February 2006
The Archives
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02.25.06How to control your amplifier from the MCE IR-blasterI just upgraded my home entertainment system with a Pioneer VSX-915 amplifier. Meaning that I now connect my Home Theatre PC to the amp digitally through SPDIF. To control the volume properly I have to use the volume on the amplifier and not adjust the volume out of my Media Center. The easiest solution is of course to use the remote of the amp, but I don't want to use two remotes. I only want one remote in my living room and that is the MCE remote. If you have a relatively new MCE remote you can easily program it to control ...
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02.19.06Time stopped at 10:09The rich and sunny planet Ursa Minor Beta has the quite peculiar property that most of its surface consists of subtropic coastline. Even more peculiar, on this world it's always Saturday afternoon. From Wikipedia - Places in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Thanks, Oyvind) And of course you would want to live on a planet where time stopped Saturday afternoon! I have just visited Switzerland. The home of high quality watches. And the home of huge amounts of commercials for the high quality watches. I decided to check a little fact that most people involved in marketing know of. The world of watch ...
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02.09.06Webcam screensaver for your media centerWebcams are soooo last century. I remember how uttrly impressed we were when we back in 1995 discovered that a bunch of programmers at the University of Cambridge had placed a camera pointing at their coffee maker so they could keep an eye on the amount of coffee left while sitting in front of their computers one floor above. Wow! We could actually see a live picture of the coffee machine at the University of Cambridge here in Norway. Big deal at that point. Not very interesting today. Like most webcams. But, for some strange kind of reason it's cool to have ...
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02.03.06The silence of the fansI have my HTPC and the amplifiers inside a cabinet in the living room. The cabinet is well wentilated and has a specially mounted fan in the bottom to push air though it. I have described the cabinet here and the mounting of the fan here. To put it short the fan is mounted in rubber bands to eliminate vibrations and noise. However, I should have said "was mounted". The problem is that rubber bands need maintenance. Of course I could try to find better quality rubber bands, but I have choosen another soultion. It works fine so far, so ...
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02.02.06My next time lapse experiment – any good advice?This experiment was a manual, "poor mans" time-lapse. Time to do something more advanced. Time for a true time-lapse. I now have a Canon PowerShot S50 that I can play with. I can mount it in a window and connect it to a computer. Through such a set-up I can program the camera to snap a picture every hour for one whole year. I also have a couple of potential locations with a more interesting view than my own. (More than 100 000 people have seen the view from my living room anyway! My last experiment was popular way beyond expectations...) A ...