Home Cinema

Putting together a great home theater system can be simple. The key is pairing a good high-def picture with engaging surround sound.

Factors to Take Into Consideration
Some of the factors that a professional will consider when installing a home theater include:
1. The size of the room.
2. Where your audience will sit in relation to the screen.
3. Acoustical properties of the room.
4. Ambient light issues that may affect the type of video display system to be used.
5. Whether a projection system or large screen television will work best.
6. Whether In-wall or standalone speakers would be most effective.
7. Where your components will be located.

Home cinemas are good because although you have to pay for the set up you dont need to buy a ticket to see a film. Also you dont need to watch it in a room with mobiles ringing and babies crying. You can pick a film old or new, whereas cinemas have the newest releases and you sometimes cant watch the old films in good quality.

To be able to get a full experience you need good equipment such as a HD tv to get the best picture, surround sound to you get the best sound like in a cinema. You need DVDs which will play on your DVD player or your bluray player. Often they dont play on both.

Due to home cinemas everyone can relax and enjoy a film

Home cinemas have as a result decreased the amount of people going to the cinema, not by a significant amount but i believe as technology grows as a result cinemas will grow unpopular.

Mobile phones

The history of mobile phones begins with early efforts to develop mobile telephony concepts using two-way radios.

The larger phone here, had a short range, were extremely heavy, could only make calls, were very expensive and the battery life was only a few hours.

Interview with Dad:

Did you have an old fashioned phone when you were younger?
No, but my Dad did. Back then it seemed like an amazing invention but today it seems almost pointless. They were too expensive for children to have and young people to have.

Would you have needed one when you were younger?
I didn't even see the point in my dad having one to be honest. When i look at the call log on my blackberry today, after work all my calls are to you and your brother. But me and my brothers and sisters didn't have phones so i don't really understand what he used it for.

What was wrong with the phone?
It's battery life was awful, it wasn't in colour which today is unimaginable you could only make calls so there was no text messaging. Hardly anyone could afford phones, so even if you had a phone you had no one to call.


Today phones have colour, games, music and text messaging. Also they are significantly cheaper and have Internet access. They have changed they way we live as now we couldn't even leave the house without a mobile phone. Phones are a laptop, music player and phone all in one.

In 2010, people can't imagine what society would be like without the invention of the mobile phone. We cannot even imagine leaving the house without one. It has caused many problems though such as a new way for people to bully, by sending anonymous texts or filming bullying happening which was a serious issue in 2005 which was given the name 'happy slapping.'

iTunes

On April 28, 2003 Apple revolutionized the music industry by creating the iTunes Music Store.  

iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files.

You can download music from CDs and you put them into your own personal library. From this library you can create seperate playlists and adding the music you want to certain places.

You can also download music from the iTunes store. These normally cost between 79p and 99p per song. An album normally costs slightly less than the actually retail price, so you can save moeny from using iTunes.

Unfortunatly songs at almost a pound will build up and end up costing you a lot of money.

Also from the iTunes store you can download music vidoes for you to play on your computer or to put onto your apple product such as the iTouch but you have to make sure that it works on the apple device you have, although now in 2010 most of the new products also by apple allow you to watch videos, films and play games.

Another thing you can download from the iTunes store are games,TV shows and films. The films can be rented for a week or downloaded at a higher price to keep. Games can be free or charged. The charged games are a lot more advanced and better but they can cost around £3.99 per games which builds up.

You can also download podcasts.

You pay for items on the iTunes store by credit card. You can also give vouchers for iTunes for £5, £10 etc which you can put onto your system and pay for items that way.

Using iTunes you can also sort out a calander for your apple device, add pictures.

You can also download album covers which will show when you play a track.

From the tracks on your iTunes library you can also burn CDs which is when you create a track list and put them onto a CD for you to play in a car for example.

Apps are a key feature of apple products such as the iPad, iTouch and iPhones. They can be downloaded from the iTunes store, onto iTunes and then synced onto your device.

It says this on Apple.com about Apps.

'Manage your finances. Update your Facebook wall. Get a new high score. The App Store in iTunes has an app for just about anything. To download apps, visit the App Store in iTunes or download directly from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.'

'The iPod is the number one music player in the world. iTunes is the number one digital music store in the world. No Apple customer woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music. No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod'

I have an ipod touch, and as long as i have wireless connection i can access the internet, Facebook and MSN. Also some of my apps need internet access to use them. I can download songs from iTunes straight to my ipod which makes buying music easier. Without wireless i can still listen to all my music on the go and use some of the apps. With my iTouch i can also check the weather, the news and my calander. I can have everything i need on the go.

Technology in Nightclubs

Lighting effects used to enhance the nightclub experience began with the invention of electricity.

Light effects used to be conducted by using natural light such as refraction, reflection and colour filtering.

Dimming and electrical pulse generation soon followed, as did the mechanization of the fixtures themselves. With each new development in electrical and lighting technology, came new inventions and innovations in lighting effects.

Strobe Lighting

Developed in the 1930s for scientific and industrial use in the study of fast-moving objects, the strobe light became a popular nightclub effect during the music era of the 1960s. It gives the illusion of moving slowly and is still used in nightclubs today.

Colored Lighting

Colored filters, called gels, are fastened to the fixture to create the desired color. Mechanical gel frames, on which are mounted any number of gel filters, are also employed to change colors in rotation. Newer LED color-change lights allow any number of colors to be programmed with a single fixture, either statically or at preset intervals.

Lighting Controllers

Lighting is controlled in a number of ways. Early manual lighting controllers used a simple system of switches and relays. The development of DMX protocol (Digital Multiplexing) in the late 1980s streamlined lighting control, bringing it to the digital front, and is now the standard in theatrical lighting control.

MIDI controllers (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), was the forerunner of DMX, developed in the late 1970s. Midi controllers are still used for critical nightclub lighting effects.

Both MIDI and DMX protocols can be operated manually, using specially designed lighting effects consoles, or entire effects shows can be programmed and operated by computer.

It has made nightclub business increase due to improvements and has given people something else to do.