We Saw a Chicken …

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  • 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.

  • take your …

    picks, various

    Just a few of the guitar picks I’ve tried (though the one at the top is a felt uke pick). I got a bunch of Fender celluloid picks at The 12th Fret today, and they could be good. The huge one at the bottom is indeed homemade, made from two sheets of wood veneer laminated together with the grain offset 90°.

    There’s a tale about the Kinky Friedman one.

    (more…)

  • Gutenberg Canada

    Project Gutenberg Canada / Projet Gutenberg Canada opened its doors a couple of days ago. It’s gone through several organisers since I first heard of its imminent launch in 2002, but I’m glad it got going.

  • So, Herr Rorschach …

    pen cleanings

    I cleaned my fountain pens today.

  • two wind turbines

    Two new small wind turbines have appeared along Highway 8. Both are near Clinton.

    The first is an 80kW WES. I’m not really a huge fan of two-bladed wind turbines, but at least the old Lagerwey design is well proven.

    WES 80kW

    The second is a bit more of a mystery. Apparently installed by a local trucking company, it reminds me of design from the 1980s, but I can’t remember which. This one’s nearer Vanastra.

    mystery wind turbine

  • the nuclear family holiday (last) resort

    I’ve been invited onto the committee that looks after a small (and almost full) cemetery in Ajax, so I went out to take a look at it. It’s nice; it’ll last you. One thing I learnt there: RB67 polaroids don’t come out too well if you leave the darkslide in.

    On the way back, I headed down Liverpool Road to take pictures of the Pickering wind turbine with the RB67. It’s a strange place, the beachfront at Pickering. There’s beach volleyball with the nuke station lurking toxically in the background.

    welcome to pickering

    I don’t know why the town doesn’t rename itself “New Prypiat“, and be done with it.

  • spent too much time in the henhouse

    The Chuckie Egg Professional’s Resource Kit (warning: loud embedded YouTube video of the BBC B version) is a worryingly complete website about Chuckie Egg. You don’t know Chuckie Egg?

    chuckie egg

     You should. I’ve probably spent more time playing this than any other computer game. It was even my workhorse for testing how quickly my fast tape loading routines worked on the Amstrad (I think I got somewhere north of 9000 baud on a good tape, and it loaded back more than once, so – success!)

    There are emulators and versions for just about every computer made, so go nuts.

  • disnaeland

    Conclusive proof (if any were needed) that Scotland invented Unicode:

    didnae

    isnae

    wasnae

    If you try to display a UTF-8 apostrophe on an ISO 8859-15 system, you get a reasonable representation of didnae, isnae and wasnae.

  • oh no, wait, this is even more moronic

    I was mildly incensed to see an ad truck tootling about downtown. What was even worse was that it advertised cleanourair.com, a site purporting to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.

    Get this: the founding sponsor of the site is VisionAdz, a company whose sole purpose is to have ad trucks tootling about downtown, polluting our air and my eyes.

    Bill Hicks was right about advertising types.

  • burning question

    What’s the proper name for someone from Saskatchewan?
    (apart from “Doug”.)

  • few people will understand this

    zx_printer.png

    zxcolours.png

  • sustainable much?

    It would seem that Elizabeth May, leader of the Canadian Green Party, is against wind farms on the Nova Scotia coast. This in a province that gets 75% of its energy from imported coal, and has some of the best wind resource in Canada.