Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Historical Lunatic

This was going around a while ago, but I just got to it now - so here's my result.

I'm Charles the Mad. Sclooop.
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

gmplayer, sony mp3er, and other rantings

I been usin' good old mplayer for a long time now. I've mostly used the cli version, but recently installed the gui version, gmplayer, in windows. In the cli version, you can adjust the a/v sync with the +/- keys. In the gui version, it appeared at first that these keys do nothing because there is no indication that anything is happening. The adjustment per key press is small enough that you don't notice the change. But in fact, they do work in the gmplayer and the player decides that you want the same adjustment for every file you ever play so it saves them to the config. But there is no easy way to see what the a/v compensation is or get it back to zero. There is a slider bar in the gui config interface, but it also has no zero mark or any other kind of indicators. And it tells you that you have to restart the player for the changes to take effect. So I may remove it and stick to the cli version - the only problem is that anyone else who uses my computer will have trouble figuring out how to use it.

Don't buy a sony flash based mp3 player. They force you to use their proprietary software to transfer music. It's crap. I think I'm going to sell mine for 1/2 the price I paid for it just to get rid of it - that is if I can't somehow get my money back from Sony (doubtful). All of the Sony CD mp3 players that I've used were pretty good - you could just burn a bunch of mp3s to a CD and it would play them - I just throw away the software CD they come with. I like Sony hardware - it seems pretty well made and such, but their software and firmware is total garbage.

Wireless networking - a wonderful convenience and a real pain-in-the-ass. Give me a cat5/5e/6
any day. I have an increasing suspicion that wireless networking has never worked, but thus far they've been able to fool people into believing that it does.