mean mean stride

Title of this entry is a lyric from a song I've always liked where its title is of a character in a book released back in 1876.

i ♥ gps

If I haven't said it enough times, I love GPS. Truly.

Case in point:

I was driving back from Inverness yesterday and was approaching the part of I-75 where you can opt to stay on it or break off on to I-275. There was some night construction going on. The right two lanes were blocked off completely. Traffic was backed up for at least a mile.

Seeing all the stopped traffic ahead, I took the nearest exit, instructed my GPS to avoid the highway, then plotted a route home.

I'm sure I avoided at least 30 to 45 minutes of sitting in traffic doing nothing.

GPS rules once again. 🙂

feather pedal express

Something I did other than avoid traffic with the GPS was purposely drive 60mph on I-75. The speed limit is 70mph, but at 60 you get much higher mileage.

Usually the fuel gauge needle is just under full whenever I come back from Inverness, but this time it didn't budge. I kept my speed at 60mph on the interstate and did not let my tachometer go over 2500rpm when I was doing in-town driving. It really works.

cold(?)

The filters in my air conditioner hadn't been cleaned for some time (if ever), so I cleaned them out and whoa.. now it cools better than it ever did. It did so well I thought we were having a cold snap (no joke, I really thought that).

more on the new beast PC

I'm likin' my newly built PC. Truly. I played Counter-Strike Condition Zero at full 1680x1050 resolution with absolutely no problems whatsoever. The video action was as smooth as silk. Very impressive. As I write this I'm downloading Half Life 2 (I bought it thru Steam a while back) to see if I can run that the same way I can run CS:CZ.

screencast vibrations

For the latest DVD I did for work I encountered a very annoying problem. This video presentation was almost all screencast style, meaning the video you see is of a computer's desktop GUI. On a computer monitor, the preview looked fine, but on a traditional 525-line scan CRT television there was this absolutely irritating vibration on video playback. It looked exactly like an interlacing problem.

When I researched this on the internet I found absolutely no information that would help me, so I had to figure out what the problem was.

Fortunately I found out what was going on. On creation of the MPEG file, the frame type was set to "lower field first". I changed it to simply "frame based" and ta-da, all vibrations disappeared.

Now I can screencast anything and it will look proper on a regular DVD player attached to a traditional television.

Boo-yah. 🙂