I noticed Pan looking out the window intently this morning… presumably watching the wild rabbits in the front yard again. But no, it was somebody else looking for the bunnies today! Grabbed a little video, set to the tune of some classic cartoon music from Warner Brothers:
I recently researched the available cordless power gardening tools (string trimmers, blowers, mowers, etc) to see what might be worth buying. Many companies are now offering 40V and 56V lithium battery systems and Greenworks now has even an 80V system (though higher voltage doesn’t necessarily mean more power is provided in the tool). There were a few reviews here and there and a few video demos but nothing that showed how well these newer, more powerful tools could handle more challenging tasks in the yard, like cutting down yards of tall, thick thistles.
I eventually decided to try both the string trimmer and blower from Ego Power+, based on their 56V battery system. And so I’ve put together a little video demonstration of a more serious test of their capabilities that might be useful to anyone else considering upgrading or switching over to cordless:
So I read a lot of reviews and settled on trying the Ego Power+ 56V system. From someone’s takeapart video, they seem to have designed their battery layout well, and they have a very good rapid charger that keeps the batteries cool while charging. I was going to try the Greenworks 40V system but I came across a number of complaints about build and design issues. For what it’s worth, I’m definitely happy with the Ego Power+ system so far and I recommend checking it out!
It’s rare that I go out to movie theaters, preferring to have friends over to enjoy my home theater, but sometimes I do for special movie events, like the release of the first new Star Wars movie in a long time: The Force Awakens. Well, we happened to go to a theater with an impressive sound system and I was startled by a number of instances in the movie where you could seriously feel the sound pressure of something big happening on screen or the impact of an explosion, not just *hear* it. In other words, some serious pressure waves in that theater. That experience left me wanting to find out how to get that at home!
I’ve long been pretty content with my Acoustic Research S12HO subwoofer (a 12″ inch down-firing driver), particularly in my old condo’s home theater. It filled out the bass response well, without being overbearing and without bothering the neighbors. I’ve had it since 1999. However, in my home now in the hills above Santa Cruz, I have a much larger room with a huge vaulted ceiling and my old subwoofer can’t really fill the room. (Plus I don’t have close neighbors to worry about bothering.)
So I did my usual many days of research and ended up settling on getting two (yes, two!) highly-rated V1800 subwoofers from Power Sound Audio. The V1800 subwoofer features a 725 watt amplifier and a huge, vented 18″ driver capable of getting down below 16 Hz. It’s capable of delivering up over 120 dB of sound. (Here’s a list of comparative decibel levels.) I bought two of them because a single subwoofer can potentially fill a room in such a way that you get large peaks of output in some locations in the room and large dips, even dead spots, in other locations. Adding a second subwoofer in a different location allows it to interact with the room in such a way that its peaks and valleys will tend to cancel out the other subwoofer so you get a more even response throughout the room. It also has the side effect of increasing the output overall by quite a bit (about 6 db).
Here’s a great set of tips on how to go about optimizing both subwoofer placement and crossover settings. For me, the only really practical location was up front on either side of my equipment cabinet:
Even with the large vaulted space of my home theater, I found that the appropriate gain setting needed for both subwoofers was only about 20%. It was amusing to turn them both up to 50% gain though just to see what would happen. The room shakes so hard at that level that I’m afraid of turning it up any further for fear of breaking something like a window.
Anyway, set an appropriately balanced level, their impact (literally and figuratively) is still quite dramatic. These guys fill out the bass end of music wonderfully, nice and tight, without being overbearing at all. And for low frequency effects (LFE) in movies, the experience is fantastic. The rumble from a passing train in a movie makes you believe there really is a train passing by. A rocket launch shakes the whole room (and much of the house) – you feel it in the floor, the walls, the chairs. And most amazing of all, you feel sharp explosive impacts on your chest. No need to strap subwoofers to your chairs! “Tron Legacy” makes for a great bass demonstration throughout. I particularly love how you literally feel a jolt to your chest when Sam is struck by the laser digitizer and transported into the digital world.
… and Happy Star Wars to all!
Pan had developed a habit of lying in wait on the upstairs deck early every morning, in a perfect spot for an unsuspecting bird to alight nearby on the wall. It was unfortunately a reasonably successful strategy, so I decided to try one of those plastic owls to ward off the birds. Pan and Hera’s different reactions to first seeing it was amusing:
And yes, the guardian owl has been effective. It’s been well over a year (I’m backdating this post) and almost every bird has stayed away from the deck but Pan continued to go out before dawn every morning for most of a year, oblivious to why the birds stopped coming. All except this one little guy who came along many months later. He was apparently too smart for his own good and not fooled by the plastic owl. He even seemed to taunt Pan through the window over the course of a week or two. However, I’m guessing this is also that same bird that Pan eventually caught a little later.
A little while ago, after reading “Ready Player One” again (Spielberg is making a movie!) and after seeing a couple of tech talks by old Atari game programmers, I was lamenting that I sold my old Atari VCS so many years ago. Well, Darlene jumped on this comment, found a bundle someone was selling on eBay and surprised me with an early birthday gift. Yup, an old Atari VCS/2600 (four switch version), a set of controllers and a bundle of game cartridges. Sweet! (I think my brother and I actually had the six-switch, Sears-rebranded version, but still very cool!) Thanks, Darlene!
I immediately had to go fill out the set of 40 cartridges with a couple of other games I remember us playing a lot. Of course then was the challenge of hooking it up: the Atari outputs an analog RF TV signal… on an RCA-plug cable. You can use an adapter like this one to go from RCA plug to coax TV cable input. I don’t have a TV tuner, so rather than pulling a VCR out of a box in a closet, I hooked it up via my old USB EyeTV tuner/video converter to my MacBook – success!
Yeah, you can play any of these games via emulation on a modern computer, or even a smartphone/iPad, but there’s something very different about jamming the physical cartridge into the old physical console and handling that classic Atari joystick. (And having to use cotton swabs and alcohol to clean the contacts on all of the Activision cartridges to get them to work again!)
It’s been fun to pick these up and rediscover old visual/procedural memories, like the admittedly-simple path through the Adventure maze. Some titles are only vaguely familiar until you plug them in and see the game again and then go “aha!!”
So… to paraphrase Atari’s old marketing… have you played your Atari today?
Caught a super thin crescent of a new moon chasing the sunset a couple of days ago:
Looked like it was on fire as it set behind the ridge – here’s some video through my telescope
(at 4x normal speed):
