Michael Kratz

A while ago, I stumbled upon these awesome high resolution renders posted by a guy (Mojo) who used to draw and render the CGI models for Star Trek Voyager and more recently Battlestar Galactica, they make great desktop backgrounds. Read more

I’ve been wanting to invest in a large LCD TV for a while now. However what has stopped me from purchasing one, is the looming release of LED backlit models.

Right now, much to my disappointment, all LCD TVs currently available in Australia are powered by CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluroescent) backlights. The issue with these is that they’re 100% on, 100% of the time. So when something black is displayed on the TV, the pixels need to ‘cover’ the backlight and try not to allow light to shine through. Invariably, some light always does end up shining through. This is why the contrast ratio on typical LCD TV’s sucks. Enter LED backlighting… Read more

Discovery is yet again on-orbit (STS-120). Space walks are happening, and bits and pieces are getting shuffled around and added to the International Space Station. I’ve always enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the various shuttle missions on NASA TV, but the thing that has become annoying lately is the lack of a decent high resolution/bit rate NASA TV stream.

The streams from the NASA TV site are rather dismal and don’t come anywhere near the kind of quality one could potentially obtain over a broadband connection. It annoyed me so much, I went hunting for better quality…. Read more

About a week ago, I saw a wierd advert on a website for a “Cryo Kennel“. Thinking, thats wierd… lets see what thats all about, I clicked on it, much to my surprise, I ended up at http://www.scifi.com/eureka/.

Turns out it was a quirky advertisement for a new Science Fiction TV series called Eureka. Read more