Philip

On my last trip to Hawaii I picked up a Pantone Huey Pro as colour calibration has always been a bit of a sticking point with me and the laptop’s not so great LCD screen (which I rarely use nowadays). You can calibrate by eye but it’s probably better to just let a real calibrator do the job for you.

Anyhow, the Huey Pro is a small USB device with stand that plugs in and handles calibration of the monitor as well as dynamic light adjustment which supposedly keeps things fairly consistent across different lighting situations. The calibration is quite straight forward, you simply put the Huey to the middle of the screen and let it display various colours once the monitor is warmed up, it measures and generates a profile to fix any aberrant colour issues.

After calibrating my Dell monitor went from a nasty bright yellow tint to a deeper, richer blue which is what I’m used to seeing now. The best thing is to save your old profile, then switch from the calibrated one to the previous one as a test after a few days of getting used to the new profile to see how bad the old profile was for you.

The Huey Pro software runs under Mac OS X and Windows, however for GNU/Linux users you can get Argyll here which works with the Huey Pro for calibrating under GNU/Linux or Mac OS X. From what I can see you can use the Huey Pro software for simple, fast calibration, or the Argyll software for more in depth (and longer) tests.

Anyhow, worth looking into if you want to make sure those photos and video look pretty close to what you hope they do in real life, unfortunately doesn’t calibrate printers or scanners so you’ll need to get more expensive hardware and software to really get everything calibrated, but for me it’s good enough for the moment.

Recently I dropped by Jaycar and picked up one of their new items, the MS6115 Power Meter. I’ve been wanting a power meter for ages in Australia like the US 120V Watts Up! or Kill A Watt to measure power consumption by standby devices and also see how power efficient devices are.

Image taken from Jaycar

The specs for the Power Meter:

Max Power Load: 10A, 2500W
Voltage Measurement: 210-301V AC +/- 3%
Amperage Measurement: 0.02-10A +/- 3% (+/- 0.03A)
Watt Power Range: 0-3010W +/- 4% (+/- 10W)

The function button switches between Volts, Amps, Watts, Max Watts, KW/h and Cost so you can see what a device is currently consuming and how unplugging devices affects the power consumption. For example, I plugged it into my TV/VCR power board that was on standby to discover my PSTwo power supply consumes 10w of power doing absolutely nothing, not even plugged into the PSTwo! Going into the settings you can set the price per KW/h for two different times (typically on/off peak) and includes a clock and day switch to get most cases (except for the very complex Synergy on/off peak + shoulder times), so I simply plugged in the standard rate of 13.94c/KW/h from Synergy.

So, after that it’s time to check out what’s drawing what. Of particular interest is the new consoles like the PlayStation 3, which consumed 9w on standby and about 165w powered on which seems a bit high from what other people are saying on the Internet, so maybe it’s just the Aus version with a different power supply. My laptop got 7w standby and 14w powered on (with the large LCD getting 50w and 2w on standby) so it seems fairly accurate even though it can have +/- 10w.

Anyhow, it’s a neat tool to see what devices are really costing you and is cheap at $40 from Jaycar here, there’s probably a few still in stores in Perth if you’re after one.

Ars Technica gives a good report that EMI is having a boon of downloads of DRM free music now that they’ve gone DRM free, with sales of albums up 272% with associated EMI artists getting a moderate increase in sales as well. Apple apparently is putting the pressure on Universal and Warner using EMI as the example.

Read about it here.

JVC announced a new 1.27″ D-ILA chip for use in projectors with a staggering 4096×2400 pixels and 20,000:1 contrast ratio. This means there’s more reasons for cinemas to shift to digital if the cost of these things are low enough to make the switch worthwhile.

Read about it from Engadget here.

I posted about this earlier, looks like the Novint Falcon has been released for general sale now. It’s a 3D controller with haptic feedback, so you move a ball grip in 3D over a range of 4″ cube and get force feedback according to what is supposed to be on screen. It’s good news for 3D developers like the SpaceNavigator, these things used to cost a fortune.

You can order and find out more here.

Blockbuster decided to favour to hold Blu-Ray in 1,450 stores in hopes to resolve the high definition format war and from consumers consistently choosing over 70% of the time to get the Blu-Ray version of the movie over HD-DVD. Blockbuster will still rent HD-DVD from 250 original locations and online, but looks like it’s probably on the way out. Other reports show that cancellations of HD-DVD player purchases have suddenly shot up from this news.

Read about it here.

A post on Destructoid suggests that using an old PS1 (yes, the first version) gives better audio output than high end CD players when just playing audio CD’s and it’s now worth $6000 US in parts in comparable technology today. I’d say most audio experience is subjective rather than objective, companies love to take advantage of this to sell horrendously expensive equipment like cable linkups.

Read about it here.

I came across this a while ago but worth bringing up again to remind people that some devices are out there that get around the brain-damaged HDCP (and cracked, apparently) protocol to stop you using your perfectly good display (like my Dell 24″) with your HDCP outputting devices (like my PS3). HDFury is a device that plugs directly into your display VGA or BNC input and accepts a DVI + HDCP signal and converts it to a good quality VGA output. (I’d prefer HDMI -> DVI/VGA myself, admittedly - VGA has some visual artifacts depending on cable quality and length).

Read about it here. They have a pretty similar view to myself, which is basically we’re being inconvenienced at the multimedia industry’s convenience. Basically since HD content is now able to be copied perfectly, HDCP is basically useless. Even if that wasn’t the case, it doesn’t take some intelligent person to do an LCD panel signal copier from a working display system to snarf an uncompressed stream, or worst case, display it on a projector, record the resulting signal. I doubt they’d (ie, prominent Asia-Pacific media pirates that USA seems completely uninterested in stamping out it seems) be bothered with that now that they have the tools and media in hand to make perfect copies of HD discs.

I mentioned earlier about this, but it looks like it’s going ahead that India’s getting the first air powered cars. One of the models known as the CityCat can hit almost 110 km/hour and travel just over 200 km on a single tank of 340 litres of air at 4350 psi for about $2. The car itself is due to cost $12,700. Refueling takes a few minutes however the car can refuel using a power outlet to run a built-in compressor in about 4 hours.

Read about it here from Popular Mechanics.

I’m all up for a small air car in Australia or air-powered motorcycle/scooter if possible, so it’ll be interesting to see where this will head. MDI apparently will bring its technology to 12 other countries including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

A while ago I was hunting around for a cheap battery recharger to consider handling my AA battery consumption for various electrical devices hanging around the house and switching to NiMH rechargeable AA’s. While perusing a sale at the local Mac shop I came across the Rezap Battery Doctor which apparently handles your standard NiMH or NiCd batteries, but interestingly it also recharges those disposable Alkaline [Titanium] AA’s up to 25 times - these generally blow up/leak if recharged in anything else. After plunking down a $2 coin for a brand new Rezap (yes, that was the sale price… RRP is $80 AUD) I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a go.

Essentially Rezap can handle 4x AAAA to D and 1x 9V batteries via the 4 charging points which are handled individually. Charging takes a few hours to many hours depending on battery condition. I’ve been using it with some old batteries that were lying around and they were able to bring them back to 1.3 - 1.4 V, adequate for what I require. Apparently, getting them at about 0.9 V before they’re completely dead helps a lot, similar to the rechargeable batteries - you can’t let them over discharge. Recently I’ve been using Duracell Ultra’s, however I think the newer power output and handling isn’t as good as the standard Duracell or Titanium batteries, so I’ll probably switch to more mainstream ones since they were causing issues and tend not to charge to maximum capacity in the Rezap as compared to standard Alkalines. Even they recommend using standard (even OEM type) Alkalines, but I’ll try and get milage from my existing AA’s first.

Anyhow, have a look for yourself at the Rezap website here, I’m all in for Aussie inventions that keep things out of landfills! Definitely made my money back already, but even worth it if you use a lot of batteries, you can get them for $30 or less on eBay if you’re keen.