Elvis Ripley Dot Com {b}

While doing some sound research I was reading about the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and looking at some pictures of their old equipment and watching videos of very nerdy Englishmen banging on old tea pots. This led me to

Delia Derbyshire who worked at the Radiophonic Workshop during the 60's and 70's. She has some amazing videos spread through the internet of her just making sounds, primarily for electronic music.

One my favorite themes is the Doctor Who theme song. A guy named Ron Grainer is listed as the composer but Delia was the one who took his song and put together the electronic arrangement that I love so much. Some more samples of Delia's music is on her site. I recommend Moogies Bloogies. It is pretty weird.

The BBC has digitized some of her old tapes found in an attic after she had died in 2001. They are pretty interesting for their time but not up to Doctor Who theme standards. I think that is what I was really hoping for. If she only had a podcast; I could subscribe.

A few days ago I rented a sod cutter to remove most of the grass in my back yard and make a large garden area. The sod cutter was loads of fun to use. After a little bit of trouble getting it started I would just hold on and it would wiggle around and cut through a huge section of grass. Lots of fun.

It took a little over an hour to cut the sod. Most of the time it went very easily but occasionally it would run into a bump in the ground and I would have to wrestle with the big vibrating sod cutter. It would also need to be lifted off the ground to turn around. Rough stuff.

The progress so far. My reunion and rain kept me from getting all the grass up at once.

This was my first cucumber, two more shortly followed. Cucumbers are some of my favorites.

Fish (pictured left) pointed out that if you had bookmarked elvisripley.com/blog you would be taken to the archive site where nothing was going on.

When I upgraded my site and broke everything, I archived the old site at archive1.elvisripley.com and put the new site here. While I did put a message about the switch on the old site I didn't have anything on the old site/blog and elvisripley.com/blog was pointed to the old site along with all the old links.

Going forward, if you have a link to my site, bookmark http://elvisripley.com and that will point to the latest version of the site because at some point I will probably archive this site and do something exciting or maybe not. I guess eventually I would.

While watching The Totally Rad Show my Xbox 360 froze. I then tried a few times to restart it. Each time the system would freeze during the opening logo. After those few times it would not restart and I got the expected ring of death. I have a pretty early Xbox 360 so I expected it to happen. It looks like July is for Movies.

Update: I got this back after about two weeks of being without. It took a few days for me to send off my old Xbox but it was only at the repair center for a couple days before they decided to send me a new Xbox 360. It is quite a bit quieter which is nice because the first couple of Xbox 360 generations were super loud, mainly from the disc drive.

My parents have been saving this for a long time and I got a DVD of it on Sunday so it could be shared with the internet. This was during Today's local news update.

Update: KJRH had this taken down. It was probably too embarrassing.

I watch quite a few movies. I try to keep the momentum of movie watching going and probably watch 5 a week, sometimes a little more and sometimes a lot more. Over the last month I have watched these movies. I may have missed a couple but this is most of them.

I decided to try a new screen paint mix for my living room wall. Before I had painted a screen area in the middle of my yellow wall. I have been thinking and preparing for my next projector like always. The big difference between each generation of projector is the brightness of black. Every generation it gets a little bit blacker. My Optoma HD70 is a lot blacker than my Optoma H27 was and the next projector will be even blacker. There is a level where the blacks are black enough and you can start to enjoy truly black blacks as far as your eyes are able to perceive. Knowing that I decided to paint the whole wall to create an interesting projection effect which I will demonstrate below.

Also during this repaint I decided to change the mix a little bit. Before I just used Behr Silver Screen which is a normal favorite. This time I used a mixture of around 70% Behr Silver Screen and 30% Behr White Opal Pearlescent. The pearl paint adds an amazing shimmer to the image. It looks brighter with richer colors but it also looks like a plasma television. It has this glow to it like the light is coming from behind the wall. If you get close to the wall you can see all the micro reflectors doing their stuff but when you get back around 6 feet that disappears and it just looks great. I could probably go higher and might at some point. I will probably go paint, projector, paint, projector, back and forth. And now the examples.

Here is an example of normal HD footage. This is the maximum size of the projected image so there wouldn't be any light grey blacks around it.

Now here a commercial. It is a standard definition commercial that is also letterboxed so on a widescreen display it shows up as a little image. With black blacks you don't feel like you are watching a tiny image in the middle of a large screen because the surrounding black pixels are darker than you are able to perceive so the image is small but you don't feel like it isn't filling up the space. It just is the space.

These final images are much better than a commercial. Below are movies shown in their very wide aspect ratio. Once the blacks get black enough you start to see just the wide image like watching a movie in a theater instead of seeing dark grey bars at the top and bottom. This lack of grey bars make the wide movies seem larger instead of smaller which they actually are compared to HDTV sources.

This new paint mixture buys a little bit of time but during dark scenes the blacks are visible painting the dark grey bars above and below widescreen movies. The increased contrast of whatever my next projector will be in addition to the iris that is in most that brings the black levels down so only the minimum amount of light ever leaves the projector for ever frame shown so you never get the waste light visible in the room.

The set with even more pictures is on flick if you would like to see the out-takes.

The paints used are Behr White Opal Pearlescent No. 751 and Silver Screen 770E-2 that is also called Silverscreen 770E-2

Here is an image of the screen surface up close with a flash to get an idea of the color and reflectivity. It is very neutral.

A short update on the home server because it isn't to a finished point so there can't be too much to tell.

The first thing I tried was creating a virtual hard drive and using iSCSI to connect it to my Mac Pro. There isn't a native iSCSI client in Mac OS X so 3rd party solutions are the only option. They weren't very stable and using a fixed volume size I lost a lot of the benefits.

The second thing was SMB transfer. This worked very well and was very stable but it used 100% of the server's CPU which limited file transfers to 30-40 MB/sec reads and 20-30 MB/sec writes. If I got a faster CPU this would be just about right.

The third thing I tried was NFS transfer. This was great at reading files from the server and was able to go over 100 MB/sec approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet. (125 MB/sec) Write speed wasn't so great. Sometimes it would be 30 MB/sec but after a while or if another write or read was started the speed would drop to around 4 MB/sec. NFS is probably the best if the Mac OS X to Solaris issues get sorted out. This solution also used around 20% of the server CPU so I had enough headroom to enable compression of the data on the server with no performance hit.

So for now I will go with the second method, SMB and upgrade the CPU to something with a few more cores and a higher clock speed.

Update: After some more tweaks I was able to get a little under 50 MB/sec for both reads and writes for most situations. Lots of tiny files still dropped to lower transfer speeds. The processor is still maxed out most of the time.

Update Again: Actually I may not have changed anything. Sometimes it just seems to go faster. I haven't figured that out yet.