Wednesday, August 27, 2008
City link tunnel announcement silliness
The radio announcements always say "The left lane is closed from the tunnel entrance to firebox B59".
Well, firebox B59 is the end of the tunnel. So why don't they just say that!
My 2c.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
$1000 desktop with 4 cores + 16GB RAM
Now it seems a quad core with 16GB RAM is possible, using AMD hardware, for a similar price:
Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H AMD Mainboard x 1 ~ $100
AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core (AM2) 2.2GHz x 1 ~ $200
Team Elite DDR2 8GB PC-6400/800 (2x4GB) Ram x 2 ~ $700
So $1000 for the bare bones.
A server on your desktop!
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Successful reading of ext2/3 from WinXP
The drive came preformatted as NTFS. I managed to get Linux to mount it via ntfs-3g and the old ntfs modules, but it was unstable, and obviously still isn't ready for write access.
My second idea was to use FAT32 (vfat module) as most USB keys use that and I'd successfully used it on my LaCiE 2.5" 120GB USB2 disk. Unfortunately most of the MPEG files are bigger than 4 GB, which is beyond the capability of FAT32. Back to the drawing board.
So I googled for "winxp ext2" and found the following:
http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer. The "Ext2 Installable File System for Windows" software is freeware.
It sounded great, and to my surprise, it lived up to its claims! I did a "mke2fs" on the USB2 disk, and copied some files across, ranging from 400MB to 8GB. I then plugged it into the WinXP laptop and it found it, let me (permanently) assign it drive L:. I opened Windows Media Player Classic, and it played it all without issue - no lag, no problem going past 4 GB. I was very impressed.
So two thumbs up from me for Ext2 IFS!
Friday, August 8, 2008
Levels of Cults
eg. the Manson family, David Koresh
If the group is a bit bigger, we call it a club.
eg. Collingwood supporters, Trekkers
If it gets really big, the terminology is religion.
eg. the Catholic Church
I'm sure society or family might even fit in there too...
Review: Dell 2408WFP 24" LCD
http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/monitor_2408wfp?c=au&cs=audhs1&l=en&s=dhs
I got a fantastic deal! The base price was $799, but Dell had a 10% off coupon plus free 4GB USB stick plus free Sennheiser headset plus free Shintaro 7" digital photo frame. I couldn't pass that one up!
Positives
- 1920x1200 resolution - fully HDTV 1080p ready
- Lots of inputs: DVI1, DVI2, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, Composite, Component, SVideo!
- USB hub and card reader built in
- Beautiful crisp pure colours, no banding as it is a full 8 bit panel
- Dell "Sound Bar" attaches to bottom - I bought this too ($55) and the sound is very good.
- Easy slide up/down and rotate, can be used in portrait mode if desired
- Cheap price for 8 bit panel
Negatives
- Crappy controls - buttons are stiff and menus difficult to navigate
- Doesn't read SmartMedia flash cards (my old Olympus) but handles xD,Sd,MS,MMC,CF
- Picture in picture will only allow the 2nd display to be Composite, Svideo or Component, so effectively useless
Overall
Highly recommended, 9 out of 10 marks.
Scam? 6-bit versus 8-bit LCD panels
You may recall that LCD screens were expensive for a long time, then suddenly the price dropped, and all these affordable panels appeared, boasting fast response times (5 ms) and so on. Well that's because these cheaper panels were "6 bit" panels. That is, instead of having a colour range of 8 bits per pimary (red, green, blue) and being able to display 16 million colours (2^24), they only have 6 bits per channel (2^18 or 262,144 colours). The LCD controller peforms "dithering" to increase the apparent colour range.
You may have noticed on your cheap home LCD that when looking at your digital photos, that flat areas like skies would have "banding", and that your "cleartype" fonts looked a bit oddly coloured in the aliased regions? Well that is all to do with only 64 (rather than 256) shades of each colour being available!
This can be seen in the pricing too. The 24" Samsung 245B costs about $500 - that's the cheap 6 bit panel, whereas the "professional" 245T model costs $1000 - that's the 8 bit panel. The same is true of the Dell "entry level" 24in (yep, 6 bits) and the corresponding "Ultrasharp" which is an 8 bit panel.
You have been warned!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Recipe - Spanish Chicken Rice
INGREDIENTS
500g chicken thighs
2 cups rice
3 cups chicken stock (or water and salt / stock cube)
1 capsicum
2 onions
2 tins of tomatoes
2 tbsp vegetable oil
7 cloves
4 bay leaves (dried ok)
1 cup peas (optional, frozen ok)
saffron (optional)
METHOD
Heat the oil in the pan, and gently soften the chopped onions and capsicum.
Add the rice, cloves and bay leaves and ensure the rice is heated and coated with oils.
Chop the chicken thighs into small pieces and fry until browned on the outside.
Add the tomatoes and chicken stock (and possibly saffron and peas) and place lid on top.
Simmer on stove (or place in moderate oven) until rice has absorbed all the chicken stock.
Serve with salad.
I've been mentioned in someone's patent!
http://www.google.com/patents?id=cuqgAAAAEBAJ
Abstract
There is disclosed the use of a beehive cell arrangement of shaped quantization blocks for grouping pixels for the digital approximation of analog video information. A frame may consist of beehive-arranged hexagonal quantization cell blocks or brick-wall-arranged rectangular cell quantization blocks, where each pixel belongs only to one shaped quantization block. A beehive cell arrangement of circle-shaped quantization blocks is described for use when the frame is partitioned into overlapping quantization blocks.
Patent number: 7313287
Filing date: May 21, 2002
Issue date: Dec 25, 2007
Inventor: Yuri Abramov
Assignee: Yuri Abramov
Primary Examiner: Jose L. Couso
Attorneys: Edward Langer, Shiboleth, Yisraeli, Roberts, Zisman & Co.
Application number: 10/478,233
U.S. Classification
382/251