I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.
For the project the following materials was used:
The wood was bought at Bauhaus and the paint at the local paint shop.
After we carried the board up the stairs it was quite clear that it was perhaps a little too big for the wall. But after some rearranging we got it to fit 🙂
Here’s a picture of the screen being painted.
I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.
Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.
Having used the Nokia 770 for a while now, I have some tips and tricks to make the device even more useful.
There is no included calendar program by default so one has to install external to provide this functionality. At iola we use the Google calender service pretty extensively so this was a requirement for the application. I tried installing Dates without much luck, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to add a calendar? Anyway, next up was the GPE calendar which was recommended to me on #maemo. I installed it and this special debian package which fixes some bugs in part that handles the subscription. Viewing the calendars is working great, it easily handles my 3 calendars, but it doesn’t seem to handle adding new appointments.
To access other IM services one needs to use transports or install gaim. Jaim.at provides icq and msn transports and an easy way to register with them. The only problem seems to be the lack of renaming in the default jabber on the nokia 770. It’s quite to know all your IM buddies icq ids 😉 I think I’ll try gaim.
The last tip is getting Wikipedia to use the whole screen. The default theme has a menu in the left side of the screen which takes up quite a lot of screen space. By installing a new theme, one can customize it better for the Nokia 770 display making it much more pleasant to read Wikipedia articles.
It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications 🙂
I saw the documentary The Corporation today. Extremely interesting movie. A very cool thing is that they created a divx version of the movie and is distributing it on bittorrent making it very easy to get. They then plead people to donate at the start of the movie. Interesting concept, I really hope it works for them. The movie touches a number of very interesting topics related to corporations, including governments, patents, science, marketing, environmentalism etc., besides explaining in a very clear way what corporations are.