Month: August 2005

The Champagne Blog up and running

eirikso2 Comments

Bernt and Bjarne has started a very important blog. The Champagne Blog. It will be interesting to see what they will bring. You can already learn how to sabre a bottle of sparkling beverage, and it will be interesting to follow their experiment on how to turn cheap white wine into a sparkling beauty. 🙂

If you want to try to sabre a bottle of champagne, it might be smart to start out with something that’s not too expensive. However, we don’t want to drink bad champagne, so it has to be a good one. I can recommend Tarlant Brut Zero. An excellent budget champagne. If you happen to live in Norway the product number at the Norwegian Vinmonopolet is 4673801. And the price is a ridiculous NOK 215,-

Still, if you want to do your training on something even cheaper, try the Cremant de Bourgogne Brut Millésimé from Les Caves des Hautes Côtes. The closest you can get to champagne without actually drinking the real thing. Product number 731401, NOK 136,-

The Champagne Blog up and running

Why your camera phone will outperform your compact camera – bigtime!

eirikso6 Comments

The companies making mobile phones know it. They have a huge advantage over all other gadget vendors. The mobile phone has become the device that you really can’t do without. If you forget your iPod while heading off for work it’s not that serious. If you forget your digital camera, you’ll not return unless you really, really need it that day. It is the phone that makes you turn around and travel all the way back home to get it. So, they have a very valuable place in your pocket.

The only reasons for not having all your gadgets in the same device are:
1. Size
2. Price
3. Quality
4. Usability

There is absolutely nothing that indicates that it should be impossible to make a device that has a reasonable price, good usability, perfect size and includes the functionallity of my phone, MP3-player and digital camera in the near future. However, there is another huge difference between my Sony Digital Camera and the one in my Nokia Phone.

The operating system
The camera in my Nokia is a camera with an operating system. Basically that gives endless possibilities to system developers and third parties making additions and extra functionallity. Marking my pictures with data from my bluetooth GPS. Giving my camera advanced direct blogging functionallity. Supporting new image formats. Analyzing and recognizing patterns in the picture. Combining the camera with the networking functionallity of UMTS, GPRS and bluetooth.

All of this is impossible in my Sony Cybershot DSC-P150. I need to buy a new camera to give it new functionallity.

The same goes for my MP3-player. The stupid dependence on firmware from Creative is an example. With an open API in my MP3-player someone would have fixed that before Creative could put down their first meeting in the group that makes firmware.

So, even if you don’t want all your gadgets in the same device, gadgets without an operating system are sooo last century…

Why your camera phone will outperform your compact camera – bigtime!

Did you know..

eirikso2 Comments

….that the flowers on the cucumber plant smells wonderful?

Now you know. There will definitely never be any cucumbers on our balcony, but at least we have had the pleasure of some flowers with a very nice fragrance.

And you have also learnt that it is impossible to know what to expect on eirikso.com

Is that a good thing? Will I loose my regular readers if I start to write about stuff that is not about home media technologies?

I guess you’ll speak up if you hate posts like this?

Did you know..

Biggest Flop of 2005: The Media Center PC

eirikso6 Comments

Jon Bøhmer just pointed me to this. I can’t let that one go without a comment. But, I’ll make it a short one.

1. Yes, I totally agree that the ugly, noisy, unstable and $1000 PC will not be a success in everyone’s living room

2. But this one can turn into a classic:

“…the vast majority of Americans will never — I will repeat that — never think of the PC as an entertainment device. The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation. End of story.”

The media center is not about a noisy $1000 PC in your living room. It’s about an architecture that lets you access your media in a user friendly and convenient way. It’s about the fact that young people can not think of music, video and pictures that is stored anywhere else than on a computer or on a network. It’s about a platform that accepts content and services from flexible feeds and different content creators. It’s about the fact that the computer eventually will be more user friendly and convenient than loads of different boxes, cables, remotes and user manuals.

“The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation.”

That is if you have a time machine that can drag you back to the ninties and let you stay there.

Biggest Flop of 2005: The Media Center PC

A coincidence or are the people over at Engadget a bunch of cheap copycats?

eirikso3 Comments

Edit: For the people not reading comments, the brilliant Peter Rojas of Engadget just assured that this is a 100% coincidence. And I believe him. Case closed.

Edit2:
And now the writer of the guide over at Engadget, Barb Dybwad has contacted me as well. No doubt about the fact that we worked on these articles in parallel.

Keep up the good work over at Engadget. A coincidence does not make you copycats. But those pictures where a bit blurry, wheren’t they? 🙂

I posted this how-to on my blog on August 14th. I was quite satisfied with the guide so I sent a message to Engadget notifying them about my post in case they wanted to link to it.

No answer from Engadget, but two days later this article shows up. Dangerously close to mine, but with bad pictures… Maybe a pure coincidence. I shure hope so, taking suggestions from users and just copy them without even mentioning where the original could be found seems too unprofessional for one of my favourite web sites.

A coincidence or are the people over at Engadget a bunch of cheap copycats?

Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London

eirikso2 Comments

I am going to speak at the Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London at the 29th of September. It will be an interesting conference. My presentation starts at 1050:

The mobile phone as a remote, television set and production tool
Eirik Solheim, Programme Manger of
Interactive Television, NRK, Norway
• NRK’s experience in distribution to mobiles
• Using the mobile phone as an interactive remote for enhanced TV
• The mobile in the production chain for both professional and user generated content

If you plan to be there, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?

eiriksoLeave a comment

A while ago, I read about The Global Consciousness Project over at RedNova News. Being a quite sceptical engeneer I usually don’t find experiments like these very interesting, but this one tickled my brain…

From RedNova:

“One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers – a one and a zero – in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts – ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ as it were – could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros – which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine’s usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, ‘forcing it’ to produce unequal numbers of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.”

Read the story at RedNova and think about it. If you find it even remotely interesting then start experimenting with the idea that the data from random number generators could actually say something about global events when analyzed properly.

If the nodes are simple random number generators then you could easily turn your computer into a node. Someone should make a project like Seti out of this. A software that you could download to your computer and turn it into a node for this project. You would have millions of computers generating data to the project. It would be possible to add location to the data and see if changes are greater near the events that will make a change in the flow of numbers.

I also immediately start thinking about another wild project that I have suggested here before:
Everything you would ever want to see

Even for a sceptical engeneer it is important to sometimes let go of physics and what I base on current knowledge. If not for anything else, for creativity alone…

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?