14 Aug 2005
The graphics card in my desktop only has a D-Sub/VGA connector, so for the minute at least I’m stuck using that with my CMV Polyview V372 LCD monitor. This means some quality issues have come up, mostly when there’s chunks of fine, alternating, colours (similar to in the gamma chart illustrated here) or even just large solid areas (sync lines become visible occasionally).
I’ve moved my computer upstairs for today in order to get chunks of work done away from noise, etc., and only took monitor, keyboard, mouse and computer up: nothing else. This obviously makes cable management far easier. Seemed like the opportune time to procrastinate benchmark improvements in quality.
Okay, so I didn’t really benchmark. I just observed that it looked better when coils of cable (I had a largish coil on the DC-side of the display’s transformer sitting right under it that I hadn’t undone yet), particularly power cable, were kept away from the VGA run (and, if they must cross, making those crossings perpendicular). I was convinced I needed to buy a DVI-capable graphics card to get better quality, but this has stepped things up remarkably. One more purchase that can be put off for a while longer!
Having said that, though, buying a new card would probably give me not only marginally better quality by DVI, but also improved colour definition: this TNT2 M64 was never the most wonderful when it came to rich 2D quality.
13 Aug 2005
I’ve been playing with LyX over the last three days or so as my English major work comes into the final stages both of writing — the idea itself is finalised — and typesetting, which is ultimately why I’m using LyX in the first place (though its output is so brilliant I think I’m going to start using it on a more permanent basis).
Judging from the websites I’ve stumbled across whilst giving myself a crash course on using it, that’d make me one of the few users of the application that didn’t regularly make use of its extensive Math features to the point that I talk equations in my sleep. (Though it seems there are some humanities users out there!) But I digress.
One of the niggly things I’ve discovered is that it is incurably difficult to do little things taken for granted in normal WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org (as opposed to LyX, which proclaims itself “the first WYSIWYM document processor.”) — though of course it is intended to be far more high end than these applications — not the least of which is the difficulty of inserting certain symbols.
LyX, being a graphical interface to the LaTeX and TeX processing frameworks, supports raw input by way of ERT. This is the secret to getting special characters that display sensibly in LyX itself.
Note that it is possible to copy and paste a copyright symbol into LyX from another program, and that Mac users can simply press Option + G to insert this character (lucky little…). In the case of copying and pasting, however, there is the unfortunate side effect of the character displaying as an unknown character block (due to the character set in use, I imagine) — which, when editing large documents, can be time consuming (think “What did that unknown character say again?” whilst editing).
So, the best way I’ve found is simply to use an ERT insert.
Simply create a new ERT insert by pressing Ctrl + L, and enter
\copyright
into it.
This is a LaTeX shortcut that seems to work fine, with one caveat (could just be my system): the copyright symbol appears only as a circle at less than 100% zoom in Xdvi. Note that exported PDF or PS documents don’t suffer this problem, and seeing as Xdvi manages fine at 100% I’m inclined to believe it’s just a rendering bug in that application.
Now I can stop procrastinating and get back to typing my major work that doesn’t have a single copyright symbol in it (it’ll be Creative Commons licenced)!
12 Aug 2005
It didn’t have the SMS voting, vision mixing and live replays output to multiple displays, or driving around in the small hours of the morning that followed, but it was fun nonetheless. Yeah, just another talent quest thing ;)
And yes, the name is a typo, again one that stuck. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot. *Josh glances at domain name, then at Katy*
I took some video with my little digital Pentax Optio that I quickly cut together tonight and then uploaded it to Ourmedia (hey, it worked once, why not again?). Vaguely amusing stuff, even if the quality isn’t technically great: hey, I shot it on a still camera and edited it in Windows Movie Maker because it’s quick and easy and free(-as-in-beer), so purists and professionals can shut up already!
For obvious reasons, that means it’s only available in Windows media format for the minute. You can download the short clip (all of 1 minute 41 seconds) from Ourmedia. (roughly 4.6MB)
11 Aug 2005
Well, it took me a while, but I finally got around to a camera-toting expedition to lower campus as suggested. Comprehensiveish photo evidence follows.
Just like the original photo only crunchy focused better. Because my camera is not a phone. *nods* ;)
It’s really a glorified 7-11 or a vending machine that does notes and credit cards, and has cereal in stock. Yes, cereal.
I presume you put your card in the slot labelled “Notes”… I didn’t actually check. You can’t quite see it when the photo is scaled down that far, but there’s actually someone’s mobile number listed next to “Info” at the bottom of the screen… would you put your phone number on a vending machine? Ah well, at least it’s not selling prepaid credit (yet).
10 Aug 2005
Category: Geek. Decidedly geek. Yeah, I’m talking about cables.
So we were patching an extension to the phone system here today (no, no more phones, don’t worry… just an extension for an existing handset), and for some reason were using some seriously weird STP cable. The S stands for solid. This stuff is very solid.
The second photograph is probably better (though the first is far prettier — which was actually the only reason I shared it, sorry low-bandwidth visitors!)… you can clearly see that the STP cable (shielding and core) is nearly one and a half times the diameter of the standard (boring) ivory cable that we mere mortals generally use for telephony hookups. Which creates problems.
The back of this standard RJ11 connector allows the STP monster cores to insert up until the final section that guides individual cores to position under the pins — at which point it is simply too thick to continue. On the other hand, the normal (boring) ivory cable (that mere mortals use) moves unimpeded to the end of the lug without difficulties.
I haven’t got photo evidence to back up this claim, but the same is true of standard RJ45 connectors/lugs. This cable is truely… odd. Because it’s an STP cable with solid orange/white orange solid blue/white blue pairings, and seems in nearly all other respects like a network cable (albeit lacking two pairs)… but its cores are bloody enormous!
Trivially, it seems like the actual conductor in this souped-up cable is smaller than its standard counterpart. And it’s made out of tin. So it’s probably a worse cable, though my multimeter’s battery died (and I haven’t got any spares) so I couldn’t actually test impedence.
So. Does anyone know what this thing is? Got me stumped. And vaguely frustrated.
In the end I terminated it to a wall plate (because the odd stuff was of course what we used to do the long run in a cavity) and made a short RJ45 to RJ11 patch (because I didn’t have any RJ11 wall plates), thus avoiding all kinds of complications, but it’s more curiosity at this stage than anything else.