Hours/Kilometers trav­elled for a mag­i­cal chunk of sil­i­con we like to call ‘teh b0xxen’.

I picked up a per­spex case and an absolutely kick-arse Pio­neer DV-344 DVD player. It’s region 4 only, which sucks, and no RGB out­put, which also sucks — there’s YPbPr though. On the good side, a 118dB SNR with 0.0016% THD means it sounds pretty darn good. Only stereo ana­logue out­put, but I don’t care too much about that… there’s opti­cal dig­i­tal out­put if sur­round is required. See­ing as I fairly lit­er­ally ‘found’ this, there’s no remote… which is a lit­tle bit of a bum­mer but what­ever. I mostly wanted it for CD play­back (*lis­tens to Steve crying* — shut up, it sounds freakin’ excel­lent) so it’s no big­gie. How­ever, on the video play­back side of things, it’s absolutely won­der­ful for events in that it doesn’t have any stu­pidly con­spic­u­ous Pio­neer splash screens, etc., instead sport­ing only text-based “Play/Pause/Stop/Open/Eject” titles. The default back­ground colour is black. So that’s rather mag­nif­i­cent. It doesn’t even have a screen­saver so it’s quite safe for use pretty much every­where. A thing of beauty indeed.

Speak­ing of things of beauty, Selo’s com­puter (3800+ DC 939, Asus A8N-SLI, 1GB King­max DDR400 (512MBx2), 6800GS PCI-E, Lightscribe DVD-RW, 120GB, 300GB, 19″ Fujitsu 8ms) is hawt. Heh, espe­cially the Lead­tek 6800GS ;-) Gonna need that Fujitsu screen to cool things down eh? Okay, enough of the air­con­di­tioner jokes! It’s actu­ally quite good. But his case is pretty banged up after being wedged in the boot of a BMW for a cou­ple of months (seller = afflu­ent IT sup­port dude that sells few-months-old hard­ware for cheap!)

Any­way no pho­tos yet because my cam­era is on loan to Budd who will return it soon (or else :)) and then there’ll prob­a­bly be a cou­ple. Some­thing rather shiny should be arriv­ing later this week for me, and there’ll be prob­a­bly pho­tos aplenty of that.

In other acquis­i­tive news, I came by a Sony 4x4” PVM-411CE for cheap (time­code screen burn, really minor) last week and it’s doing fan­tas­ti­cally. It’s the rea­son I’ve actu­ally been able to see DVD out­put from this player thing and hope­fully it’ll mean I need to carry (and, as a pre­req­ui­site to that, beg/borrow/steal) less TVs for var­i­ous applications.