Category: Gadgetology

Well, there’s always a catch.

Whether that catch is the power supply or the motherboard is what Kent is working on figuring out now. (He got the two 22″ VGA monitors out of the deal – which turned out to be better than advertised, since they were both dual-input monitors with A/B source selector buttons on their front panels – since I’ve already got LCD flatpanels I’ll be using for this.) All I do know is that everything else powers up, but when the PC is connected to power, it just emits a whine, and can never seem to be turned on. I can’t wait to hear what it sounds like when it is up and running though – just the Avid Meridian module, the “QuietDrive” (HA!) and the VTR all turned on sound like a plane about to take off next to my head.… Read more

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My wife and I made the trip from Arkansas to just south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border and back in one incredibly compressed trip lasting 26 hours. The whole process was made much easier by the fact that her vehicle has dual controls – two steering wheels, two brake pedals, two accelerators, etc. etc., you get the idea. (Now, never mind that one set of those controls is in the back in a tail gunner position…okay, okay, just kidding there.) So we didn’t have to do a Chinese fire drill for someone else to take the wheel. With only brief stops for gas, one five-or-six hour layover at a truck stop in a tiny little Illinois town (whose name I now can’t remember – Topica? Topeka? Tapioca? Kai Opaka?) for a nap, and about a half-hour stop on the return trip for a little bit of a “picnic” in the parking lot of a filling station, we were always on the move. … Read more

It seems like I get new toys in sporadic bursts; tonight I’m messing with the latest one, a slide/35mm film scanner. This may seem like an odd thing to have for someone who doesn’t even own a film camera (he said as his photographer grandfather spins in his grave), but I’ve wanted one of these for ages for an entirely different reason. I have quite a slide collection. Many moons ago, I was very much into slides of photos from various and sundry NASA missions, and amassed quite a collection. In later years, I routinely salvaged promotional photo slides that were due to be thrown away at the places where I worked. These would usually be the very familiar publicity photos, logos, etc. (you see, everyone else got the same slides sent to them too), in 35mm color slide form. Some years back my slide projector broke, so I’ve had a ton of slides and nothing that I could really do with them.
Now, as with so many other things in my life, they can be digitally archived. The scanner itself is a pint-sized cousin of my flatbed scanner, and makes roughly the same disagreeable grinding noises. The scanner software itself is a hoot, obviously a product of a tech writer or translator for whom English isn’t even high enough on the food chain to be a second language; maybe fourth or fifth. When my first scans were X-ray negatives, I figured out that I needed to switch to “generic color” mode instead of “nagetive” (yes, that’s really how the software spells it). The result of a good scan is a rather large TIFF file, and I usually need to do some color and contrast balancing in Paint Shop Pro. But the images turn out nicely. (I’ve already turned a couple of my early slide-scanning experiments into images on the front page of the site; see if you can spot them.) … Read more

Okay, so it’s more than 14 hours later. Gimme a break, I’m still doing my disturbing victory dance all around the house.

This is an Avid video editing setup I just won on eBay. To find out how much I spent on it…well…just go here and see for yourself. It’s kinda like the very definition of pennies on the dollar.
This changes the whole picture as far as work goes. Remember what George Carlin said about envying dogs’ ability to lick themselves? “If I could do that, I’d never leave the house!”
More pics below. … Read more

Alas, my poor little buddy.
What you see at right is an NEC MobilePro 820c, a handheld PC that goes everywhere with me. (I added the “Don’t Panic” myself – that’s not quite NEC standard issue yet.) I do 95% of my writing on this little machine, and an increasingly large part of my web browsing as well. I have extensive Excel spreadsheets to keep track of my game collection (and some other collections). It’s wireless. It’s got decent battery life. It’s a godsend.
Well, at least until this morning. Something happened and the poor little guy got completely wiped. No more spreadsheets. No more wireless card drivers (and it’s staunchly resisting any attempt on my part to reload said drivers). All articles-in-progress lost.
I probably could’ve been doing a better job of backing this machine up (it can hardlink to my old PC, Orac, though that’s hardly a guarantee of safekeeping where data is concerned). I’m still frustrated that this all happened out of the blue though. 😡… Read more