll keep you posted!

]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/04/boring-backups/feed/ 1 A man’s shed is his castle http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/a-mans-shed-is-his-castle/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/a-mans-shed-is-his-castle/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:44:08 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/?p=1101 While searching for ideas for sheds for our planned garden makeover, I came across http://www.readersheds.co.uk… If you visit, it’s quite an experience.

Unbelievable but check out the “pub shed” (shed of the year 2008) .

Am secretly  desiring a modern shed… we’ll see

]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/a-mans-shed-is-his-castle/feed/ 0 Photo masterclasses now available http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/photo-masterclasses-now-available/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/photo-masterclasses-now-available/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:25:44 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/photo-masterclasses-now-available/

(reminder to self: read these)

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]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/03/photo-masterclasses-now-available/feed/ 0 Practical experience of building a home theatre system http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/practical-experience-of-building-a-home-theatre-system/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/practical-experience-of-building-a-home-theatre-system/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:37:13 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/?p=1089 There is tons of info out there on the web about home cinema/home theatre. A lot of it is badly out of date. And very little of it is organised into practical experience/recommendations. It’s a minefield. And that puts it beyond the interest of a lot of people because it takes a lot of digging to figure it all out. There are so many different options, combinations and configurations.

So, here’s my practical experience of starting from pretty much scratch and building a credible (but not overly expensive) home cinema system out of a mixture of parts I had already and some exciting new components. Be warned: this is not for the feint-hearted…

By the way, I’m not an audiophile. I won’t be entertaining any “gold-plated cables” (especially not the digital variety). I don’t believe that beyond a certain point purity of connections or the number of thousands of pounds you spend on electronic equipment makes enough of a difference to make it worth it. I am taking my system from being a relatively “ok” normal TV system to having some nice features – but I’m realistic about it. It’ll be “good enough”, cost an additional total of about £600 (for now). And a focus on simplicity (for the end product). Getting there might be complex.

First off, my requirements:

* Access to a variety of input sources via an HD-ready TV as simply as possible
* Surround sound capability for all input sources
* One remote to control everything – with simple activity-based commands so you don’t need a degree to figure out how it all works
* Access to the internet and to iPlayer etc for watching internet-available TV sources (less reliance on PVR, more on demand)
* PVR via an existing Humax box
* DVD/Blu Ray via existing players
* Access to photo, movie and music collections stored on my central server and played via the TV/Surround sound.

What I have already:

* Samsung 32″ HD-ready LCD TV
* Humax P9200T PVR
* Sony surround system (old)
* Samsung Blu Ray/DVD
* Pioneer DVD player (multi-region)
* Roku Soundbridge music client
* Central music server on a NAS (mt-daapd)

My plan: (after a lot of digging and choosing)

* Purchase an AV receiver which acts as the “hub” for both sound and video and switches sources for the TV
* Purchase a “HTPC” (Home Theatre PC). Actually a small, lightweight Linux box with a HDMI output which is used to connect to the Internet.
* Configure XBMC (Xbox Media Centre) software such that it can play iPlayer etc via the TV for TV on demand

After lots of research, I selected the Onkyo 507 AV receiver – it has enough HDMI inputs and less of the gimicky/high end features but is great value at about £200. I also selected the Asus Revo Aspire as my HTPC because it is small, quiet and has good reports of being good enough to handle HD quality video sources without jerkiness etc. It can also connect to a large local USB drive which may end up being my central backup and media server (in due course).

I also found the Harmony One Universal Remote – which has been a godsend and really works well to replace the (otherwise) eight remotes which make for a dizzying array of options when just trying to use everything.

I’ll be adding more to this most, as I go:

Setting up the Harmony One Universal Remote:

Actually this was the easiest bit. The Harmony is a great device – a little long winded to set up, but it does what it says it does. I’ve completely replaced the use of about 8 remote controls with a single one and life is much easier!

The best bit is it can automate the “startup” process which is otherwise an exercise in memory (which input source has to be on for this to work?) – and it actually means that the customisation features found on the “more expensive” AV receivers (which I didn’t get) are unnecessary. So, when I press “Watch TV” on the remote, it turns my TV on, moves it to the right input, turns the AV receiver on, puts it on the right input and bingo, the TV works. It takes a few moments to do this all, but it’s much easier than remembering.

Setting up the Onkyo AV SR507 receiver
This was also fairly easy to set up.
The Onkyo is very simple to configure and works well with the Harmony Remote.

The main job when setting things up is simply mapping the various inputs to the appropriate outputs and choosing the optimum formats to make sure the quality is good.

There are a couple of things worth remembering:

  • The 507 doesn’t do any Video processing – which means if you pass an input in (say Component) then you can only receive that at a component output. It won’t upscale to HDMI for example and you can’t pass component in and output it in composite etc.This confused me at first because I had a couple of SCART outputs (from the HUMAX and my old DVD player) which I wanted ideally to route through the Onkyo (because I wanted to use it to switch audio and video in one place) and I thought originally that I could switch them into the HDMI output to the TV. I figured out a better solution for this was to leave the video signals going via SCART and directly into the TV but passing digital audio (via Optical TOSLINK cables) via the Onkyo and then out to the surround sound system. By leaving the volume on the TV permanently down (since there was no option to switch audio off either on the TV or from the two outputs) this worked nicely – and the Harmony Remote made switching to each of the different input/output combinations easy.
  • I couldn’t get the auto-configure surround sound setup to work – partly because my sub-woofer is a passive one and the Onkyo needs a powered one and partly cause my speaker setup is slightly non-standard. Anyway it didn’t matter – the default setup was pretty good and I might look at an alternative sub-woofer in the future.
  • Finally I still have one problem – for some reason the Samsung Blu Ray HDMI output which plays perfectly when it’s put into the Samsung DVI input (via an adaptor) fails to display when it’s passed through the Onkyo… I’m led to believe this is some kind of HDMI handshake issue where either copy-protection mechanism or just the HDMI resolution gets screwed up by the pass through. Onkyo shirks responsibility for this but one of their local dealers was pretty helpful and suggested I try a “DVI Detective” which can be used to “con” a device like the Blu-Ray that some other device is on the other end. It’s £120 so I’m leaving this for a while – let’s see.

Setting up the Asus Aspire Revo and XBMC

This was definitely the toughest part. Linux (which I chose as the OS for the Revo for maximum flexibility and lowest cost and also to experiment with) is not terribly mature when it comes to HDMI, TV resolutions and/or sound.

I had to follow a bunch of guides online but this is the basic gist of what I did:

  • Installed the latest Ubuntu install via a USB key (that bit was very easy)
  • Once you have that the OS up and running, you can follow any one of the great guides out there for installing XBMC install on Linux. Google is your friend. Check any one of them out. This part should be -relatively- easy.
    Then:
    Sort out the remote:
    Improving audio:
    Sort out the resolution with the TV:
  • The remote was a bit of a challenge. I had bought a cheap CyberLink remote for the USB IR receiver and I wanted to use that to receive the Harmony One remote. I had to mess around getting LiRC to work to pass the right set of codes (google searching) for the remote, then map the codes I could then make work map to XBMC using the key mapping file lircmap.xml in .xbmc/userdata/lircmap.xml
  • The next problem, in fact the biggest problem, was the resolution. The resolution the Revo used was fine but there was a lot of overscan on the TV (ie some of the picture was missing off the edges of the TV all the way round – enough to be very annoying). I tried a bunch of stuff – messing about with the EID values in the xdata.conf file etc but nothing worked. In the end, I upgraded the drivers and then used the “Overscan compensation” option which was then available. By default the Nvidia ION drivers with Ubuntu are the 185 version and the latest ones are at 195.
  • Finally i had a problem with the sound on XBMC getting it to work it failed with some of the DVDs I tried to play – saying “incompatible”. More google searching got me out of that one.
]]> http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/practical-experience-of-building-a-home-theatre-system/feed/ 1 Re-syncing Blackberry contacts if they get removed, duplicated or corrupted http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/re-syncing-blackberry-contacts-if-they-get-removed-duplicated-or-corrupted/ http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/re-syncing-blackberry-contacts-if-they-get-removed-duplicated-or-corrupted/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:59:01 +0000 tim http://www.belowbelief.com/2010/02/re-syncing-blackberry-contacts-if-they-get-removed-duplicated-or-corrupted/
I recently did a major cleanup of my contact data – merging my “phone contacts” with their “email counterparts” (which in the past often meant I had two contacts for each person – one with a phone number and one with an email address or several). Plus storing them in one place (my work Exchange server) and syncing them out to places I want to use them – like my Yahoo mail account, my home Mac laptop and my Blackberry phone.

This bit was all quite successful and I dropped from 574 contacts to a more manageable 364 – with no duplicates. I used Yahoo AutoSync and an Excel export of Outlook contacts to achieve this.

At the end though – since I’d basically exported all my contacts, processed them in Excel and then re-imported, my various sources were out of sync with each other. I found the best solution was to make the contacts right in Outlook, then clear the contacts in Yahoo and my Blackberry and force a complete re-sync. This worked fine for Yahoo, but my Blackberry remained resolutely empty of contacts and showed no sign of resyncing.

Maybe it would have done if I’d left it for four hours, but I felt the need to force it more quickly.

Here’s are a few ways you can supposedly do it:

(1) on the Blackberry, go to Contacts > Options -> Desktop -> Wireless Synchronisation. Switch it from “Yes” to “No” and Save. Then go back in and switch it to “Yes” and save.

This did nothing for me. No sign of the contact records being resynced.

(2) on the Blackberry, go to Options > Advanced Options > Enterprise Activation and in the email field press and hold the ALT key and type CNFG. Once you enter this a hidden menu will appear and you need to change “Wireless Sync” to No, now exit this menu and wait 30 seconds and repeat the process but turn sync back to Yes. Once you’ve changed this setting you will see a slow sync will automatically start and it will repair all the wireless sync settings.

This did nothing for me

(3) on the Blackberry, go to Options > Advanced Options > Service book -> Desktop [SYNC]. Click on this and on the menu choose “Delete”. Then immediately, click Menu and then “Undelete”. This puts back the service book you just deleted.

This worked for me. Suddenly the Enterprise Activation process started running. Actually it got to 90% and got stuck on the Contacts – saying “Initalizing”. I left it for several hours and it was still stuck so I braved a “battery pull” and reboot and then it started Activating again. This time it worked nicely and an hour or so later it said “Activation complete” and bingo all my contacts were back.

Hope this helps someone!

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