Posted by marshall
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:03:00 GMT
So the projector was ceiling mounted, fulfilling a dream of many years. Yet all was not rosy in the land of Home Theater. I was a bit nervous about the stability of the hushbox. I was very nervous about something bumping the projector and having to adjust the aim again. I had big black wires running across the ceiling to a power strip barely balanced on top of the vertical blinds. All in all, it was ugly and precarious. Not quite the beautiful system I had envisioned.
There were further problems. I soon came to the disheartening realization that my retro-reflective high-power screen is designed to reflect light back in the same direction as the source. This is great when the projector is right next to your head (deafening you with fan noise just before your skin melts from the heat from the bulb), but not so great when the projector is suspended high overhead: the picture is rather dim when one sits on the floor or even the couch.
To top it off, one of the fans in the hushbox wasn't working. This caused the projector to overheat and shut itself off on New Year's Eve (thankfully after the main event). Now, this is probably some minor electrical thing that a do-it-yourself type could easily fix. I am not such a type. Well, perhaps I am with software, but electrical hardware remains a mystery to me. So this minor electrical straw basically killed my home theater camel. After all, who wants to watch a movie with the constant fear of the projector overheating and burning up right before it falls on your head?
Slowly, painfully, the understanding came that I had just poured a lot of time and money into a dream that would remain elusive. I would need to fix the fan. I would need a new screen that would reflect differently. I would need longer cables. I would need to re-mount everything when we moved to Idaho. I would need to replace the bulb in another 1,000 hours. All for a projector that wasn't even capable of fully displaying HD video.
The costs of front projection were starting to outweigh the benefits. I began to consider an option I had hoped I wouldn't be considering for a long time: replacing the projector. (Cue dramatic music.)
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Posted in Pictures, Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:25:00 GMT
Around the middle of this past December, our projector bulb hit 1,000 hours. Projectors (and, by association, rear-projection TVs) have a bulb in them that has a life expectancy of a certain number of hours; in the case of the LT150, the magic number is 1,000. At that point, the bulb needs to be replaced. Bulbs that are run past their life expectancy have a tendency to explode, which can cause serious injury and/or death to the projector.
As I began to read about replacing the bulb, I came across some forum posts by Serious Home Theater Buffs (TM) about modifications to the LT150 to improve the picture. One of the biggest ones was disassembling the projector and painting over the clear segment of the color wheel, which required a bit more comfort with the concept of ripping apart a finely-tuned electronic device than I could muster. There was another modification, though, that did not require such drastic measures: placing a Hoya FL-D color filter in front of the projector. I further learned that Whisperflow, a well-known hushbox maker, could build such a filter into a hushbox design. I decided that I would do a projector tune-up: new bulb, hushbox with color filter, and -- finally -- ceiling mount.
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Posted in Pictures, Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Sun, 08 Jan 2006 13:16:00 GMT
If I were the type to make New Year's Resolutions, I might make one to update this blog more frequently over the course of the next year. But despite my best attempts to revive this thing every now and then, it seems to languish for months at a time with no posts. Ah well. I recommend an RSS news reader (Firefox, Safari, SharpReader, NetNewsWire) if you'd like your computer to do the work of checking this blog for you.
Lara and I spent Thanksgiving in San Francisco with my brother Adam and his wife Britany. Good times. We ate at a restaurant on the pier called Butterfly, which served us a quite nice Thanksgiving dinner. The Sony Metreon was playing Chicken Little in Digital 3D, so we went to go see that. Nice, but not the completely stunning experience I was expecting given the technology. Adam & Britany headed out of the city before Lara and I did; we spent a couple more days walking around and seeing the sights. San Francisco's such a great city: the international flair, the bush man, the ability to get just about anywhere by walking, the ocean, the bay, the nearby forests and mountains...it's a neat place to be.
Adam and Britany got an iSight as an early Christmas present from other family members, so now 5 out of the 7 households in our combined family (Lara's parents/siblings and mine) can do video chats. Multi-way video chats in iChat are very cool:
Lara's mom and my sister Ingrid are the only hold-outs now...both under the heavy influence of friends/family who only know Windows and still cling to antiquated notions of the superiority of Windows over the horrible, unstable, limited old Mac OS. Understandable if one's never spent any significant time with OS X, but sad nonetheless. Ingrid just had to get her system reformatted because of some malware that couldn't be removed by Spybot or Ad-Aware or other scanners; I don't think she realizes that these problems are not universal to all computers.
It was a fairly quiet Christmas this year; we didn't do any traveling, so we were pretty much by ourselves. We opened presents in the morning, and spent a fairly lazy day at home before going over to my friend Jon's apartment to play Compatibility with him and his fiancée. Fun times.
For New Year's Eve we invited some friends over to play games, eat snacks, and watch the ball drop on the big screen. We don't have cable, so we were using the EyeTV with an antenna. Unfortunately, we're pretty far from the TV transmitters near L.A., so the picture was kind of going in and out. At least we saw the Big Moment clearly.
That's about it for the major events. 2006 should be an interesting year, what with MAF's move to Boise, Apple's move to Intel, and our move to a vegan lifestyle. Just kidding about that last one. With Carl's Jr. now serving hand-dipped chocolate malts, there's no escape for me now.
Posted in News, Pictures
Posted by marshall
Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:47:00 GMT
Ah, Redlands, where you can see what you breathe. The smog generated by thousands and thousands of square miles of running automobiles comes in and settles here, frequently hiding the nearby mountains in summertime. It does cause some quite lovely sunsets, though:
The sunsets in Idaho are supposed to be brilliant, too, despite the lack of smog. All the benefits with none of the drawbacks? Almost sounds too good to be true.
Posted in Pictures
Posted by marshall
Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:59:00 GMT
I finally got around to buying a copy of NoiseWare the other day. I've been meaning to get some kind of photograph noise reducing software for a while, and the new phone gave me the final push. As with most consumer digital cameras, the camera in the 6682 doesn't fare too well in low-light conditions, and even has some graininess in well-lit scenes. NoiseWare is amazing at reducing the noise while preserving the detail. It's not perfect -- there's only so much it can do with what you give it -- but it certainly helps.
Click on the picture below to see a before/after comparison:
I really should have bought it earlier; it also works very well on photos I took with my Treo. Combine it with a bit of black/white level adjustment and slight unsharp mask, and some surprising detail can emerge.
NoiseWare's certainly not the only product on the market that does this; I also tried Noise Ninja, and I've heard good things about Neat Image as well. I liked Noise Ninja's method of selecting parts of the image you knew to be noise. But from what I read and from the free trials I used, NoiseWare seemed to provide the best results. I got the Photoshop plug-in version; there's also a standalone one for those without Photoshop. All three of the products mentioned have versions for both Mac OS X and Windows.
Posted in Pictures, Computing
Posted by marshall
Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:51:00 GMT
Looks like the order went through after all. Apparently it was submitted to the warehouse Thursday afternoon when I ordered it, processed on Friday, submitted to FedEx on Saturday, and actually shipped on Sunday, arriving yesterday afternoon. Strangely, FedEx left no door tag; if I hadn't been tracking it on-line, I wouldn't have known they had attempted to deliver it.
The box included the Nokia 6682 itself, a new SIM card (already installed in the phone), a 64 MB MMCmobile card pre-loaded with some extra software like Opera and QuickOffice, a power adapter, a USB cable for connecting it to a computer, and several manuals. The USB cable was surprising -- that's been an extra cost on most of the phones I've owned (the Treo being the only exception, but Palm devices have historically included cables for synchronizing).
So far I'm liking it. I stayed up way too late installing a Nintendo emulator, an SSH client, a Bust-a-Move style game called Frozen Bubble, and several other applications. The Nintendo emulator was all that I hoped it would be: I can finally jump in Double Dragon, and several games that didn't work on the Treo (including Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Excitebike) work perfectly well on the 6682.
The camera is certainly the nicest I've had so far in a phone. While it's still quite grainy for indoor shots, pictures outside come out fairly well. Here's a photo of the intersection by the Redlands Carl's Jr (slightly color-tweaked and sharpened in Photoshop):
I'm most of the way back now to the Bluetooth functionality I had on my Sony Ericsson T610. The T610 would inform my Mac of incoming calls and text messages, complete with looking up the Caller ID in my address book, and I could forward calls to voicemail or respond to text messages using the computer. The computer could also detect when the T610 came in range and do things when I left the computer and/or came back, it could pause iTunes when I was on the phone, and I could select people from my computer's Address Book and click "Dial" to dial them on the cell phone. The Treo could do none of these. The 6682 can do almost all: about the only thing it's missing is that it doesn't notify me of incoming text messages and let me reply. I can send outgoing text messages from the computer, I just don't receive them.
There are, however, some phone-computer things that the 6682 can do that neither the Treo nor the T610 could. After synchronizing the phone with the computer, I found that my phone contacts included the pictures I'd set up in the Mac Address Book, so now I have photo Caller ID without having to do anything special. The contacts include both work and home addresses, as well as the Notes field. The Treo could only sync one address and didn't sync the notes or the photo. I also get the album art of the currently playing track in iTunes on the phone with Salling Clicker, which may have worked on the Treo, but Salling Clicker was so limited and unstable on it that I never really used it.
The best part about the synchronization, though, is that I didn't have to install any software to do it. I just clicked "Set up new device" in the Mac OS X Bluetooth preferences and followed the prompts, and now iSync has a 6682 icon in it (looks just like it, too). No abandoned Palm software, no quirky Missing Sync, just out-of-the-box pain-free integration. Technology is so wonderful when it works.
Update: I should clarify that the whole photos and notes sync thing with the Treo is a limitation of the Mac sync software, not the device itself. Given decent software, the Treo could have synchronized those. I'm told that Outlook for Windows, for example, synchronizes both of these fields. So that complaint is more directed at Palm's virtually nonexistant support for OS X.
Posted in Pictures, Smartphones
Posted by marshall
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:46:00 GMT
I finally got around to sorting through the rest of the pictures, and have put up another 50:
The photos.
Posted in Indonesia, Pictures
Posted by marshall
Tue, 03 May 2005 09:22:00 GMT
Well, we've sorted through some of the photos taken here, and we've posted a gallery of over 50 of them.
The photos.
More to come!
Posted in Indonesia, Pictures
Posted by lara
Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:55:00 GMT
More pictures will have to come later, but we had a great time yesterday celebrating the wedding of our friend Reza. It was really neat to see some of the wedding traditions here. I am looking forward to looking through pictures with Reza and his wife so that they can explain to us better what was going on. But here's what I got out of it:
We started out at the groom's house. His family fed us breakfast as everyone gathered together. They had gifts for the bride's family that they were putting together to give to them as a sort of bride price. The groom was dressed in an Indonesian outfit.
From there we went to the mosque. They found some chairs for us and some others outside the mosque so that we could see what was going on. We didn't understand much, but it was interesting to watch. They all took off their shoes and sat on the floor for the ceremony, with the men on one side and the women on the other. There wasn't any music except for some chanted prayers. One of our Muslim friends borrowed our camera and brought it inside, so hopefully we got some good pictures and can get a better view from the pictures on our camera. :-)
Then after the mosque, we went to the reception at the bride's family's house. The bride and groom changed into traditional Acehnese outfits. A group of men ate in one room (including the village leaders), a group of the women ate in another, and then the rest of the people all ate outside. Since I don't speak Indonesian, I ate in the men's eating room with the rest of the PACTEC guys. It felt somewhat odd for me to be the only woman in that circle, but they didn't seem to mind. Everyone sat on the floor, and they had SO MUCH food spread out all through the middle of the floor, with all of the people sitting around it. The bride and groom sat at the head of the "table" in the men's room. The walls of the house were covered in fabric, and they had created what looked like almost a throne for the bride and groom. It was quite impressive-looking.
So all in all, we felt very honored that Reza and his wife would invite us to their wedding, and we had a great time.
Posted in Indonesia, Pictures
Posted by marshall
Thu, 14 Apr 2005 08:33:00 GMT
For this week's Acehnese-version-of-American-food experience, we got hamburgers from a local stand. Tom and I each got the "special". This has many of the ingredients one would expect: a beef patty (or some kind of meat, at least), cheese, lettuce, and tomato. It also had a few ingredients one doesn't normally find at the local American burger shop: sliced cucumber, Acehnese hot sauce, and a fried egg.
That's Tom eagerly devouring his very own spicy egg burger. As with KFC, Tom and I found the local twist to be quite palatable. We also tried one of the more exotic (to our minds) drinks here: avocado juice. This is a blend of avocado, Milo, Nescafé, and milk. It actually tastes a lot like a chocolate-banana milkshake. It was recommended by David (one of our guards), as it's his favorite drink:
Oddly enough, out of the juices I've had here, it's probably the only one I'd order again.
Posted in Indonesia, Pictures
