June 2008 Entries
Admittedly, I'm surprised that there's something of an active market for CRTs in today's age of flat-panel displays. Most of you know that I recently replaced my 19" Emerson CRT TV with a 17" Sony Trinitron, which I'm now using as an HD-capable set along with a colorspace transcoder. Just a few days ago, I managed to sell the 19" TV for $25 on Craigslist to somebody that wanted it for a game room.
Today, my friend and I found a great Craigslist deal: 17" and 19" Dell FD Trinitron monitors, conveniently located just off Storrow Drive in Boston, for $20...
I can't help but talk a bit about my own uses for USB, the universalized successor to just about every other external port save for video that was available on the original IBM PCs. My laptop lacks a parallel port, floppy drive, and the two PS/2 ports, but features three USB ports in their stead. What's hooked up to them? A parallel adapter, a floppy drive, and an adapter with two PS/2 ports. Pure genius, folks!
Then there's the issue of incompatibility. I recall, back at a trade expo in the 1990s, seeing somebody with an OCR wand hooked up to...
As I had mentioned earlier, I bought a hi-definition VGA transcoder box, so that I could effectively gain the ability to view true HD signals on my computer monitor without actually having to dump $500 on an HDTV. At the moment I only have 480p-capable hardware, but for $50 I'd say it was a good investment to be able to do 720p and 1080i in the future.
I took a gamble and bought a no-name "Hi-BOX" off eBay for a couple of reasons. The Hi-BOX was $15 cheaper than Neoya's X2VGA 2.0 and Vdigi's VD-Z3. The X2VGA simply doubles 480i's sync...
It's hot out. Yesterday I measured 102°F in my bedroom, which is always ten degrees or so hotter than the rest of the house. Meanwhile, it was 68°F in the basement, so I decided to take my laptop and radio and set up down there. If it stays cooler than the rest of the house, I'll probably end up spending the summer down here, minus when I sleep.
Unfortunately, there seem to be a few problems with this idea. First is that we use the basement as a storage space, so at the moment I'm sitting on a rusted bar stool...
It looks like the local library system finally ditched their Dialcat installation. For as long as I can remember, the library had maintained a system in which their Dynix-based catalog could be remotely queried by any VT100-compatible terminal emulator. Today, though, I dialed in and found that the number is now out of service, and the library has removed all information concerning the number from their website. Of course, I'm not entirely sure how long the system has been out of commission, since I haven't used it since roughly this time last year.
I suppose I could've seen this coming. Back...
After my previous experience with Firefox 3.0, you'd probably come to think that I wouldn't even bother taking Firefox 3.0 RC1 for a spin. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the best of me, so I went and downloaded the latest build from Vector64. Imagine my surprise when Minefield loaded up with Googlebar and Adblock Plus clearly functioning as they should! ChatZilla and DOM Inspector appear to be in working order once again as well.
Firefox's new theme is still terrible, except this time around I managed to force a recreation of the Firefox 2 theme onto Firefox 3 with a simple RDF...