A couple of weeks ago (just before the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war was proclaimed to be over), I bought a PS3.

Actually, no, we need to go back a bit further.

Just after Christmas, I splurged on a flatscreen TV. It's not enormous, but it's sufficiently nice that suddenly it showed up all the flaws in my TV signal (of which more in some other rant), and I started to feel the need to buy a DVD player, or something - something that would do this staggeringly expensive bit of kit justice. I looked into building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) - a computer which would run as PVR, DVD player, and home media server - and would have built one, too, but for the fact that someone suggested I look at a Playstation 3 instead. And in my research, it really looked like it ticked all the boxes. The boxes look like this:

Box 1: Play DVDs.
Box 2: Play DivX and Xvid movies which I have, ahem, acquired.
Box 3: Be DLNA compliant so I could use it as a server for my Pinnacle Soundbridge, which is my only way of getting music to my 1974 Tandberg amp. (note to hi-fi buffs - it's an early transistor one, not one of the legendary valve ones)
Box 4: Act as a PVR.
Box 5: Also, it would be nice to be able to get media off it in some way so I could watch movies on my laptop in bed.

I should say at this point, for God's sake please do not tell me what I should have bought. I work in a very geeky office. I have already had that conversation about a zillion times. I have what I have, okay? Move on.

That caveat aside, a PC can obviously do all this stuff and more besides... but it's a hassle to build one, and I struggled to find a box thin enough to fit under my TV (and the ones I did seemed to have their own foibles when it came to putting stuff inside them).

So much for the shopping list - does the PS3 tick all the boxes? Well, no. It hews closely to that venerable motto of the Sony Corporation : "Great hardware, shame about the software".

First off, I did not buy the PS3 to play games on it, so right now I do not own any games. This review is not about the gaming, which I'm sure is wonderful. I bought it as a media centre, and in this respect the PS3 has a number of stupid little flaws which really hobble it. First off, and most importantly in terms of my aforementioned boxes, it is DNLA compliant - but as a client, not a server. So it won't talk to my Soundbridge. So the laptop is still doing duty as the repository of all my meedja, which was kind of what I wanted to avoid. For the same reason, the laptop cannot see whatever media is stored on the PS3's hard drive. So strike Box 5.

There's another box which we can't tick quite yet - the PS3 will Real Soon Now have an extra box which can be attached to it which will turn it into a PVR... but the PlayTV box is still slated to be released 'early 2008'.

So, in terms of network capability it has to be regarded as a bit of a flop. As far as I can tell, the logic behind this lack of functionality lies in a couple of hardware foibles which makes the PS3 unattractive to those with large home networks - in particular, the small amount of RAM in the box (256MB) means that, as a multitasking media server, streaming video to several places at once in someone's mansion somewhere, the PS3 ain't gonna cut it.

Of course, since it's just little ol' me here and I can't watch movies in bed and play games in the lounge at the same time, it'd probably be just fine, but let it pass.

Okay, so it won't serve stuff up to other machines, but it'll play everything, right? Right?

No. Nearly, oh so nearly, but... no. Again, Sony' software engineers have excelled themselves. The PS3 will play DivX stuff unless it is DivX 3.1.1... and even then it is weirdly fussy about aspect ratios. For example, I have all 6 star wars movies that appear to be encoded identically, except for their sizes. 2 out of 6 won't play. In general I estimate that around a third of my entire movie collection will need to be re-encoded.
[EDIT: Firmware 2.20, which was released this week (26/3/08) does seem to have helped, a bit - but I still have a big swathe of movies that won't play.]

Finally, there's one other area where Sony's software engineers have snatched defeat form the jaws of victory, and that is with the front-end software of the PS3, the so-called Cross Media Bar or XMB. This is very pretty, and seems sensibly laid out - but let's say, for the sake of argument, that you attach a USB hard drive to the machine. First off, unless you have all your stuff in the PS3-approved folder structure (that is to say, music in a folder called MUSIC, movies in a folder called MOVIES, and photos in a folder called something which doesn't appear to work) then the standard viewing setup won't see anything at all. What's REALLY irritating is that even if you do rearrange your media to accommodate this little foible, then the PS3 will only look in one level of subfolders. So for example, each album in my classical music collection is kept in a separate folder, and they are all kept in a 'classical' folder inside my music collection. The PS3, bless it's freakish little semiconducting heart, will look as far as 'music\classical\' and no further. So anything in a subfolder of 'classical' - which is pretty much everything - is invisible.

There is a way round this - pressing the green triangle button and selecting the 'view all' option means you can browse the entire folder structure - but really, this is very poor interface design.

Anyway, that's enough of a rant. It works great as a DVD player, though. And I kind of like it, for reasons which are not really clear to me - I mean, the interface is only moderately good, and aesthetically the external design is weirdly unresolved. So I won't be sending it back. But I'm pretty disappointed. I can only live in hope that Sony's software engineers will remedy some of these failings in future firmware updates.

There is still one radical alternative. Sony actually provide official support for those who wish to install Linux on the PS3 and use it as a computer. I could, if all else fails, install Ubuntu or Yellow Dog Linux, and use the PS3 as a media server that way... but I have one question which I have not yet found the answer to, and that is this: Linux and the PS3's native operating system need separate partitions of the internal hard drive. If I put movies etc. on one partition, can the other OS see it? If I put all my stuff on the PS3 side, will a Linux media server be able to find it? I don't know. In any case, turning to Linux to avoid fiddly little OS foibles seems like going from the frying pan into the industrial furnace.

So, I'm putting my faith in Sony's software engineers. Oh dear.

(via core77, which has a particularly good front three pages right now)

In praise of foil! Yay for aluminum foil. If you can read the comments and keep your temper while all around you are repeating themselves (then you're an Internet Zen Master, my son, as Rudyard Kipling never wrote)... like I said, if you can read the comments without losing it, there are some interesting insights there too. Use a bit of aluminium foil to rejuvenate a stripped thread in a hole in a piece of wood? Who'da guessed?

I've been doing a bit of DIY, gradually (oh so gradually) doing up the flat so that it no longer looks like a rather tired 1970s DIY magazine centrefold. (What it looks like now, I don't want to speculate on). Just finished this set of shelves last weekend, and I'm pretty pleased with them. I wanted a set of shelves I could climb up - I was bored with having top shelves which I never used because I couldn't be bothered to fetch a ladder - so I designed and built these. On the left, you can see my original computer mockup; and to get the picture on the right, I had some fun with my camera and some very long exposure times.


As long as you never get close enough to see the quality of the build, they look pretty good. Happy with that.

Ceci n'est pas un Philippe Starck paintbrush. In reality, c'est un infuser de tea.

I've backed off a bit from the habit now, but at one point I was getting worried about the depth of my tea fetish. Seems I needn't have worried - however low you go, there are always those who've taken it to the next level. And some of them are gadget obsessed. Coolhunting has collected a bunch of these little gizmos. Personally, I thought I was doing okay with my Bodum Assam teapot and my beloved long handled infusers... not for me the variable-temperature electric kettle from Nothing But Tea, which does sound like every tea fetishists must-have...

Someday every home will have one... but that day isn't yet, judging from the mixed reviews for the CompuCarve. But as the guys on core77 point out, the very fact that this is being offered at all - and marketed as a tool for the layman - is quite cool. And at the bargain price of $1900, too. Hopefully, they'll release a better one at about the same time that I can afford a workshop.

Billed as Sydney's greenest building, it's just the latest ecobuilding to be bragged about. Yeah yeah... but what caught my attention was the big fat sandstone wall in the atrium. When (yeah, when, not if) I design my own house, I've always promised myself it would have a big fat thermal mass in it to regulate the temperature. Imagine doing that with a couple of massive blocks like this... yeah, I'm so doing that.

Okay - this is Boris...um... Boris VI, I guess. He picks up about 80% of the muck on the floor, and can negotiate pretty much anything on my floor, including the sheepskin rug (the lizards still give him a bit of trouble, though).

Boris VI is a mini-Boris - I've stripped out all the gear trains, directly connected the motor units to the wheels and the floorbrushes, and used smaller wheels so he now has a much smaller footprint.

I'm declaring him finished - considering what a difficult problem this is - the different obstacles, then different types of stuff to pick up - I reckon he'll do. As long as he doesn't come into contact with his nemesis (the phone cable) then he's fine. So I'm declaring him done, his field testing finished, and now he can get on with cleaning the fliippin' floor. Get to it, robot! (Bless his little metal heart).

I want to monitor my domestic power consumption. Now there are any number of gadgets that will do this for a reasonable price - plug-in things that will tell you how much an individual appliance is using, or monitors that sit by your electricity meter. Being a cheapskate, though, can anyone tell me why I don't buy a cheap clamp meter from Maplin, which I can clamp round any wire in the place?

I suppose it will rely on certain assumptions, like fairly constant input voltage and fairly constant consumption from my bits and pieces, but as an energy saving measure, can anyone see any flaws in my plan? Do you think it will be sufficiently accurate?

core77 covered this debate on apartment therapy, which asked the question: when you've worn cloths once, what do you do with them?

Most people (although judging from their comments there seem to be several exceptions) are reluctant to mix them up with the clean stuff, or chuck them onto the dirty washing pile prematurely. I guess the standard approach is to drape them over a chair or something (that's what I do, anyway), on the assumption that they're going to be worn again soon. Of course, this means that every morning I transfer a big pile of clothing from the chair to my bed and back again while I rummage for things to wear. Other approaches seem to include using coat racks, clearing a space in your closet, or hooks on the backs of doors (I'm thinking that's not going to cope with the sheer quantity of clothing my chair has to deal with).

I have a special interst in this from two perspectives: I'm planning to redecorate my bedroom in the near future, and if I could design out that big pile of clothing that would be a bonus; and also, as the core77 article points out, it's bizarre that nobody has designed an item of furniture which deals with this thorny (and pretty much universal) problem.

So, in the spirit of ethnographic research (or just sheer nosiness), I'm curious - how do you deal with this issue?

i have a couple of white walls, currently unadorned, so how 'bout this for my flat?

I've been looking for a home automation system that will (a) be very low power so I can justify it for just one light and turning the wirless network on and off, and (b) can be controlled from my mobile phone.

There are several very basic systems that satisfy (a); only just found a system which satisfies (b), which is the Pluto home system.
Bad news: it requires an always-on Linux server, so is almost certainly more power hungry than the network;
Good news: if you don't want their hardware, you can get the software for free, as an open source project! Hmmm... pretty sure I can scare up a Linux server from somewhere...

Being an eco-aware gadget freak is a bit of a trial at times. When it comes to electricity and power consumption, I have an eco-angel on one shoulder telling me to cut down, and a gadget devil on the other which just wants more more more! My bete noire at the moment is my wireless network. This sits happily under the sofa in an always-on arrangement, which is wonderfully handy for two reasons: first, it's always on, and second, it uses up a couple of inaccessible power points (and the position of the cable modem limits it a bit anyway). Unfortunately, such profligacy gets my eco-angel wagging reproachful fingers.

The obvious answer (to a gadget freak) is a remote control power point. These are relatively cheap and come with a remote, so I could turn the whole caboodle off at the mains without having to crawl around under the sofa. But it's another remote, which is, well, just dull.

The thing is, if it were just the network then I could probably live with it. But I have another little domestic bete noire which I'd like to be able to fix. The stairwell outside my door is very dark, and although I have an external light, the switch for it is inside the flat, which isn't very handy when you're fumbling with your keys in the pitch black corridor. So, I'd like to be able to turn this light on from outside. Again, a remote would be handy, but I'm not about to take a remote with me when I have a bluetooth enabled mobile phone and a PDA which does bluetooth and wifi!

So. First off, the whole point is to save electricity, so an always-on PC home automation system is ludicrous. What I want is this:

1. Turn on my outside light at a command from my phone (or PDA);
2. Turn on my wireless network (which can be done just by turning it on at the mains) via a similar signal.
3. To have the ability to turn off mains AC sockets. My life seems to run on batteries, which is great except for the chargers that I absentmindedly leave plugged in when they're not charging anything! Turning these off without bending down would be a boon.

That's it. Doesn't seem like an outrageous list to me. But can I find anything which will do it? No. Home automation systems seem to assume that it's okay to lug another remote around with you, which just irritates me when I have two devices perfectly capable of performing this function.

The table is now a much more realistic glass; the speed is slower. Other than that, much the same as the last one really. Still not happy with the focal length on the camera - objects may appear larger than they really are!

As I may have mentioned (really?) I've just become a homeowner for the first time. This virtual model is a little project I started off before I'd moved in, to check out how the sofa would fit, work out whether I really wanted to change the lighting in the hall, etc. Now I've moved in, I guess it may still come in useful. Maybe.

It's not exactly TV quality video, and it'll flash by awful quick - sorry about that. But if I fiddle with it any more I'll never post it, and I have more important things to do (like clean the damn place), so consider this a first draft which I'll fix up eventually. Of course, the real view out the window is nowhere near as nice... but hey, in this version, I can make the view exactly what I damn well please. So I made it nice.

The actual model is very basic - I scanned in the floor plan and extruded it. Dead easy. The thing that takes the time is getting the lighting right.

I've only been in my new flat a week, and a bird has managed to drop into one of the wall spaces. I panicked a bit at first, thinking I had a really impressive rat infestation, but rats don't make slapping, flapping noises. Now I can hear it scrabbling pathetically against the plastic grille on my wall vent. There's no way of getting to it from outside (I mean it - it's a blank wall), and no way of getting the grille off without destroying the vent (no visible screw holes or anything, and nowhere to conveniently insert a Stanley knife).

The stupid thing is clearly injured and will die whatever.

Wot the blazes do I do? Let it die where it is, and hope it doesn't smell too bad? Or do I make a mess of the wall in order to free it, so it can die in the garden? It can't be that big - from the sound of it, I'd guess it's a grownup starling or tit or somesuch. At the moment, all I've done is cover up the vent so no light can get in, which seems to have calmed it a bit. But it's been there at least a day now.

So in the meantime, it just scrabbles around at the bottom of a dark hole waiting for death, like some ghastly metaphor for something.

Not a particularly engaging title, I admit... ;)

1. 3D laser scanner. I do a bit of this stuff at work, but I came across a couple of websites with some fascinating homebrew laser scanners, for making 3D models of Things around the Home. I would love to make one. No practical reason, other than the learning experience, I guess! As examples we have crazily homebrew, or slightly more sensible homebrew.
2. Political cartoonery. I had this great idea for a cartoon of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. (This will be completely meaningless to anyone outside the UK, but what the hey). Entitled 'the Carrot and the Stick', Tony will be this Ken Dodd-like figure, grinning maniacally and brandishing a tickling stick (note for those lucky enough to live outside the UK: tickling stick = a feather duster). Gordon will stand just behind, wearing a bulky rabbit costume and a face like thunder, and generally looking extremely threatening. Cradled in his hands, where a nightclub bouncer might cradle his baseball bat, will be an enormous carrot.
3. Design Dream House. My parents built their own house. I seriously want to do that. I know I could, and it would be brilliant. I wish I'd done architecture instead of design.
4. Write book. Actually I've already done this once; it was science fiction, and I wrote it for the Games Workshop people. They didn't publish it; the plot got a little complicated. I found it way too difficult to write a straight-up blood-and-guts gothic heroism story - hey, I'm a complicated guy. My characters were complicated, okay? My hero went mad. That just doesn't do it for your basic nine-year-old Space Marine fanatic. Someday I'll come back to it and rewrite; more likely I'll try and start from scratch again.
5. Lego robot for sweeping floors. Preferably solar powered. Got all excited about the new Lego robot sets which are coming out in August (ish). Need to justify it somehow. Since I have no carpets, a simple sweeping robot that I could fire-and-forget (like, forever) should be adequate. Can't afford to go out and blow the necessary cash right now, though... but you can now download design software for designing stuff in Lego . How crazy is that? (Mind you, the software doesn't get a stunningly good press).