TechnoMire |
About my daily struggles in the world of IT... |
Yesterday was a great day, and I enjoyed it by lying on a deck chair in the sun in the back garden at my in-laws. We were visited by a very enthusiastic butterfly and I made a couple of quick snapshots with my HTC Touch HD. It was the only camera I had handy and I feared for the outcome, but without any photo shopping (only the auto-correct function in Irfan View) they came out nice. Just like the butterfly :)
Jeff Foxworthy said so years ago: Stupid people should carry a sign with them always, saying they are stupid. Just so you know they are and can deal with them appropriately.
Here's another candidate:
She's from the Dutch Lower House - mind-boggling as that is to believe - and is horrifyingly ignorant about statistics and research. Lilian Helder, Here's your sign!
What scares me the most, however, is the fact that she was voted into office by a large portion of my countrymen. We need more signs, Jeff, help!
Since I'm posting this on my blog, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook all at once
(thanks to the wonderful Posterous functionality) I may need to explain for
the newbies:
This little fellow (at least, I think it was a fellow) has been finding its way into my back yard for a couple of weeks now. Usually at night and with another hedgehog almost twice its size – but today it was eating in the yard in broad daylight. The food in the pot is crumbs from wheat biscuits. They seem to love that stuff! :)
My evening started off on a false note, with a headache coming on and my mouse arm playing up. I cancelled on a friend and had already more or less decided on spending the evening watching movies or episodes of The Cleveland Show – which is an awesome spin-off of Family Guy and in my opinion much better than American Dad has been so far. It wasn’t until after ten that I decided to try a different tactic. You know when you have a cold, and you are sometimes able to sweat it out with physical exercise? Well, I was hoping to try that with my headache. So at ten forty-five I ran off to do my usual route.
My home is at the edge of a residential area. When I cross the street I can either go straight through a small industrial park, or do the same route in reverse and first take a small road straight into the farmer’s fields surrounding the town. Because I’m not a huge fan of industrial architecture – and because the architects that built this park weren’t such huge fans of industrial architecture either – I almost always start off through the industrial park so I can end my run enjoying the countryside.
I was surprised to find hardly anyone about as I crossed the park – I only passed four cyclists (mind you, they were coming towards me – I’m not nearly fast enough to overtake them). Because an industrial park is usually pretty busy, and the road that I took is a connecting road, it gave me a sense of extreme loneliness. The other two-thirds of my run was through the countryside, and I did not see or pass anyone there, but countryside is supposed to be quieter, so I did not feel nearly as alone.
In fact, I always enjoy the countryside. Despite the quiet and despite taking the same route almost every time, every time I see something new or interesting. Just tonight I was amazed by how clear a night it was. I took a moment looking up at all the stars that were visible. It’s not often that you can see the Milky Way so clearly! My route takes me through the industrial park and then over an old dike – I think a sleeper dike – and down again through the fields in the polder. The fields are interspersed with small canals and on a clear night like this one, radiation fog creeps up from those canals and across the fields and roads. I could see a small fog bank extend from one of those canals in the distant street light behind it, which was pretty enough, but further on a fog bank had already reached the road. There was a street light directly behind it, shining on the fog from above. Because it was not equally dense everywhere, one section appeared as a more or less solid mass and cast its own shadow. It was at eye height and running through it and actually seeing the fog around me was almost magical. That, and the clear sky and the fact that there was nobody around made this yet another unique run.
A couple of days ago, I bought a new media player and I wrote about it here. Now I have had a little time to play with it, and I wanted to give you an update.
I ran into a couple of small problems trying out the different possibilities. Firstly, the media player would not play my holiday movies. I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4 and it saves movies in .mov files that are made up of a series of small jpegs. The box said that my player was supposed to play .mov files, so you can understand my annoyance.
Secondly, I wanted to save myself the hassle of copying huge movies to my portable hard drive, so I decided to buy a wireless USB adapter. The WD TV Live came with a long list of compatible adapters, but naturally none were available in the shop. I finally decided to chance it with a TP-Link version that was not on the list, promising the computer shop clerk to let him know if it was successful. It was not.
I connected the wireless USB adapter and no matter what I tried, it never found my network. At this point, I decided to try to update the firmware. According to the WD website regular firmware updates would be made available with support for new wireless adapters. Now, this did not solve my problems with the adapter I bought, but from this moment on, I was able to play my holiday movies. Clearly WD keeps updating the firmware to increase compatibility, even though my particular adapter had not yet been added.
Because my adapter still would not work, I went back to the store. The clerk gave me my money back and I ordered one of the adapters from WD’s own list. This week, I could come to pick up the TL-WN821N. It found my network immediately and after inputting the key it also immediately recognized my desktop’s shared folders.
Regardless, if I had known beforehand, I would not have bought this particular model. It cost me 139 Euros plus 12 for the HDMI cable and 29 for the wireless adapter, coming to a grand total of 180 Euros. Comparable models do not need to cost more than 100 Euros, some models even with room for an internal 2.5” hard drive. I got worst scare from today’s iBood.nl special offer (http://www.ibood.com/nl/nl/): The Netgear EVA 2000 HDTV media player for only 30 Euros! It is not as good as the WD TV Live, but 110 Euros is a lot to pay for Flac and HD movies. Especially since I do not have any music in Flac format at this point.
In conclusion, it took me a while to configure my media player to my liking, but after some effort, it works just fine. It plays my large mpeg and blu-ray movies and shows my holiday pictures – both from USB storage devices and through the wireless USB adapter from the network. But it is expensive and needs additional hardware to function properly. Check carefully before buying!
So today I bought a media player. The Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player. I had been wanting to buy one for a while now, just to enjoy my movies on a big screen like that 42 inch Panasonic in the living room. I specifically asked that it play Matroska (.mkv) and MPEG2 (.m2ts) because nowadays a lot of movies are Blue Ray quality.
The WD TV Live is a nifty little gizmo that is about the size of a pocket bible and weighs about half that. It is even shaped like a small book and made in stylish grey. I expected something bigger, and this is a nice surprise.
The TV Live does not have an internal hard disk, but it has a LAN port that you can use to access shared drives in a network and it has two USB 2.0 ports. For a test, I hooked up the media player to the tv using the two included cables for high definition. I then connected the power cable and plugged my 149 GB WD Passport drive in the USB port. Now, that little passport drive has no power connector, so it has to get its juice from the USB cable. I was afraid this might be a problem, but the media player took it like a champ and the passport drive ran smoothly.
The TV Live has four more ports: One for standard and one for high definition audio and video, one for HDMI and a Toslink connector for even higher quality multi-channel audio. Unfortunately a HDMI or Toslink cable were not included, which I think is a serious shortcoming. Oh well, I’ll just go to the shop tomorrow, again.
Like I said, I tested the player with high definition audio and video and a passport drive. The player is controlled with a remote that works pretty much intuitively. Once I had it turned on, I could switch the television to the right channel (In this case not HDMI or PC, but Component. PC only did video.) and within a few selections I was browsing through the drive’s contents.
That is as far as I have come at testing the TV Live HD Media Player. I had wanted to try a HDMI movie, but I ran into two problems. Firstly, I had no HDMI cable I could use and secondly, I was unable to copy a HD quality-movie to my passport drive. As it turned out, the silly thing would not accept files over four gigabytes. A bit of Googling led me to the solution, which was – as usual – quite simply that the portable drive was formatted to be compatible to Windows 98 and ME as well as XP and Vista. It was FAT32 instead of NTFS. Remedying the problem was easy enough, but formatting a 149 gigabyte drive takes a while and backing up what was on it previously does too.
So, in the end, I won’t be able to watch any big movies until tomorrow. I will definitely get me a HDMI cable and soda and popcorn for movie time! :)
I have had my Fujifilm FinePix S6500fd for a while now, at least 3 years, and I had never taken the time to experiment with the super macro function. Well, yesterday I took a stroll through Schagen and came across a spot filled with wild flowers. I made more pictures, but these are nice to brighten up my blog.
TechnoMire is my personal blog. I plan to fill it with posts about my experience in the IT, my love for volleyball, travelling, and photography and my activity in the 'demo scene'. I will try to post in English, but may use Dutch occasionally. Enjoy or avoid! ;)
