2008 — 15 January: Tuesday
It's now 01:16 and just time to pop this placeholder up before turning in for the night. Mike has just sent me a screen capture of his SD PAL Starship Troopers frame but reports that the blessed hdcp1 prevents him from capturing the matching frame off his Blu-Ray disc. He ended up staying awake even longer than me (judging by the timestamps on his emails) photographing first his Dell widescreen monitor (and, after another re-boot2) his hi-def Samsung TV screen, both of which processes, of course, introduced some artefacts all of their own. Good grief. And I can hear yet more rain. Hope it doesn't rain too much more...
Hah. It did!
So, instead of going out and getting soaked, I've been amusing myself this morning by reading the Wikipedia article on hdcp. It suggests a reason for the failure of my (non-high-definition, but upscaling) Panasonic DVD HD PVR to succeed in displaying a picture via its hdmi output through my iScan video scaler: "HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc and DVD players (with HDMI or DVI connectors) use HDCP to establish an encrypted digital connection. If the display device... does not support HDCP, then a connection cannot be established. As a result, a black picture and/or error message will likely be displayed instead of the video content." The behaviour of my system might make me suspect the "heavy-handed footstep" of the Image Constraint Token at work though, theoretically, this should only disable video (it does) and not audio (it doesn't) and (of course) should only be present on a high-definition disc in the first place rather than being injected into the digital stream put out by my otherwise innocent upscaling standard definition player/recorder.
I had not realised that Hollywood's paranoia extends as far as protecting even standard definition signals piped via this fancy "digital SCART" connector. Shame; it's a much neater interconnect solution for linking kit together.
Next adventure?
Still blissfully undecided at this point! Though the need for provisions is a never-ending one, it seems. Perhaps I shall venture as far as the car wash, although perhaps just leaving the car on the drive will achieve much the same result. Should I bother to venture out, my main co-pilot says the trick is actually to keep your hands off the wheel, and to remove the bendy aerial, of course. I should be able to manage both those.
The rain, the rain
Let's just say if the water butt was still upright3 my cup would overfloweth, and leave it at that. I know it's still (09:50) raining, of course, because I am now steaming gently having dashed out earlier (yes, even earlier) to wheel out the green bin — after missing three consecutive recycling collection opportunities the thing is now just over half full. Christa would be amazed.
Time for brekkie, and then some basic decisions regarding the rest of the day. Meanwhile, Junior phoned a few minutes ago. He's got this ghastly winter virus at the moment so is confined to his flat for the day. Ugh! Still, it's now 11:00 and the rain seems to have stopped. Hooray!
I mentioned Christa's daffodils Spring-ing (as it were) into life yesterday. My neighbour reports (and I quote): "Toads fornicating in Lee pond — like some seedy club there are several suitors a-lurking in foliage." What I want to know is a) are they bufo calamita? and b) how does he know they aren't married? We don't want any of that here in the Gardens, do we?!
Oh well, time for some necessary restocking of the food shelves <Sigh> Eastleigh, here I come, ready or not.
What's new?
Gosh, let's see. Nick popped round at lunchtime to return a couple of items. I then grabbed a bite to eat and sorted out my "generic" shopping list to go and hit Eastleigh4 (including, let it be noted, snaffling the only well-fired loaf left in Sainsbury's). Also, having noted his nice, warm-looking, hat I gave my phone number to a chap who was paying for his parking ticket as he said he'd find out where he'd got the hat from. (A fellow widower, it turns out, [yclept Mr Bulpitt] who says he has taken an alarming five years to put his life back to "normal" — cripes!) It has never been my normal inclination to approach total strangers in this way, but I'm making a conscious effort to improve my socialising skills even if they will never attain the level that came naturally to Christa.
While I admit I sometimes lay on a bit thick the air of domestic chaos in which I tend to operate, I genuinely surprised myself today by noticing that it's nearly two months since I turned in a Building Society savings account book. The account was initially just in Christa's name, but we changed that to be a joint account in October when the radiation therapy had given her a relatively pain-free couple of weeks and we were once again briefly mobile. Of course, after her death in November I had to take the passbook back in to get the account reset yet again, this time to just me. I was given a receipt, but so far there's been no sign of a new passbook and the lady at the branch today5 assures me this is not normal. So, another piece of bureaucracy will be heading my way soon as I wend my way through their "lost" passbook procedure(s). At least she was able to show me that there have been no unexpected transactions, the account is indeed now in just my name, and the total has gone up with some accumulated interest in the interim. The wonders of Capitalism, heh?
Since it's now 18:41 or so I think it's time to go feed the inner man yet again. This evening's planned entertainment will be either reading the two (PC and Mac) magazines I picked up in WH Smug or, just possibly, experimenting with the component outputs from both the Humax hi-def satellite box and the Panasonic HD DVD PVR as I once again try to tweak my system another micron or so nearer to nirvanity (and if that word doesn't exist, it jolly well should).
Starship Trooping... department
Mike has sent me over the result of his work in capturing a reasonable Blu-Ray image of the same scene I showed yesterday. I've scaled it to the same width, and used the same amount of JPEG compression, and you can see it clearly shows the number "165" above the exit gate, doesn't it? Ignore the digital artefacts on the nearly vertical diagonals which are from an interaction between his Samsung digital TV and the digital camera he used to photograph the screen. These artefacts are not present on the TV screen in "real" life!
