September | 2008 | Buttered Side Up

A few years ago (*cough*) I bought a nice bike from a man called ‘Peter Bundy’. A man obviously good with his hands he built it for me, painted it red and sent me on my way.

Peter Bundy is a bike framebuilder from NSW, Australia. He used to own this little suburban shop in Guildford where he built a large number of track frames for the state track teams as well as a number of other of the top riders in the state. So people a lot better than I was ever going to be. I understand that he relocated to Riverwood on the south side of Sydney. You can find his website at http://www.peterbundycycles.com.au/.

Of course it needs a service, and an update (it’s without cleats because at the time they were hugely more expensive than I could afford!) but after some pumping of tyres and oiling of chains it appears to be in pretty good shape.

Jo has already said I’m not allowed to ride to work in North Sydney, but perhaps a couple of trips around the suburb are in order next week.

Back in November last year I started this blog about digital photo frames and at the time, I wanted one. They were *everywhere* and retailers were certain they were going to be the big thing of Christmas 2007. They were in catalogues, on billboards, in product placement on tv and even advertised on the new plasma displays in the public areas of my local Westfields.

These days you can get them anywhere, from Instant IT ($80) to MSY ($90), from CameraWarehouse ($100) to Kmart ($120), and from your local photo development place ($180) to your local post office ($200). And that’s just the 7″ ones with plain frames.

So after some investigation, I came up with my requirements:

minimum 800×600 resolution
minimum 8″ viewable
wireless connectivity
landscape orientation, auto scaling up to 12mb files
support for jpg, avi (xvid and divx), gif
touchscreen options for next and previous images
not more than 1″ thick
no ugly power cable
integration with my Logitech harmonyOne remote

Too much to ask for? In a word, yes. The clinchers are the power cable, touchscreen and for the money, the resolution. Other annoying things include how deep they are physically (as opposed to emotionally, we’ll get to that later). You could mount them on the wall but most of them would stick out at least an inch throwing a shadow onto the wall from the room lighting. Hey that black one above would shade a small town.

The other issue for me was they were all just too ugly. And in this age of Apple Air laptops and form over function, that’s important. Who ever thought plastic was a good frame choice for your favourite photos? Or MDF painted a colour which is one of the few that wood can’t naturally occur, like lime green. Purple. Or ‘rosewood stain’ (think High5 red).

So instead of a digital photo frame, I went for a Sony Bravia X series 40″ LCD tv. Which I’m well aware doesn’t satisfy any of the above requirements, it exceeds them. It’s bigger (40″), has more pixels (1920×1080) and with a Beyonwiz S1 satisfies all my media requirements (almost any graphic format, almost any video format). Just don’t tell my wife about the cost difference, and if you have to, work it out on a pixel to pixel ratio (over $3 per pixel vs $0.80 per pixel… cool huh!).

I worked out I didn’t need another screen in the loungeroom, and when I thought about it any other room either.

Study : already has enough screens to look at pictures on
Dining room : no power point near the piano or other flat surfaces
Kitchen : Still planning on mounting a kitchen laptop for recipe access and music, a photo frame doesnt give me this
Garage : uh, no
Bedrooms : and have a constant lcd screen on? no thanks.

There are some interesting uses of LCD screens to show images popping up however, like on your Internet Fridge (what? you don’t have one? why not? a fad? NO WAY!).

A few other options I’ve seen include LCD panels which make up the main sections of a room divider…. a traditional “screen”. I like this concept, especially the idea of putting photos of people naked in silhouette on two, then a silhouette of someone with an axe on the third panel.

Of course you can go too far with LCD technology, it’s a large draw of power and surely isn’t really making our lives that much better? I’m a big fan of LCD over plasma for sure, just walk into any Telstra shop and up to the plasma displays to feel the heat they push off.

I can’t help but think this is a complete waste of energy, and contributing to the decline of a liveable atmosphere and the rise of the worlds oceans. I mean really, what’s the point of these displays? Wouldn’t a banner lit with fluro’s do the same job?

I don’t mean to pick on Telstra, as there are many more companies who are bringing more and more screens into shop display windows and adding LCD and plasma technologies to digital signage.

But just as I decided I didn’t need another 8″ LCD screen in the house, perhaps we can cut down the number of plasma displays in our lives? Perhaps for Christmas this year we could advertise using recyclable mediums (magazines for instance) and start to reduce the number of screens we need invading our lives.