Week of 27th June, 2005

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Monday, 27th June

 

The fault with Jane's car lights is now fixed, so I need to settle the bill.  I'll do that later, once I've visited a hole-in-the-wall.

I thought I had to pay the bill for my off-site storage room, but I'd forgotten that I had set up a direct debit for the cost - so that's something I don't need to worry about any more.

And, as of 16.15 the courier hasn't rung the bell to pick up the wireless access point. Talking of which, Dabs have sent e-mail to remind me what I need to do, and confirming that they will send the WAP to the manufacturer for "repair". I'll probably get it back in "4 to 6 weeks". Excuse me? If I'd bought from a shop, in person, I'd have got an immediate replacement, and so I told them - "New replacement, or refund - your choice." Whether I deal with them again will depend on their response.

Later: Well, the carrier (Parcelforce) came at 17:15. Amazing, isn't it? They give an 8 hour window (9 to 5) and then they're 15 minutes late. So, if Jane hadn't been here, I'd have been sitting around, scratching my a**e all day. Now to see what happens on the replacement front.

I had to install the Canon scanner on the Acer this evening. And, of course, I couldn't find the driver CD. So I downloaded the drivers from Canon's website. What they don't tell you is that the complete scanner support package requires 2 downloads - Scangear Toolbox and Scangear CS-U. CS-U is the actual driver, Toolbox is a front end. And, once you've got both installed, they work. Similarly, Paint Shop Pro can see a TWAIN scanner, and use it, but Paperport can't. I remember this from last time I went around this loop - Paperport can only see a pre-installed TWAIN scanner. It is unable to scan for new hardware, post-installation - and if you want to use one of their sheet-fed scanners, install Paperport with the appropriate scanner type selected. Otherwise, the driver doesn't get installed, and sheetfed scanner no work.

So, on the Acer, I installed Paperport with support for a Paperport Vx sheet-fed scanner - which I can't use, because the Acer has no serial port. And since there was no TWAIN scanner installed, a hook to scan for TWAIN hardware was omitted. So now I need to find the Paperport install CD - which is easier said than done. It'll come to hand, eventually.

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Tuesday, 28th June

 

I finally got round to paying the tax (by the book, Vehicle Excise Duty) on Ally. It is incumbent upon me to do this before month-end, or I become liable for a sizable fine. Alternatively, I can make a SORN (Statutory Off-Road Notfication) declaration, which effectively says, "I still own this vehicle, but I do not intend to keep or use it on the public highway." This costs nothing, while the Excise Duty is UKP110 a year for a car with an engine of less than 1500cc, like Ally. Jane's car, Hopalong, pays a duty of UKP165 a year, because his engine cubic capacity is bigger than 1500cc - or 91 cubic inches.

After Sarah got her new car, she made a SORN declaration for BLC, since we're going to scrap him. I have assumed that the declaration comes into force on the expiry of BLC's tax disc, at month-end. I may well be wrong in that - the SORN may have immediate effect, in which case we're illegal. The car breaker who was offered first refusal on the car hasn't deigned to reply, so I've started the process of having the local Council dispose of him. They require a form filled out, which they are sending me, and then someone will come along with a truck, lift the car onto it, and drive away. But before they do that, I'll blag a few bits for Ally - like the spare wheel.

While I was at the local shops, taxing Ally, I picked up a DVD copy of "Garfield - The Movie" on sale at the local HMV shop, for UKP4.99. At cursory glance, the CGI Garfield is quite successful, and Bill Murray voices him well, but the actor playing Jon isn't nerdy enough. The CGI/live action fusion is nigh-on perfect - but Nermal is not Siamese.

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Wednesday, 29th June

 

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Thursday, 30th June

 

Last two days of this ingest shift, and it's not very busy. Probably the summer holiday - oversea seem to take a long summer break. That said, today I did 85 promos, 4 commercials and about 8 long-form programmes - an hour or more each, in overlapping fashion. I can say this because my managers have introduced a new work-tracking scheme - we now have to account for work done each day, via a special form.

Last weekend, they didn't send about 5 music videos for our processing. Four of those have now been scheduled for air tomorrow, and although we have the distributor master tape, we've got freelances on overnight. The music video processing is non-trivial, so it has been agreed that these videos will be offered for air on Monday, and the master will be added to the new lot that will be processed over the weekend. Meanwhile the single instances scheduled tomorrow will be amended out - which had been done by the time I left.

Next week, I'm on earlies - the 6 a.m. start - ugh!

On the computing front, I'm seriously considering retiring Celery. And if I can lay my hands on a Kuro box, I'll retire King as well. That last is easier said than done, since the "Buy" link on the website leads to a holder page that says the sales site will be back up on 8th July. I'll believe it when I see it - that's the third date they've posted for resuming sales.

The Kuro is a network appliance, based on the Buffalo Linkstation. It's sold without a hard disk, which you provide, and once installed and configured, runs a custom version of Hard Hat Linux for PowerPC over a custom 2.4.17 kernel in ROM. People have had success replacing the disk parts of Hard Hat with Gentoo, and even Debian. Given that, I may try Debian Sarge, or I may just add apps over the original Hard Hat. Whichever I do, I'll need wget for my cartoon strip collection scripts, and I want to run a local NNTP server for Usenet. I may well add ntp for accurate time on the local network. I'll need it to keep the Kuro on the correct time, anyway - Kuros are notorious for poor timekeeping out of the box, due to a wrongly-configured tick-count variable in the stock install. Linkstations seem to keep good time, although mine is ntp-synchronised fom Demon's timeserver.

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Friday, 1st July

 

I've started loading the iRiver with MP3s of my favourite music. I'm using Audiograbber, with the add-in Blade MP3 encoder .dll, to rip and encode. MP3s are created at 192kbps, and dragged onto the USB-connected iRiver. I'm using FreeDB to get ID3 tag info for the music files, and it's noticeable that the tagging quality is variable - some tags contain metadata that is essentially meaningless.

I've even posted a couple of track-lists myself - for the Haydn piano sonata CDs I bought from Arembe, having found the audio cassettes at 1 Royal Crescent, Bath. Audiograbber automates nearly all of this - you just need to type in the track titles, and any other data you think appropriate.

While I was checking the homepages for these, I discovered that Blade is no longer being developed. The last release is dated 2002.

Now I need to learn how to drive the iRiver H340. It isn't particularly intuitive.

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Saturday, 2nd July

 

Further to my comments on Thursday about cartoon strip collection, I need to change the script slightly. One of the strips - General Protection Fault - has started using .png format, which I don't download yet, although all the software I use understands it. I just need to amend the startup parameters for wget to tell it that .png is nice to know.

 And there's a thriving community of people adding functionality to the stock Linkstation, including wget and a full software toolchain. Linkstations I can get easily, and the stock Linkstation has 2 USB2 ports, and a universal power supply, as opposed to the Kurobox's one port and US/Japanese power supply. All this even without knowing the root password, although people are hacking on that. Luckily, there's a back door, which will allow you to install your own root-privilege user.

Later: the script amendment is done - after today's collection run. We'll see if it works tomorrow.


It's the Live8 concerts today, and the rest of the family are watching. I, of course, curmudgeon that I am, am avoiding it. While in favour of the sentiments expressed - "Make Poverty History" - I can't help feeling that there's a lot of things wrong on both sides. And I'm not a pop music fan.

Notably, the Western, developed, nations are guilty of enforcing disadvantageous trade terms on the poorer nations, over and above the level of Third World debt they hold. At least some of the G8 nations (notably the UK) have decided to cancel some, if not all, of that debt. And the Americans are leading from behind, again, I gather.

But the Third World aren't entirely in the right, either. I'm thinking Zimbabwean oppression of the poor, institutionalised corruption in many countries, and the endemic civil wars. I've seen claims that the West has poured in excess of USD10exp12 into Africa in the last 50 years, and what have we seen for it? Precious little - a lot of the poorer Africans are worse off now than they were before Live Aid, 20 years ago. Now there's something Dubya should be waving his big stick at - nasty little African dictators oppressing their population, while skimming most of the aid monies into Swiss bank accounts. Come to that, it wouldn't need a paricularly big stick - just a willingness by the Swiss to co-operate with international fraud investigators. It shouldn't be too difficult to sort out who is behind a particular Swiss bank account, and freeze/confiscate the balance if proven to be derived from corrupt practices - after all, they're already doing it for drug money.

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Sunday, 3rd July

 

Jane has been complaining about me leaving the Acer set up on the dining room table - she says we can't eat in civilised fashion, which is true. But I don't see (or for that matter hear) her complaining to Katy about the Epson printer and scanner that go with her computer, and which are also on the dining room table.

Anyway, it's time, and past time, that something is done. So today, I cleared the floor in the study - the main thing preventing me moving back upstairs - packed it all into boxes, and started setting things up properly.

First was a CEE22 mains distribution strip, liberated from the redundant kit pile at work - 10 outlets, IEC/CEE22 moat plugs, something I prefer for fixed wiring in these circumstances. In case you're wondering, think the mains inlet on a PC. I screwed the strip onto the underside of one of the shelves under the hi-fi. That let me wire up, successively, a Belkin 7 port USB1.1 hub (liberated from Celery), the TDK CD/DVD printer, a 5 volt switchmode power brick for the PDA cradles (currently only wired to the Palm), the HP 840 printer, the iRiver, and the Sharp hi-fi. This has saved me 3 (soon to be 4) 13 amp mains sockets - it'll be 4 when I get the Ipaq cradle powered from the 5 volt brick. Along the way, I tried to get Paperport to recognise the sheet-fed scanner, which required me to first install a USB-to-serial adaptor, which Windows identified as a Prolific UC-310 (the while complaining bitterly about unsigned drivers). That came up as COM5, but Paperport couldn't see it - COM1 and COM2 only, COM1 is I don't know what (there's no serial port externally visible) and COM2 is the IRDA port.

Then I tried PsiWin, for the Psion 5MX. And it couldn't see COM5 either. So I tried a reinstall of PsiWin 2.3, and mirabile dictu, it could see COM5, and use it. This let me backup the Psion - something that has needed to be done for months. Maybe I should try reinstalling Paperport again - certainly the last reinstall discovered the TWAIN driver for the Canon flatbed scanner.

<pause>

Nope - Paperport 6.1 can only see COM1 and COM2, even though there are 5 on the Acer. So that's a bust. And the tech support is an Eliza-like AI, which isn't au courant with early versions .Paperport is currently at version 10, and the Paperport Mx scanner is obsolete - and not supported under XP. Must try it on Optimum, and see if a pukka serial port will work.

And there's now enough space to break out the Brother laser from store, and physically install it. That'll be Wednesday, and then I'll think about retiring King in favour of a hacked Linkstation or Kurobox. And Transparent are doing 120GB Linkstations for UKP144 plus carriage - a total of UKP150.

And, of course, GPF has posted a Sunday strip in .jpg format, so I can't tell if the script change works.
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