17 Dec 2005
I’ve fallen in love with PDF all over again. Well… not quite. But it’s pretty cool.
| I think it was Steve I was speaking to a few days back, and he alluded to Acrobat’s slide transition capabilities, of which I knew nothing. Until I installed OpenOffice.org 2.0 on a machine I’m using for playback tomorrow and discovered that I couldn’t get it to fullscreen on a secondary monitor (and for various reasons I’m not willing to make my playback screen the primary monitor : |
). So I figured that maybe Acrobat would. |
Pull up the PDF export dialogue… oh, an option to save transitions, cool (I didn’t use it, but it’s nice to know it’s there). More importantly, there’s now a lossless compression option in OpenOffice’s export! Off to Acrobat Reader to open it up, and… yes. All still there, great quality, and it will fullscreen on whatever display you have the window on. Beautiful.
17 Dec 2005
Not strictly my dog, but still… heh. He’s a geek. Heh.
Addendum: I know it’s a crap photo. I accidentally took it with the flash on (for some arbitary reason I’d been using it the night before and had forgotten to turn it back off like I normally have it), and the dog moved before I could take a good second photo. No, it wasn’t posed.
17 Dec 2005
Far out. I didn’t realise how cheap these things were: Voice over IP has nothing on calling cards.
I just called Tori in HK for about 30 minutes and it’s like… ~1.5c/minute. That’s 45c, which is nearly as cheap as a local call from a payphone here in Australia. Sure, there’s the cost of a local call to connect to the calling card service — let’s say ~20c, but still… wow. The cheapest VoIP rates here for the same service are still like 5c/minute or thereabouts.
Good stuff!
Also good stuff is the reason I was calling (well, at least part of)… Tori was in the SMH for getting Band 6 in every unit (along with Louis Garrick and Angus Thompson from SACS)!
16 Dec 2005
Today annoys me because the numbers released don’t mean anything. It’s just appetite-whetting statistics, making one more impatient for 9am tomorrow when the real results are released! Oh, yes, for anyone who cares to know, my marks were about what I’d expected. Advanced English was higher (I got band 6!! My presumptuousness in those two exams must have gone down well… as confidence or something. Whatever, it worked!), and ITF was lower (probably should have studied a bit for that!), and Modern and Business were… significantly higher than state average, but still pretty ‘middle-of-the-road’ IMO. Whatever. Oh and I got E4 for both Extension courses… would have liked a higher Ext2 mark, but whatever. Probably the (unpublished, unlikely to be published) reflection statement dragged it down, seeing as it was written… last-minute-ish. Or maybe that didn’t drag it down and they just didn’t like the story. Who knows. Whatever :P It’s over!
Aside: is this the second-last entry under “School” on this blog?
16 Dec 2005
Woo. Popped into Jaycar yesterday evening to buy some tape for Sunday, and they had quad-screened Belden 75 Ohm coax in their offcuts/discount box! It’s priced as if it were 5M, but I think it’s probably closer to 7 or 8, and the quality is brilliant. Even with crappy non-crimp (screw on) connectors. I got home and kicked myself because there is a tool here that can probably crimp on the ends, but I didn’t remember at the time and just wanted something that worked! Heh.
We’re still probably a bit short on cables, but I’m hoping to use this from the MX-50 to the projector (control is gonna be just behind the screen, and it’s not a particularly long throw)… so I just need to get ONE MORE cable sorted for camera #2 and everything is good. Assuming we have enough cameras, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish, with several people fishing, so God-willing we’ll get something sorted in time there. If not, it’s going to be great quality playback with crap quality live vision! Ah well, we can but try!
Anyway, I’m about to disappear and pick up my new toy for the weekend… Hello Panasonic MX-50!