Category: Tech

Banner and Favicon

So, finally, I put up a banner, as I hope you can see above. It’s not the ambitious, evolving comic strip I envisioned, but maybe later. It’s a crop from a photo of my computer monitor. The TV tuner was playing CNN, and the “WHY” on the screen just happened to be there. For emphasis I sharpened the monitor and blurred the wall behind it.

wendall
© DOuG pRATt

A while ago I succumbed to my friend Tom’s interest in seeing a more interesting favicon (pronounced fav icon, like two distinct words). So I did neither dog nor rat, but my walrus character. It was done pixel-by-pixel in the Windows Paint program. The intent was to make it appear as though the walrus was moving out of frame, and to make him seem a bit menacing. Tough to do with 256 pixels, but I think I succeeded.

Canon MP600

New scanner! New printer! It’s a scanner-printer. The Canon MP600. Won’t bore you with lots of technical details. My 6-year-old Lexmark printer was dead, and although my Epson scanner is still fine I wanted to free up some desk space. After much consideration, and wanting to keep the price below $200, I bought the MP600 for $160, and I used it for the last two posts.

Now With MORE Storage!

After five months of blogging, and being generous with video, I’ve managed to use up 3.25 gigabytes out of a 50 GB quota. That’s 6.5%. Oh, no! I’m going to run out! Must get more! (That’s a joke for my wife.) But now I do have more. The Web-hosting service has increased the quota to 200 GB!

Obviously, at this rate I can keep going essentially forever. So I’ll increase the rate. The videos are encoded in Adobe Flash to stream at 512 Kb (that’s bits, not bytes) per second. The free Flash video (FLV) encoder I use works well, and I’m utterly reliant upon it, so I sent the programmer some money via PayPal. But the quality for a given bit rate isn’t as good as Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), or Flash 8.

There’s no way I’m going back to WMV9, because it isn’t cross-platform compatible and it doesn’t support a preview still frame. The problem with FLV8 is that it must be purchased from Adobe and it’s very expensive.

So what I’ll do to improve video quality is take advantage of all this storage capacity I have at no additional cost. I’m kicking up the bit rate for the videos by 50% or more. This will mean longer download times at your end. If you have trouble with sputtering-and-buffering playback, let me know.

All-Classical WGBH

Boston’s commercial Classical music radio station, WCRB, is struggling at its new frequency, according to a recent news account, as seen below. The moment it left its original frequency can be heard here.

Meanwhile, public station powerhouse WGBH is now offering its HD Radio all-Classical music channel on the Net. Bravo. Way to go. Encoding runs at 128 Kbps, and it sounds fine. I just added this link for it on my Windows desktop.

Reception is mixed to new WCRB signal, programming

By Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent | January 25, 2007

Is WCRB-FM fading out?

While the Dec. 1 move of the commercial classical station’s frequency, from 102.5 to 99.5, has made tuning in troublesome for some listeners, changes in the station’s programming have raised other questions. In Boston’s classical music community, the reception to both the signal and the revived station has been mixed.
Continue reading All-Classical WGBH

Watching Netflix Watch Now

I thought screen captures weren’t possible with the Netflix Watch Now player, but not so. I grabbed the picture above and shrank it. Another bit of good news is my connection speed is now consistently being rated as fast. On the downside, I’ve found a couple of issues with using the TV output from the computer, but these are within my NVidia graphics adapter, and have nothing to do with Netflix.