Jacken's Blog

So I finally decided to go with the Proac Response 2.5 clone speakers. The original speaker costs $4400, but a very good copy or the original is possible to build for around $1000. It uses high quality Scan Speak speaker elements, and I bought them today. My friend Micke is also building a pair at the same time. So now I have four speakers standing in my livingroom. Everything is covered in MDF dust. Thankfully I have a very understanding wife.

So far we have put together the side and top walls. Today we glued the Bituben dampening material to all the walls (except the front baffle) I still feel faint and feel a stinging sensation in my fingers. Next time, gas masks. Anyway, we are moving along in a good pace. Hopefully we will have a pair of working speakers finished this weekend. The plan is to first finish the speakers, but not glue the back end so we can make adjustments to the stuffing and filtering. I also want to try different lengths of the bass reflex tube. Coming along nicely. But I’m still worried about doing the veneering.

Here’s a quick picture of my finished Cyburg Needles speakers. First time I do any wood crafting, and they sound great! Next up, a pair of Jordan Transmission Line speakers.

In my quest to make a nice sounding bedroom stereo for a small budget, I bought a Sonic Impact T-Amp. To really make the most of it, you need to modify it to get more bass. Naturally I had a bit of a misshap when I slipped with my soldering iron and destroyed one of the surface mounted condensors on the board. Trying to find a component that small was impossible.

Instead I ordered a kit from 41hz.com called Amp5. I spent like three nights soldering it together. Because I managed to destroy the T-Amp, I was very cautious, measuring every component. I also checked off all the mounted components in the component list. When I did the initial test, I had a bit of a problem that turned out to be a cold solder. There is two torroids of copper that needed a lot of heat, but I got that sorted. I did a quick mockup to test the system, and got two minutes of great sound out of it before leaving for work. But when I put it into a chassie, one of the speaker terminals got short circuited so there was a big flash and bang. after that, one of the channels was dead silent. So I sulked all weekend, and Ylva came up with a lot of jokes of me not getting close to anything with a soldering iron.

Today I decided to at least finish the chassie and solder new speaker connectors that isn’t as easily shorted. And to my big suprise, the amplifier worked! Amazing! And the sound quality is great. I must say I like the sound of T-class amplifiers. Puts my old (very expensive) preamp and amplifier to shame.

So the Amp5 kit can take quite the abuse. I now have a great sounding stereo in my bedroom. Success…

This looks promising. For some reason Apple forgot one of the reasons iPod got successful. The ability to play a commonly used format, mp3. They crippled the Apple TV so that it only plays h264 encoded videos. But now the hacking community are fixing this. And it’s not the first time. I used to have an Xbox with Xbox Media Center that really did everything you need to play DivX and other formats. You needed a hacked Xbox to be able to run XBMC, and it was developed by a group of hackers around the world.

Now look at the mess you get with Xbox 360. You need a Windows machine to view movies. And it’s in Windows Media Format. There are some hacks that transcodes the video, but that’s just lame. This makes the Xbox 360 completely useless as a movie/media player.

This is the problem when you start to sell both hardware and content. Just look at Sony. The conflict of interest between trying to do the best hardware product possible, and the desire to cripple it to protect content. And now Apple has fallen into it.

So go hackers! Looking like I’m going to buy an Apple TV after all…

After spending the whole of saturday in bed suffering from a bad hangover, I managed to finish my first add-on module for Drupal.

I’m planning to change the mail system at work, because we now use an old outdated system. The one I’m looking at that I think is most promising is the Zimbra mail system. I’m just waiting for two new features before we can start thinking of migrating. The first one is the ability to have shared mail folders. This is appearently planned for the next version. And they need to fix so that you can tab between fields in the othervise exellent web client.

There’s been a lot of discussions about the MacHeist bundle. And I must agree with some of the critique on how to share the loot between the MacHeist gang and the Independent developers. But one thing is for sure, If I had not bought the bundle, I would never have discovered an amazing piece of software called FotoMagico. The kind of quality it gives you when making a photo presentation is mind blowing. And the interface is so easy to use, it’s almost spooky. Recommended.

I’m looking forward to see what Apple manages to do with the TV thingamagook. I hope that they learned some lessons with the iPod. Like putting in support for MP3 and other formats. So hopefully they will add support for DiVX etc. But now when they are content providers as well, my guess is that they will not. And that’s a product killer. Look at how all the other companies that release products where they try to please the customer, but also have to make sure the content providing part of the company don’t get upset. And then you get stuff like the Sony MP3 player that really does not play MP3, but convert it to their own format. And the customers run… In another direction to buy something else.

But looking at Apple handled DiVX support in Quicktime, they will fuck this up. Which is a pitty, I really want this kind of product.

Update: I now got a beta version of the software that partially fixed some of the problems. It still does not seem to work correctly with an other antenna.

I was out shopping yesterday with my family. And sometimes you just have to get some new gear. So I bought a Pinnacle PCTV USB DVB-T receiver. I used a computer in the store to check that It was compatible with the EyeTV software. As usual there was no Mac compatible software included with the Pinnacle hardware. But when I connected it all, I had really bad reception of the TV signal. I tried a lot of different places in the appartment (including standing in a room that has line of site of the broadcast antenna for the DVB-T broadcast) but still only got a 46% signal quality. So the video was choppy or nonexistent. Fortunately I now got a Macbook Pro, so I tried to install the Pinnacle software in Windows, and naturally I got a 100% reception and it worked like a charm. My conclution is that there is a bug in the EyeTV software. Here’s a funny tidbit, If you remove the antenna you actually get marginally better reception.

So I guess my adventures with this continues. Let’s hope the support at El Gato can help me.