a different look (v5.0)
I saw this one last week somewhere on I think digg, it is about a piano that is mechanically engineered in such a way that it can reproduce speech.
And what about the following robot woman called HRP-4C (see her in movement action here) which uses an advanced Yamaha voice chip to sing. We are getting close and closer to the uncanny valley moment.
After several weeks of waiting for offers to renovate the duplex house we had an eye on, we could finally start negotiating with the seller about the asking price. We know that some renovation is really necessary in the house and because we now knew what roughly would be the costs of it, we used that argument to do a bid far below the asking price. After several counter offers from the seller, we bought the house for 15% below the asking price, which we have the feeling is quite a good deal.
We will do a construction check to inspect the house and to get to know the possible risks of the house. Furthermore we have to arrange our mortgage and setup some official documents, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem. Anyway, we are happy that we finally found a house on a very nice location. In every way compared to what we now have it is an improvement. We know that there is a lot of work to be done in the house, but we take the time for that and we like to renovate it to our taste.
House front
House front view
Hamtoren
House back view
Switzerland
The last two weeks Nina and I were on holiday to Switzerland. We jumped on the train at Utrecht Centraal to Basel and from there on we took several other trains to visit places and locations. We started our holiday in Luzern, which – to our impression – was the most attractive city.
The overall weather was quite good, except for one hot day in Lugano where it was too warm to walk around, so we where sitting at and in the swimming pool the whole day. Now I understand those sun-adorers who take a hotel at the beach and do nothing the whole day. The day after Lugano we went to St. Moritz where the weather became the complete opposite. It was snowing and almost freezing, so we had to buy extra clothes. Even the people in the village themselves didn’t expect this snow/weather.
The final destination was Zermatt with its Matterhorn mountain nearby with a height of 4478 meters. The transport in Zermatt is mostly electric, so it is a quiet village and very clean. The village is even in the top five of greenest cities in the world.
We have seen a lot of beautiful landscapes on our trip and nice villages with old buildings. You can see the pictures we took at the travel gallery under the Switzerland flag.
Two weeks ago we decided that we should look for a new television, besides looking for new houses. I did some research and found out that the Samsung UE32B7000 32″ LED LCD television seems to be what we needed. We didn’t want a 37 or 40 inch screen, because it’d be too much an eye-catcher in the living room. This television is only 3 cm. thin, not too power-hungry (I measured ~75 watts – see also this comparison of HD-TV’s) because it is illuminated by LED-lights instead of CCFL’s (TL-like tubes) and last but not least it has quite some nice technological features. You can use widgets – and even develop them, somehow Yahoo is involved in this technology. Some default installed widgets are from Flickr (photos from internet) and a weather-channel. There is even a Twitter-widget which you can use and there also seems to be a Youtube-widget, which I haven’t found yet.
The television has many, many inputs. One useful input is the network connection which we now have connected to our router, which itself is connected to our network attached storage (NAS) device. This is just a little box with harddisks in it and some mini-operating system running. The television supports DLNA, which means that it can stream video/audio/photos from that little NAS, which works flawlessly.
So we now have an up to date multimedia living room.
