Category Archives: Uncategorized

Shortest day- supposedly

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0°C, dense fog.

Added up – this could be the shortest day. the earliest sun-set was last week- on the 13th December and the mornings will continue to get darker for a few days yet. We have 7 hours and 39 minutes of daylight today. By Saturday, we will see an improvement of 6 seconds on that. wow!

Audigy: finally got round to putting in the new soundcard in this computer. Though it still needs some setting up, it definitely makes clearer sounds as well as doing some special effects like echo and reverb on mouse-click sounds too. The biggest change should be in games- we’ll see about that.

(w)Hoot

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7°C, cold, damp and very dull.

CDs: Tom Waits, this is a triple set which leaves me wondering why he can’t release more often so they are spread out & we don’t have to wait so long?

Game: latest incarnation of the Sturmovic flight sim series. 

Which is very nice to have just before the holiday, but I have a painting to finish….

True to my word- ithe painting now finished   ….pitcha tomorrow.
The Tom Waits triple is promising- never one to make a judgement on first hearing, all the right ingredients are there.
Finally– the title comes from the sound a bird made while I was out with the Ladies (both proudly wearing their flashing LED collars).

Faster? is it not so?

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7°C, clear.

I may be enjoying a faster internet connections, maybe it’s just the few sample tests ran this afternoon, time will tell. the best speed so far has been 1.65Mbps.
Bristol: today has seen us nostalgically driving over old cycling routes from the years I lived in Birstow. With some over-confidence, I took some wrong turns- ten years has been enough to forget, but the remembering has been rather nice. Cheddar Gorge was just the same, as was Wells.

Wireless= done.

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10°C, still windy.

Finished: the home network is up & running, the wireless network runs well enough with just below the highest level of encryption. It’s hard to see exactly how fast the connection is to the isp, but it certainly dooes not seem slower than before. My next question is- can I run the client machines without a software firewall?
 
Here is a broadband speed test site. I got 507Kbs download, and about half that for upload.

Wireless Shenanegins

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12°C, very windy, C=52 miles.

Too many options: maybe "me" is right, there are hundreds of settings in that router, probably because it allows so many standards for ADLS as well as wirelesss connections. I can get the wireless connections to wqork, but there is no incoming connection to my ISP despite the diagnostics saying the right things.
 
Linseed: that Stalkinghorse picture is near enough complete, later I will take a photo’ so you can see.
 
ok, the photo will have to wait, this will be a night of poor sleep as it is.

Help files not working

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15°C, grey, then sunny intervals with rain.

There must be something wrong with my Windows CD, a recent re-install of Win 2000 has left me with the same fault as the first time I put windows 2K on. Hyperlinks don’t work in compiled .html help pages. There is a peculiar solution, it is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811630

If you have installed Service Pack 4, the fix is to open a Command
Prompt window and then run these two commands:

regsvr32 /u <drive>:winntsystem32hhctrl.ocx
regsvr32 <drive>:winntsystem32hhctrl.ocx

 

that technique worked last time but then I lost the file after a reformat. Funny how I found the solution – during an idle moment I searched for my name in Google to look for my oldest posting somewhere. I’m only putting this here in case I loose it gain- not an act of generosity.

Holiday soon, one week off, time for a couple of paintings, especially finish the crane-pointers plus another quick A4 one. Some animation, including the deconstruction of another element- probably something asteroidal this time. There’s no harm in planning.

T20

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16°C, clear.

New speakers for the PC.

Though a vast improvement in the sound quality over the previous pair, the bass is a bit bloated. Treble & mid are clear such that they actually sound sterio rather than 2 mono channels. I expect with a bit of fiddling that they will sound better. Music is always the real acid test, but I rarely listen to mp3s, more often it’s internet radio, both of which suffer poor sound quality in the first place. There is always the limitation from the quality of the sound-card which is a generic motherboard mounted job. The better sound cards are separate – and the best are external to the computer case to reduce hum.
Creative have fallen onto the marketing ploy of stating the output wattage as a guide to it’s loudness. Such a practice is absurd, 14W rms has no connection to how loud they go, we need to know the sensitivity of the speakers to find that out. the units to look for are db/W (decibels per Watt). At least they didn’t publish pmp in watts ( peak music power), that is the most misleading spec that pseudo-hifi companies use.
…that completes my recent run of of oders from Amazon.

Editing Videos

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16°C, clear.

Premier: using Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 is far easier than the old version 6. The trouble now is getting the output files small enough to upload to photobucket. They use a flv converter built into the web server, but it has limitations. Some of the DivX attempts have been corrupted with multicoloured blocks flying around the screen Both frustrating and taking up time, at least DivX renders quickly, muich more than WMV encoding does.
Good job I’m patient isn’t it?

 
OK Ok getting somewhere, here is the first one to successfuly upload. OldWarden_ Gladiator
Secondly, The Old Edwarians, planes from before WWI. These are the oldest flying aircraft in the world. Edwardians.
Finally, a render from an imported model which is a fun thing to play with, it’s ready rigged so I can just get on with animating it.