Affordable Blu-Ray Home Cinema System

On December 30, 2009 in Development, New Technology, Tutorials.
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You may have read that I recently installed a complete new system in my family house lounge? Well here is the kit I used:

  • Samsung 46″ 5 Series LCD (Comet – £599)
  • SkyHD+ box (Sky – £30)
  • PS3 Slimline 120GB (Asda – £180)
  • HDMI 10.2Gbps Monster Cable x2 (Amazon – £100)
  • Logitech Z5500 5.1 THX (Amazon – £298)

    • This setup falls in at £1207, with a budget of £1250 leaving a little room for extra remotes (for example the PS3 remote / Keyboard) and optical cables.

    It seems expensive until you consider what you get for the money: The Samsung 5 series has been reduced from £999 to £599 in the Christmas sale in Comet, and for that you get a HD ready TV with a huge screen, beautiful looks and built in Free view. It also has plenty of functionality and tons of additional features, not to mention the superb picture quality. The speakers have been reduced from £500 to £298, and trust me when I say that they pack a powerful punch! I have had the older Z5400 setup in my room for a number of years and they are more than adequate to wake up the neighbours!

    Now to my main point: A 5.1 blu-ray home cinema system will set you back at least £500 for a decent setup, which will only allow one input (if that) and will be used for one and only function. Using a PS3 and Z5500′s (for a total of £480/£500) you will get a top of the range Bluray player, as well as all the additional functionality that a PS3 brings (BBC iPlayer, Internet Browser, Gaming, Internet access etc) as well as having a brilliantly powerful 5.1 system which can take up to 6 inputs (including your TV, Sky box, PS3, PC, Laptop and room for one more too!).

    The cables make this system what it is, and are expensive. But when your spending this sort of money on a Home Cinema System it’s worth the extra few pounds to get the best cables around! You’ll be surprised at the difference it makes!

    More to come soon!

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    Movement to High Definition!

    On December 30, 2009 in Development, New Technology.
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    I’ve often slated SkyHD about how it’s not ‘true’ high definition. However, with the approach of the new year this seems like a good time to make amends. More to the point, Sky have offered a free SkyHD+ box, with 50% off the installation fee (I should think so too – I routed the additional wires from the LNB dish to the box itself with the Sky+ box last year!!).

    Anyway, I’ve had a PS3 connected to a Samsung 5 Series for a while now, but to be honest I was never particularly impressed. The HD seemed a little grainy in places, but I put it down to the TV. However, I’ve recently brought a full new setup for my lounge (including new LED TV, 5.1 speakers and PS3 for Blu-ray). Along with it I brought a 10.2Gbps HDMI monster cable. After an afternoon setting it all up, I must say that the resulting pictures are amazing. It does go to show that a signal is only as strong as its weakest cable. The HD picture from the PS3 is amazing! I’ve already ordered another monster cable (8.4Gbps) for my setup.

    I can’t wait to get the SkyHD box in place so I can connect some more monster cables to it and see if it really is as brilliant as it’s acclaimed! Check back soon for more, or read my post about the best, and most affordable blu-ray home cinema system here!

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    Stopping IE6 Optimization

    On December 24, 2009 in Development, Website Design.
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    For those of you in the know, you will understand the burden which is IE6. It’s far less efficient, and awkward to boot, at designing websites to look both good and work well. Amongst the problems are;

    Images can’t be wider than 800px
    Images can’t be .PNG
    Padding is calculated differently

    IE in general is a nuisance; things in Firefox just work! I’m currently designing a new menu for a website i’m working on, using :hover in the CSS and some onmouseover JavaScript. In Firefox everything works perfectly. However in IE (even the latest 8.0b) the onmouseover flickers. Getting around this requires extensive work – which wouldn’t be required if the browser worked like Firefox!

    I realise this is a bit of a rant, but it has hit me time and time again – designing websites and previewing in Firefox, occasionally checking in IE7+ and then realising i’m going to have to re-work the site in order to make it IE6 compatible!

    Merry Christmas!

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    New Website now in testing

    On December 19, 2009 in Development, General, Internet, Website Design.
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    So the new site is finally up and running. It’s already been optimized for IE and Firefox, but the menu is still causing problems on certain browser versions.

    Please fill in the poll, it only takes two clicks and will help me loads! Feel free to comment too if you have time! I can add you to the Blogroll in return if you wish?

    Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

    Thanks guys, and a merry Christmas.

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    If it’s not broke

    On December 15, 2009 in General.
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    As some of you may have been aware, the site has been down for a few days now! – My fault for messing around with stuff.

    The term “If it’s not broke… Don’t fix it” comes to mind.

    Anyway, I’m back now with a much improved site, ready to start blogging all over again.

    Note: I lost all my previous blogs in the ‘firesale’ and only have printed versions. I will get round to re-publishing them at some point, Pinky promise!

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    Automatic Photo Uploads!

    On December 11, 2009 in Development, Internet, New Technology.
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    I was watching ‘The Gadget Show’ last night, and a particular gadget took my eye. It’s the Eye-Fi. A wireless SD card which automatically uploads any photos on it to either a PC or the internet (such as TweetPic or Flickr).

    It’s a great idea – with one minor issue: Naughty photos (such as drunk office snaps) would be automatically uploaded when you return home after a night on the smash! The Gadget Show team brought this up. Could the software be altered so that it adds a simple interface to cameras, allowing you to select the photos you want to upload. It’s a balance between efficiency and safety.

    Running with this idea of Wi-Fi enabled SD cards, could an idea be implemented so that they automatically download data? Could this be run alongside version admin software and possibly user access control to give up-to-date files and data from an FTP or server?

    It’s a great idea, and I think it will do well. With some good ideas behind the concept it could be the next step in mobile data storage!

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    Google Wave and Twitter Marketing!

    On December 8, 2009 in Internet, marketing, Website Design.
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    I recently read the blog ‘Is Twitter The Main Force Behind The Wave?‘, which was wrote by Alex Sleat (a personal friend of mine) and discussed the use of Twitter to not only market Google Wave but also spread invites. In response, here are my thoughts on the first three points raised in his article, the fourth being an entirely different kettle of fish.

    Should software or web apps be put under this much strain this early on in development?Although I think that pressure can add to and excel success, I do feel that in this instance Google have jumped in too early. They seem to have had a lot of negative feedback, which I would mainly associate to the way which Google discussed the concept as a revolution in Internet Messaging, yet in practise hasn’t worked out quite as expected. Twitter had a major part to play in this, with various trending topics hitting the top 10 shortly after its release.

    It is good that the general public are becoming more aware and involved in beta testing, or should it be left to tech-heads?

    Yes and No. Obviously it’s important for the general public to test out new software, as they often pick out different flaws or approach things in different ways to IT Professionals. However, I think it should be a confined and controlled test group of maybe 150-200? Leave the hardcore testing to the ‘Tech-Heads’, as they are the one’s who will find the deeper lying problems with BETA versions, which may require big fixes in some circumstances, in contrast to the usually smaller issues (GUI, glitches etc) which general users find.

    Where would Google Wave be at without Twitter?Probably somewhere close to where Google Mail was back in 2004. Google has utilized (knowingly or otherwise) Twitter to pass around invites between parties. Without this (and other Social networking sites) there would surely be less people on Wave, consequently less general users testing out the software (as discussed in point 2). On the other hand, Social networking sites may have a bit of a negative impact on Wave, as more and more invites can be pushed out to a wider audience, consequently allowing more people to comment on the good (and more importantly bad) features.

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    Google XML-Sitemap ‘www.’ Prefix error!

    On December 3, 2009 in Internet, Tutorials, Website Design.
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    I have had the ‘Google XML-Sitemap’ plug-in for WordPress installed for a time now, and everything was working perfectly.

    However, after the plug-in was updated some time last week it started showing errors in Google’s Webmaster Tools. The error was the following.

    “Paths don’t match we’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don’t use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm).”

    To fix this is simple, but I had to search around quite a lot to get the fix. All you have to do is go to the General tab under Settings in WordPress and add the ‘www.’ prefix to both the WordPress address AND the Blog address, then rebuild and submit the sitemap.

    If you are still getting errors (which I did) check that any additional URL’s mentioned in the XML-Sitemap tab of Settings have the ‘www.’ prefix, as mine reset automatically.

    As I said; Simple! But it took quite a lot of re-building and re-submitting to find the answer!

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    Google Developments!

    On December 2, 2009 in Development, Internet, Website Design.
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    Google have recently announced some new features, demonstrating again its dominance over the World Wide Web!

    Google’s latest feature is the integration of ‘real-time result’s (RTR’s) including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace updates to be shown for relevant search results. Although the feature is currently limited to a minority of key words it will be built upon to produce more and more results in this fashion. It’s a brilliant idea, gathering such vast amounts of information in one place. Although Google haven’t released financial details, Facebook have announced they are making no profit from the setup.

    Google Goggles (it’s a mouth full) is Google’s next development – Using images instead of keywords to produce search queries, consequently returning both visual and text based results (including, perhaps, RTR’s). This must use some similar code to the similar image feature (another amazing feature from Google) although it must also feed to a variety of databases in order to analyze and search indexed pages using said image.

    Google still dominates the Internet search market, boasting a global share of about 70 per cent share globally. The company reported revenues of £3.66 billion for the quarter that ended on September 30 this year. The majority of the revenue came from Search Advertising. Google may be seen to have competition in local times from Wolfram Alpha and Bing, but its ever-evolving search techniques and developments just show that it really is the world leader in Web Development.

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    The best game on the iPhone

    On December 1, 2009 in #60SecondShout, iPhone.
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    The best game on the iPhone I think is ‘Orbital’.

    It’s a brick-breaker styled game, shooting from the bottom of the screen like in bejewelled. The graphics are great, not to mention the simplistic yet addictive game play which makes for a unique experience.

    It’s all about shooting circles and watching them grow as you blast other circles at them, consequently blowing them up! Each circle that explodes is a point. My highest score is (currently) 34 although I’m intending on improving it this Friday on the train down to London.

    You can try it out at http://www.orbital-game.com/ but for £0.59 you can play it for hours on the iPhone, and it looks and feels even more amazing!

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