I had another play with my halo-lit sign for the house this weekend - I live on a mostly unlit, unnumbered road, and the sign for the house is a very small plaque - I think I have the winning cominbation of shiny bits and LEDs. Cranking up the LEDs from 8mcd (before) to 1500mcd (now), makes the sign bright enough that you can see it dim light, which was the aim. I might try the ultra-mega-hyper-bright LEDs (8000mcd), just to see how bright they make it, but they are a bit more expensive, and I’m going to need to get 80 or so, so it’ll make a difference. The final design will probably be green, not red, since it was pointed out that having a red-lit sign in the window might give the wrong impression.
IMAP Client update: Mahogany fell at the first hurdle by being clunky and crashing. Mulberry on the other hand is kind of cool, talks SSL to my IMAP server, and hadn’t done anything wierd yet. It could be The One. 14 days to decide.
Once again via skoo, this site is exactly what the web was made for. Sharing of scientific findings. Genius.
Hahah! Even better, the ‘reset to defaults’ button also asks if you’re sure, using the same broken confirmation box. Luckily I remembered that when you re-install the nvidia drivers, it annoys you by resetting all the defaults for screen size etc, so that has got me back to somewhere sensible.
I just found an odd thing. The Nvidia graphics drivers come with one of those little systray apps to allow you to fiddle with the settings. One of them, I just noticed, was ‘Rotation’. Indeed, as you might guess, you can rotate the screen through 90,180 or 270 degrees. I can just about think of reasons for this being useful (reflection arcade-console style, or a feature-lacking projector). I tried it just to see if it worked, and it did. It also popped up a box labelled ‘confirm display change’, just like it would with any other change. The fun part is that the box’s contents were something entirely different, not including OK or Cancel, but some slider to do with powersaving. Now, the display properties changes that you make normally time-out after 15 seconds, so you can’t blind yourself. I can now get rightside-up desktop for only 15 seconds at a time! What fun!
Sweet! I have been playing on and off for the last year with MP3 Karaoke software. The standard for ‘pro’ karaoke is CD+G which is CD Audio with embedded graphics (the lyrics). There is an online version of this where the audio is ripped to MP3, and the graphics to a .cdg file. You can play these on your PC with a winamp plugin. The format for .cdg files is fairly simple (the graphics are pretty basic!) and I spent a little time last year writing a decoder for it, with a view to making a Sega Dreamcast karaoke player. That got half-done (as usual), but what I have just finished is a CD+G/MP3 to MPEG1 converter. That means that even if your DVD/VCD player doesn’t understand CD+G, you can still use that data. It’s a little bit of a niche thing, I’ll admit, but I think it’s kind of cool. As soon as I get the MPEG-encoding smoothed out a bit, I’ll put it up for download, probably with source. I don’t think there is any CD+G source around elsewhere, so that’ll be neat.
After my moan the other day, I had a recommendation for Mulberry, and since then have also found someone elses nice list of IMAP clients. So this week I’m trying Mulberry, and maybe Mahogany. I’ll let you know how annoying they are, I’m sure.
Just spent the afternoon assembling my shiny new Shuttle SN41G2 (the Nforce2 one) - it’s small and pretty quiet. I found another quirk of the KVM switch though - don’t use it to leave windows installing while you do something else. It just sits and spins it’s wheels after a certain point.
The shuttle seems nice so far - I don’t have the new hard disk for it, so it’s just an ancient maxtor 3Gb in it for now. The new one will be a quiet WD jobbie. There’s also a GF4Ti4200 on the way. It’s a bit wheezy - there’s a temperature controlled fan, to keep it quiet, but it spins up and down in quite a twitchy way.
Not only is there an official UK Internet Guru, but her name is Caramel Quin. I don’t think I’ve heard of someone called Caramel before. Not outside of the adult entertainment industry. I’m all for “getting the country online” and that, but there is a sort of wierd forcedness about it when it is a government goal.
I have a dream, that someday, Outlook Express will have IMAP4 support that will play friendly with Courier IMAP, and not need resetting every few days. IMAP is really nice for when you move around a bit, or want real folders that are accessible from several places, but client support is pretty sucky for the most part. Maybe it’s time to start looking around again - I haven’t tried any new ones in a little while now.
Recently Read: Basket Case, by Carl Hiassen. More in the florida-nutcase genre from Mr Hiassen. This story is a murder mystery with a rock & roll angle. It’s not as fun as his eco-terrorist stories with ex-Governer Skink, or Strip Tease (which is hundred times better than the movie), but it motors along nicely, and a couple of the set-pieces are very nicely done.
Saw Shanghai Knights this afternoon - the sequel to Shanghai Noon. You can’t beat a good Jackie Chan movie. This one is no exception - there are a couple of not-quite-right characters, but the whole thing is so deliberately cheesy anyway that it can be forgiven. Aiden Gillen is really wanting to be Alan Rickman quite badly, and the kid is a litte *too* much of an Oliver! extra (with a disturbing Clockwork Orange undertone - that hat, that hair, those freckles). There is a fight scene early on in a marketplace with a sequence using umbrellas that is particularly cool and choreographed. Owen Wilson is excellent too - when I first saw Shanghai Noon, I didn’t really like him much, but I’ve seen a bunch of his other films now, and he’s really grown on me. Bottle Rocket (starring Owen and Luke Wilson) was one of my favourite films of those I saw last year.
Fine, but geeky, April Fool’s article from yesterday. One in a long line of joke RFCs. Somehow I still can’t take RFCs with numbers greater than 2000 seriously.
It only means anything to me after many happy hours playing Sublogic FS2 (now Microsoft Flight Simulator) on my Atari ST, but the overnight demolition of Meigs Field in Chicago is a bit of a strange story.
w00t! I ordered my Glastonbury ticket today… I’ve always wanted to go, but never had a plan. This’ll be my first time camping, such as it is too. It promises to be fun.
Well, what do you know? Thanks to philb for pointing at this very focussed site about UK parrots, from which it seems they were problably ring-necked parakeets.
There is a green parrot sitting in the tree at the end of my garden. Very pretty. I should point out that parrots are generally not native fauna in southern England, just in case it wasn’t obvious. I need to spend more time in the Big Room.
I was in Game the other day, and I noticed a box marked Defender on the GameCube shelf… the logo looked like the Williams Defender logo, but the pictures on the back didn’t. It seems that Midway have made a 3d rewrite of Defender. This is just plain wrong.
The new game is pretty, I suppose, but it isn’t Defender. Have a look at IGNs video… The joy of Defender is the constant motion, the flow of the game. You never actually stop. The attackers don’t run on rails. It’s one of those games where you get into a ‘zone’ and do impossible things. People watching can’t see how you are doing it. There’s few enough games like that, without losing one to renovations.
This is all that remains of an 7-year chunk of my life. It’s really quite depressing, although I left them over a year ago now. Not that I regret leaving for a minute, mind, it was the best thing to happen to me. It just all seems such a waste.