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Updated: April 29, 2009
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Brian Crosthwaite
STARDATE: 20081204: Hardware Madness. That's madness as in anger -- not wild and crazy. I recently purchased an IBM USB DVD-RW Burner. Totally portable, fits in those ThinkPad pouches, full featured burner -- the cream of the crop -- the cat's meow. A drive that retailed for over $600. I got it for 17.
So what's with the anger?
Cable.
USB cable not included. No biggy I've got USB cables. Ah, not this one. I go online. I found the cable . $350.
For a cable!
I find this cable in many places and the cheapest I could find was 335.
The cable is a two cable configuration. One cable is a USB port to power in on the drive. You can also use a ps. The other cable is the data cable. Non-standard. It appears to have a box that most likely has some sort of logic stuff in it then what appears to be 10 lines out to pins on the drive.
USB has only five lines in it, I just don't know the pin configuration on the drive end. Sierra Hotel India Tango.
STARDATE: 20081222: I'm free!
The iMac is this wonderful fast machine that blows DVDs. When I needed a dual layer disc I was kinda in a hurry so I went to Walgreen's and blew $10 on two DVD-DL discs. Well, the iMac blew the first disc. See comment above on the in regards to the cable.
I blew two more DLs then quit using the damn machine. I broke down and finally bought that DVD-RW drive for the R30 and A21p. I have since tested and am currently using CDburnerXP and DVDCopy3.
I have freed myself from that blasted machine. I feel like my data, my blank disks and my sanity are safe. It is also nice to back stuff up on my own time and space. The iMac is a family machine and it gets used most of the day.
My solution to the DVD cable problem was basically to bail by simply getting another DVD burner. Now, I'd love to have the cable for the drive as that unit is way cool.
No Key Time.
My Mom has been on hospice since early November. It is now two days before Christmas and we are all exhausted. I am only doing email (not regularly) and occasional net stuff. Nothing else. I am tired.
STARDATE: 20090101: On December 26, 2008 at 12:45pm, my Mom, Peggy S. Crosthwaite let out her last breath and passed. She was 89.
Happy Valentine's!
Brian Crosthwaite
STARDATE: 20090206:
The Future? or a New Move
Key time has been sparse. I have, however, been at they keys of both an emulated 64 and a real 128D.
It seems a lifetime ago that I went to Monastery of the Ascension. It was only a couple of weeks ago. I spent most of the time there doing something I have little time to do -- absolutly nothing.
It was really nice. The two months prior were rather in tense and stressful. My Mom's meds had to be constantly monitored, recorded and adjusted. Her decline was seemingly slow but it had a pace to it and it took a toll on the whole family.
Upon her death, a new set of todos popped up. There have been a constant flow of new things to deal with. The escape to the Monastery gave me energy I hadn't had since October.
I slept in -- an unusual thing for me. I did have the A21p with me running the A22m's HD with Win2k on it and WinVICE. I booted GEOS and, using a piece of paper that I had put notes on and geoPaint, I reconstructed the floor plans of my Dad's office. I then cut and pasted and tweaked the furniture from my own office floorplans.
It was a bit like a meditative exercise. Upon placing furniture in the room I discovered many things. No.1, I'd have more floor space, No. 2, I'd loose many bookcases and I'd loose many machines set up.
STARDATE: 20090214: This requires some discernment. I need to look at the equipment I have that I planned to hook up one day and see if that is even possible.
The whole Annex will simply cease to exist. I look at it now and it has become a speedy place to stow stuff out of the way, hardly an efficient us of space. The Ataris and Apple are in there. The PET 4032 is in there. All machines that, at present are forced to lie dormant because of the stalled eBays -- the stuff was moved in the Annex to simply get it out of the way.
There are things in that room I don't even want that prevent us from using the space. Just crap.
STARDATE: 20090215: The playroom will remain the play room, with the gameframe tucked away in the closet like it is now. There is a special closet. Double doors, one set that, like now, open up into the play room. The very same closet also opens up to the room behind that will be Voyageur Studios' new location. A secret passage!
Our present house has a secret passage of sorts. It leads from the laundry room to under the stairs out in the Annex. At presant we duck through the passage to access certain items in the Annex. Despite the mess the Annex is in, it will be missed.
The Fall.
I feel like I'm planning the demise of NC. I will loose so much space and now need to either dock or sell the machines that I will no longer have access to. Here is the grim reality -- I haven't had access to them for a long time.
It is a repeat of the playroom taken over by the PET system fiasco all over again? This time it is an iMac sitting on the floor of the Annex and things get piled around. It's box is on top of the pile of empty boxes in the barn -- where the iMac should and will be. It'll be there until a space to open it, coinciding with me having time to work on it, happens.
Perhaps the move will open things up for me. I have recently readied the Apple IIs and the garage for a mass exodus via eBay. I pray that the move enhances those efforts, rather than thwarts them. Only time will tell. Time is one thing, I feel, I no longer will have.
It feels like the end of an era and perhaps the end of my part with computers that have become archaic. Computers I still support because they are my machine of choice. Perhaps those will be the remaining legacy and I'll keep the C128D running while the others slip quietly away.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
STARDATE:20090216:
Days of Future Passed.
Yet another AC from the Tréo. The future looked grim for a while there, but that vision is clearing as I realize that I haven't envisioned what the future holds. I still walk in the fog of having a parent on hospice pass. My life was busy and very intensely so, monitoring meds and constantly adjusting and watching the slow decline of my Mom. It took an enormous pile of energy.
Then there were all the things that followed, funeral home. death certificates, letters and all the follow through. It just seems to go on and on. My Brother and I had a very intense 4 daze of doing the final go through of everything -- this entailed going through several things that hadn't even been previously noticed, let alone looked at.
Burned out? Yes.
But what now?
Big sigh. Well, there are things like the gorilla shelves that were a major innovation for the studio -- back to the drawing board.
STARDATE:20090219:
DVD vrs VHS.
DVD boast fine picture quality, great sound, and all those extra features and bonus materials.
DVD offers scene selection, language selection, subtitle/language selections. So many pluses! But at what cost?
Well, your DVD player probably will never eat your DVD and mangle the disc, like a VHS might. But should you get a scratch, the DVD might come to a halt. Ok, move to the next section then rewind until you reach a point close to the freeze. Oops! Too far! Try again. And again. Once more. Give up.
Oh wait it's a tape, just let it play through the rolling picture will pass and you hardly even notice. Oh, a bad mangle, lets just fast forward a bit and -- bam! -- you're watching and virtually nothing is missed.
With VHS you don't get that once in a while frame freeze where the picture just stops and the sound just stops. You don't get those arifacts -- especially in dark scenes. VHS picture quality is not that bad. Want a better tape? Beta!
With a population that can support new technology that steps up in both quality and price, it makes it hard on those who have chosen a technology and expanded in that technology when the industry decides to leave that technology behind, forcing the consumer to switch.
We have a VCR up stairs -- bought new and one downstairs -- bought for $10 second hand. Both are very good quality. I have collected VHS movies for around 20 years or so. Now we collect movies on DVD. I also have movies on Beta. Blu- Ray is all the rage as the new technology and if with a population reaching epic proportions, there is probably a large amount of people who will buy units and movies as they want the latest and the greatest technologies, even though they are a very small percentage of the populace, there is enough to make the sales of units very, very successful. Add to that group, people entering the market -- young people just growing up as it were, and you have even more potential buyers of the new technology.
This makes the new technology a better sell for movie companies releasing films for public consumption. Soon the tides turn and DVD goes the ways of VHS and VHS goes the way of Beta. Remember records? 8-tracks? Cassettes? Audio-CDs?
So one day we decided to get a DVD player.
WS:
My camcorder can film in 4:3 or widescreen modes. I won Intervideo's DVDCopy3 from a raffle at a PC user group meeting a couple of years ago.
The software got tried, tested and put on a shelf. That was prior to the acquisition of a digital camcorder.
DVDCopy lets you copy DVDs, merge DVDs to one disk and make DVDs from video files. It also lets you output to VCD, MP4 and WMV disks. You can also output to your HD. This last part is great if you are not brave enough to endure the time your computer will be tied up to render the DVD files and burn the DVD. It will be tied up and should anything go wrong or you abort, your DVD will be a coaster.
DVDCopy supports single and dual layer disks and a number of burn speeds. The options, for the most part are fairly limited in what you can do. But, it is useable.
Now, DVDCopy3 only outputs to full screen. So the widescreen video is tall and stretched. That sucks.
Not being one to accept such atrocities as viewing WS as FS I had to do some tweaking. Having the video in avi form helped and this is what came about. It might not be the best solution, but for my situation it worked...
Using MP4kits.com's (www.mp4kits.com) Free AVI to MP4 Converter, convert the file to an MP4 file. Then run the resulting file through NCH Software's (www.nchsoftware.com) Prism Video Converter and save it as an avi.
This process takes a looooonnnnng time, especially on older machines like an R30 ThinkPad and the like. It will also make a FS video that appears as WS by doing the letter box thing. I don't know what this does on a WS display since I do not have access to one. The resulting file is then put in the make DVD from files option of DVDCopy. I have it output to my HD and then use CDBurnerXP to put the DVD folders on a DVD. That only takes 30 mins or an hour for a dual layer on the 850 MHz A21p.
STARDATE:20090411: Ok, sometimes the audio can go bye-bye on certain files, depending upon the original avi. Also SUPER from eRightSoft (just google it) will convert many, many file types to many other file types. I found it good for moving 3g2 files from my PDA to avi. It can also make DVD ready files -- all but standard in size. You might want to get yourself a cheet sheet before convertion if you have a non-standard file to convert, as SUPER will make the file what it thinks it should be (as far as frame rate, res, etc.) rather than what it should be.
Brian Crosthwaite
Archaic computing. Hm. Think I've reflected on this before. I used the AC term as a sort of tongue in cheek term- of- endearment. It seemed at the time that the entire computing world at large had forgot of the very existence of the commodore 64.
It was an arcane machine. But it really wasn't, it was the computer I used for everything. I didn't even have a 128 back then. I had considered a 128 as a machine I wanted, but not as a replacement, upgrade, or improvement on, or over, the C64. It was another commodore and therefore another cool machine.
Do people still call their computers their machine? How about cars? Seeing some pop cult stuff, now and then, you'd think if it did happen, I might hear someone say it. Remember "mean machine?"
Wow, maybe I'm the antiquated one -- not my 64. I have two 64s setup and one gets occasional use -- enough to leave the computer and it's vast library accessible.
Enough hooby wahby!
Mulling over the layout, as I've done off and on -- mostly off -- I've found that more discernment is needed in the lines of furniture. Much of the furniture in the studio and surrounding area at present, was acquired for the area based on shape and function.
Is a new set of custom shelves in store? Perhaps. The current furniture was not custom made, but it was custom fitted. Fitted by chance and circumstance. My Mom would have a shelf she'd ask me about or Rex had a computer desk that was in need of repair. It turned out on many occasions that what was offered fit.
In the case of the table, I saw that at the shop and said "that's what I need!" It was half the size of the card table I had the 1200 on in the middle of the room. It was exactly what was needed.
Of course, to follow this approach, I'd need to scrap the current furniture, or at least be ready to move stuff around.
This may happen on a small scale, but all in all, the studio may get set up time permitting.
This posting is late as my life is still so full of things that require my immediate and full attention that there is not enough time for them, much less anything else.
At present, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
by
The Quiet.
There is a saying regarding the quiet before the storm, implying that there is a stillness before things start happening. It is a tradition that when my family goes on vacation, or camping, I rise before, or with the sun and fire up VICE on some Linux or Win box and work on a commodore PRG for LOADSTAR.
It seems like forever since I've had the opportunity to do so. The current LS PRG has been in limbo for quite awhile. It is the all on a Treo with Frodo. I'm on Strider under WinUAE running Wordworth. I'm across I-5, on the opposite side from Disneyland. I have been here for several days, but have done no programming.
I have however typed up a story about three kids that find themselves on a haunted adventure. My life has change so much in the past six months. Writing is something I'd like to spend more time doing. And Writing Ghost Mystery Stories is a passion of mine. I have been at it since around 1980 or even earlier.
I never knew I was a story teller. On late evening I found myself telling a story to a group that had gathered in the dorm -- one of my first collage experiences at BSU. When I had spun the tail, just about everyone was in awe of this frightening tail. It still does hold a high place as one of my most frightening tales. I've usually prefer calm subtle hauntings -- but not always.
The future of noesiscreation.net is totally unclear. I have sketches and slight visions, but nothing concrete. I still use the commodores and Ataris and TRS-80s and such. But there are major changes still on the horizon.
Moving Day is set for the 15th and the studio is only one element. There may be some time before the next AC posting. Who knows what may blow in, in the next storm.