| Date (yyyymmdd) | Comment |
| 20081201 |
Last month I bought a Wifi USB dongle for a laptop with disfunctional screen that was donated to me. The laptop did have wireless but the card didn't support WPA. I lookup up a wireless mouse too. The idea is that I can now use the laptop to watch youtube in bed using the big television screen in the bedroom. I didn't do that a lot yet and I think the S-video cable I am using is a bit to short. It is nice to get it working in such a small amount of time though. Another thing I bought that was up-and-running in no-time, was a fire-wire cable. The idea behind that was to get the movies from the DV-tapes from my cam-corder. I expected to be spending a lot of time for a good video-editor to cut-out the bad parts, and put the seperate scene in separate files. As it turned out Microsoft Movie Maker was already installed on my PC and did the job just fine. The seperate, smaller files can than be uploaded to websites, or burned to DVD. Also it's good to have a backup of the tapes. I might copy the files on the hard-disk to DVD and I will certainly backup my harddisk with Acronis true image. I can therefore also reuse the DV-tapes because I have enough backups. It was also nice to make text overlays, but it was all very time-consuming. And of course it took a lot of drive-space. I am planning to take some more videos now though. The plan to start a retro-computer club is still on-hold. It is getting busier every month, and December will be terrible. But I am going to a retro meething on the 20th this month. I should be trying to sell some stuff there, but my experience is that there will be no opportunity to set up my stuff let alone sell something. Maybe I should go empty handed and try not to buy too much there. My brother bought a slide-negatives scanner, because he has thousands of slides. He already scanned a few hundred but progress is slow. I want to visit him and check out the stuff, maybe I can help him scan some more slides for a while. My wife bought me a anologue-digital converter intended to get VHS videos on DVD. I was on sale very cheap, I got it a few days ago but I still didn't open the package. At the end of this month my fixed telephone-line subscription will end. It's a nice way to reduce the monthly expenses. Also it will bring some peace to my house. People constantly are calling my wife about unimportant things and my wife is calling them about unimportant things. Most of the time when the phone rings, I don't pick it up any more. We are still keeping ADSL, and we will be using VoipBuster to call other People. Other people can reach us on our cell-phones. There are not a lot of people that have my cell-phone-number though. I never take it with me and most of the time it's out and the battery is low. That will probably have to change next year. I am also looking for a housekeeper/cleaning-lady, because I am too busy and I hate cleaning. I hate dirt and rubbish even more though. Maybe the money I save on the phone-bill will pay for that. I am programming a lot at work lately, but I don't see any opportunity to do some hobby programming in javascript any time soon. |
| 20081222 |
I didn�t do a lot of Cam-cording, video-editing or using the firewire-cable otherwise since the last post. Neighter did I put the donated laptop to a lot of work. The Analogue-digital converter package is still unpacked. My brother discovered some very old slides of me as a boy while wrestling to scan his complete collection. I did talk a lot about starting the retro-club since the last post, but we still didn�t kick-off. December has been terrible busy (as predicted) till now, but I managed to get away to the retro meeting. This got me inspired to finally do the Apple ][ shapetables demo in JavaScript (which I uploaded). I had a hard time finding the documentation, I used to have a lot of Apple ][ manuals, but I had to sell them because I needed the space. luckily I found the pages I was looking for as a pdf on scribd.com The housekeeper/cleaning-lady, came over once, she did a good job but still I don't know if I want to keep her. At work I am installing all the tools that I need for work (and thats a lot) on the new Pc we got. I hope I can erase the HD of my old PC work tomorrow. That is necessary because I do HRM and therefore have a lot of confidential personal information on my PC. My car is at the garage because one of the springs of the shock-absorbers broke. I hope I have it back for christmas. My wife will get her car back tomorrow. She crashed it when it was slippery, and now it is finally restored. |