We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • the beast of the bios

    I now have a 16:9 LCD monitor for the front room computers. The Ubuntu box needed a little reconfiguration of the X Server to work perfectly, though I think the bandwidh for 1440*900 might be a bit high for my old KVM, as I’m getting some sparklies on solid colour.

    The mini-ITX box was another story. It resolutely refused to see the wider screen. Then I found out I had to update the BIOS. Yuk.

    Since Catherine is of the teacherly profession, she bought a USB floppy drive with her iMac five years ago. The drive hasn’t seen much use, but it was essential here. First I had to find a floppy that worked (discarded a couple), then I found that Windows XP’s “make bootable floppy” option doesn’t actually make a disk that boots. I had to go off to bootdisk.com to find a super-minimal floppy boot image. Once I got that, I installed the bios tool and the flash image onto the floppy, and rebooted.

    At this point I got really annoyed. The bios tool linked from all the VIA pages is too old to recognize the new bios file format, so exits with “It is not Award BIOS” error message. Once I found the right link (thanks, filupn), I was in business. Or was I?

    I then discovered that my SP13000 had its BIOS protect jumper on. This meant dismantling the box. For most PCs, it’s not such a big deal, but for mini-ITX, it’s a horror. I had to remove the DVD drive, the hard drive, the PCI card and riser and many cables just to get down to the motherboard. Putting it all back together was hard, with the expected amount of squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the cables to get everything in.

    The BIOS upgrade, the machine rebooted, and now all I need to do is update the graphics driver. Unfortunately, there are many that are described as the VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics Driver. Argh.

  • excel: alpha code to numbers

    I use an annoying program that labels its output A..Z, AA..AZ, BA … rather than numerically from 1. This is annoying, as a spreadsheet won’t sort it correctly (it does A, AA, AB …). The following code will convert this code to the right numbers, assuming your alpha code is in cell B3:

    =IF(LEN(B3)=1,CODE(B3)-64,26*(CODE(B3)-64)+CODE(RIGHT(B3))-64)

    This will only work for codes of two characters or less, and is case sensitive.

  • More from The Cackle Sisters

    WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has even more from my favourite Old Weird America artists today: The DeZurik (Cackle) Sisters. Your money back if you don’t love them.

  • sometimes, I’m ashamed to be canadian

    Ottawa prepares WTO challenge on Belgian seal ban

  • the first family of folk

    The Carter Family recorded their first session 80 years ago today. Here’s Wildwood Flower, which they recorded in 1928.

  • *loud* banjo

    I just got a Jump Lead from Troubadour in the UK. It was designed as a clip-on tuning pickup, but it can work really well as a general acoustic pickup if you put it on the right place on the instrument.
    I discovered that if you clip it to a Fielding-Cutler Mute on the bridge, the sound is great: warm, mellow, very little acoustic feedback, but lots of chunky overtones. I like it!

  • Kincardine Wind is go!

    The OMB’s decision on this project is here. It’s good reading.

  • What’s That Tune???

    Andy wants to ID some tunes; can you help him? What’s That Tune???

  • Tranna ain’t Bawlmer, hon (eh?)

    We just saw Hairspray. As the movie of the musical of the movie, it acquits itself quite well, but the edge of the original is lost under the sugar coating. I was about to add that we didn’t need a remake so soon after the original, but Waters’s version is 19 years old, which is an age in movie time.

    The good bits? Nikki Blonsky is a wee honey, with huge cartoony eyes and a winning smile. James Marsden adds a little extra sleaze to the role of Corny Collins. The musical numbers are infectious; but then, they should be, coming straight off the stage.

    The mediocre? Travolta’s face padding made his eyes look way too close together, and he’s no Harris Glenn Milstead. The cameos from the original are a little too cameo (didja catch Ms Lake as one of the talent scouts?), and the racist baddies are too bland to be disagreeable.

    I recognized many of the Toronto locations: the high school’s on Spadina just north of College, most of Tracy’s neighbourhood was around Roncesvalles, the TV studio looked to be on Dupont, and yes, those streetcars were old Red Rockets (one even with an Eastern Avenue destination).  If you didn’t know Baltimore, you might think it passed, but it’s nothing like the real thing.

    It’s a pretty good summer movie, charming and fluffy, but the original is still better.

  • shredder work #1

    shredder work #1

    Media: tempera, shredder, glue stick. 

  • the good old Sally Ann

    I scored a brand new, complete and unused Kelly Kettle for $4 from the Salvation Army today.

    Kelly Kettles are a marvel of thermodynamics. Instead of lighting a fire under them, you light the fire inside the double-walled boiler. The tapered walls make the fire draw something fierce, and you get boiling water in a very few minutes. I kippered myself a bit making the morning coffee, but it was worth the effort.

  • Almost as good as “Keyboard Missing: Press F1” …

    Bought an RJ Tech DVD player today because it has VGA output, and we have a spare 19″ monitor. It seems that you need a composite video display to be able to use the on-screen menu to select VGA Out on this unit. This is teh smrt programming.

    Update: Yup, the RJ Tech RJ-800DVX does need to have the VGA output enabled from a composite video source. This is very strange, as the composite does seem to work with the VGA enabled, so why not enable both out the box? I’m glad I still had my Plextor TV tuner from my abortive attempts to run a PVR. I hooked it up to the PC and DVD player, fiddled with it until I got an image, then selected VGA video output. It works beautifully now, playing every region of DVD, MP3 CD, and downloaded MPEG I can throw at it.

    Update #2: Just got this e-mail from RJ Tech:

    N/P won’t solve the problem.
    You need to press V-mode to change the dvdplayer setting to VGA mode.

    I’m sure I did this and it didn’t work, but props to RJ Tech for answering in one business day for a $50 player.

    Update #3 – 12 August:  I’m now on my third RJ-800DVX. The first one fell over last night, with no disk being recognized and a nasty screeching sound as it tried to seek. The one I got in return from Canada Computers was DOA with the same problem. The new unit is quite different – it has a much cheaper looking remote, and now has a SCART socket as well as VGA on the back. This one works, for now at least.

  • gah!

    Saw my first Back To School! ad of 2007. It was at FutureShop.

  • Never attribute to poltergeists

    … what can be more readily explained by bad wiring or static.

    Whenever we walk past the computer desk,  Doug’s stereo turns on. But on if you walk from right to left.

  • All Official Announcements!

    Julian Koster has a website

  • strange fortune

    fortune

  • Do you need _pellets_?

    There really is a conference called Interpellets 2007.

  • you dig?

    Looks like they’re finding some interesting old building remains on the Shangri-La site at the corner of Simcoe & Adelaide. There are archaeologists all over it!

    (did I already say how happy I was to see the monstrous ad-scaffold gone from this site?)

  • manhunt!

    There was a full-on police manhunt in our neighbourhood last night. Between about 3:30-4am, a police car vroomed and screeched round the streets with its lights off. Maybe it was a manhunt, or maybe they just had their Starsky & Hutch on.

  • poor wee sole

    I have an unwell platy. I think she has swim-bladder problems, as she can only scoot around with her front fins, and pretty much sinks when she stops. I put her in an isolation tank, but it’s not looking too good.

    Yeah, I care about platys. I have hundreds of them. They make hundreds more on a monthly basis. They’re cheap. But they’re still animals.