A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

I am quite interested in stereoscopic media, and I have been so for a very long time. Even then I have not yet ventured into the field of content creation, but I have plans! To soothe my fascination with S3D pictures and video I put down an order for the Aiptek 3D i2 as soon as it came in stock, this because it is a very economical purchase, at least compared to the Fujifilm Real 3D W1 which I will mention further down.

The i2 camera showed up a few days later and I went to pick it up. It did feel a bit plasticky but not totally bad. It was already getting dark outside as I had spent the day out of town so when tried it and noticed a very sluggish framerate I assumed it might need a bright sunlit day to work properly. This was very positive thinking on my part, but I had a tiny suspicion.

The morning after me and the 3D camera went out into the brilliant sunshine, and to my dismay the camera still recorded a stuttering video just like the day before. Sure it has two very small lenses and it is a cheap brand, but the specifications says 720p in 30fps, so I was quite disappointed! I decided to check how low the frame rate actually was. Back at my computer I took a closer look at the recorded video files. The camera sure saved in 30 fps, but many of the frames were the same, making it appear to have a much lower frame rate at playback! When I ran it through a video converter it reported how many unique and total frames it had: 136 unique frames out of 1360 frames in total. That is only 10%! This means the effective frame rate is  3fps instead of 30 fps! This of course was unacceptable and it had me promptly putting that test video on Youtube. To see it in the 3D player you need to click over to the site.

Of course I deemed the product to not represent what was advertised and I asked if I could return it. I got to pay for shipping it back as it was not broken, just not up to spec, and now they have finally approved a buyback so I will get my money back! I still ended up a bit unhappy as I was naively thinking (even though I knew Aiptek to be a low quality brand) that I would get a nice solution for spontaneous S3D content creation. Apparently it was not to be!

Update: For your reference I have also attached a few pictures taken with it. The noise levels in a dark room are quite horrible, but not as apparent here as I have scaled the images down. In daylight it actually works as well as my digital camera from six years ago, except that each image gets slightly different color, you can easily see this in the road picture.

About the Fujifilm Real 3D W1; I was very hyped for this product when it was first announced but as it was quite expensive and practically impossible to find in a store for testing I did not spontaneously buy it. I finally did get a hands on experience at a photographic fair, and even though it’s a solid piece of hardware I am still not buying it. This mostly because the 3D screen does not work well for me at all; it works by shifting the display back and forth beneath a parallax barrier so  each eye gets 30 fps 60 flickering Hz individually. A static parallax barrier display would probably be more comfortable due to the light being constant. Also, the buttons to control it are very unintuitive as they have two commands and you have to tilt them one way or the other, all of them. I really liked the general concept but I wish Fujifilm would make a revised model with a different screen, new interface and buttons and a better movie mode. And to keep the price down they could also skip the optical zoom as it probably messes up the baseline anyway. That’s what I think!

Just about everyone else has a laptop already, so a while back I fell for the materialistic pressure and made myself a laptop user, now I am the happy owner of a black Samsung NC10. It is actually sold as a netbook, but really, I would rather have this one in my lap than an actual laptop, which I nowadays think is very bulky in comparison.

I somehow managed to break the Windows installation on it, and I was unsuccessful reinstalling it via a USB stick. I quickly ordered a USB2 external optical drive to end my problems, a 22x dual layer DVD burner with LightScribe. A bit overkill? Not really as DVD burners today are not more expensive than either DVD or CD players. In difference to most external optical units this is not an ultra slim version, it contains a full size 5.25″ optical drive, so it is quite large! If you look at the comparison pictures below you can see that it probably has close to the whole netbook’s volume!

Update: I managed to find the culprit to my machine acting up. After reinstalling the OS I was still experiencing the problem that the task bar and desktop would not appear after signing in, which was quite frustrating. This made me think about what could still cause a problem while the whole machine had been reinstalled. The only thing then connected to the machine was a small Microsoft USB mouse, and… when disconnecting it the taskbar and desktop appeared! I reconnected the mouse and noticed that it occasionally restarted itself, so it is most surely instable hardware, I am looking into getting a new laptop mouse right now!

Luckily enough the USB drive was immediately useful and booted my Windows disc at once! Very awesome, and most likely, perfectly normal. For some reason I have recently gotten used to machines not working as expected… there are more things that needs fixing.

All in all, I am very happy with my new small computer. The requirements I had which were fulfilled was:

• LED backlit display ( – longevity etc)
• Matte display ( – not a fan of gloss)
• 16:10 aspect ratio ( – not 16:9)
• SDHC slot ( – universally useful)
• Wifi ( – for private networks)
• Bluetooth ( – to connect to the phone)
• Support for 2GB RAM ( – heavy apps!)
• Minimum three USB2 ports ( – mouse, stick + extra)
• Minimum 6-cell battery (- for battery life)
• Minimum 10″ display at 1024px width ( – for readability)
• Close to full size keyboard ( – fingers are not tiny)

Nice things included but which were not a must:

• 1.6GHz hyperthreading ( – love!)
• Multitouch touchpad ( – using Two Finger Scroll)
• 160GB HDD
• VGA port
• LAN port

And that is about the whole computer spec! Before my purchase I was searching for machines that matched what I wanted, and I only got two results! The Samsung NC10 and the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, which explains why the specs of the machine very closely matches my requirements.

I got the NC10 mostly because it was readily available, both in stores for demoing and on mail order, while the EEE PC was on backorder just about everywhere. I did read some comments from people that do prefer the Asus, because of key placement and not up to spec battery life, but currently I am very happy with my Samsung machine :)

Since I was camping with my parents last year I had planned to get something to make accessing the internet a bit more comfortable. Previously I brought with me a switch and a bunch of RJ45 cables, and then we shared a 3G Internet connection through my father’s computer. This meant his laptop had to be on if more than one person wanted to surf the net simultaneously, or else we could just pass along the USB modem.

Yesterday I was in town to pick up a camcorder (!!) I had ordered, and at the same time I bought myself a D-link DIR-635 wireless router for cheap. I had read that with the latest firmware this router could get online using a USB 3G modem connected to it, as it has a USB port, which sounded like a perfect solution for effortless camping Internet sharing!

It took me and a friend two and a half hours to figure out how to set it up properly! A very important detail, which my younger brother told me to try when he got home from work about an hour into our suffering, is that you have to remove the PIN code from the SIM card or else it will not work at all! I never thought of that, as I myself do not subscribe to a mobile Internet connection, and in all honesty I was hardly aware that the modem contained a SIM card in the first place! :P I totally blame the hot weather making my head really slow and mushy!

Here below are the settings and gear that worked for us, in case someone out there is trying to set this up themselves, with these exact pieces of hardware and operator! Right.

Router: D-Link DIR-635
Modem: HUAWEI E220
Operator: 3 (Tre)
Country: Sweden

Username: tre
Password: tre
Dial Number: *99#
Authentication Protocol: CHAP only
APN: bredband.tre.se

Other settings were left at default values.

The Dial Number and APN was given to us by the support before telling us they did not sell that router themselves and thus do not support it. We found the Authentication protocol (if it matters) on a forum, and the login information we deducted from a predefined setting for 3 in the UK, where the username and password both were “three”, and finally we just tried using the Swedish words instead, and magically (after those 2½ hours) it worked! We hardly believed it ourselves!

Now when we turn on the router, it connects to the Internet via the USB 3G modem, and all machines connect to the router through WiFi. No cables to connect, no computer to boot (except the one you use), and you are not tethered to the switch! It will be awesome.

While looking for a good mike to record my voice with for videos (still getting there) I bumped into a Youtube clip where a similar mike was mounted on a swimg-arm desktop light. Of course I had to do the same thing when I got mine, the Samson C01U. A few weeks back I finally visited IKEA and picked up the very cheap TERTIAL lamp. To get it to do what I wanted I did the following:

1. I unscrewed and removed the light socket and casing.
2. I cut the cable at the top and pulled it out of the arm.
3. I filed down the plastic retainer for the lamp head so the mike holder could fit instead.
4. I mounted the mike holder and cable to the arm.

Done!

Actually there was a bit more work to it than what I listed, but that was mostly because I did not know how go at it at first. In the beginning I tried to remove the light by dismantling it with the cables intact but as I could not figure out how they were attached to the light socket, without breaking it apart, I ended up cutting them anyway. Then I tried to file down the plastic retainer bit, but it took forever, and finally I resorted to a power drill which worked almost too well. The end result did not look very nice, but when mounted it is hardly visible. Below are pictures from the short process and the final result!

A little more than a year go I decided to enhance the experience of music video games, they mostly being DDR and Guitar Hero, which I am really fond of. It all started when I randomly bought colored LED strips at IKEA, just to try them out, and I installed them under my TV bench for epic underground pimpage. Below is a short list of what I purchased for this project, in chronological order. The links are mostly to Svebry, an enthusiast  store in a neighbor town with really good prices!

• Colored LED strips
• Half mirror ball with included motor mount
• Two spotlights for the mirror ball and the actual bulbs
• Two three color light organs (responds to sound)
• Stroboscope with color filters
• Smoke machine, smoke liquid and maintenance fluid
• Blacklight tube including fixture

Not everything was in stock, so it took a while to get everything in ready. In addition to the actual hardware I bought extra remote power switches to accommodate for all the new lights, power cables and cable holders, hooks and chains for the light organs. Oh, and a can of black spray paint for the remote.

All of the lights except the stroboscope are on separate remote power switches. The stroboscope is used alone for the best effect, so when I want to use it I just switch off everything on the remote, which only has four channels, and manually turn on the strobe. I have one original white remote for my normal lights and one painted black for the disco effects.

The smoke machine is not permanently fixed somewhere, but something I bring out when the situation calls for it. In addition to increasing the fun you can have with a laser pointer smoke also helps you test out your optical fire alarm!

My original plan was to quickly write a blog post about it all, perhaps with a video, but as you can tell that never happened, until now that is. The pictures included in this post are what got me working on this post and are from last Friday when I happened to get a bunch of people invading my home for some Guitar Hero World Tour action. I had setup my E-410 with an RF shutter so I could take random shots. It really looks like I am living in a box, no?

In these pictures all of the gear is active except the strobe, naturally. You can see the light organs with their red, green and yellow bulbs in the corners, the blacklight tube top center behind my normal ceiling lamp, the mirror ball is pretty obvious, the LED strips beneath the TV bench and of course some smoke in the air :)