Balmoral to Taronga – an excursion

Naming Guide

Struggling to come up with a new product name? Branding firm Igor have a freakin’ brilliant “Naming Guide” available for free in PDF format on their site. It doesn’t magically make me any more creative :( but it’s a brilliant resource. If I bookmarked sites anymore, this would be one of them. Not in a lost-at-the-bottom-of-favorites-folder kinda way, either.

Geek Jesus Bible

I was just struck by how awesome it is to be able to read the word of God on a computer. Just… wow. Coolness. God uses IT. (I of all people should be more aware of this… we continue to learn).

Twelve/Six Four Six point Eight

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 4×4″ 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.

It goes both ways

But I seem to have a habit of internally overstating deadlines. Yet another one due two weeks later than thought! Woot. So now it’s just English, which is (insert superlative for ‘wonderful’ here). Even so, off to uni I go to collect an assessment very helpfully available for collection only in the middle of mid-semester ‘break’… at least I don’t have anything due, unlike some other faculties/years.