Photo masterclasses now available
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010Great photo articles: http://www.bbcwildlifemagazine.com/masterclasses.asp
(reminder to self: read these)
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Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Practical experience of building a home theatre system
Monday, February 15th, 2010There 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 A lot of it is badly out of date.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)
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XBMC installOnce 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.
Re-syncing Blackberry contacts if they get removed, duplicated or corrupted
Monday, February 8th, 2010I 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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HomeAway.com launches Superbowl campaign
Sunday, February 7th, 2010Today’s the day. HomeAway.com launches it’s advertising campaign bring back the National Lampoon Vacation stars – the Griswolds – in a superbowl advert and further webisodes showing that hotels are not all they’re cracked up to be.
Check out the advert here: http://vacation.homeaway.com
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The great HDMI swindle
Saturday, February 6th, 2010The world has gone mad! Be careful: go into any electrical retailer in the UK and try and buy a HDMI cable. You’ll likely get suckered into the great HDMI swindle. It seems a giant cartel is in place – ensuring that no such shop can sell these cables with anything less than a 1000% markup. HDTV manufacturers are all in cahoots over this one – and as the price of the TV and DVD players fall, it seems they are attempting to recover their profit levels by drastically over pricing the connecting cables. Also notice that when you buy a HDTV, it usually doesn’t come with such a cable.
In Curry’s Hammersmith, the cheapest HDMI cable is £39.95. And the ones which are “better quality” (including gold plating), according to the helpful sales staff, can be had for £79.95.
Now, as any electrical engineer can tell you, HDMI is a digital cable. Digital cables transmit 1s and 0s using a low signal voltage. Provided the cable is actually an electrical conductor, there is absolutely no way that gold plating can make any difference to the “quality” of the received image. Even in the old days, with analogue signals which suffered more from interference and arguably could perhaps be improved by a low resistance conductor, the difference was detectible only by committed audiophiles.
You’ll be glad to know I gave the Curry’s sales assistant a snotty lesson in cable conductors for digital cables and then went online and bought one for £2.95.
Think for yourself and don’t get suckered.
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Map of the USA
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Texas view of the world?
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Life hacking
Friday, January 1st, 2010Here, “hacking” means finding a better (perhaps cooler, perhaps non-obvious) way to do something, and I’m a big fan.
(terminology of hacking explained here)
Sites like lifehacker.com are focussed mainly on the software side of “life hacking” but others, like ikeahacker.blogspot.com focus on the physical – in unusual uses of Ikea products.
My favourite ideas are based on “re-purposing” – the exploitation of loop holes in retailers’ or manufacturers’ products or marketing efforts to obtain working and useful products for a specific purpose at far less than the usual cost.
Usually the modification process is a fun project in it’s own right and often there are communities of willing volunteers on line helping out with ideas to make them work better or test different options.
The best example so far is my dell mini 9 – a 300 GBP fully functioning Apple Mac mini computer at a very low cost and very portable.
Other examples are a free sample pack of different filter papers, supplied by a company which caters to the film industry and supplies those filters in huge size. It just so happens that the free sample pack are cut to just the right size to fit over a regular sized flash-gun on an SLR camera and come in a handy booklet so you can select the best one for colouring your flash.
IkeaHacker shows innovative uses of Ikea projects to solve unintended problems or even do something crazy – for example this pimped chair with underseat heating…
Or try these fun photography hacks to take better pictures.
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