Trinitron G420 & other things on the cheap

The things you find…

Sony Trinitron Multiscan CPD-G420

The one on the right is replac­ing the one on the left. The one on the right was found on the street — the one on the left was found in a rub­bish dump a few months ear­lier. My sec­ondary mon­i­tor just got an upgrade… I’ll be putting off that new LCD pur­chase for another cou­ple of months!

And yes, that is Pre­miere Pro on the screen. CS3 has a free Beta avail­able… I’m really lov­ing it! It’s crip­pled in many ways but if you can’t afford Pre­miere and don’t already have an ear­lier ver­sion it’s a pretty good option. I’m prob­a­bly going to install the free Beta on a sec­ondary com­puter once CS3 goes gold and I buy the real thing… so there can be one real ver­sion that does every­thing, and another production-capable work­sta­tion also run­ning CS3. Speak­ing of which, two pro­jec­tors, two vision mix­ers, three cam­eras, two PC’s, a DVD player, a cou­ple of radio mics and a whole buck­et­load of cables are get­ting a work­out tomor­row evening for a cook­ing evening. Should be inter­est­ing… but I des­per­ately need sleep now to be awake for then. Need more time to just veg and blog and talk to peo­ple and stuff… ahhh! *head explo­sion* Next week should be an improvement…

# by Josh on April 30th, 2007 Tags:
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DVD audio playback (Yellowcard followup)

Steve writes in with the fol­low­ing gem after my lit­tle jibe at him about using a DVD player for CD-audio play­back:

I worked with some­one the other day who tried to use a DVD player for audio CDs at a show and I made them drive back to the ware­house and pick up a real CD player on the spot.

It’s just not good enough. Their insides and pro­cess­ing isn’t suited to read­ing and decod­ing CD audio, and they DO sound dif­fer­ent (in a worse way).

*gig­gles*

# by Josh on March 7th, 2006 Tags: ,
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Yellowcard: Silent Lights and Sounds

Yellowcard: Lights and Sounds CD cover

Stu­pid DRM. My com­puter, of course, gets around the copy pro­tec­tion on this CD instantly. My DVD player (which I use as a CD player: shut up Steve, CD play­ers don’t sound a-few-hundred-dollars bet­ter, so I don’t care! ;-) ), on the other hand, can’t play the damn thing. As of right now I’m rip­ping it to my com­puter (loss­lessly with FLAC) and will have a pres­tine, non-DRM copy on a burnt CD for my use in a mat­ter of minutes.

And if a friend ever asks if they can bor­row my Yel­low­card CD (bought on a whim know­ing only one of their songs, I’ll add), I’ll be sure to lend them the ver­sion that works bet­ter: The one I burnt myself, with­out your stupid-arse soft­ware all over it.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll hes­i­tate to pur­chase EMI CDs in the future. All other DRM-encumbered crap I’ve bought in the past has at least had the cour­tesy to work in my DVD player (this one made detec­tion take ages, then picked it up as a VCD with wierd timecoding) — this is the bar­rier at which point it becomes infi­nitely eas­ier to use Peer-to-Peer than buy things that look like they might be inter­est­ing in a CD store.

With phys­i­cal media, I can (read: should be able to) toss it in any­thing and expect it to work instantly (no rip­ping required, etc.).

And, you know, if I wind up using Peer-to-Peer for this kind of stuff, my loss­less (yeah, that’s CD qual­ity, not MP3 junk) audio col­lec­tion will be shared back with the rest of the world. Yes, even the CDs you make it harder for me to use legit­i­mately. I will fig­ure out a way to get them onto my com­puter (or some­one else will with another CD), and I will use shar­ing net­works if scum­bag con­tent providers pro­vide me with suf­fi­cient impe­tus to do that.

(Inci­den­tally, if any­one wants to bor­row a non-DRM-encumbered Yel­low­card CD…)

# by Josh on March 7th, 2006 Tags: , , , , ,
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Our new-old TV

We’ve finally bought a TV capa­ble of hav­ing RCA cables plugged directly into it! Sure, it’s sec­ond hand, con­ven­tional (i.e. not flat) CRT and a Sanyo, but it’s 51cm and means we don’t need to use a 19″ BenQ LCD bizarrely wired directly to our DVD player which has a VGA out­put (nearly exactly half the LCD’s native res­o­lu­tion, which is handy, but it’s a pain to lug from the office to the liv­ing room every time we wanna watch a DVD!).

So that’s excit­ing. I’d post pic­tures, but just imag­ine any generic curvy CRT TV and you’ve got the right idea. ;) It wasn’t really worth the time it’d take to find the cam­era, take a photo, come upstairs, upload photo, resize photo, login and upload via FTP, and then fig­ure out the path to the file for inclu­sion in this post!

It also has won­der­ful won­der­ful mono sound, but that’s okay, because we’ve got a nice Sony sys­tem hooked up for that… at least the audio side of things is pretty good qual­ity, even if the vision is func­tional but far from excel­lent (Infi­nitely bet­ter than the 20-or-30-something year old set we used to use as the main TV, though!)…

Later: As a direct result of the won­ders of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, I ven­tured down­stairs with a cam­era and took a photo of a per­fectly bor­ing TV.

A perfectly boring TV.

There you go.

# by Josh on March 1st, 2005 Tags: , , , , ,
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Sexy LCD goodness!

Yeah!  Brrraaaaaaand new BenQ 19″ LCD just arrived, and it’s kickin’.

http://www.benq.com.au/HomeShowProduct.asp?prodID=239

Model num­ber is FP992, and it’s pretty funky.  Aside from being just plain HUUUUUUUGE, it also dis­plays Stuff™, which is always desir­able in a mon­i­tor.  Fur­ther, it’s the heav­i­est damn LCD screen I’ve ever had to deal with.  And it does por­trait mode, which is always inter­est­ing.  Haven’t had a chance to play with that prop­erly, yet.  On the to-do list.

Oh, yeah, and it works sex­ily with our DVD player (which has VGA out­put), after a spot of hack­ing (yeah, go fig­ure — less than 3 hours out of the box, and already it’s being hacked with!).

This evening has been throughly unpro­duc­tive, I’m glad to say.  Eye-candy for the masses!

# by Josh on August 11th, 2004 Tags:
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