amedia

I have a bunch of videotapes that I'd like to convert to DVD - things like the Shining Time Station Christmas special and the Harris/Dietrich pimping tape. I don't think my computer has the horsepower to do it digitally, so I'm thinking about getting one of those machines that's basically a videotape player and a DVD burner together. (I think Go-Video makes one.)

Has anyone used any of these? Can you recommend a good one? All input gratefully received!

I sent the laptop back with a description of what went wrong, and got an email saying that they couldn't reproduce the problem. From talking to people at the convention and online, I got the impression that something had been jostled loose in shipping, and that same something probably got jostled into place when I shipped it back! The policy on their webpage says that if there's nothing wrong with the laptop, the customer has to pay shipping and handling to get it back, but their email went on to say that they would replace the laptop, which I thought was pretty darned nice. I had been prepared to fight - I took photos of the laptop with the error message before I sent it back and planned to send them if there was a problem - but it turned out I didn't have to.

So I get the replacement laptop today and a thought struck me. "You know," said I to myself, said I, "I sent mine back with a full battery, which means I wouldn't necessarily have to plug it in just to see if it starts up." So I went ahead and turned it on before I dug out and set up the power cord. And what do you know, it started up. "Mine had very tinny sound, so I had turned the sound off," said I to myself, "it would be interesting if this one started silently." And what do you know, it started silently. Of course, those could have just been coincidences ...

When the desktop came up, there were two installation programs on it: an FTP program and a photo-manipulation program. (You may remember, I took, cropped, and uploaded digital photos while I was at the convention.) The clincher: the photos from REVELcon were in the "My Pictures" folder. And the browser history displayed all the sites I had visited when the laptop was working, dated two weeks ago.

THEY SENT ME BACK THE EXACT SAME LAPTOP!

But it's working. They obviously turned it on at some point because the time has been reset to Eastern time. So I'm going to wait a few days and see if it KEEPS working. If not, I think I'll ask for my money back rather than a replacement or a fix, because this is more than a teensy bit odd. But for the moment, I have a laptop again.

Didn't see this one in the theater because we didn't want to watch it with a bunch of little kids! Really, really enjoyed watching it at home. Loved the references to 2001! Interesting mix of savage satire and hopeful humanism. Loved the dance in outer space! I kept wondering why the musical sequences seemed so familiar; I looked up the movie that Wall-E is always watching and it's "Hello, Dolly!" which I saw and adored many many years ago, so it was just on the edges of my memory. The romance was surprisingly sweet and touching. Hugely enjoyable movie.

( Easter Eggs etc. )

Whatever the technical issues may be, it looks like, if I decouple the Heisenberg compensators open the icons in Photoshop, save them, and re-upload them, they come out all right.

Case in point - the icon above.

Here's what it looked like before:



Can y'all verify that it looks okay now?

I'm about to leave MediaWest for a visit to my parents. Mom and Dad don't have a wireless network, and while I can use their computer to get online, I tend to be paranoid about what shows up in their history, so I probably won't be doing much on LJ this week. See y'all later!

ETA: Mom and Dad have some neighbors with an open wireless network ...

About five years ago I got a DVD player for my birthday, and it has finally died. It did interesting things while it was dying - for a while there, every now and then when I hit pause, the screen would divide into 9 tiny pictures and keep moving. Which was cool, but somewhat inconvenient.

Anyway, about three or four years ago I got a DVD burner for my birthday, which worked for about eight months and then just quit working. Without any cool special effects. If I were a properly-organized person, I would have called the manufacturer and complained. If I were not quite that organized, but still more organized that I really am, I would have gotten rid of it one way or another, trash, freecycle, whatever. Being me, I stuck it in the garage and forgot about it.

Back to the present. The only place to buy a DVD player where I live is the Wal-Mart, which I would prefer not to patronize, but we just haven't had the time or energy to drive to a nearby city with more options. So we've been trundling along for a few weeks now without a DVD player, and we kinda miss having one.

I bet you see where this is going. I'm not sure what reminded me - but I went and salvaged the old burner from the garage just now. It won't RECORD - but it PLAYS just fine! It will do until we get a new player.

Now if only I could find my primary reading glasses...

SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!

Ever since that multi-spectral imaging for deciphering palimpsests came out, we've been saying, "wouldn't it be great if they found..." "oh, you don't suppose they might turn up..."

They found a LOST COMMENTARY on ARISTOTLE!!!!!!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6591221.stm

So... if you're using the hubby's Mac because you haven't gotten around to getting your Windows machine fixed yet, and your older, ginormous cat is super-clingy because you've been away two of the last three weeks, and as he oodges onto the keyboard he manages to lie PRECISELY on both the command key and the F5 key...?

You will hear an electronic voice out of nowhere reading your entire screen. And calmly cataloguing your frantic efforts to shut it off.

Is there any way to download music videos - not the fan kind, I mean the far-less-cool kind made by the original artist - from the Internet? I need a copy of "My Humps" for my gender studies class tomorrow; I've been taping VH1 all week and they're not playing it anymore. I did get "Beep" and "Stupid Girls," which will be awesome for class, and an honest-to-goodness Hasidic Jew rapping, which I'm going to copy for a colleague who teaches a course on rap - but I really want "My Humps"! I can watch it for free anytime I want from AOL or Yahoo or MSN, but I can't seem to get a COPY that I can put on a DVD and play for the class. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

I hate to admit it, but I need help figuring out how to d/load a file. The person who sent it to me has just gone out of town, so while the most logical thing to do is to ask him nicely to re-send it in a different format, I can't do that for a week, and I'd really like to open it before then.

( detailed information )