As I said in my previous post about my new surround system, the Pioneer RCS-606H, I would come back with a review after testing it out.
After trying it out for almost two weeks I’ve ended up loving it - and disliking it a bit.
First of all the positive sides:

• Good sound!
• It looks good!
• Automatic setup of the system with a microphone.

And lots of negative stuff:

• The remote feels quite cheap - the bottom sliding cover is quite loose and seems like it will fall off any day.
• Lots of buttons on the remote I wish wasn’t hidden under the cover and some that could have been hidden.
• Do not store radio channels automatically.
• Only plays region 2 DVDs.
• “one touch copy” do not work - supposedly because my television do not support it, but there is no documentation of what kind of functionality the television must have to support it.
• Ugly menus. Seems like they were designed back in 1996.
• The Jukebox-functionality is crap! Terrible overview of the music you got on the hard drive and what a mess it is to actually copy music over from a external hard drive or DVD. First of all it only supports FAT drives, so no chance for me to connect any of my external drives, and secondary it only allows a maximum of 999 files -or- 99 folders with music. What the heck is going on - don’t Pioneer think I’ll fit more than 999 MP3s on the 150GB internal hard drive?
• No mute-button - would it cost Pioneer that much to implement something that simple?
• The TV-guide system “Guide Plus” is of course not supported with the channels I have (normal antenna)

Seems perhaps like the negative side is a lot bigger than the positive, but it’s not. All-in-all I’m quite pleased with it. All the negative stuff is just details - it’s good sound I want after all. It would however be smart of Pioneer to look at the design of the menus - the system is so much better than it looks like when you’re browsing through the horrible menus.

Bought myself a home cinema system today to increase my listening & viewing pleasure of music and TV-shows/movies.

My lucky choice was Pioneer RCS-606H which has everything. Just let me list some of the features;

• 160GB harddrive recorder
• USB input to connect cameras, external harddrives, memory sticks and so on
• DV-input to record and show movies directly from a camcorder (which I don’t have though)
• Lots of input and output connectors
• Automatic setup of the speakers with a microphone
• A killer design - just look at the images!
• Cheap - got it with a friend-discount

Just need a huge (50″ +++) LCD screen to match it now

Won’t get it before Monday, so will get back next week with a small review of my first experience with it.

Wulffmorgenthaler again! Yeah, I know it, but I love the comic strips.

And if you love them as much as me, you would probably like to view all of them easily, and not just one by one directly from their website.

Therefore I wrote a script that allows you to download all the comic strips easily. The script is written in PHP, and you need access to a webserver running PHP (or just on your own computer having PHP with minor adjustments to the script). Upload the script to any folder of your choosing. The script will attempt to create the folder ‘wulffmorgenthaler’ in the same folder as the script, but unless the access rights are correct you have to create this folder yourself.

There are 3 ways you can run the script:

1. Access the script directly from the place you put it (e.g. http://domain.com/wulffmorgenthaler.php). This way all images from the first image available at http://wulffmorgenthaler.com will be downloaded until the last one (4th of August 2003).
2. Access the script by adding ‘?start=url‘ to the URL in pt. 1. This way you start downloading comic strips from the date of your choosing.
3. If your download was aborted somehow, you can just point your browser to the same URL as in pt. 1 and it will continue from the last place it stopped.

Download the wulffmorgenthaler.phps source code. (remember to change the extension to .php)

The script isn’t perfect, of course, but it did the trick for me. You’re welcome to change it to whatever your needs are.

Check out iBar - intelligent surface system - interactive bar.

It’s a really cool technology from Switzerland where a interactive surface generates circles around drinks, connects drinks with lines and even connects hands placed on it.

Check especially out the video they’ve put up on the website which shows the technology in practice

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