Spotted this superbly impressive 3D-TV commercial from Samsung – definitely pushing the boundaries. It takes a little while into the commercial to try and determine what’s the actual building and what’s the projected image – very nicely done. [via Cherryflava]
A few weeks ago I bought a new TV. A nice shiny, new Sony Bravia 40″ EX400 series digital LCD TV. It’s a nice step up from our 28″ Philips CRT TV that we’ve had for almost eight years now.
It’s a great TV and I’m glad we made the choice. It’s a full HD digital TV with a great picture and flexible set of features. It has a digital and analogue tuner built in, multiple analogue and digital inputs as well as a USB port for watching DivX encoded movies directly off of a USB stick (I bought a 16GB memory stick just for that purpose).
But I digress – the actual reason for this post is related to the digital tuner. When I first plugged in the new TV and went through the setup process, part of which is auto-tuning, it picked up 12 over-the-air digital channels as well as the 5 terrestrial analogue channels.
I know there’s been a lot of media reports about digital TV coming to South Africa and it being a requirement for broadcasting the 2010 FIFA World Cup (which by the way got off to a cracking start, even though it’s difficult to work with vuvuzelas blaring in the city all day and night long) but I was always under the impression that you needed a set-top box to decode the over-the-air (not satellite) digital channels. So when I did the initial setup of the TV I wasn’t surprised that none of the digital channels the digital tuner in the TV picked up were not displaying, since I didn’t have a decoder.
However, this morning I happened to switch to the digital channels accidentally and they were being broadcast and displayed on my TV. The following channels are being broadcast and unscrambled by my TV’s digital tuner:
Yes, I know, for those who have satellite/cable TV this is nothing exciting – but for those of us, like me, that don’t think paying the premium price you have to pay to get satellite TV is worth it, without having full choice of which channels you want to watch – I think it’s great! Yes, we’ve got loads of movies on DVD but it’s now nice to have a little bit more choice in our TV viewing, and we’re not (for now) paying anything above our usual annual TV licensing fees.
I’m hoping this is not a once-off (testing) thing or at the very least it’s accessible to us through-out the broadcasting of the World Cup, and of course first-prize, available to us in future.
Are there any other South Africans out there that have seen this with their own digital TVs?
How cool is this printer? I so want one. [via Onelargeprawn]
A little less than a year ago I bought a new Dell Vostro laptop. It’s a nice light-weight, yet powerful little laptop that has done me well until now. Actually, to be honest, it’s still doing me well, it’s just the hard drive that’s been giving me problems.
I’ve had intermittent crashing since last year November. So much so that I got fed-up and rebuilt the machine from scratch. Re-installing the OS all my apps and restoring my backed-up data.
Then, about six weeks ago, it started happening again. Fed up with the constant and intermittent crashing (not limited to any particular application) I gave up again – backing up my data but I didn’t do a re-install. Instead, I called Dell.
When I bought the laptop I included an extended warranty (next business day) for a little extra. Now, I know, I don’t normally do the extended warranty thing with appliances as it’s usually over-priced and most of the time not worth it. This time, however, it paid off for itself.
Firstly, Dell call center staff actually are not only helpful but friendly too – something a lot of call centers around the world can learn from. All they needed to look up my details was my laptop service tag number. With that they could tell me what my warranty period was, when it expires and asked me how they could help. I explained that I had been having intermittent crashing and IO read/write failures.
They then asked me if I had any diagnostic error codes – I said I didn’t note down the actual error codes from the blue screens but they all pointed to IO failures. He then asked me if I had the laptop with me and I said no that it was at home. He then proceeded to explain to me that if I power the laptop off and then hold down the function (Fn) key while pressing the power button it would boot up into a built-in Dell Diagnostics mode. Wow, I was impressed, I’d learnt something new about my laptop (apparently this is built-in into all Dell machines).
So when I got home I ran the diagnostics tool (which looks very similar to a BIOS screen) and it let me know that there were indeed errors with the hard drive. I noted the error codes down and continued with the rest of the diagnostics. It even continues into a windows-like interface with nice options where you can either run a quick, full, or specific diagnostic test. It also has a symptom-tree function where you pick from a list of symptoms (like blue-screens, hanging, etc) and it shows you the various tests that can be performed. Let me tell you, it’s exhaustive. I ran all the tests and all of them passed, except for some of the read/write tests on the hard drive.
Obviously, now, the problem actually was the hard-drive. I called them up the next morning, following-up from my previous call and they verified that the drive would need to be replaced. Since this was a Friday and we would be going away for a long weekend I asked if the drive could be delivered to me at my office the following Wednesday (my first day back). They said not a problem, all I had to do was call the business day prior to when I wanted it delivered (before 4pm) and they would ensure next-business day delivery.
Monday morning I gave them a call again to confirm my delivery address and contact number. I was warned however that due to the volcanic ash from the Icelandic volcano that the delivery might be delayed if they did not have enough stock on hand. I understood. Before ending the call the agent asked me if I needed assistance removing the drive, re-installing the new one as well as whether or not I had the operating system to re-install. Oh, they also asked if I needed any data recovered/backed up on the drive once it was delivered to Dell. Is that service, or what? I said that it wasn’t a problem I could remove the drive, re-install the new one and re-install the OS by myself.
When I got home on Tuesday I made sure I had backed up all the files I needed and began shredding various sensitive and personal files before completely uninstalling everything down to just the OS and then removing the drive from the laptop, inserting it into my portable drive enclosure and using my work laptop to format the drive as well as removing the partitions, re-creating a new single partition and formatting it. Yes, I know it’s overkill but I wanted to try and make it as difficult as possible for any data to be recovered from the drive (there shouldn’t be a reason for it).
To my utter amazement, a little less than 20 minutes after I walked into the office at 8:30am on Wednesday morning (today) the courier brought me my new hard drive, sealed (not with a kiss, but with anti-static wrapping in a padded box). I removed my drive from the laptop (I had re-inserted it the night before again after cleaning it) and gave it to the courier, took my new drive from the anti-static enclosure and he left with the faulty drive. I installed the new drive – ran all the diagnostics and all the tests passed – clean as a whistle. I was a happy man – now all I needed was to re-install the OS, my applications and restore my data.
By the way, Windows Easy Transfer (for moving your entire windows profile, application settings, personal files, etc) works like a charm. Less than 12 hours later, I’m fully up and running again.
Dell Customer Service gets an A+ from me – well done!
As you may know, we’re fans of board games and we were recently introduced to the Settlers of Catan board game as well as playing Catan online and having written a review.
I’ve just come across this excellent piece on CNET’s Crave gadget and technology blog.
With OLED technology fast becoming the norm in new Television sets, board-game makers, like Settlers of Catan could very well be looking into using this technology to add “reality” to their game. Many people play games online (computer, console and hand-held) as opposed to normal “static” board-games because of the graphics and interactivity. But with OLED technology and projection the two could very well be merged.
Have a quick read of the CNET article as well as checking out the video demonstration below. I’m sure right now it could be quite expensive but it could very well be a viable option for many not too long from now.
At first glance, the cardboard tiles in the video look like typical white hexagons out of Settlers of Catan. But with the help of an overhead camera and projector, each piece becomes a mini-computer capable of displaying animated video images and even triggering events in adjacent tiles, such as queuing soldiers to attack.
In the video, you can also see what happens when players manipulate the tiles in various ways. When one part of the tile is lifted off the table’s flat surface, troops are offloaded onto shore by “pouring” them. Rotating the tiles can change the perspective on the animated building, tree, or person being displayed.
Isn’t that just awesome?
As you should know by now, I favour Google’s Chrome browser and today (finally), Google have released their latest stable build of the Chrome browser, 4.0.249.78. And as you can see from the screen shot above (if you’ve not already used their beta releases of v4 already) extensions and bookmark syncing are now available.
After my previous problems with the latest beta builds and instability on my laptop I was hesitant to stick to the beta builds and opted to wait for the stable version to be released.
Now, finally, I too can enjoy the benefits of over 1500 extensions and bookmark syncing.
Below is a list of the extensions I’ve just installed and tried out (you can click on any of the images below to go to the relevant extension download page):
Since I use Google Reader to keep up with all my various news/RSS feeds the first extension I’ve installed is the Google Reader one. It downloads and installs in, literally, seconds. If you’re already logged into Google the icon will already show you how many unread items there are. Clicking on the icon shows you unread items at a glance which you can click on the title to read the article or open Google Reader in a new tab.
Next on my list of wanted extensions is the 1-click Weather extension provided by Weather.com which gives you a toolbar icon showing the current temperature in your city and clicking on the icon will give you a detailed weather map as well as a mini forecast. If you’re using Windows Vista/7 you’ve probably already, like me, got the Windows Weather widget on your desktop but this is always using Chrome.
Like many other people, I too have and use my Gmail account, especially when sending emails when away from my own laptop and when sending interesting posts to friends. With this extension I can quickly keep a tab of any new emails arriving and the unread email count in my Gmail account right from my browser toolbar.
If you have a Google Wave, Google Voice account as well as Gmail and use Google Reader you can always opt to use the One Number extension which uses a single toolbar icon to monitor all your Google accounts together.
Even though I read most of what I’m interested in via Google Reader, I occasionally search for something through Google or click through to view the full post on the website, since it may be limited in the feed article. I’m so used to where ads appear and how they appear that they don’t really bother me, but others may enjoy the AdBlock extension (works similarly to Mozilla Firefox’s ad blocker – and it’s customizable too).
Update: for developers and designers out there – I’ve just seen the following post recommending 15 must have Google Chrome extensions.
These are just a few extensions that I’ve showcased here like I said there are over 1500 extensions to choose from. Go and have a browse, try them out, if you find an interesting one and it works well, let me know in the comments. Happy surfing!
PS: Remember you can manage your installed extensions (and their respective options) by selecting Extensions from the Tools menu or type in chrome://extensions/ in the address bar.
How cool is this little gadget? Now you too can print your very own toast. Just a pity it’s only a design concept – I’d so get one if it was a real product!
It’s a concept by Othmar Muehlebach, and it won second place at a design contest in Switzerland last month. [via Crave]
Last week I ranted on about Google’s Chrome browser hanging my laptop and after non-use of Chrome the problem went away. Well, it seems that I had spoken too soon. The very next day my laptop hung again, and I had not used Chrome since before I wrote the blog post.
So, frustrated with the hanging, I did a little more digging and found out that there was a known problem with one of Microsoft’s Windows updates, MS09-065 (969947), which caused hanging of the OS (with mouse movement still working) for users with Nvidia and ATI video cards. Now, I know, it’s an XP problem but the update applies to Vista as well so I thought it might be exhibiting the same problems with Vista so I removed that update as well as the Nvidia driver update and re-applied the Nvidia driver update again.
It was a short-lived experience, as the problem returned.
So, I gave in and restored my laptop back to it’s clean, factory-install version of Vista and began rebuilding it again. Many, many long hours later and about 1.7GB of various windows updates later, it seems I have a usable laptop once again.
And yes, this post is being written and posted using Google Chrome, again my browser of choice!
For a long time now, actually since the very first release of Google Chrome, I’ve been an ambassador for how cool a browser it is and that it’s been my browser of choice ever since they released it. That is up until today when I realised Google Chrome has been the culprit of my Vista OS hanging (note, no BSOD). At first I thought it might have been a Windows Update or one of my other applications, however it always happened while I had Google Chrome also open.
Now, for over a year now I’ve never had any bad experiences with using Google Chrome (either with Windows XP or with Windows Vista). For the last couple of days I’ve explicity NOT used Google Chrome and lo and behold, I no longer have to hard reboot my laptop anymore. And it seems I’m not alone – nor is it a recent occurance as others have had similar problems.
I guess I’ll have to monitor the news and forums feeds for a resolution before I used Google Chrome again – I sure am going to miss it until then!
It’s interesting that all of the innovations in this clip from Time Magazine’s Top 50 Innovations of 2009 are all geared towards a greener planet. How many of them do you recognize? Of those in the video, I only remember hearing about the Energy Meter.
You can read more about them here on Time’s website or click here for the actual list. [via CherryFlava]
