Some of you may remember the Fiat Cinquecento from the 50s-70s. (I don’t, but my student colleague from Italy reminded me. Thank you, Enrico!) Abarth, a tuning company in the Fiat group, have no put their hands on the new new Fiat 500. The result is what you can see on the picture, a little 1.4 liter 16v turbo charged 135 horsepower Scorpion. The car will be shown at the 2008 Geneva International Motor Show later this month.
Not everyone is too happy with Windows Vista. Microsoft has actually been forced, during a lawsuit going on these days, to admit that they allowed some hardware manufacturers (after pressure from Intel) to brand them selves as “Windows Vista Capable” back in 2006, even though they obviously weren’t. I guess the one on the picture is one of those… (I apologize for the bad picture quality, but I only had my cell phone available at the moment).
As you may have noticed the HD format war is finally over. Toshiba and HD DVD has retired from the market and Sony can celebrate their revenge over VHS. Hopefully most manufacturers will now launch products and prices can come down to a reasonable level. Personally I am waiting for a Denon or Marantz, but any input is welcome. But what will happen to SACD, one of the other format victories from Sony? (Well, Sony has nearly managed to kill this format them selves, but that’s an other story).
So what did actually happen? One important aspect is of course Sony’s support for Blu-ray as a standard feature in all PlayStation 3 game consoles. But more important is probably the major studios’ support for Blu-ray, also from those initially supporting HD DVD. Without any content HD DVD couldn’t stand any chance.
But despite the victory, Blu-ray is still premature. PlayStation 3 was delayed several times waiting for the Blu-ray technology. And even if there already a significant number of players out there, only a few support the Blu-ray profile 2.0 which is what could be considered the first full specification. Blu-ray profile 1.1 was released only to get reduce the head start of HD DVD, but should probably never been released, because it is only with profile 2.0 you get full interactivity and ethernet return channel functionality. But anyway, the pre-release was very necessary to cope with the competition from HD DVD and it obviously succeeded.
Congratulations Sony!
I have been working on a analysis on Volvo Cars at school lately. (Yes, I am studying in Gothenburg, Sweden, the home town of Volvo). Soon we had a discussion about whether Volvo is a dull car or not. Of course it is! Just take a look at the Volvo V70 station wagon to see what I mean. But then, in my search to see if there is a slight hope to find something more exciting I dumped into the Volvo you see on the picture above. It is a Volvo C30 modified and tuned by IPD. It doesn’t only look great. It performs great as well. The 2.5-liter turbo engine is boosted to 384 horsepower. And it of course has a Alpine DVD/CD/MP3 player with iPOD integration, satellite radio with live traffic and touch-screen navigation with voice control.
So who said Volvo is dull?
As you may remember from previous postings I have ripped all my music and stored it as audio files on my network storage server. So, you might ask, what are you gonna do with it there? Well, I agree, music is no good on a server if you can’t listen to it. So to listen to it I have bought a network music player called Squeezebox. Squeezebox from Slimdevices (now Logitech) is a Hi-Fi network music player supporting almost all music formats including MP3, WMA, AAC, AIF, WAV and FLAC. It also has a hi-grade Burr-Brown DAC with solid stereo cinch connectors in addition to both electrical and optical S/PDIF output for connection to a even more serious DAC, if you have one. I have connected mine to my Rotel Processor, not because of the audio quality, but because this one supports even more audio formats like HDCD and DTS.
The audio quality of this device is very good! At least in my ears. It is definitely as good as a dedicated CD player in the same price range (299 USD). As a consequence my Pioneer SACD/CD player is no longer in use. At least not for playing ordinary CDs. SACD and DVD Audio however is an other story. But anyway, I’m to lazy to get up from my chair to put on a SACD so I end up listening to the standard CD version through my Squeezebox anyway. That’s how good it sounds. If you want something better, you can either upgrade to Slimdevices Transporter, which is their absolutely high-end alternative, or add a Benchmark DAC 1 to your Hi-Fi system. Read the rest of this entry »
Greenpeace has launched a guide to greener electronics, ranking the top manufacturers in the PCs, mobile phones, TVs and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals and recycling. I am not too proud to see that my Acer notebook is on the mid-lower end of the scale and worst compared to the other notebook manufacturers regarding environmentally thoughtfulness :-( On the other hand my Sony PlayStation beats the other game consoles (Nintendo and Xbox) with great margins and Sony, together with Sony Ericsson, is raging on top of this ranking.
I have now got rid of all my CDs. That means the physical media, not the music on it. All music is carefully ripped and stored as audio files on my network storage server. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the official opening of my blog! This blog was started after inspiration from my colleague Eirik Solheim at NRK. Check out his fantastic blog here: eirikso.com.
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