April 2008 Archives

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 flickr 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.

My current project in my spare time is to build one of these Sun x4500 servers for a normal price. It is a really exciting project. It is also the first complete build of a PC that I have ever done. I have taken a few PCs apart and upgraded parts and added things to them but my history with Macs has left me with a series of computers mostly built by Apple with core options.

I ordered did as much research as I thought I needed and ordered all the parts and really had a great time. I got a really efficient and low power AMD processor and a super great motherboard and case but I made an error in picking out my parts. The motherboard I picked out was super popular and full of wonderful reviews but it was also too new. I thought I was being pretty careful and I was but I underestimated the progress that had been recently made with Solaris. I think that if this had been a year from now the situation would have been fine but Solaris is still in the process of moving from a big slow OS to a more versatile and progressive OS.

So after I had a working PC build running Solaris and Spinrite but not network accessable, among other things, I am sending the motherboard back and will try again in a few days, maybe over the weekend.

If you were to check here you would see that I said Portishead was a very subtle band. They sure are most of the time. They have a concert on Current tonight that should be pretty interesting. They went back to their old school and did a show in the drama room.

Their new album comes out in a few weeks and they will probably be playing only new material so I thought I would let you know how much I enjoyed their new music. It is really just what I was looking for. It is very Portishead but it isn't like what they did 10 years ago. It is hard to explain what is different but it sure is. Sometime it is like old Portishead and sometimes it is like Terminator 2 but most of the time it is like Eraserhead so that is pretty good.

One time during Spring Break my family and I went to Dallas to see Portishead at the Bowlerama. It was getting close to Spring Break and I don't think Angelene and I had anything to do and I needed something to wear to prom. (This is a picture of me at a simulated prom.) I got a very nice Versace green velvet suit that judging by that photo is very large but it was the style at the time. People thought it was crazy amazing so that is all that mattered.

Over the last couple of week there has been a lot of chatter about getting great internet pants. These are pants built for knowledge workers. The general consensus is that the 5.11 Tactical Tac-Lite Pro is the best pant for people who sit for most of their day.

I ordered a pair for myself a few days ago and as you can see they are still not found. I am really looking forward to them because I have a few late night projects coming up and I could really use some good sitting clothes. I think the main idea that if you are sitting around you want something room so you can move your legs around and get comfortable. I think that is the idea. Updates to follow.

If you would like to watch a 3 minute walking review of Internet Pants you could watch that here.

So even though I was planning on scrapping the site originally, then compromised and decided to keep the old site but stick it at archive1.elvisripley.com so it could still stick around, I have now fixed it so all my old links work with the site. So if your browser was set to go to elvisripley.com/blog that would work again but you would go to archive1.elvisripley.com/blog and as another example elvisripley.com/blog/2006/06/24/dmc-l1-best-camera-so-far would work in case you were curious what the best camera made so far would be. (as of June 2006)