InfoHole

Roomba 560 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

June 16th, 2008 Posted in technology | No Comments » After seeing an Engadget article about a Roomba Pacman hack I was fascinated by the idea of a robot vacuum.

Being skeptical; I searched for reviews and the Wikipedia page for the Roomba for more information about how well these things actually clean. I found lots of praising videos on youtube , which combined with the information on Wikipedia that the 560 is the fifth generation of Roomba convinced me to order one.

A few things to note about the Roomba 560:

has IR sensors in the front bumper which allow it to slow down before bumping into any furniture.
carefully navigates around the top of stairs without falling down them (not shown in the video).
has an on-board scheduler and auto docking system so that it can clean and then recharge itself on a programmed basis without any interaction.
will clean for about 60 minutes each cleaning cycle.
using the included lighthouses you can block it from entering a certain room, or set it to clean one room fully before automatically going to clean the next room.

My Roomba arrived this morning. Below is a video of a quick run around my living room and entrance hall, at the end of the video I cut the cleaning cycle short to demonstrate the auto docking system.

You may also download a high quality .wmv version of the video here (147MB).

Red Alert 3 Game Play Video

June 11th, 2008 Posted in gaming | No Comments »

The Red Alert side of the Command and Conquer series has previously provided a naval game play aspect that other games in the series haven’t. RA3 promises to expand upon the naval aspect of the game as well as bring back favourite units including the Tesla troopers.

In the video we see that the traditional ore gathering method has been replaced with Ore nodes which harvesters simply dock with to gather ore and then return with it to the base. Many amphibious units and abilities have been added, including the Bullfrog amphibious troop transport and the ability to deploy the Soviet MCV either on land or in the water.

Red Alert 3 is due to be released later this year. Hopefully it will take advantage of multicore technology unlike Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars which would choke up during massive battles on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 768mb gfx card.

Check out the video below or download the high resolution 400MB .mov version here (right click, save target as).

Engy Dinner by Cacti

June 9th, 2008 Posted in gaming | No Comments »

This one is for the TF2 players out there, this animation by Cacti is hilarious (note you need to play Team Fortress 2 to understand what is going on here).

Mini CDN For My Blog Videos

May 28th, 2008 Posted in computing | No Comments »

After posting an example of 720p resolution H.264 video I was annoyed that whilst viewing my own blog I was not receiving the best video load rates, as my blog is hosted on a server in the USA and I am located in the UK.

Regular encoded .flv videos would load perfectly well as I could download from the USA at 200kB/sec and these videos only require about 90kB/sec of bandwidth, but the H.264 video requires about 470kB/sec to load/play instantly.

So, I have coded a simple CDN solution and now videos for users from the Western hemisphere will load from a server in the USA and videos for users east of the Atlantic will load from my server in the UK. I now receive download speeds of 480kB/sec which is just enough for the H.264 video and only limited by my broadband connection.

I shall expand upon the CDN code in due course, but for now it is a perfect and fully automated solution requiring no maintenance.

If you experience any troubles with the videos on the site then please let me know by posting a comment below.

H.264 Video in Flash

May 27th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized, computing, funny videos, technology | 1 Comment »

Adobe announced last year that the beta flash player supported H.264 video, and since then the latest Flash Player 9 release version with H.264 has rolled out and most people seem to have it installed (thanks to MySpace and other large social networks often forcing flash player updates).

H.264 is a more processor intensive codec than previous codecs allowing for much higher quality video to be stored in smaller files. Apple has been making use of this technology for a while now within their .mov offering, but the ability to play H.264 video with the flash player means that web video can easily take advantage of this technology.

I just grabbed the Transformers movie trailer from Apple (in 720p .mov format, encoded with H.264) totalling 105MB, and have plugged it into the flash player below. Check out the full screen quality!

Previously even with ON2 VP6 such quality would of required around a 170MB file.

Update 29th May 2008: I have uploaded three copies of the IronMan movie trailer to demo the quality of H.264 at various bitrates and filesizes. Honestly I have a hard time telling the difference in quality even on a 24" monitor. The 480p seems like a perfect solution for full screen web video.

480p 56mB

720p 121mB

1080p 197mB

TF2 Gameplay

May 26th, 2008 Posted in gaming | No Comments »

One of the projects that I am working on is centered around gaming. I thought that I would post this video of some Team Fortress 2 gameplay, just for fun.

The machine specs: Dell Dimension 9200, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, RAID 0 HDD, GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb, and a Dell 24" wide monitor running at 1920 * 1200.

Update 30th May 2008: Added another TF2 video, this time with me playing as Pyro. Low and high quality versions below.

Oh no I’ve been ZVUE’d

May 15th, 2008 Posted in money, technology | No Comments »

I just tried to ask management questions on the ZVUE investor confrence call but my questions were not accepted. I quit my technolgy consultancy with ZVUE in 2007 but still hold a large chunk of shares which are now sitting at about 10% of their original value.

ZVUE message board with my questions.

Send Faxes via Skype with PamFax

April 15th, 2008 Posted in computing | No Comments »

Trying to contact someone that is stuck in the 1980s? Previously I would hook up my laptop to a phone line to send faxes, but that was a real hassle.

I have just recently discovered the PamFax plugin for Skype, which allows you to send faxes using your Skype credit. PamFax accepts a variety of document types, I simply sent a PNG of my scanned document.

PamFax was kind enough to let me know via Skype chat that my fax sent without any issues. You can also check the status of your faxes via the “portal”.

Higher Video Quality for YouTube Arrives

April 7th, 2008 Posted in technology | 2 Comments »

YouTube appear to be rolling out an option allowing users to watch videos in higher quality than before (example).

Not all source videos uploaded will be high quality/definition (cell phone video etc), but it appears that when a high quality video is uploaded to YouTube several conversions are now being made. This allows users with fast internet connections to watch the high quality version.

Sites, such as Putfile, that have had high quality video streaming functionality (example) for over a year have now lost an edge over YouTube which previously swayed some users to register on their site rather than YouTube.

With YouTube providing free high quality video streaming, revenue sharing, groups, and various other features; the days of UGC video sites popping up quickly or established non-niche sites even surviving are surely numbered.

Vista SP1 Stable

March 31st, 2008 Posted in computing | 1 Comment »

Vista Service Pack 1 was released a while ago but at the time there were a lot of reported install problems, these appear to have been resolved.

I have just installed SP1 which took about 30 minutes to complete. Amongst other fixes that I have yet to notice network transfers now begin much more quickly, or atleast the status bar begins working more quickly. Network drives also appear to mount more quickly, but that could just be my imagination.

You can download the 32bit version here: 32bit Vista SP1