City link tunnel announcement silliness

On the way to work, the Burnley tunnel tollway sometimes has speed/lane restrictions.

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.

$1000 desktop with 4 cores + 16GB RAM

It was only a few months ago that I built my new $1000 desktop computer for work, which had an Intel quad core CPU 1333 FSB plus 8 GB RAM (4 x 2GB unbuffered DDR2).

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!

Successful reading of ext2/3 from WinXP

I bought a 750GB LaCiE USB2 external drive and wanted to copy DVB MPEG files onto it to watch via a WinXP laptop while away at a conference. It's been a while since I last tried to share files between WinXP and Linux; since then big disks and big files are common place.

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!

Levels of Cults

When a small group of people are brainwashed into a belief system and way of life, we call it a cult.

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

I recently bought a new LCD for home. I've still been using the Samsung 17GLsi CRT which I bought in 1992 for $1550 (!) and Naomi has been using a cheap Viewsonic 1440x900 LCD (6 bit panel). So I waited a while until Dell offered good incentives to buy their Ultrasharp high-end 24" LCD (8 bit panel):

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

It was brought to my attention earlier this year that there are two classes of LCD panels. I always thought I was up to date with these details, but I was totally unaware of this one.

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!

Recipe - Spanish Chicken Rice

This is an old favourite of mine that was taught to me by my mother. We both lost our paper copies but I've successfully replicated it from memory twice recently, so here it is for you to try.

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.