Out Of My Mind – MadMike

Thoughts, Facts and Interesting Finds by Michael

I think it is every movie loving geek to have a personal home theater at home.  A place where you can sit back and relax while watching your favourite DVD in style and comfort – at home.

Well designers, Acoustic Innovations of Boca Raton, FL. exactly did that for a family living in this not to humble 10000 square feet home in Hawaii…

OK now that I have stopped drooling over the house, lets look at the real reason about the post…the movie theater!

No you are not looking at the inside of a Star Wars spaceship…that is the home theater!

The shuttle “windows” are actually  six flat panel HDTVs, each with a futuristic touchscreen remotes from Crestron. There are life-size R2-D2 and C-3PO droids that talk. It also has a three dimensional fiber optic starscape (roof) and also the interesting motorized pocket door that is the entrance thus really making you feel as if you are stepping into space.

When designing it the designers didn’t want the computer equipment to break the intergalactic illusion, so they hid it behind acoustic panels on the walls were designed to look like starship doors, equipment racks can turn 180 degrees, so they can be concealed by a concave cabinet, and the Runco DLP projector that makes the magic happen is hidden inside a soffit in the rear of the room. The screen is a curved, anamorphic 107-inch display from Stewart Filmscreen, which is acoustically transparent to accommodate the five speakers behind it.

As you can see it opens up and swings 180 degrees to show the kit…

Sigh…  Check out the sources below for a few more photos.

One day when I grow up and make lots of money I will also do that, in the meantime the 81cm Sony CRT TV will have to do…  🙂

(Source: ElectronicHouse and NewLaunches)

Sometimes the staff at my place of employment try and diagnose their own personal PC problems.

Sometimes they are lucky and fix it themselves. Other times (more often than not) they bring it into our office in a terrible condition (just short of loosing data or already lost data) for us to have a “quick” look (aka fix).

Well now troubleshooting has just becomes easier (and a lot less risky) thanks to Morris Rosenthal and his “Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts”

To quote his site:

This page offers links to flowcharts for PC diagnostics, excerpted from my book. The non-active links are for charts that are included in the book but not available online. The published book contains seventeen flowcharts for computer diagnostics plus a short text for every chart expanding on the decision points. The troubleshooting process is the same for an expensive Sony or IBM, or a downmarket eMachines or Acer. Dell and HP (who purchased Compaq) manufacture desktop PC’s in a wide range of price points, but you have to go through the same troubleshooting steps for the cheap ones as the expensive ones if you want to correctly identify and repair the failure.

The eBook can downloaded anywhere in the world for $9.95 or the book can ordered from Amazon for $14.95, or from Amazon UK for £9.95 or through any retail store by the title “Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Revised Edition” or ISBN which is: 0-9723801-7-5.

 

It is a good start if you are not technically minded and want to troubleshoot your own PC…before taking it to a pro  🙂

Typing xx&eHHm&HHx&eH might not look like anything initially, but put more together on a line and add a few more lines then you can end up with something that looks like this…

This form of art is also know as ASCII art.  It is the art of taking normal letters, symbols and numbers and laying it out in such a way that a picture is created.

Now if you have a lot of time and patience you can try your hand at it OR you can use an ASCII Art Generator…  upload your picture you want to convert and then specify the size and click generate – no mess no fuss.

I stumbled upon a website called GlassGiant.com that has an ASCII Art Generator.

I must admit I was pretty impressed with the results. I took a photo from Facebook and then some random Google images and told it to convert for me.  Here is just one example of what it did (squint your eyes if you not getting it…)

Give it a try – you know the ASCII geek in you wants to…  http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/