Tag Archives: head voices review

Island Style [Weekly Head Voices #27]

Posted on July 26, 2010 | 4 Comments

(This post introduces the new Weekly Head Voices Nerd Index, or WHV-NI, a metric by which you can see if you should read a post or not. See this page for an explanation of the WHV-NI. The NI of the first part of this post is 0/5, whilst the NI of the part starting with the accepted paper is 3/5, also due to the extensive Head Voices Review at the end.)

Kids, I’m still here! It just that the holiday season is here, and I’m feeling all strange, but I’m super-busy, mostly because I have to put oodles of time into a cool new augmented reality project for the new computer science first years that will be arriving in the first week of September. There’s also the complicated issue of WHV-regularity vs. worthwhile content: I really like entering your visual cortex on a weekly basis, but I prefer doing so with at least some kernel of information value.

We spent some fantastic quality time, perfectly scheduled right in the middle of the Dutch heat-wave (harr harr), on Texel, beautiful little island on the North Sea. Here it is on the map:


View Larger Map

… and here it is in real life:

One fabulous unit of my genetic offspring running on what appears to be our private beach on the island, but wasn't. It was just that nice.

Here’s a nice path on that same island, just because I hope it makes you all nostalgic and pensive:

This photo makes you feel like you should go somewhere mystical, right? Photos of mysterious paths on islands do have that tendency. Check out those clouds, man...

I can do nothing but very strongly recommend that you visit an island when the weather is perfect.

(WARNING, NERD INDEX 3/5 starts here!)

In other great news, Stef’s paper on example-based exploration of multi-fields was accepted by the journal Computers & Graphics. Get it, read it, CITE IT:

S. Busking, C. P. Botha, and F. H. Post, Example-based interactive illustration of multi-field datasets, Computers & Graphics, 2010.

In spite of the fact that my TPN has not yet been able to deliver that jingle he promised, the Head Voices Review simply has to discuss a number of items that have recently been extensively analysed and, err, reviewed. We make use of the proven HVR classification system:

  • Samsung SyncMaster P2370 23 inch 1920×1080 (HD) screen for my home workstation at € 185 including shipping: AWESOME. Many many pixels. Two browsers adjacent.
  • Philips GoGear Ariaz MP3 player with 8G memory at € 70: MOSTLY AWESOME. I can copy music to AND FROM the player on Linux and Windows, no extra software required. Sound quality great, good in-ears. It’s a shame that the slightest perturbation to the ear-phone plug causes audible disturbance, so no carrying this in your super-tight Mika jeans pockets.
  • Sony PS3 Eye USB camera at € 40: AWESOME. Based on a number of websites, we got this camera at work for doing augmented reality work, and oh my, is it fast! Just to make it an even more attractive deal, the lens is adjustable between 54 and 75 defrees of field of view.
  • Nokia E71 at any price: DIVINELY AWESOME. Many of you know that I love my phone.  We’ve been together for almost two years now, and I thought that I might be falling out of love, until I ordered a new battery. Once again it manages 4 days on a single charge. Other smartphone users come to me with jumper leads when they run out of juice, and then I just smile as I jump-start their pitiful fruit-themed bricks. I have also temporarily stopped lusting after the latest and greatest Android-running keyboard-toting battery-draining super-phones. Together with the battery life, the keyboard makes this e71 the ideal phone for the socially-adept, attractive nerd with stamina. YEAH.

So boys and girls, that’s it for this week’s edition. I have to go jump-start some phones, and also do a bit of work on a slightly longer term blog project that I hope to finish sometime in the next few weeks: It’s a post called “The Human Animal Post” and with it I hope to perturb, ever so gently, some of your brain cells.

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Weekly Head Voices #18: Refactor my dogfood.

Posted on March 21, 2010 | 4 Comments

Welcome all, to this, the 18th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, in which I discuss a number of issues that mostly have nothing specific to do with the 11th week of 2010, but which might or might not have crossed my mind during that time! Issues include good news on the EuroVis 2010 front, a new edition of the Head Voices Review featuring my completely unexpected stay in a 7 Tesla MRI scanner (as a test subject, of course)  and finally some nerdy backyard philosophy dealing with the well-known itch to Rewrite Everything From Scratch, Because What’s There Now Sucks.

First, because I have no other visual element for this week’s post, and  because I am, as you might have noticed, a method blogger, I present you with probably the best chatroulette.com improv I’ve ever seen so far. For those of you who have been completely asleep the past few weeks, chatroulette is a new site that’s been taking the interwebs by storm. The site pairs up random strangers for webcam chats. One is allowed to move to the next random stranger with the click of a buttom (resulting in the new English verb “to next” someone..). Random hilarity (and often perversity) ensues! Here’s that mostly SFW and brilliant piano improv:

YouTube Preview Image
(The original video had to be pulled, after 4 million views, due to some YouTube issues. Merton, pianist, has posted this new version. Thanks to Francois for the heads-up!)

Back to business, we have just heard the great news that our two EuroVis 2010 submissions have been finally accepted for publication.  The articles are:

  1. S. Busking, C.P. Botha, and F.H. Post, “Dynamic Multi-View Exploration of Shape Spaces,” Computer Graphics Forum, 2010.
  2. P.R. Krekel, E.R. Valstar, J. de Groot, F.H. Post, R.G. Nelissen, and C.P. Botha, “Visual Analysis of Multi-Joint Kinematic Data,” Computer Graphics Forum, 2010.

Fantastic work you first authors you! Remember people: YOU HAVE TO CITE THESE SOON, AND YOU HAVE TO CITE THEM OFTEN! This also means that a number of us will be going to Bordeaux in June (I can imagine worse places to go to in June) to mingle with other scientists and to drink really good red wine.

That good news brings us to the influential WHV feature, the Head Voices Review! (My TPN is still working on the new jingle.  Hopefully it’ll be on time for our joint Vodka review feature.) In this edition, I’ll be reviewing the Philips 7 Tesla MRI scanner and the JBL Duet-200 computer speakers.

On Friday, I unexpectedly had the pleasure of trying out a state-of-the-art 7 Tesla Philips MRI scanner, as a test subject. I can report that the bore, although small, is quite comfortable. However, test subjects with claustrophobic tendencies should probably look elsewhere.  Scanning can be quite noisy, especially when a diffusion weighted imaging protocol is applied that involves scanning in 162 different gradient directions (to study the structural connectivity in my brain). However, the music that gets piped in between scanning sessions more than makes up. After scanning, it was scientifically confirmed that there is indeed a brain housed in my skull, an observation that pleasantly surprised me. Soon I hope to be able to post visualisations, made by one of our MedVis ninjas, of the structural connections in my brain.

All in all, if you have a few million euros lying around, this piece of kit is highly recommended.  To summarise:

  • Philips 7T MRI: AWESOME.

In a previous review, I was quite negative about the Logitech S3-30 speakers, for a large part due to the absolute mess of cables that it comes with. This past week I took delivery of the new JBL Duet-200 speakers I ordered, for the grand amount of 30 eurobucks, to replace it. The JBL is a single unit containing two speakers, something which might be seen as a drawback, but which I consider an advantage. In spite of its compact appearance, it packs quite a base and more than sufficient volume.  In addition, there are exactly two (2) cables: One for the power supply, and one for the audio. I can only hope that Logitech contracts JBL on their next PC speaker product design. My only (minor) gripe is that the JBL-supplied audio cable is only about 40cm long. All in all:

  • JBL Duet-200 at € 30 price-point: AWESOME.

MRI scanners and PC speakers: No product too big, no product too small for the Head Voices Review!

Finally, it’s time for some backyard philosophy.  This week, it’s a brief point of really nerdy philosophy, although I think the principles apply to some non-nerdy activities as well. Software developers, as well as many other engineering types, often reach a point during working on a project, when they have a hard-to-control urge to trash the whole thing and start from scratch.  There is usually a very strong belief that the project / software / product can be designed much better by starting from scratch.

It turns out that this is an insidious and mostly incorrect belief, for a large part due to all the knowledge present in the existing “ugly” product that will get thrown out. Engineers easily underestimate the importance of this knowledge. It turns out, much as we don’t like to hear this, that refactoring is, nine times out of ten, a far better answer than rewriting from scratch. Experienced developers know this, and are mostly able to suppress the rewrite from scratch itch.

Joel Spolsky wrote a really good essay on this phenomenon. Go read it!

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Weekly Head Voices #16: Go Go Gadget!

Posted on March 9, 2010 | 9 Comments

This post is dedicated to my man Helmut in Vienna.  Your appreciation is much appreciated!

In this edition, I report on my productivity and activities of the past week,  extol the time-saving virtues of iGoogle and conclude with a new WHV feature: The Head Voices Review!  Unfortunately, due to a chronic lack of sleep, there will be no backyard philosophical contribution.  We hope to be back on track for the next edition.

During week 9 of 2010, the temporal context of the sixteenth edition of the Weekly Head Voices, I spent 2 hours preparing for lectures, 3 hours lecturing and 12 hours in scheduled meetings.  I spent a significant amount of time assisting five of our MedVis Ninjas shepherding papers out the door, so now you have to cross your fingers that we get 100% accept rate, else the Ninjas get really angry.  Counting up to the weekend, and without any cheating, I completed 22 GTD tasks, again one task more than last week.  If this continues, I will eventually attain infinite productivity, so you better watch out, ok?

Noteworthy happenings include two Skype Video meetings, which worked really well and saved me a significant amout of travel time. These meetings would be even better if my correspondents would invest in webcams, allowing me to look at more than just my own face during the discussion. In other news, I’ve been spending even more time futzing around with processing, resulting in a first blog post detailing the installation of said library with video capture and augmented reality support on 64 bit Linux machines.

The main topic of this post is gadgets. I’ll be talking about two kinds of gadgets, so first I’d like to start with a screenshot of my iGoogle:

iGoogle your twitter.

I’ve been aware of iGoogle, and used it as a poor man’s aggregator before getting addicted to Google Reader, but never really appreciated the possibilities.  In short, you can add all kinds of web applications, called gadgets, to any number of tabs (each tab is a page), thus mixing and matching for example the social networking websites you use on one single web page.  Because I’d recently been wasting far too much time switching between twitter, facebook (everytime someone mentions facebook, I somehow reflexively and compulsively open the site, hence wasting more precious minutes of my life, which at my advanced age is no small matter), gmail and compulsive news checking, I decided to compress my time wasting into a single page visit. So far, it seems to be saving me a number of minutes every day, minutes that I’m saving for later…

Finally, it pleases me greatly to be able to introduce a new feature on the WHV: The Head Voices Review! [As soon as my TPN completely masters Ableton, I'm hoping he'll make me a nice theme song that I can insert here.] Some of you might know that this blog has a rich history in reviewing gadgets. See for example this post where, after weeks of investigation, I posted an in-depth review of not one, but TWO cheap-skate headphones.  To summarise:

  • Sennheiser PX20: SUCKS.
  • Philips HP-200: AWESOME.

To kick off this first edition, I’m going to discuss three more computer audio gadgets.  First off, the Logitech S3-30 2.1 (that means stereo speakers with sub-woofer to my non-audiophile readers) computer speaker set with built-in amplifier.  I’ve used these extensively for five years now (purely for the purposes of reviewing them of course) and have set out my conclusions in the table below:

  • Logitech S3-30: SUCKS BADLY.

I base my conclusion on the sub-par design of these speakers, especially in terms of the cabling.  Below is an artist’s rendition of the cable design for these speakers:

Artist's rendition of Logitech S3-30 speaker set cable design. Note the bird's nests.

As you can see, it’s as if the engineers had been challenged to see how much cable they could waste in producing these speakers, and as a side-challenge, how they could ensure that any desk carrying these speakers would instantly turn into an unmanageable mess of cables in various states of entanglement.  Why why why didn’t they read this really important paper?

I have recently ordered the JBL Duet 200 to replace the S3-30.  After at least five more years of extensive testing, I will document its performance in a future Head Voices Review.

On the topic of Logitech, a number of my screencasts up to now have been performed using a Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.5mm jack plug, purchased especially for that purpose.  Now that I’ve also purchased the quite affordable (6 bucks for the whole headset, that means headphone AND microphone!) yet very stylish Sweex HM400 headset, also for recording screencasts, I can present the following comparative review:

  • Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.mm jack plug: SUCKS.
  • Sweex HM400 headset: AWESOME.  Wait till you hear my deep baritone narrating the next screencast.  I expect that it should sound almost exactly like this:
YouTube Preview Image

Err, that’s it for the first edition of the Head Voices Review! I don’t think that you have to worry too much about the next edition arriving anytime soon.  Here at HVR headquarters we take our sweet time, as we pride ourselves in jumping to all of the wrong conclusions, all of the time.

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