This is a quick tip for anyone using a 1080p TV/monitor for their computer display. Odds are good you don’t like the look of the fonts. The problem is that a 32” (or 42” or 52”) screen was not meant to be seen from 18” away. Add to that that 1920 pixels across a 32” screen is only about 72 dpi which is much lower than most modern computer screens.

You could try to tweak the ClearText settings but you won’t get what you want.

Simply lower the TV “sharpness” setting ! Yes, rather than try to make the computer accommodate the display, let the display just blur things a little. I turned the setting down to “10” and things look much better.

I think Popcorn Hour shot themselves in the foot when they launched their next generation C-200 media player. For about $300 (US) you get a box that does what it does and nothing more, has not native disk storage, has a small but fervent following and is not hugely customizable.

On the other hand, for $330 (US) you can get the Acer Aspire Revo with the ATOM 330 (dual core), ION hardware accelerated video processing, 2GB RAM, 160GB drive (plus a cute and usable wireless keyboard and mouse) and for $0 and about 10 minutes with a very easy guide, you can have a great XBMC media player that can do just about anything you want because it is standard PC hardware in a tiny little box. (OK, so that was too much of a run on sentence, but you get the idea.) Oh, if $330 is too much, there is a $200 version that has the same graphics !

What surprised me was that the Revo came with Windows 7 64bit Home edition. What surprised me more was that the obvious way of using XBMC was not the fastest or the easiest.

I first tried installing XBMC for Windows and it looked to be working perfectly. Then I tried playing one of my HD TV shows (a 1.1GB h.264 MKV file) and it shuddered – badly.

Next I tried the special DSPlayer version of XBMC that is setup to use the ION graphics. After about 5 hours of messing around with guides and trial and error, I threw in the towel.

Finally, I downloaded XBMC Live and using a handy guide, spent less than 10 minutes to create a bootable SD card (could have as easily been a USB stick) and had the Revo flying along perfectly. I even tried an action scene in an HD movie (performance hit 8Mb/sec video stream) from my NAS and the Revo was not even breaking a sweat – CPU(s) were about 20%-25% load.

My final setup – all anyone sees is the TV and me using the iPhone as a remote …

• Acer Aspire Revo R3610-U9022 (hidden behind the TV)
• network connection (the Revo has wireless ‘N’ but I don’t)
• HD (1080p) flat panel TV connected to the Revo with a single HDMI cable
• wireless mouse and keyboard (bundled with the Revo) (hidden in a draw) for the occasional upgrade or new feature
• NAS for most of my video
• XBMC Live installed to the Revo’s hard drive
• iPhone XBMC Remote (collect3)

So, my advice ? Get the Revo. Get XBMC Live. Try it with the SD or USB instructions. If you like it, format the drive and install it for good. Later, if you want, you can follow other guides and install downloaders for podcast, streaming video, and more. Even if you don’t leverage the Revo for all of it’s idle time and other capabilities, it is still a great deal for a great media player.

To be continued …

I was surprised to read the teaser for the March 2010 Car and Driver article on removing blind spots. Surprised because I was taught this by my driver education teach in 1980 ! Perhaps 30 years is not too long for a good safety tip to move mainstream. (fig 1 & 4 show the recommended views while fig 2 & 5 show what most drivers actually use).

 
photo credit and full article: Car and Driver

From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.