After reading in the news that California plans to regulate the power consumption of flat screen TVs, I did a little checking on my setup. My TV, a Sony 32″ LCD, consumes 156W. My DVD player, a fairly simple Sony model, takes a miserly 9W. The power hog is my home theatre receiver. This Yamaha 5.1 channel unit consumes 530W in 5 channel, 230W if only stereo is used! And the subwoofer is powered, drawing an additional 40W. This is likely the maximum power consumption, when the volume is cranked way up. But even at moderate listening levels, the unit gives off a lot of heat. I think the DSPs on board that operate on the compressed digital audio are to blame. The idea of consuming half a kilowatt just to listen to simple movie dialogue is appalling.
Archive for September, 2009
Half a kilowatt
Sunday, September 20th, 2009William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
Sunday, September 20th, 2009I started reading this after being taken in at the bookstore by the first page, which, as in other Gibson books, is memorable. Here is one sentence on that page: “Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that it’s interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.”
The story is about the search for the maker of “the footage”, a collection of snippets from a movie which is being released anonymously on the internet. The snippets are released in random order. Fans of the footage reassemble the snippets to form their own movie, applying their own pattern recognition. This is the only book of fiction that I know of to discuss watermarking of video.
The rest of the book doesn’t live up to the first page. In fact, it drags and is often tedious. It would have been good to cut about 50-100 pages. Gibson’s style is not particularly easy to follow. It’s a lot like reading emails from a busy, self-absorbed geek.
I’ve read glowing reviews of this book and its meaning on the internet. The book would be worth those reviews had it been better written and motivated.
Trip to Taman Negara
Saturday, September 19th, 2009Last semester, I went with the NTU staff recreation club to Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia. The park contains a rainforest dating back over 130 million years. It is divided by rivers and contains tigers, elephants, many monkeys, and lots of monitor lizards.
The trip was as interesting as the destination. We boarded the train at the station in Tanjong Pagar. Though the station is in Singapore, the station itself is actually part of Malaysia. Ditto for the train tracks. In what other country does the railway belong to another country? Therefore you go through immigration at the station, and are in Malaysia as long as you are on the train, though you are travelling through Singapore! The train reaches the Singapore/Malaysia border at Woodlands. There, we got off the train and went through Singapore immigration (to leave the country) and once more on the Malaysian side (to enter Malaysia). Confusing? Yes!
The train is an older diesel locomotive, with airplane type seats and a dining car, and grody toilets. The train stops at practically every small town along the tracks. We reached our final stop, Jerantut, at 1 am, after 8 hours of travel, and were taken to a hotel for the night. The next morning, we took a bus to the Park entrance.
We stayed at the Mutiara resort. It’s a luxurious (to me) resort located right at the edge of the park, actually just inside. Among the funny quirks are that you cannot buy alchohol outside the park, being part of the state of Pahang, which is “dry” Malaysia. But you can buy inside the park. I guess that’s because the park is national rather than state territory.
You might think that a tropical rainforest is hot, humid, and full of mosquitoes. Actually, it is not. It is cooler than in Singapore, being in the shade. It is humid for sure, but not oppresively so. The bugs were not a problem. I was not bitten once in the whole trip. I think that’s because the rivers flow fast through the park, and the birds and other critters keep the mozzie population down.
The best part of the trip was the boat ride up the Tahan river. The huge trees shade the river, and the water is cool and clear. The guides make sure you get wet by using their paddles to spray up water.
Long boat, of the type I went on in Taman Negara
I did have a minor medical emergency on the trip. I slipped and fell at the entrance to the Gua Telinga cave, and had to go the Klinik for stitches. Fortunately, Malaysian clinics are good and very cheap. I came home with 4 stitches on my leg as a kind of souvenier.
Taman Negara is “awesome” according to the Lonely Planet guide to SE Asia. I agree. Here are some pictures.
On the Tahan river
River bank near swimming hole, Tahan River
Rapids near swimming hole
DLNA : Does Lots of Nothing Again
Monday, September 14th, 2009My Samsung Innov8 phone has a feature called “DLNA”. This is supposed to let you wirelesslessly connect your TV, cellphone, and pretty much everything else that may have wifi, together. Presumably, you can show pictures or video from your phone on your wifi-equipped TV. In theory. Of course, these grand connectivity schemes never work (bluetooth?).
My DLNA client is located in the cellphone’s “Applications” folder. When activated, it says version 1.0. That should tell you what you to expect. However, the DLNA logo is prominently displayed on the back of the phone, and on the box it came in. So I decided to try it. When launched, the client asks you for your wifi network name. After 3 tries, it managed to log in. The screen showed a status message that said “server active”. Nothing else happened. None of the other menu options suggested a way to use the client. Nor was there a brochure that came with the phone to explain what to do next. I wonder how much longer DLNA will survive as a labelled feature on cellphones: 1 more year, 2 years (my bet), or 5 years.