Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

The weather changed a lot during the week. Last weekend I took pictures from Katehaki bridge full of snow and talked about sliding cars. But this weekend the sun shines and you can feel it warming your face while you are walking in the street. Today was a beautiful day. I enjoyed it playing music, preparing a tasty lunch (with a stolen recipe), and fixing an ill powerbook.

The winter seems to come to and end, and the weather forecast talks about 17º/18º C here. It’s gonna be better until the burning summer arrives.

I wanted to post a meme for some time. Today I found one in Kat’s blog, and it’s quite simple, although the results are “strange” (or funny). I’ll add also Spanish to the languages for the meme

The instructions.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence/phrase.
4. Write the next four sentences/phrases together with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig through your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.
6. Pass it to six friends.

Instrucciones.

1. Coge el libro que tengas más a mano. (no vale hacer trampas)
2. Abrelo en la página 123.
3. Ve a la quinta frase.
4. Escribe las cuatro frases siguientes a partir de las anteriores junto con estas instrucciones.
5. No, no vale hacer trampas y desempolvar el ultrachachi guay libro para impresionar al personal. Si lo haces la maldición del meme caerá sobre ti y pasaras 500 días y 500 noches sin sexo/sin ordenador (Escoje lo que peor te siente )
6. Pasalo a….. (me niego a hacer cadenas).

The result.

I had two magazines, 3 computer games before the books, but the first two didn´t have enough pages. I went a bit further and I found a book with enough material for this meme. Title: Μαθείνω την Ελληνική Γλώσσα. (I learn the Greek language/ Aprendo griego). And the contents of the page 123, starting on sentence 6th:

• θέλετε τους παλιούς δίσκους;
• Ναι, θέλουμε τους παλιούς δίσκους.
• Όχι, δεν θέλουμε τους παλιούς δίσκους.

In english:

• Do you want the old discs?
• Yes, we want the old discs.
• No, we don’t want the old discs.

And in Spanish.

• ¿Queréis los discos viejos?
• Sí, queremos los discos viejos.
• No, no queremos los discos viejos.

As you can see it’s not something interesting. In fact all my literature books are in Spain. And thanks God I didn’t put them in the suitcase (Vueling lost it).

Have a nice “warm” weekend

The image speaks by itself. 3 o’clock and 6 people in our floor. Using the snow as an excuse, almost nobody came to the office today.

The good of this massive absence is that the office is quiet. No phones ringing, no people speaking loud or interrupting your work. Only the noise of CPU fans and some people teetering their fingers on the keyboard.

Enjoy your snow day off

If you have seen the news or you are right now in Greece. Yes, it’s cold.

This weekend has been one of the coldest I my life in Greece. This time it was snowing (not like my last post) a lot. I started to feel the cold and the first snow flakes on Saturday when I was leaving for Markopoulo to spend the night with some () friends. We arrived and the wind was really cold. The weather was “shouting” snow!

Hours later it started. In the beginning it didn’t stay, but after all the night snowing we woke up with a white landscape and thinking on staying there (Panos, I love your place, but I have to go to work ). We moved with a car to the nearest Proastiakos station, and after some time waiting in the car (to avoid to die frozen) we were on the way to Athens.

I didn’t expect what you can see on the pictures. But when I got to the top of the bridge to with the elevator, the image was that (bad quality picture, I know). I couldn’t believe it. Snow everywhere. And not a bit… enough to organize a nice snow battle.

The return trip to home was a bit difficult. Without the right shoes I was walking using small steps to avoid to eat snow But even with that weather, there is always someone who believes that his/her 4WD car can do miracles and drive over 20cm of snow without chains (or similar device for ice/snow) or even good wheels. So a crazy driver almost killed me. I saw the reflection of a yellow light in the snow, and I thought: In this street that goes down the hill… I’m almost sliding, therefore a 1 ton car should be like a huge sledge. Of course, the car just slid down the “hill”. I had time to jump between two cars and see the car following the way of the road (even its wheels were saying otherwise).

At least I’m alive. It’s cold. It’s late, and tomorrow nobody will go to the office. I’ll be the only stupid there because I live 1 minute from my place.

Have a nice freezing week

Small post for today.

I’ve got today the guitar for Guitar Hero III. The wireless one for Xbox360 that you can use with your pc. The guitar came with the game, and right now I do not plan to buy an Xbox. So, I sell the game for 25 euros (yep, here in Athens). I didn’t open it and it still has the plastic envelope. If you’re interested just post here or send me an email

PS: Yep, there is an option of going back to the center, fight with them to return it, and then find again the stand alone guitar. But I’d like to use that time for other things

It looks nice, doesn’t it? After some months saving money and with the help of the Christmas “gift” (gift = we (the company) take your money during half a year. We profit with it and we gave it back to you in Christmas like a present), I bought a TV. Or I should say a huge LCD Screen. And of course, after buying a piece of technology it’s time to get the most of it with some tweaks.

1. Some boring technical information.

Something to start with: What is High Definition Video? Nowadays it is considered the video displayed at resolutions of 1280×720 [width x height] (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080i or 1080p). For sure you have seen the 1080 and 720 numbers in your favourite electronics store. Think also that a DVD has a resolution of 720×576 (PAL 480p or EDTV for TV signals). So we’re talking about fine grained images with almost double quality.

And what about HD Ready and Full HD? Full HD are those Screens with a resolution of 1920×1080 (minimum). HD Ready if the screen has at least 1280×720. Even though it’s very very common to find screens (yes, TVs ) with a resolution of 1366×768, those screens are in the area of HD Ready resolutions. Of course any screen can show any kind of input, they upscale or downscale the image.

No I didn’t forget the television. The HDTV (High Definition TV) broadcast with resolutions of 720 and 1080 (For example sky HD). Do not confuse it with the extended-in-europe-but-not-in-greece-Digital-Terrestrial-Television (DTT). You can tune this using the tunners in the new TVs or using external ones (Even the on-telecom iptv box has an antenna input for DTT) The DTT quality is usually like DVD.

About connections. Think that almost all the new TVs/screens you can buy today are digital. Also all the good/high definition content is digital. Therefore connecting the content with the DVD using an analog cable can cause some quality loss. Here is where the words HDMI and DVI appear. DVI is a digital connector used mainly for computer screens. It can carry analog signals, but the idea is to carry the digital one to avoid any information loss converting from digital-analog-digital. HDMI is the consumer electronics brother of DVI. It carries digital signal for video and audio, and has been designed for simplicity: one cable for digital signals.

Plasma/LCD/DLP and so on and so forth. Those names are three of the most common names you will find in an electronics shop. What’s the best? Well, this can be a matter of taste and where do you want to place you TV/Screen. The first point, about projectors is: they work with no light (like in the cinema), but they can give you a huge (when I say huge is 100″ or more) screen for a nice price. For my personal taste, projectors are not made to watch the TV news everyday (also the bulb they use fades out quickly).

Plasma/LCD, go to the shop and see by yourself. Plasma was said to have the best quality, and nowadays cheap plasma tv beat cheap but more expensive LCD tv’s. Plasma screens need special care (just a little bit) to avoid static images to burn into the screen. LCD screens have an awful black and not so much contrast, but good ones are amazing (and expensive).

Ahm! and remember that analog TV looks like <insert a bad word here> in a Plasma/LCD screen. An analog TV usually can soften the image, but with the digital you will see high definition noise So check out your antenna or plug a digital source (today I enjoyed the digital TV offered by on-telecoms and it has nice quality).

2. Personal experience.

Well, my TV is a LCD HD ready one, it has a resolution of 1366×768 and therefore it supports 720p. You can also feed it with 1080p signals, but you will have to trust in the downscaling algorithm to get a nice image (Usually it works perfect). It has analog inputs: component, scart and VGA; and digital: two HDMI. Is the lowest in the Samsung series: LE37S86BD. It’s a 37″ screen.

So, how does it perform? Analog TV, better of. My antenna is not very good, and I had to make an extension. For company or documentaries is ok. Digital TV, quite better. The TV says that the signal quality is 40%, but I see no decoding errors. It’s a pity there are only 4 channels. I guess I will get ADSL with on-telecoms, for 35€ month I can enjoy good quality in greek channels and two Spanish channels too. (And If I win the lottery I can pay for NOVA satellite TV and get it without installing the dish, via the IPTV box).

Sound. Coca-cola can sound or what do you expect from two 5W speakers. I put my also-cheap-but-better 2.1 speakers in the TV for movies, and problem solved.

Movies and series. The first thing I did was to follow the theory: for a digital tv, a digital cable. So I scratched my pocket for a 30€ DVI to HDMI cable for my mac. Then I discovered that HDMI doesn’t support 1366×768, only the official 720 and 1080 resolutions. At first the mac sent an overscanned image to the TV, and some borders where lost (part of the dock and the menu bar). The other solution was to switch off the overscan and the TV would just put a 720p image in the center leaving borders alone. Also the colors weren’t so real, they some configuration and I wasn’t fully satisfied. I played transformers 72op movie without lights and that drowned my sorrows.

Ok, the problem was the resolution. So I thought that the VGA connection will be able to show all the resolution, even in analog mode, my computer will do the up/downscaling needed and the TV will just show what I want. I took an VGA for 0€ from the trash (yep, in my office they throw them some times for screens that are connected using DVI), and in the very first moment I plugged my mac to the TV using VGA. Voila! real colors. Or at least more real than with the expensive DVI->HDMI adaptor. The quality was so nice that I was browsing the net in the TV: reading the news in 37″ is a pleasure for the eyes

About HD movies. I do not have an HD player, neither HD-DVD nor Blue-Ray (I’ll wait until the war is over). So you can imagine the source of those movies . 720p content plays well on my mac using VLC and video encoded using H.264. But 1080p is sluggish because: VLC doesn’t use more than one processor to decode, and it doesn’t use the GPU, although animation movies play nice in 1080p. The solution to this problem is go to windows. Why? Because there is: 1. a software decoder that uses both cores (but it doesn’t give so much quality), or use the Cyberlink H.264 decoder that uses the GPU (graphics card) to decode the video.

I forgot that even if this TV is one of the lowest in the Samsung LCD series. With a good input, it gives you a nice image.

Ahm! the last one: me playing with the toy:

PS: you’re invited for a movie with popcorn in my small dungeon in Athens.