technology – Page 29 – frans goes blog

Data-cables ready

Ok, last night was a long one, but thanks to Miska from JettVision, who did good work late at night and tested that all rooms of my house now have a functional Internet connection. Yes, I now, I could have achieved this much easier with Wi-Fi, and that is what I’ll be mostly using, but our house was internally Ethernet cable-ready, so it would have been shame not to make use of this. Now, lets see when we can plug in our fridge to the connectors in kitchen, and see what groceries we need to bring home from the supermarket today…

Media room project, part 2

Media room project, part 2
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I have now the projection wall and the rotating ‘tech tower’ mostly set up, but the sturdy table beneath it was not deep enough for my old CRT display. Well, it was time for a new editing screen in any case. My choice was Samsung SyncMaster 226BW — a piano black 22″ widescreen beauty boasting 2ms response time, 3000:1 dynamic contrast range and some clever new finetuning technologies. I must say my old photos suddenly gained new life. (The only downside is that my old media workstation is even more sub-standard now than it was before this…)

Cable connection work available

There are various “rough edges” in our house still, and I am currently testing the power of social media in getting help in fixing them. If you are a professional in the hardware aspect of home IT cable connections, check out my ad in Urakkamestari service.

Media room project, part 1

It would of course be nice to be able to dedicate weekends just for resting, but since there are always various deadlines that require an academic to work also during weekends, you might as well dedicate all mornings and late evenings to house repair or building projects — logical, isn’t it?

I have been spending some hours lately downstairs doing my “media cave”. This is essentially just a small home theatre room, located at cellar level, but it should offer us rich opportunities for enjoying that DVD or HD movie in the dark, or playing games in the big screen. Looking some high resolution digital photos in this scale would be nice to try out, too.

The starting point was to build a tech centre at the back of the room; this is still half-finished, but I aim for a sturdy table fixed to the back wall, and on top of that there will the ‘equipment tower’: a rotating cabin filled with amplifiers, media players, computers and game decks. It is build for rotation and to such a height since I am too fed up to plugging and unplugging cables that lie among piles of dust somewhere at the back of some heavy piece of furniture. This time, every connection is planned to be accessible at the comfortable, working height. And since I am building it on top of large, round bearing, it rotates easily to show all those connectors and cables (the bearing is one I got from Isku’s “Multiplan” tv furniture, it claims to be able to handle max 100 kg mass). Near the ceiling there is the new video projector, Sanyo PLV-Z5; a nice, moderately priced thing with sharp and colourful image. (I wanted mine in black, and ordered it from Germany where prices are a bit lower.)

The actual projection surface has taken most of work so far: the front wall was uneven fibreglass wallpaper which needed to be whet, dusted and then covered with another, special wallpaper (a smoothing wallpaper, ‘tasoitustapetti’, made by Sandudd; see the link: http://www.sandudd.fi/fileadmin/kuvituskuvat/Tasoitetapettiohje.pdf).

Now I am having a break after one round of painting. The entire back wall will be painted several times with Tikkurila’s Harmony indoor paint, hue H499. It has non-reflective matta surface and as light grey it will give better dark levels on LCD projectors than an entirely white wall would had done. More on its use: http://www.tikkurila.fi/kotimaalarit/index.jsp?cid=valkokangas_edullise&hid=01.01.06.01.
There are still several steps remaining on this, and there are half-a-dozen rooms (and the garden, the courtyard and the garage) with several other projects waiting after this, but — you need to start with the essentials, after all! 😉

Home electronics for sale

Carrying loads and loads from the old home to the new, I decided it is time to get rid of some of this stuff. Much of the furniture went to local second hand/recycling shop. Some things I simply gave away. But there are couple of nice home electronics items, so I decided to make them my first Huuto.net objects: a big (=huge) 32 inch Sony Trinitron flat-tube television set, and a Sony midi stereo series. If interested, take a look at these links: Sony TV, Sony stereo set.

Wii news channel serves the living room

Today, starting up my Wii, I noticed a system update available and voilá: the Wii News Channel has arrived! Mixing news and entertainment is an age-old, and often critiqued trend, but now Wii succeeds in displaying news attached to a virtual globe (which is a step towards contextually aware news systems in home environments), and makes “news as a slide-show” function something that I might actually sometimes keep on the background, to be informed by a nice selection of global, regional and science/tech/entertainment related pickings. But the information sources in this system might be a bit narrow, still? More here: PlayWii – Nintendo News

The perfect knife?

The perfect knife?
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Laura gave me a gift: a very nice Japanese cook’s knife (“MAC JU-65″ among friends, a 6,5” Nakiri vegetable knife). The quality of steel and touch of handle feels very good (I am not a professional, though). Blade is traditionally ornamented and so sharp you don’t actually need to use force while slicing vegetables: you just let the blade rest on top of a tomato or cucumber, and enjoy seeing how the knife silently goes down by its own weight, and almost cuts on its own. Wow. I shall be slicing veggies every day from now on. (I suspect this was Laura’s original plan, too 😉

Geotagging for the future

As sites like Wikipedia inform us, geotagging is the process of adding geographical or location information into media, such as digital images or videos (or basically any entity: it is wide field). While we are currently looking into linking various games related tools and processes with the social media initiatives in our pervasive gaming research (read: within IPerG), I am also interested in the simplest possible way of making location tagging available for large audiences. While there are also developments of building GPS into digital cameras, and software tools for automatic location tagging with GSM cell data (in cameraphones), I still think that the approach of Flickr Maps is probably going to be most popular by short range, at least. It is so easy to drag your photo into certain location in the world map, and also browse photos with the same intuitive map interface. Example: link to few images I have mapped in my Flickr Map. (I think you need to zoom out a bit in order to actually see any of them, though.)

Wii and Fon – a no-go?

As I have written earlier, I have joined the Foneros, the growing network of Wi-Fi (WLAN) users who are sharing their connections through Fon.com routers. And I also enjoy playing with my Wii. Bleak was the moment thus, when I realised that these two marvellous examples of the advances of wireless Internet and social services are incompatible. Yes: since a Fon router does not allow any network traffic before login/authentication, and as Wii does not register any Internet connection which it cannot use for direct access into its test server, it appears to be impossible to be both a Fonero and use it for Wii’s Internet connection. How sad. Or does anyone know of any workaround solutions out there?

The House Project

If I have been a bit quiet lately, much of it is caused by The House Project: we are finally moving on in our plans (dating back few years already) of buying a house. Now we have signed a contract on a nice one (detached house, in three floors, in Tampere city region), but this is where the real work just starts. During the last couple of weeks I have been learning more about house construction and building material details, about heating systems and insulation, about air ducts and floors than I thought would ever be necessary for me. Then there is the negotiations with banks and bureaucrats, insurance companies and real estate salesmen. At some point in the shady near future is waiting the actual change of residence, and meanwhile, reading and sketching wildly, there are the decisions related to home design, home electronics and data traffic design, home security design, garden design. Well, ok: maybe the garden design part can still wait a bit. But we now have the preliminary garden design outline created already, nevertheless. And I also already have some pretty detailed ideas about the cellar-level home theatre room that will house most of my computers, game consoles and other AV tech. (No chance I would get those into the living room, I was told. But underground is optimum in any case: soundproofing and concealing the daylight is much easier to achieve underground.) More later.