Had to jet out early to Sacramento for the day yesterday because they didn't have anyone to run printer calls. One tech was covering in Seattle and 1 was out sick. Half the day is gone by the time you get there, figure out what needs to be done and actually get started. Fortunately I didn't run into any snags. I had to fix one printer with tape to keep them boing because the wrong parts were sent. And fortunately it didn't rain until I was coming home.
I ran across this video yesterday that shows how to make an almost free Wi-Fi extender for your house using aluminum foil, a piece of paper and a little glue. This is great to maximize your signal strength and range by basically Just aiming the extender toward the pc or area you want signal to reach.
The template and full instructions are located here. http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/index.html
If you don't have cardstock you could use a Wheaties box. Not sure if you could print that or not but you could certainly glue the template to the box and trim around it.
If you had a time machine, which year would you travel to and why?
Submitted by Michelle.
I think I'd like to travel back to the time of the pyramids. I'd like to see where they got the plans. So whatever year that is.
I decided to separate my personal blog from my more technical stuff and create another blog on VOX. As part of this, I am also retiring my TechZilla News newsletter I have been mailing out for 3 or 4 years. Besides being able to reach a bigger audience, VOX give the ability to add content I wouldn't normally be able to do in an email.
I'm still working on it but you can check it out at http://techzillanews.vox.com
EVERONE IS INVITED TO ADD TECHZILLANEWS TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.
Post-Mortem Edit: I've actually moved the contents of the above mentioned Vox blog into the Techzilla Said blog here.
Welcome to the first publication of Techzilla News in blog format. I decided to separate my personal blog from my professional interests and start a new blog.
Computer Repair Fraud
Computer fraud comes in many forms. Out an out lies and deception towards computer users of which many of them don't have a clue makes me go off the end. Here's one such example I ran accross looking for the videos I posted below.
If you go to the Best Buy website and find an item listed at one price, and then go to the store you get another price. While web pricing is often cheaper than retail, there can be and has been, a price discrepencey between the price the clerk looked up and the price you saw at home. Best Buy has a secret website that the stores access. I read several testimonials to this. Best Buy of course says it's probably a glitch or an isolated error. Yeah Right! Anyone have a towel so I can wipe my feet off at the Best Buy front door? I just got off the boat.
Anyway, remember, anyone can say they are a computer tech. The numbers of us that are actually competent, honest and work to the best interests of the clients are much fewer in numbers. Most clients are targets because they believe anyone who sounds like they know what they are doing.
Here's a couple of videos I found on the web that exposes some of the practices of computer techs.
Sick on Monday so went to doctor and got antibiotics. Cancelled flight to Seattle. Boss had me go to work in Sacramento on Tuesday to fix printers Spent the day at DMV. Huge building! Couldn't find anybody that knew how to fix parking tickets (info incase I get one LOL). Was expecting to be there Weds. also but he saw I was sick and told me to go home.
Meds are helping but ....too much work to be sick.
DivX is now doing a good job scrunching down the filesize of my movies. I'm seeing around 350mb/hour of video per file now which is a vast improvement. Now I can just go about doing the job and not having to play around tweaking things which speeds up the process considerably. Quality is definately acceptible.
ok time for work almost
bye!
It seems that DivX compatible DVD players need activation prior to actually being able to play homebrew, rented or purchaced DivX movies. I found this out by trying to get the player to accept my movie disc. After I got the disc burning solution figured out and went to try it, this strange menu came up. While digging around in the menus I found the activation code I would need to activate the device.
An activation movie needs to be played in the compatible player before it will play the movie I created.
The way to create the activation movie is within the Divx Player on the Tools menu. There is an option to select called Device Manager. After completing that process and burning it to disk I popped it in the player and played the movie by selecting it from the wierd menu.
I guess If I ever read the the manual I might have know this. But really, how often do you think I read DVD player manuals? NOT!
The movie disc though actually has really good quality considering it's burned to a cd-r disc when I played it.
Talk about beating your head against the wall! The hours figuring this out though was time well spent. To recap, I was capturing video with my video capture card, then editing out commercials and then compressing the output to a file to be stored and streamed to my tv.
The movies would play fine to a point then the audio would go out of sync and the video would go wacky. My goal was to get the file size down to under 1GB for a 90 minute movie. Acomplishing all this takes several steps and involves several processes to actually accomplish the task. Narrowing down where the process was breaking down though was the dilemma.
What turned out to be the problem was the source files I created in my video capturing process. I have several options to select as far as the type of capture file I want to create. Basically it just regulates the frame size and compression of the file that is created during the capture. The smaller the file, the tighter the compression.
Trying to compress the capture to the max was the actual problem. Discovering this though was difficult as all the capture files played on the pc end to end with no issues. But streaming them to the tv was another matter. I could even use the trancoder that comes with the media server to prep the file and that would play fine...it just doesn't do any compression. Setting my capture card to 12mb /sec CBR stream was the key. Since the files are .mpg files, they don't suffer the 4mb limit of AVI files imposed by the Windows VFW codec. So a 90 min movie captures to over 10GB.
It was very confusing to say the least to try to compress a capture file that would trancode and play fine without additional compression. I spent a lot of time looking at the two codecs I was using. Between DivX and XVid, I settled on Divx. Mainly because of the availability of support since it is a commercial codec. Both codecs yield close to the same results when you get the process right.
Anyway, re-capturing movies I had already burned to DVD is rather time consuming. I have an cheap stand-alone DVD player attached to my capture card. But this was better than trying to capture something off the tv to try to figure out where the problem was. At least, I could use the same source many times and measure the results start to finish. Must be the scientist in me.
Of course, re-capturing movies from DVD is not the optimal way to get a movie off the DVD in the long run. I don't really need to actually capture. I just need to put the DVD's I've already created into my DVD burner and copy the movie files to the HD and merge the files into a single video file. Then import it into my video editor and export to an AVI file using Divx. On a 90 min movie, this cuts down the processing time by about 80 minutes because I don't have to re-capture or do any actual editing.
I actually had a pretty good Idea this process would work so I focused on the making the capturing process work. Now I don't have to commit a video I capture to DVD when all I really want to do is capture something and store it on my media server....AND optimize the space for more movies than you can shake a stick at. Current count is almost 1300 and is only half full.
Another cool thing I setup today is a little webserver that is running on my pc to access all my video's and music over the Internet. So when I'm on the road I can ferret through the list easily. Otherwise I can use my remote access software to do the same thing basically. The difference is I can stream my music. The vids don't stream though.
I did install some streaming software on my system and was able to stream, but it kept buffering after about 2 seconds. I think the problem there is that the files are not actually encoded properly to do that over the Internet. And the streaming software doesn't do any transcoding. The same company makes a live-streaming software though that supposedly could possibly access my video capture card and stream live tv to my laptop. This might come in handy if the local cable doesn't carry the same channels I have on the satellite dish.
Since my Internet is actually fast enough, I might explore streaming video from my pc in more depth at some point.
Smoked this 14 pounder for 9 hours! Fortunately it's just us and no company. So it's ok I pulled it out of the smoker at 9:30PM. We often eat late anyway so NBD. Not a lot of work really but you have to go add smoke chips every hour. Luckily we have a meat thermometer because the "done timer" didn't work.
Back when I lived in Santa Cruz, I used to pre-order a smoked turkey from the Coralittas Market and Sausage Company. They have a huge container converted to a smoker out back and used apple wood from the orchards to smoke everything. Corralitas is near Watonville which has lots of apple orchards. Year round they make awsome sausages...and awsome sandwiches.