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Kazriko's Dive

Multimedia Completion, February

Another month, another small stack of things finished. Books:5. Cross the Stars. David Drake dips into the Hammers slammers universe to try and mimic the Odyssey. *shrug* It was annoying at points, had a decent enough ending though.6. Neptune Crossing. First book from Jeffrey Carver that I’ve read. I’ll have to read more. Was interesting. A guy who formerly interfaced with computers to pilot shuttles is crippled by incompetent doctors and loses his link, and thus he frequently drops into a state of disconnection from the world… encountering an alien who wants to ride around in his head.

Great post

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918I love it when someone will peel back the layers of what’s going on and tell you something in depth like this. This alone is enough to make me start following his blog. I’ve been thinking of getting a Chumby unit for quite awhile, and this helps a bit as well knowing how much research they’re putting into these things.

Displayport

http://www.pcworld.com/article/142270/dells_displayport_folly.htmlI ran into this article when searching for more information on DisplayPort.Needless to say, I disagree with him. HDMI is not a technology for computers to use, it’s made for HDTVs, and because of such it has limitations when used on computers and computer monitors. One such that many monitors have is that even if the monitor is 1920x1200, it will max out at 1920x1080 on HDMI and can only attain its full resolution with DVI.

A feature to stabilize the image, or planned obsolescense?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/04/panasonic-cops-to-rising-black-levels-in-its-plasma-hdtvs-but-q/A feature that made the black level brighter over time on plasma TVs was miscoded and does it faster than it is supposed to, causing black level problems with older plasma TVs.Now the question is, is it really necessary for them to do this, or is this a planned obsolescence feature to make new TVs appear more attractive when they come out?

Multimedia Completion

Short one this month, didn’t get much done.Books:1. Doc Sidhe. Basic premise, what if all those old irish and other folk tales had some basis in reality, in an alternate world with limited capability of travel back and forth? Drop one or two humans into the fairy world, and watch League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-esque hijinks ensue. I admit, I randomly picked this one for the first book of the year because it was the shortest one in my stack…2.

Two cautionary things about Nelnet

I sure was younger and stupider back when I was a college student. Because of this, I collected a nice cautionary tale for anyone going to college now. Collegeinvest was the company that did my student loans way back when, towards the end of the time I had their loan, they switched to using an external processing company, Nelnet, to handle their billing. My interest rate was 5% but I had a 1% reduction for paying on time every month.

Buying a TV card.

I went back into the market for a new TV card recently. My trusty old WinTV Theater from Hauppauge was nowhere to be found, and I was tired of my huge old clunky 720p 27 inch TV. Reading the reviews though makes me realize how much confusion there is about what kind of TV cards exist, and what their purpose is.1. Old style SD Analog framebuffer card. This is what I want.

Multimedia Completion December.

Books:#28: Baen’s Universe 2-5: The SciFi portion of this one was the best Baen’s Universe I’ve ever read.. I may update this in the comments, no time right now.#29: Baen’s Universe 2-6: This one was a bit Ho-Hum compared to 2-5.Games:#5: Disgaea 2: About 35 hours and also a lot of fun. I wouldn’t have beaten it so fast without the DLC.#6: Fallout 3 & DLC: 136 Hours total. X_x Lots of fun, lots of bugs.

Multimedia Completion November

Books:#26: Course of Empire. Take Eric Flint’s political intrigue and KD Wentworth’s fuzzy aliens with interesting cultures, and you have a fun little alien invasion tale. It’s very long, but worth it.#27: Baen’s Universe 2-4: Laws of Survival was interesting. Aliens come to earth to collect dogs because they think they’re intelligent, but finds that none of them behave as they do in the TV shows. Misfits is a Liaden story of a weather specialist.

Out of E-Books...

I just finished The Course of Empire, which means I’m totally out of Baen E-books now. I stopped buying them because I had a huge backlog of secondaries that came with sets that I wanted. Now I need to go find some more to toss on my phone. I’m thinking I should pick up the Storm from the Shadows book from David Weber, plus some of the early Liaden books. The first 8 chapters of the Agent of Change book seemed pretty good.