Interior design and home theaters

eirikso3 Comments
Mastiff Home Theatre

I remember a comment in a forum at a point where the talented Mr. Mastiff posted some pictures from his impressive home theatre. He had a question about some technical issues and the first answer was something like:

“You should not concentrate on the tecnical problems. You should have a serious talk with your interior designer.”

I would agree on that comment, but interior design is something very personal and something that many of us have quite a bit of possibilities controlling. And we do. And the brilliant Mastiff, owner of the home theatre in question here likes it. So, he don’t need to talk with an interior designer.

I follow huge amounts of home theatre blogs and forums. It is a strong tradition to post pictures and specs of home theatres on the net. That’s a very nice tradition and helps people solve problems, get inspiration and comment on the work that has been done. And, if you look past the technical issues, these pictures can be quite interesting cultural studies as well.

Living Room Computer

I used a picture from our own living room in a previous post. One of the comments was:

“Wait, your LIVING room? How in the world did sneak a conference table and chairs into your living room without getting thrown out of the house!”

Fantastic. And I can understand that comment as well. Still, urban Scandinavian interior design is something quite different from American interior design or rural Scandinavian interior design. And, fortunately your own home is something that you can control quite well. Mastiff likes coulour and pinewood. I like black, white and clean surfaces. Now have fun looking at some Norwegian Home Theatres: AVForum min hjemmekino. Never mind the strange norwegian language. It’s the pictures you’re after.

Interior design and home theaters

Presenting software

eirikso4 Comments

I just got a question about presenting software and how to explain certain features without using these hated bullet points.

Let’s take an example. I am going to present four of the features in the video editing software Sony Vegas Video. Worst case scenario is this slide:

WorstCase

This one is slightly better and works fine as an executive summary that you can hand out after the presentation:

Better

And another one, also good as an executive summary:

Still better

But, in the presentation you are going to tell people that this software has “Unlimited amount of video tracks”, “Simple integrated video trimmer” etc.

So you make four slides. One for each point:

FourSlides

If its possible to walk up to the picture and point at it you can also do this on one slide.

Presenting software

How to avoid making boring presentations

eirikso20 Comments

I have been doing a lot of presentations lately. So, inspired by the classic Steve Jobs and Bill Gates comparison, and after reading these comments over at Presentation Zen:

If someone emailed you both presentations, you’d probably be more likely to make out Bill Gates’ message.

How would you scape from bullet points and charts if you are presenting a technical subject?

I’ll have to throw in my little presentation guide as well. Hell, I’ll even give you an example. I am going to show you the presentation I use to tell students about pixels, colour schemes, dynamic range and a complete explanation of run length encoding of pictures.

Without one single bullet point.

The typical bullet point hell version of one of the slides would be like this:

Bullshitpoints

Nicely done with a horrible default gradient background and an ugly font.

The first quote from the comments is answered by my presentation rule number one:

If someone that did not attend to my presentation can understand anything if I mail them my slides I have made a really bad set of slides. Really bad.

Why the heck would I bother spending money on a ticket to London and do a presentation if I could just mail the people my presentation and they would get the same? Ladies and gentlemen: slides are an illustration to what you are saying.

…but what about the people that did not attend? If they are important you’ll have to do another presentation or you’ll have to produce a document that people are supposed to read. A set of slides is not a document that people are supposed to read.

I’ll show this with my example.
Continue reading “How to avoid making boring presentations” →

How to avoid making boring presentations

Give the kids something to remix

eirikso1 Comment

Another reason to think twice about DRM on all content.
The BBC has an interesting article based on research from The Pew American and Internet Life Project.

Mainstream media is already responding to adults who want to have more power over their multimedia content, enjoying it when they want to, where they want to.

But traditional media companies needed to rethink their relationship with this powerful emerging audience, said Mr Rainie.

“These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship,” he said.

Via The Future of Music, Media & Entertainment

Give the kids something to remix

Priceless comparison: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates presenting

eirikso8 Comments
JobsGates2

Presentation Zen has done a comparison of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates doing presentations. With a special focus on Bill Gates’ last presentation about Windows Live.

The fact that Mr. Gates has totally horrible slides is interesting enough. He should know better. His advisors should know better. The fact that his only interesting competitor is one of this planet’s best speakers and has some of the best slides out there as well makes the comparison simply hilarious.

All I can say is:
– I hate bullet points
– I really hate bullet points
– Bullet points, I can’t stand them

Finally. Now I know why Microsoft PowerPoint is such an insanely crappy product.

Priceless comparison: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates presenting

An interesting survey from John Battelle

eirikso8 Comments
Living Room Computer

Or simply obvious?
A while ago John Battelle asked the readers of his Searchblog to fill in a survey. 270 of his readers did. How should we interpret the results?

The readers of John Battelle’s Searchblog are among the most intense users of the internet, new technologies and gadgets out there. Sometimes they are simply geeks that do stuff that will never be mainstream. However, among John Battelle’s 270 answering readers there should be enough sane, normal, intelligent, socially skilled people to make the results interesting.

I work within the television industry and in general I think the industry don’t see how the internet will eat huge amounts of the time people currently spend on TV. Several surveys says that the net is not currently stealing a significant amount of time from traditional media. I am not saying that the internet doesn’t steal time from traditional media. I am saying that some current surveys says it steals less than someone thought at some point. That seems to relax quite a bit of people working with main stream media. I think that will change.

Broadband was the first factor to accellerate this slightly. The next step will be computers that are available in the living room and are always on. Not media centers. Regular computers. They will be there in addition to the media centers. Add modern mobile phones with 3G networks and the traditional TV have some serious competition.

Of John Battelle’s readers 60% use the internet more than 25 hours a week. 82% spend “more” or “much more” time on Internet/digital content compared with print, TV, etc.

I know that I am a geek that can’t be used to predict the future, but am I alone when I am saying that there are very few television shows that in 30 minutes can give me more fun than some good web browsing?

And what’s that picure in this post? Well, it’s two of the three computers that’s running 24/7 in our living room. Yes, I told you. I can’t be used to predict the future.

PS. And yes, the printer will vanish into a cabinet and the door in front of the computers can be closed…

An interesting survey from John Battelle

Fighting spam in WordPress

eirikso1 Comment

A quick update on the situation
I have been using BotCheck to fight comment spam on this site. After a while I realized that BotCheck also killed all trackbacks. So, I deactivated BotCheck and installed “Bad Behavior”.

Still, after a while some spam got through. To prevent that I installed SpamKarma 2. After I installed SpamKarma I have had absolutely no spam, and one single case of a trackback that was stopped unintentionally.

So – basically I am happy as can be. Bad Behaviour + Spam Karma 2 = No Spam

Fighting spam in WordPress

Eirikso at the ITAvisen podcast

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In today’s issue of the podcast that the norwegian website ITAvisen publish every friday they have interviewed the Admin of this website, Eirik Solheim himself.

I am talking about blogging, media centers, open and closed video codecs and the Online Spotlight service from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

Unfortunately ITAvisen is entirely published in a closed codec called Norwegian. Including the podcast. That’s bad. Wasting the advertisers money on something that only four million stinking rich privileged people there up north can utilize! (Stupid joke alert)

For the people lucky enough to master this rare language head over to ITAvisen and listen carefully.

Eirikso at the ITAvisen podcast