| Friday 31st October 2003 |
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| 10.50
GMT Weather : a bright clear start to the day after overnight rain. 10º C Last nights The Bill , which was broadcast live, was quite good. I was looking out for any major cock-ups, but I didn't notice anything. There were a few minor things like actors looking in the wrong direction before quickly correcting themselves. On one occassion an actress appeared to look for directions to someone out of shot, but on the whole it was well done. I would say the only major error was in not allowing for the fact that it was raining on the night. Some actors did not appear to be prepared for being out in the rain and had light clothing on. Also there were probably a few continuity errors where some external scenes were actually done in a studio where it was obviously dry. I had a bit of a late night, last night, hence this entry is rather late in the day. I did come down and feed Nelly at 6 am, but went back to bed again. I woke up at just gone 9.30 and decided to wash and get dressed before sitting down to write this. This is going to sound a little repetative, but my major plans for today are to go to Tesco's for more cans of cat food. But there are a other few things that I should do. It's the last day of the month so I will have to sort out a new page for this diary and correct other pages to point at it. I also should sort out the real dummy transmitter for Patricks filming. This transmitter is actually going to be a real dummy transmitter rather than the last which was a dummy real transmitter. There is a subtle difference there if you raed it back. It is for a quick insert during an interview when a raid on RFL is described. The raid took place in 1968 and the G.P.O. took away a dummy transmitter not realising that the real transmitter was concealed in a speaker cabinet. So lots to do now and a few plans for the future. Tomorrow is the 1st Saturday of the month drink with my old work colleagues and Sunday could be a day (or part day) out on c2c trains. They are running a special offer over the weekend with single tickets for just £1 from and to everywhere on their network. http://www.c2c-online.co.uk/leisure/special.html
20.00 GMT
I have actually had a lazy day. I went shopping and I read some stuff. No, I lie, I have designed next months diary page. For a sneak preview you can click on the link to November at the top of the page. I feel quite accomplished because the whole page (apart from one tiny bit) was made with Mozilla Composer for Linux. The one tiny part was the background image. I had to boot to windows to used my scanner, and to mess around with the picture using Paint Shop Pro. It is a shame that my old scanner has no drivers that will work with Linux. If I could use it with Linux I could also force myself to get to grip with The Gimp (image processing software for Linux). Of course if i was a real geek I would have designed the page just using a text editor rather than an (almost) WYSIWYG html editor ! I am a little bored now. There is nothing on TV to amuse me until 9.30 when Have I got News For You comes on. John Humphrys is hosting it this week. I think he'll be OK, but not a patch on Angus Deyton. It is about time he was forgiven and allowed back to where he belongs ! |
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| Thursday 30th October 2003 |
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06.50
GMT 16.00 GMT I have just
uploaded a new page with some scans of PC adverts from Feb 1993.
Some of the prices, for such primitive equipment, were rather eye
opening. Take a look HERE. |
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| Wednesday 29th October 2003 |
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| 06.30
GMT Weather : cold, grey and raining. Hangover : Bad ! Actually my hangover is getting better already. I went to the pub last night and had several pints of Youngs Special followed by a bottle of Winter Warmer. When I came home I went straight to bed and read for a little while. I was reading the April 1993 edition of PC Today. It was fascinating remembering just how primitive computers were just 10 years ago. The prices of some stuff was very alarming and I will quote some stuff here later. I hadn't really intended to do an entry here at this time of the morning so I didn't bring the magazine down with me. I was woken up by the pathetic wails of Schiba who had elected to stay out all night. He came in all cold and soggy ! He has now had some tuna flakes and has gone to bed. I think I'm going back to bed now as well ! 12.35 GMT Weather : Overcast, wet but mild. 9° C I did go back to bed this morning for about an hour, but I didn't sleep as such. I may have dozed off for the odd minute, but that was all. In the end I decided to get up and finally get my arse into gear and go out to Lewisham. I did indeed go to Lewisham to visit The Link and see about an upgrade for my cellphone. The bad news was that I would only be entitled to the phone on offer, the Nokia 3510i, as that was part sponsored by The Link themselves. My usage was too small to justlfy anything else. The worse news was that they were out of stock. Now why does that not surprise me ? Fortunately it was not an entirely wasted journey. I was shanghied outside The Link shop by a small band of market researchers doing research about transport. The questions seemed rather bizarre most of the time. A lot of them were about choosing to use either a double decker bus or a bendy bus. Maybe their is some weird mystical difference between the two, but for me I just get on the first bus that comes and is going where I want to go. In an ideal world I might opt to wait for an old RT bus if I knew one was on it's way, and possibly for a bendy bus as a first time tryout, but they would both be unusual. Any other time it would still be the first bus that came along. Another bizzare question compared the frequency of the two buses. Would I wait for a bendy bus if they were more frequent ? Fuck off ! I'd still get the first bus that came as, presumably, any other sane person would. By this time I was getting highly suspicious that the research was being conducted by a manufacturer of bendy buses. All this utter garbage was made worthwhile in the end as I got a £5 Boots voucher for my troubles. Now another thing that is bugging me, and getting to make me angry, is NTL's smtp server. I have been trying to send an e-mail since early this morning and it keeps failing. Consulting NTL's server status web site it says :-
21.03 GMT Tonights "The Bill" was all action for a change. Too many episodes this year (and possibly earlier) are like an extension of Eastenders. Tomorrow nights episode promises to be interesting as it is going to go out live. It would be amusing if they had a big cock-up somewhere. I'll be watching it with anticipation. It seems as if the dentist is calling. I was supposed to have a check up a few weeks back, but I have been putting it off. Today I lost part of a filling so I guess I can put it off no longer and I'll phone the tomorrow (probably !). I think that NTL have sorted out their mail server now. So I think I have a couple of e-mails to write now. |
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| Tuesday 28th October 2003 |
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| 07.15 GMT Weather : Cold, bright morning with clear skies. 1.5° C It is damn close to freezing this morning. I wouldn't be surprised to see the first frosts appear in a day or two. Schiba, with a little gentle help from me, decided to be sensible last night. I persuaded him to go out at 5.30 yesterday and he came back in a couple of hours later. He settled for a few hours, but I went to bed early last night and soon he decided that he wanted to prowl around. He really wanted some attention, but I was tired and eventually I left him to it and went to sleep until 5 am, this morning. At that point he managed to wake me up to say he had to go out. I was ready to get a bit annoyed thinking that he would change his mind once he had detected how cold it was, but no, he went straight out without any fuss and I was able to get back to bed and sleep for another hour and a half. He was back for his breakfast just before I started writing this, and is now getting ready for a nap on the settee. I might go along to The Link today to find out about the cellphone upgrade I mentioned yesterday. I had a look at Nokia's web site last night and found all they could say about the phone. It is very ambiguous. In the FAQ section there is a question and answer about how many pictures the phone can store. The answer says it depends on how much other stuff is stored on the phone and leaves it at that. Nowhere does it mention anything about the phones storage capacity in KBytes, or anything useful like that. Well, I will mainly want it for the more useful functions like making and receiving calls, so the "extras" are really of no concern. So my real reason for a free upgrade is not for getting any extra facilities, but as a means of getting a fresh battery for nothing. |
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| Monday 27th October 2003 |
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| 07.12 GMT Weather : Very cold with clear skies. I woke
up feeling very tense with a headache. That seems to be passing now and
I expect that by the time I have showered and dressed it will have gone.
I can remember that I had many dreams last night, but cannot really
recall what they were about. The last thing I remember seems very odd
and I cannot place it in any context. I was using, or testing a radio
controlled dragonfly, and for some reason this was taking place in
Knightsbridge. I had emerged from somewhere and had to cross the road,
but my path was blocked by some sort of procession. At the head of it
were four very large black cars. They were in the same style as you
would see following a hearse except they were huge and seated six people
abreast. I think someone in the crowd said it was "George Dubya Bush",
but I did not see him in any of those cars. Following the cars were
several columns of Salvation Army women. I think there was something
behind them, but I decided to cross the road between these ranks of the
Salvation Army. I seemed to cross the road in perfect synchronisation
with the marchers who were marching at right angles to me. None of us
had to slow down or were involved in any collisions. I remember
feeling quite pleased with myself for my timing, and also relieved about
it as well. There were a lot of police around and I wanted to avoid a
"crash" at all costs. It was, more or less, at this point that I woke up
feeling a bit confused about what had been going on.
First thing for today is shopping. Nelly says her breakfast is inedible and Schiba has left home ! So cat food is at the top of my shopping list. I find it bizarre that so much of my world revolves around cat food these days ! I don't know what to do after shopping. I'll probably be back on the PC upstairs as I have a load of off-air recordings (all BBC7) that need top-and-tailing and filed in their correct folders. What I'd like to do is to go out for a couple of hours, but I can't think of anywhere I really fancy going. Chances are I'll be staying in. 17.41 GMT Weather : Dark now, but it has been a sunny day. Max temp = 10° C, Temp now 5° C I think it is going to be a cold night, tonight. I threw Schiba out at 5.30. I just hope he has the sense to come back in later tonight, as I hate to think of him out in the freezing night. He often does it though, and it is his choice. The headache I had first thing this morning cleared after I went out for a short walk and a trip around Tesco's. For the rest of the day I have just sort of pottered round doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I don't think I have really achieved anything though. I did tidy up 3 (or was it 4) off air recordings. Two of them I listened to and enjoyed. the first was an episode of The Goon Show, and the second was episode 3 of The quatermass Memoirs. It makes me wonder what stuff being recorded now will still be enjoyable in 40 to 50 years time ? I am tempted to be very cynical and say very little ! I have been invited to pop down to those ever so nice ( ????) people at The Link to upgrade my cellphone. Apparently I can get the Nokia 3510i as a free upgrade. It has a colour screen and can receive pictures as well (wow !). I am very tempted although I am suspicious of extra costs being incurred should I actually want to receive picture messages on it. In theory just receiving messages should be free, but for some modern technologies the goalposts often seem to move without rationale or explanation. It would actually be handier for me if it could read a memory card and display pictures I had uploaded to the card on my PC. Although having said that, I can imagine few situations where I would actually want to do that. |
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| Sunday 26th October 2003 |
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| 11.12 GMT Weather : A bright sunny day. Mostly clear sky. 7° C (overnight low 5°) Autumn is mostly definitely here now that the clocks have changed back to GMT (as they should be all year round !). I was able to get up, watch Dr Who, go back to bed for an hour, and still be up, washed and dressed to write this by 11.12. I am still faffing around with the mpeg 2 video files produced by my DVB-T TV card. I have found out that the lip sync problems stem from the fact that the recordings can start with B frames instead of an I frame. These are technical terms for the types of video frames used in an mpeg 2 video stream. I frames contain the complete picture and B frames are just the part of the pictures that has changed since the last I frame (there are also P frames that are guides for sudden changes in picture content). It seems as if most of my video apps see the B frames as corrupt, unless they have been preceeded by an I frame, and thus ignore them. Meanwhile the interleaved sound during that time is treated as valid and so the video always lags behind the sound. The only video editor I have that will directly open mpeg 2 files is Pinnacle Studio 8. Unfortunately it is only a "lite" version that came with my DVD burner and will not let me unlink the sound from the picture so I can change their relative places. It appears that if I were to buy the full version of it I could do just that. There could be a catch though. I am not sure that it actually displays those B frames at the start, and that will make the task of getting accurate sync difficult. I am going back to Avermedia's website now to have another look around. I think I noticed it had a users forum and I want to see if anyone else has solved this problem. |
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| Saturday 25th October 2003 |
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| 08.25 Weather : clear skies. cold I had a full eight hours sleep last night, and I think I feel better for it. During the night I had some pretty bizzare dreams. In one of those dreams I was back in an old haunt of mine, The Forest Barn pub/bar. The layout of the place seemed strange, but it was definately there. I used to be a (very) regular there back in the very early eighties. It was an odd place because many of the regulars seemed to be crooks, and others coppers from Sydenham police station. In my dream there were no coppers there, just crooks or worse. I think it might have been one of the bar staff who suddenly announced that he had to "dispose" of one of the previous management. ( There were several changes of management during the time I actually drank there.) He rushed out the back door and we heard gunshots. When he came back in again he was carrying new clothing. What happened next was a bit of a blur, but gave the impression that many of the regulars had sprung into action to change the guys clothing and appearance. It all seemed highly efficient and well practised, but at the same time it was like an edit in a film. In the next scene (to continue with the film analogy) I was still drinking at the bar, but feeling very uneasy about my fellow drinkers. I can remember very little after that, but I do recall a woman who I fancied going off with a mate of mine. That was strange because in real life he is bent as a nine bob note. I continued with my experiments on video files recorded from my new TV card yesterday. I am beginning to get a bit frustrated with those files now. They are in mpeg 2 format, but it seemes to be something a little non standard. I am sure that the way the audio and video is interleaved is the wrong order compared to, say, mpeg 2 for a Super VCD or DVD. I am limited with the applications I have that will open those files. Windows Media Player plays them fine, but you cannot do any more than play the files with that. Pinnacle Studio 8 and Win DVD creator will both open them, but the sound/picture synchronisation is all wrong. I did open one using Studio 8 and save it as a dv encoded avi file. I then opened that file using Edit Studio. Edit studio allowed me to unlink the audio and video, and then move them relative to each other to get very close to synchronisation. Upon playback of the newly saved file the synchronisation was good enough, but the picture quality had deteriorated and was suffering from lots of mpeg artifacts. The poor picture quality is bad enough, but the time it took to just get back to a usable file was horrendous. I am going to try and find a better solution. |
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| Friday 24th October 2003 |
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| 10.31 Weather : Bright, but cloudy. 4.5° C (overnight low 2° C) This looks like a late start to today. In fact I have been up for an hour and a half. Obviously I did have a lie in, but I decided to do all my ablutions before coming downstairs and writing this up. Since washing my hair, showering and getting dressed I have fed the cats, emptied the rubbish bin and watched a little TV (mainly teletext). From this revelation you might conclude that I usually write this unwashed and undressed. I have to confess you are mostly right, although it is unusual, but not unknown, for me to be not wearing at least a pair of underpants for these early morning entries. You didn't really want to know that did you ? I hope the image of me typing away in just a pair of underpants does not put you off reading this. Besides at this time I am fully dressed. Why do we call underpants a pair of underpants. It is only one item. It has two leg holes, but it has a further hole for the body, and even one for the willy. But none of these holes splits the item into more than one part. As I write this I wonder "Am I going mad" ? I am sure that the phrase "I am wearing a pair of underpants " is valid. Perhaps it is only me who says pair. Perhaps it was my Mum who was mad. I am sure I can recall her saying ".....and there is a fresh pair of underpants in the draw". Did she mean there were two underpants in the draw ? Yet underpants is always spelled in the plural so you cannot say "give me an underpants" in the same way as you can say "give me a vest, or a shirt". Of course you can say "give me an underpant" ,but what is an underpant in the singular ? At this point I could go on about trousers which are also often described as a pair of trousers (I think). I think I'll let it rest though. I spent a lot of time playing with my new DVB-T TV card in the PC upstairs yesterday. I have two different versions of the software for it and each has it's own merits. The software supplied with it does cause a certain amount of "hiccuping" on some channels - notably some of the radio channels. However the video is otherwise smooth and non jerky. That contrasts with the updated software that never seems to have any glitches, but the video is jerky like it is only running at 10 frames per second. What is strange is that recorded video plays back perfectly ( although there is another problem there that I will describe later). I thought that the jerky pictures may have been down to my graphics card so I reduced the screen resolution and colour depth. That made no difference at all. Now I am wondering if my 1.4GHz Athlon is not up to the job of decoding the digital video, and yet that cannot be the case because the recorded video is perfect. I think I have to conclude that it is the software driving the card that is to blame. I have made a short DVD and a slightly longer VCD from video recorded from the TV card. The picture quality on the DVD is superb, but on both disk the sound/vision synchronisation is really lousy. For the moment, and until I have done more experimentation, I am going to blame it on Pinnacle Studio 8. This is the only video editor/DVD builder software I have that will open the mpeg 2 files that the TV card outputs onto the hard disk. Playing those files on Windows media player is perfect with no synchronisation problems, so it must be the way that Pinnacle Studio 8 opens those files. I think I will have to convert the mpeg file to an avi file, possibly as seperate audio and video files, and see how that fares. It is going to make the archiving of some TV programmes a very slow and long winded process, but if I can achieve the picture quality that it promises, then I guess I will have to put up with it. |
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| Thursday 23rd October 2003 |
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| 08.08 Weather : Another dull, gloomy and wet start to the day. My new card (the DVB-T card for the PC) didn't come yesterday much to my great dismay. So here I am again, waiting with all senses on high alert, hoping that the parcel man will come today. One of the things I did yesterday was to transfer a TV programme that I had recorded on the digital camcorder to the PC, and, after a bit of light editing, burn it to DVD. I decided to use Pinaacle Studio 8 for the entire process (except for the actual DVD burning). It was the first time I had tried it. After a few aborted attempts I managed to use it to do all I needed. As an editor I don't like it, but I did like some of the flexibility it has for arranging DVD menu systems. I have yet to find out if it works, but it looks as if I can design my own buttons and backgrounds, using something like Paint Shop Pro, and incorporate those in the final layout. Once Pinnacle Studio 8 had written the DVD file structure to my hard disk I then used Nero Burning Rom to do the actual burn onto the disks themselves. My burner is capable of writing at x4 and did not complain when I selected that for some disks that were only rated at x2. Mostly the disks burnt OK and I could play them on a PC, but on a set-top player I noticed a lot of jumping. So the next disk I wrote at x2 and that played perfectly. As I type this the PC upstairs is burning a third copy of the disk at x1. That will be my master copy and the x2 disk I'll give to a mate. The x4 disk I may as well throw away. 10.45 Oh happy, happy, joy joy. My DVB-T card has arrived. It is installed, and seems to work perfectly. I think I mentioned that some reports on the internet suggested it was a load of rubbish ! I suspect those people just had difficulty with signal strength. There is a big sticker on the box saying it must be used with a high gain aerial. Well that's fine if you live a long way from the transmitter(s), but around here that is the last thing you want. The signal here is enough overload the receiver, and that can cause the sort of problems that have been noted on the internet. It was something we used to see all the time during my years in the TV trade. |
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| Wednesday 22nd October
2003 |
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| 07.30 Weather : dull,grey and wet There was a lot or rain overnight. I got up for a pee at around 3 am and it was raining quite hard then. Poor old Schiba was out in it after being in most of the day, yesterday. He was crying to come in when I woke up half an hour ago. Somehow he managed to come in almost bone dry. There were a few small damp patches were he may have brushed some wet leaves, but mostly he was dry. Being an ex-wild/alley/stray cat he obviously knows the best places to stay dry when it rains. Yesterday I downloaded a program called Basilisk II. If I can install it, it should emulate an old 68K Mac on this Linux box. I have my doubts that it will install because it relies on a very large pile of library files. I doubt I have them all, and it can be a bugger tracking them down and installing them. I am now waiting, with eager anticipation, for the arrival of the postman. He may have my new DVB-T TV receiver card with him. I sorted out the hard disks, that I proposed using to store the video from the new card, last night. There is one that is very fast, and one that is reasonably fast that is larger than the rest. I am going to try the largest one first. The very fastest I am going to hold back for my video editing machine down here. That has to record DV encoded files which use less compression than the mpeg 2 that comes from the TV card and hence has a far greater need to be able to swallow vast amounts of data quickly. 10.35 Still waiting for the postman, or more precisely, the parcel delivery man ! I've got to admit that it is a little frustrating. Until he comes I am limited in what I can do. I am even avoiding going to do "numbers 2's" unless it become very neccesary. I guess I am just a big kid who can't wait for xmas ! It is still a very dull day outside. It is not actually raining at this very minute, but the sky looks as if there is more to come. It is cold as well. Unless I put some shoes on, and step outside the back door, I can't see the thermometer to get an accurate reading, but what I can see looks like it is only 7° C. |
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| Tuesday 21st October 2003 |
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| 07.33 Weather : Grey skies (but it is early yet). 4° C I had some weird dreams last night. Some of them seemed to be about being back at work, but it was all mixed up. I seemed to mix up all the people and all the places I have worked into one super work experience. Somewhere mixed in with all that there was a little bit of the future. I have, in reality, ordered a DVB-T, "Freeview" TV card from Maplins (http://www.maplin.co.uk). [ They are selling them off cheaply (£79.99) because they appear not to work too well. I did a little web research and found that many of those who had trouble with them went on to buy other models by other manufacturers, and then had similar troubles with their new models. I concluded that maybe the cheap ones from Maplin's were probably not so bad after all. Some of the problems I read about reminded me of my experiences in an earlier life as a TV engineer - bad reception from too much or too little signal, or just a poor quality signal (multipaths etc). Other problems were similar to the problems you can get with recording any video on a PC - dropped frames because of slow disk access. ] In the dream (remember my dream ?) Maplin's were selling them cheaply because they were closing down. When I received the package I found that instead of the more usual bubble wrap they had stuffed the box with other useful items to fill up the space in the box. There were all sorts of goodies in there, although I cannot remember anything except a bag of nails ! Back to reality now as the cold grey light of dawn streams through the window. That is not actually true. The cold grey light of dawn is struggling to trickle through the window, but I thought the first idea sounded more poetic. Once again all this is being written using Mozilla Composer . Yesterday I even managed to upload without resorting to my favourite windows program (Cute Ftp 4.0). I'll admit it was a hell of a struggle to set up the Linux program I used (Gftp), and I hope it has remembered some of my settings from yesterday ! It is beginning to look as if I can use Linux for most things. There are two areas that need a lot more learning. Firstly sound recording. I have a program on here called Audicity that is like an early, primitive version of Cool Edit Pro. It seems a very flaky program and the preferences settings seem to make the whole program crash if you try and change too many in one go. The second area is image editing. I have the world famous The Gimp to use, but I hate it. Having been brought up on Paint Shop Pro I find it almost impossible to get on with its Adobe Photoshop like interface ! Today's major exploit is to sign on at 09.25. After that I will have a wander around the Aldi supermarket (which I pass on the way back from the Job Centre). Once home I must try and force myself to tidy up a load of off-air recordings that are sitting on the hard drive of my "audio workstation" upstairs (using Windows 2000 and Cool Edit Pro). 19.55 Today has been mostly good. One failure was trying to get Wine (application layer to use Windows programs with Linux) to work properly. It sort of works, but will only open the tiniest and simplest programs. I need to do more work on this. I managed to get the CD burner working for three of the applications on this PC, but one is stubborn and will not play the game. I'll try and ignore that one. I got an e-mail from Maplins today about my new DVB-T TV card. With luck it should be here tomorrow. I will be installing it upstairs on my Windows 2000 machine as that is nearest the TV aerial signal. Not only that, but it will need a fast machine, and probably Windows as the O.S. There are some programs for Linux that may run it, but for now the machine upstairs will be ideal (it also has a DVD burner in it). On that machine I have a hard disk caddy to take a second hard disk. At the moment it has a 120 GByte drive that is 66% full of mp3's. I will be using another drive for video. I have a possible 3 to choose from and I will test each one for speed before committing it to service. I am off to do that now methinks. |
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| Monday 20MMonday 20th October 2003 | |
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07.58 Weather : Cold, but bright. Some red in the clouds. I'm up relatively early this morning and using the new PC. I have bottled out from trying to use Linux for this entry, but I'll get round to it sometime. The Linux installation is working quite well so far, although it is taking a long time to configure. I think I have possibly worked out how to use the ftp program (or one of them). The safest step for me to take next is to build a brand new page using Mozilla Composer and try and upload that. I can then link to it from here and see how it works. There was a good programme on BBC4 last night about the BBC radiophonic workshop. Surprisingly it was made by Associated Redifusion - one of the "independent" TV companies. I find it odd that a programme about the BBC, and shown by the BBC was not made by the BBC. I recorded it on my DV camcorder and, possibly, today I'll be making it into a DVD for future viewing. One of these days I must do something about hooking the TV up directly to a PC so that I can capture programmes directly rather than use the camcorder as an intermediary.
I feel like having a break from PC's today. I'm not sure what
to do instead though. Maybe I might go out somewhere, or maybe
I'll read a new book that has been sitting here unopened for a
fortnight. |
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| Sunday 19th October 2003 | |
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09.40 Weather : mostly clear skies, bright and sunny. 8° C (overnight low 6° C) This morning it is a very late start to the day. I have had a bit of a lay in, but I did get up at 09.00. Since then I have been battling with EPGexplorer on my PC upstairs. This is the electronic programme guide for the DAB receiver. For reasons that are obscure it has stopped listing BBC programmes. This may be because the BBC have stopped transmitting them, or it could be something daft like a corrupt registry entry. The BBC are transmitting something, but I have a suspicion that they have their wires crossed and are sending the wrong data. On the other hand the data stream is called "test BBC guide". On top of that Schiba has been doing his best to get my attention. He even followed me upstairs and sat on the spare bed with me for a short while. Normally he is very wary about upstairs. Partly because it is further from the way out, and possibly because he once peed on my bed and I chased him out with much fierce shouting. When I think back on Schiba and compare him now to what he was like when we first met, I realise he has come on leaps and bounds. Our first meeting was when he would warily sneak down the garden path to eat Nelly's leftovers. Then he was a bedraggled heap of skin and bones afraid of everything and everyone. Now he is much more relaxed and will even let Jodie stroke him and not bolt when other strangers are in the house. His coat is much smoother and clean, and he has put on a little weight. He is still a very lithe cat compared to Nelly's dumpy form, but you can no longer see his bone structure. I think this winter will finally see the transformation from ally cat to domestic cat. He is 95% there already. Today should be the day ! I have tidied things up a bit and should, finally, move the new PC into place where the one I am using now sits. I still have not resolved all the problems with the new PC, but it is mostly there. The major problem revolves around the internal software modem when I am using Linux. It now works, but is intermittent. Sometimes it will pass data at full speed and at others it will only run at something equivalent to an old 300 baud modem. The simple answer is to use my external modem, but I still want an internal modem. I have asked a neighbour, who is going to a computer fair today, to look out for a PCI internal hardware modem. I doubt he will find one, but it is possible, although I am half betting that he will come back with another software modem if he comes back with anything at all. I don't think many people who have not used Linux appreciate the difference between a software modem and a hardware modem, and that includes the traders at the computer fairs. The easiest way to describe the difference is that a hardware modem is seen by the operating system as nothing more than another serial port. It neither knows or cares that there is a modem connected beyond that. The only driver it needs is that for a serial port. By contrast a software modem has an associated program that is run on the PC and does some of the work that would be done by internally on a hardware (or external) modem. As such. the driver is big and complicated and specific to the chipset that the modem uses. I do have some internal modem cards that are pure hardware modems, but they are all old ISA cards and can't be used on the new motherboard as it has no ISA slots. These modems all look like standard 15650 UARTS (universal, asynchronous, receiver-transmitter) as far as the operating system can see. They all date back to DOS days when drivers, as we know and love them now, did not really exist. Apart from the modem problem it should be all systems go ! Somehow I will need to bring both systems into sync when I do the transfer so look out for some gross errors on these diary pages (like days disappearing). I will endeavour to not to lose anything, but I doubt it will be that smooth at first. |
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| Saturday 18th October 2003 | |
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07.27 Weather : cold An early start for today. I am not sure why I am up so early today. I had another late night last night after a long session playing with my new PC. I am having problems with the modem still. I changed the internal modem card and found some Linux drivers for it after a long search. It now almost works, but almost is not enough. It is pretty strange because it can dial out, connect and log in to the other end, but no program seems to be able to access the data. I suspect it may be down to file permissions, but I am not sure. I did hook up an external modem via com port 1 ( or /dev/tty0 as Linux likes to know it ) and that worked just fine. I am probably being foolish in trying to use a Winmodem for Linux when I have a perfectly good external modem. It is just that an internal modem is neater than an external one. I hope that by the end of today I will have the new PC installed and in use. |
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| Friday 17th October 2003 | |
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11.18 Weather : Bright and sunny, but cold. 10° C (overnight low 8° C) It's a bit of a late start this morning. I went to the pub last night and had several drinks with Kevin. Started on Youngs ordinary for the first pint. Then moved on to special, and rounded the evening off with a bottle of Christmas Pudding Ale. I felt nice and happy after that ! I made a terrible mess once I was home. I decided to stay up and watch The Bill, that I had recorded earlier, even though I was totally knackered after not much sleep the previous night. I felt a bit peckish so I made some ham rolls. In one of them I put in some exotic chutney that I had lying around. It was pretty nice, but on the first bite a great dollop oozed out and fell on my shirt. In attempting to clear that up I managed to dangle my hair in it as I reached over for a tissue. While turning my head to wipe the chutney off the hair on one side the other side dangled in it. This morning I have washed my hair and had a good shower. I am now beginning to feel reasonably OK again - err, forgot to mention I had a bit of a hangover this morning :-( Today I have two choices. I can try and get myself dynamic enough to go over and have a pint with Ivor, or I can do some more to getting my new PC ready to take over from the one I am using now. I suspect it will be the latter as I still have few things to do before I could go out. Not least of all, have some breakfast. I think it would be a mistake to drink on an empty stomach especially as I have promised a neighbour that I will go and have a look at his PC early this evening. A few pints on an empty stomach would kill all my enthusiasm for the rest of the day ! If I am to stand any chance of going out I had better get my skates on as I will have to leave in 45 minutes, and I haven't even checked my mail yet. |
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| Thursday 16th October 2003 | |
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08.55 Weather : mostly clear skies. cold. 8° C I feel pretty rough this morning, and it's all down to lack of sleep. I got a bit carried away with trying (and succeeding ) in finishing the book I have been reading in bed. It was 03.05 when I turned the light out. It was 04.00 when Schiba started howling outside my bedroom door (which was open) that he wanted to go out. At 05.00 I woke up needing a pee. At 06.00 I woke up because I usually do then. Finally at 08.30 I woke up and came down here to feed Nelly and type this. At some point I am going back to bed again. I decided that I would use Linux Mandrake for my new PC as I am most familiar with it. It all installed perfectly and I have added many extras to it. I even managed to get a Winmodem working successfully. The software for that cripples it to only operate at 14.4 Kb/s unless I pay for an upgrade. I am not going to do that. Instead I'll either use an external modem (which I already have) or try and find an internal hardware modem (which I have, but only as an ISA card which is no good for the new motherboard). There is one thing that does not work, but ought to. Every time I try and plug in my USB pen drive it locks the entire machine up ! I am not sure where to look to correct that. I may try and download the Mandrake updates first and see if that fixes anything. I have a nasty suspicion that it may be something to do with the way USB support is lodged in the kernel. That is one place I do not want to mess with. |
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| Wednesday 15th October 2003 | |
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08.30 Weather : cool, but a bright start. Another late night, last night. I was reading until half past midnight so I have had a bit of a lay in this morning. At 6 am I had Nelly come and jump up on my bed to purr very loudly at me. Sadly that is the best Nelly can do to try and convince me to get up and feed her. As it is actually rather relaxing I went back to sleep again. What I couldn't ignore was Schiba howling at the back door ! I didn't do an update after 11 am yesterday as I was rather busy. My second parcel arrived soon after that last entry and I got stuck into making up my new PC. I thought I would do something different so I have sprayed the case (and the CD drive front panel) matt black. Everything I sprayed was detachable from the main chassis so I was able to carry on working on the "innards" while the paint was drying on the outer panels. The basic spec is the new Asus motherboard, a 1.3GHz Duron processor, a floppy disk drive, an 80 GByte hard drive and a Toshiba CDRW and DVD combo drive. The motherboard has integrated graphics, sound and LAN. I have decided to make it dual boot between Linux and Windows. Originally it was going to be just Linux, but there are a couple of things I will still need Windows for. In particular my scanner is not supported by Linux (as far as I can tell). There is one other reason for making it dual boot. The hard disk was one that I originally was using for video work. Unfortunately it gained a few bad sectors after a little accident, and now drops frames when recording video. That area of the disk is now partitioned for Windows in the new PC. I have already installed Windows on it together with some of the core programs that I'll use on it. Today I will do the Linux installation. All I have to decide now is what distro to use ! |
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| Tuesday 14th October 2003 | |
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09.35 Weather : cool but bright start. 10° C Although it is 09.35 now, I have been up since 08.00. I am currently waiting for a parcel to be delivered - 2 in fact. I know they have both been dispatched and are out there somewhere. So I am on full alert and increasingly excited about receiving my new shiny toys. I am expecting a new optical mouse and 1 Gigabyte of memory to put into my video editing PC. The original optical mouse I have nicked to use on the PC I am using now. In areas where there is a certain amount of fag ash lying around I find that optical mice are far, far better. The 1 Gigabyte of RAM should speed up video processing a bit, or that is what I am hoping for. I have also ordered a new, but cheap and cheerful motherboard to use with a Duron processor that I have had lying around for some time. I am going to make a dedicated Linux PC. For the first time I will mount the hard drive internally, rather than in a disk caddy, and try to use that as my main on-line PC. I can do many things using Linux, most in fact, but these journal pages could be difficult. I may have to rebuild my website from scratch, and that is a task I do not relish. On the other hand it is getting a bit messy and could do with a clean up. Right now though I am going back to looking out the window anxiously mode ! 11.00 No sooner than I had pressed the save button after the last entry when my first parcel arrived. I now have a whopping 1.25 Gigabytes of RAM in my video editing PC ! The parcel also contained the new motherboard. It looks OK apart from one minor disappointment. It does not appear to support USB 2, but that is only a minor gripe and it was probably only to be expected of such a cheap board. I hope that before the day is out I'll have it up and running. My next major decision is to whether I'll use Red Hat Linux or Mandrake Linux. |
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| Monday 13th October 2003 | |
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07.07 Weather : not bright enough to tell, but it's cold.10° C I thought I had better get up early this morning even though it was late before I went to sleep last night. In fact it was 22 minutes after midnight when I turned the light out this morning. I was reading a rather well written sci-fi book called The Trigger in bed last night, and could have read on for even longer if I hadn't noticed the time. The book is another collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and someone who's name escapes me for the moment. In the book, a future is discussed where a means had been found to cause explosives to be detonated at a distance using a projected beam (apparently microwave radiation at a certain frequency and power level). This would enable any enemies weapons to explode before they could be used, and, significantly, ones own weapons to do likewise. Once the science bit is over, which is where I am up to in my reading, the story then goes on to consider how the world would adapt to having no guns and bombs that work in a conventional way. It is a good idea, but I think the science behind it is fatally flawed. There is apparently no way to shield any explosive from the effects of the radiation, and that seems odd for any electromagnetic radiation at microwave frequencies. Secondly it would appear to operate only on Nitrogen based explosives by breaking the molecular bonds between nitrogen containing molecules. Well that's all right up to a point, but many other things use nitrogen containing chemicals, including us ! There could be get out clauses for both these objections because at the halfway point in the book the reasons for the effect have not been found. Maybe when I read more these explanations will become apparent. I suspect not though, because it is not necessary for the basic plot of near total disarmenenent to continue. Yesterday I noticed from my bedroom window that Autumn is well and truly upon us. The leaves on the trees are turning yellow and falling. I tried to capture what I could se from my bedroom. The sun was making the yellow leaves glow like gold, but sadly the effect seems to have been lost on film.
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09.08 Weather : slightly grey skies with sun breaking through. 10° C (yesterdays high - 18° C) I thought I would watch some Dr Who before writing this. I was only up in time to watch the last 1 hour of Dr Who on UK Gold. It was not one of the better stories, although it was supposed to be one. For a start it was a Peter Davidson era story and had Tegan in it. Peter Davidson was not one of the best doctors. Some of his stories were good, but he seemed so let down by Tegan. Tegan, whose real name I don't care to remember, always seemed annoying and somewhat ugly to me. She was supposed to have been an air hostess and thus represent glamour and beauty. Instead she was as irritating as a wasp and as attractive as a bag of spanners. Perhaps I am too picky, but most of the doctors assistants had a certain amount of sex appeal in one or more episodes, but I cannot recall Tegan ever appearing remotely that way. 09.56 I've just got to cut-n-paste a couple of lines I read on a blog site (http://www.livejournal.com/users/redcountess/231200.html). It describes how I felt last week so nicely ; "I appear to be ill. Whether it was walking around in the sun earlier, the excesses of last night, or a virus, I’m not sure, but certain parts of my body hate me right now." Yes, indeed, some parts, of my body did hate me ( quite a few in fact )!! I do seem to be 99% better now, but I am still not prepared to agree on that last 1%. Interestingly there is a further line from that same web page which backs up other stuff I've heard ; "a lot of people seem to be getting this virus....". |
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| Saturday 11th October 2003 | |
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08.20 Weather : A bright sunny start to the day. 9° C I hope it is all just part of waking up, but I feel slightly snotty this morning. As the day progresses it could get worse or it could go away. I hope the latter ! I first woke up at 6 am because I was having a dream that seemed to have got stuck in an infinite loop. In the dream I was building another transmitter. This one was never intended to work, but the valves had to light up. One of the valves I had selected was an old valve that was probably made in the 1930's. When it lit up it displayed, or somehow showed, something like a cross between an e-mail address and a URL. By going on the internet it was supposed to be possible to trace the history of that individual valve. I knew that this was impossible, but every time I looked it was there. The only way out of the dilemma was to wake up. Priority for today ; I must go to Tesco for cat food. I said I was going yesterday, but I never did. I had to give Nelly some food she wasn't keen on this morning. She has now left home to find her own food ! (She'll be back soon - it's cold out there, besides she has never caught anything before except one small mouse that was probably half dead from poison when she first moved in here). 5 minutes later and she is heading for the back door ! |
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