Before Christmas, the range of multimedia content on my harddrive was already growing; I’m a big music fan, and want to have the my music collection always near me, so basically this meant ripping all my cds to mp3. Furthermore, with my new found hobby of photography, the number of photographs in my photo collection was also growing. Nothing that couldn’t be handled my old pc so far. But then came another hobby of mine….movies…having recently acquired an enormous amount of HD-ready or Full HD movies (some of you might have seen me carrying around with half a terabyte of new movie material in my arms) the need for a separate media machine became clearer and clearer. Not in the least, because my old machine was not able anymore to playback the movies. Therefore, with some advice of my fellow colleague Tally, I decided to assemble a new media pc.

First, and most important requirement for this media centre was that it did not look like a pc. One thing I would hate to have in my future living room is an ugly pc case. So we had to find something that did not attract attention. The Antec Fusion (Black) case was all I needed; while it had the possibility to harbour two harddrives, a micro ATX motherboard and a dvd drive, it did not look like a normal pc at all, its look resembles that of a hifi amplifier. See the picture below.

So, the next things we had to find after we found the case, was a suitable motherboard and a processor, fast enough to handle all the media. Because, I did not follow any of the technical developments in computer land for the last couple of years(unlike before), Tally was a great help in finding the right equipment. The motherboard was already found soon, an Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard with a HDMI output for a Flatpanel TV and an Intel chipset with Full HD capacity. I specificly chose an Intel Chipset, because a) I do not like AMD since my previous bad experiences with it, and b) Intel really supports the open source community, so drivers should be available soon for a wide range of OSs. The processor we chose was an Intel Core2Duo 2.20Ghz, which is more than able to do the job. Add to that 2 GB of RAM, 500Gb of harddrive, and a dvd-rw drive and the media centre is complete. See the picture below for an overview of the complete system.

So far, I’ve been running Vista on the PC, not a choice I fully support, but for now it does the Job. In the future, I hope to run my beloved Haiku on it, an open source operating system, based on the old BeOS, and much alike to Mac OS X. To control my media centre, and organise and play back all media, I used the windows media centre (with remote) up till now. But I must say, this media centre software is much too limited, and furthermore it engages the screensaver on the most unusual and unwanted moments; as a replacement I’m thinking of Mediaportal, an open source equivalent I tried before, with lots of nice addons (read last.fm plugin) but a major pain in the ass to configure…well we’ll see… Additionally, I’m also not too fond of the LCD display of the Antec Fusion, which is simply too bright, and thus circumvents all my wishes to keep the damn thing as unnoticed as possible; anyway as usual I might be doing something wrong.

Well…I certainly hope I did not bore the non-geeky folks under my audience (if any ). For you, I promise, I will write up some interesting posts far away from the world of computing So keep tuned!

Here’s the abstract:
In this paper we represent one specific instantiation of contextualised mobile social software for learning called contextualised blogging. Contextualised blogging combines the community aspects and flexible content access of a mobile blog with the adaptation to real-world settings made possible by contextualised computing. By combining both social and physical context information, we aim to improve current informal learning approaches. A special kind of data matrix symbols, called semacodes, is used to relate information from a blog to physical objects. The contextualised blogging application in this paper is developed in three steps. First, a conceptual model of the problem domain will be described. Second, a general technical framework based on this conceptual model will be developed. Finally, a specific instantiation of the technical framework called “ContextBlogger” is presented. The paper concludes with a description of the planned evaluation of the software, a summary, and a conclusion of the results so far.

Nice! For those who are interested, you can find a preliminary draft of the entire paper here.

The story deals of a failed wizard called Rincewind which was expelled from Magic School, mostly because he learnt a forbidden spell, or as Pratchett says the spell learnt him. Moreover, it’s the only spell he knows. Now this failure of a wizard, by some unexpected series of events comes into contact with a tourist from the other side of the Discworld, called Twoflower, and becomes his guide in the city of Ankh Morpork. Obviously, this is a receipe for disaster and soon enough the entire city burns down. Anway, I’m really enjoying this book, even if I only read about 80 pages about now, but the style of writing, the humour and absurdness of the world Pratchett describes makes it a very easy read and nice way to relax after work. For people that like British humour like me, this book is definitely worth the read. Also you can find it around 10 euros, maybe even less, which makes it even more worth trying.

One of the things that really speaks for Last.fm is that it also collects information (called scrobbling) about what you play in other players, like winamp, iTunes and for example your iPod, and uses this to improve your personal profile describing your music taste. Another advantage over Pandora is that the users themselves tag the music (in a way similar to del.icio.us) which really makes it easy to find music, also using non-standard search terms. I also like the descriptions for each artist being displayed when a track is played in the Last.fm player, with handy links to similar music or similar artists. Also, Last.fm displays information about listeners that have similar musical taste (your neighbourhood) and you can add friends to your profile, to see how similar your musical taste is.

So go and try it out and drop me a mail if you like it, so we can compare our musical taste and advice each other about new music. I already bought a couple of cds based on recommendations Pandora gave me, some artists I even never heard of, this is the perfect way of discovering new music. Of course, this way still comes after borrowing cds from your friends or listening to some music together, enjoying some nice beers…