Solid!

Finally... thought of the day... SSD's finally their prices are coming down!!! So we can finally make the near silent, near vibration free Morpheus Server to be, erm.. silent.

Customers who wish to explore the potential of SSD should get in touch!

Sorry no update... mustabeenbusy!

Yep... didn't realise it is already April! Last time I was just coming back from CES Las Vegas, landed in London Gatwick, went home to cool my heels and then off to the ISE show in Holland (Check out our website news page or Facebook page!).

Not long after I found myself in Magliz... Bulgaria! Just for a short break... and it was amazing to be in somewhere so different from what I am used to... great food too... so when I got back I bought a bike! Went to a wedding (thankfully not mine) and with Mike as the DJ we had nothing to worry about... :D (I know he might be reading this lol)

Anyway, back to the buiz of designing stuff....so what happened so far? Well quite simply put, working on a few projects right now... The next generations of our CD players will soon be ready... here is a pic to show the beast I am dealing with...

Yes CD player, for some reason unknown to me, there seems to be a surge in demand of the 'ol silver disc spinner and hence a lot of priority is put on to getting this prototype to production, which I hope it will be in about 8 weeks time, so I can disappear for the summer break! lol...

What else? Amplifiers too are getting a bit of a push too... I thank my friends in forums who kept singing their praises, thank you, thank you! If you are into audio, have a browse in http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/

Bamboo?

So what the hell was I on about??? Well, just before CES2011 I realised that it has been like 3 years since designing the Morpheus music centre and perhaps it would be cool to have a different way to present the Morpheus at the forth coming shows. Something for the life-style concious customers that we seem to be getting more and more each day...

From the original concept, the Morpheus can be placed or mounted in three ways:

Then I remembered that I have had an old design of a stand that I wanted to make for 2008 but due to other pending projects it was temporarily shelved (like 3 years lol). For 2011 I thought, perhaps good time to bring it back! (Well, there was little else we could show physically since the other début was the internal BlueTooth streaming module!)

Because of the show schedules, time was the essence and for some reason it seems to bring up the simpliest and, to me at least, the most elegant solution... and this was the actual concept mock up: (Yes, I took a paper tube and cut it!)

Being so well balanced I could actually take a Morpheus unit and plonked it on the tube and the whole thing would remain stable without toppling over and I haven't even made a base for the stand yet!

Inspiration?

Maybe it is because I watched too many Kung-Fu movies in my youth or the fact that in my earlier years I lived next to a bamboo forest in Hong Kong. A fountain my father created long ago perhaps? Fact is I always liked showing the thickness of the materials used as I have with the Morpheus and tube housing of the Morpheus Server too... to me it is always important to show the products are made off!

Anyway, the final prototype was created and worked a treat too, I will add more pictures later on as we are packing the stand for the ISE show... but here's one of them:

Also, for the production version, I will be introducing a few tweaks to make the stand more versatile and user friendly, and hopefully show them in different colours too, so stay tuned :)

Oh! I forgot about the base and some rather good ideas for spikes... but that would be too geeky wouldn't it?

I've got one word for you....

Bamboo!

Yeah that's right... so stay tuned.

just a thought...

Tonight is just one of those nights where I have decided to switch my brain off early.

Surfed a few sites and TV channels and found nothing remotely interesting to me... and for some reason I am fed up with all the technology that surrounds me but doing nothing for me on an evening like this one...

So I decided to call it a night as I felt like listening to a bit or radio and read a bit by my bed side, like I used to all those years ago...

One word came to my mind: FAIL!

I wanted to listen to the radio and found the Wi-Fi enabled iPod being left at work and prolly flat too... so next, I enabled Virtual Radio on my SE W995 Symbian mobile on it's docked speakers, and oh yes, within a couple of searches I got fed up it's incredibly rubbish sound and tired of looking for a decent preset channel.... so that wasn't working for me.

Now if I open my lap top I know I would end up pressing more buttons than listening, going from channel to channel and eventually I end up reading nothing and getting all mighty mad at my noisy HP Entertainment Laptop!...sigh... If only I had a simple radio next to me with no glaring back light, clicking hard drives, whirring fans and flashing led's all over the place... Oh wait... I got an idea... let me dig out my 1950's Philips valve radio...

Sorted!

I now have warm sounds and since it can only pick up a hand full of channels, I quickly settled on one... and the room is faintly lit by the FM dial back-lit by a genuine filament bulb!

Nostalgia? Definitely!

Happy? Yup!

Did it keep me awake? I'll tell you in the morn..........................

Man and Machine part II

Once all the zillions of holes have been done, counter bored and tapped... we turn our attention to the other side... the top side... the side where everyone will get to see!

As the Morpheus Server is available in different colours, we have decided to do away with printing as that can only be done after anodising it... which adds cost and time to complete. So why don't we put all the important logos etc. into the metal, and anything boring like serial numbers underneath with a sticky label... job done!

Next job, we had 2 choices... engraving by man, or engraving by machine. After asking talking to our experienced engraver John on which way to go, he explained that he would prefer doing it by hand. To him the hand engraving adds a final personal touch to each product and we agree!

Here's John in action:

Man and Machine...

After the main box section is cut and machined down to size, we have to start adding all the holes, slots for all the internal bits to mount on... This is one bit we have to rely on our computer aided machines to make sure all the right holes are in the right place...

There you go, my first video in my blog!

OK, so it isn't an amazing video I know, but I hope people now realise that even with computers and machines, these things still take considerable of time to complete, one by one. I remember having to explain to some people there isn't a machine out there that you pour in materials from one end and out comes the finished products from the other end! :)