Kristof Goossens

I found this cool little powerplus bee flashlight on the bespaarbazaar for only a few euro. It is tiny but bright and is recharged by turning the handle. One minute of turning gives about four minutes of light and if you want it really bright, you turn it while shining. It’s pretty powerful and very eco-friendly. Not to mention that it saves batteries if you forget to turn it off (or someone nicks it to go play with teddybear in the dark and you find it back the next day completely drained)

If you’ve read previous entries in my blog, you know I have a creative zen and it didn’t stand up too well compared to an iPod. it has now become my daughters portable Bob the builder player.  (She’s 2 by the way)

Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out to be very scratch-proof. The scratches clearly show up when looking at the screen from close by.

It’s ok when looking at it from a little way off though. I think that eventually I’ll have to remove the plastic outer cover completely (or I should have invested in a screen protector like I bought for my iPod.) Come to think of it, that might still be a good idea to do before the display is completely ruined.

After having used a wireless doorbell for over a year (and having people push the button without anything happening when the batteries were dead once again) we switched to a grid-fed video system from avidsen. It’s what is called an evolutive system which means that different modules like multiple camera’s can be added to it later on. This is what it looks like from the inside.

Image quality is pretty good, it has six infrared leds for night-time illumination and two way hands free voice communication. You have to speak into the microphone from the outside though as it is not that sensitive, but I suppose that is done to prevent background noise by passing cars to drown out the conversation. power consumption is very good at less than one watt in doorbell mode and twelve watts when the video display is on.

Well, we’ve been having some interference of the dehumidifier and kitchen electronics on our tv (you could see specs in the image when stuff was switched on or off) so we decided to buy a monter power filter (HTS-800) and I must admit that the picture quality has even improved beyond what we expected (which was same image, but less interference) I tried taking images of before and after, but you can’t really see it on a digital camera. The image is more relaxed now with black being less fizzy grey and the white images tend to show less flickering. It has a pretty convenient label system built in as well so that you know which plug is inserted in which socket and you don’t pull out the DVD player when you wanted to disconnect the subwoofer for example. Another nice feature is that it doesn’t seem to consume much energy, at least not according to the plugwise system which I use for metering my devices. In fact, it is less than one watt and you don’t feel any heat from the device from electrical waste either. The light bulb under the switch is probably the warmest part of the block.

We also bough this filter for the cinema room to protect the beamer. The image improvement there was less visible though. But then again, that was pretty good to begin with and it’s the LCD itself which is starting to degrade after over 2000 hours with an off-color green tint in the top and bottom where usually the black borders are and a slight color shift where the white subtitles are usually projected. The Philips astaire beamer still offers very good light output on it’s original lamp and we compared it with a 700 hour Benq DLP projector. The DLP is noticeably sharper, but the light output was about equal at five metres distance. However, due to my glasses, I have a lot of Rainbow-effect when looking at DLP-projected movies.