2009 — 25 August: Tuesday

Step back with me to Cornwall in September 1975 for tonight's picture of Christa (or figure in a landscape):

Christa in Cornwall, 1975

We were on our first real holiday together. I was getting over my Dad's death a few months earlier and the break did us both the world of good. Ho-hum. It's not quite as late as yesterday — a mere 01:01 — but again definitely time for some sleep. G'night.

Busy, busy

Crockpot to be stuffed. Although it does more or less cook itself, it certainly doesn't fill itself. And the all-important initial cuppa, too. It's obviously rained overnight but now (at 09:01) there's sunshine and blue sky (partly). Off we go.

Forgive me, Christa, but my ignorance of your mother tongue remains vast. Only the Germans, I suspect, would have a composite word (Waldeseinsamkeit) for expressing the feelings or mood of being alone in a wood or forest. And now BBC Radio 3's playing three variants back-to-back. Are all German forests so gloomy, dare I ask?!

Yet another little dent in the saintly Thatcher's "legacy". Turns out the stupid 1984 Video Recordings Act (howled for at the time by a mindless but well-orchestrated tabloid campaign) is no longer enforceable because somebody failed to notify the EU about it. Quarter of a century ago. Oops. Mind you, the BBC seems to suggest it was designed to stop dodgy DVDs. That would have been a neat trick 14 years before they were available. (Source.)

Audible bliss

I just nipped downstairs to fill in Friday's car service time on my little kitchen calendar, but couldn't resist playing a few bits of favourite music. Before you (I) know it, it's nearly an hour later — and I haven't yet brought all my MP3s online since Brian keeps failing to re-enable digital audio from the Linux box. I think I shall retrieve a small subset of my CDs from the loft so I can keep a "Desert Island Discs" collection readily to hand. I am very pleased indeed with the sound of the Audiolab amplification. It remains to be heard1 what Audio-T can manage in terms of loudspeaker improvement. Music is very cathartic. I think Christa would have enjoyed Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa". He's a shamefully recent discovery of mine. Oh well. Time (11:21) for another cuppa and "lemonses" methinks.

The other Big Bro

aka our guvmint, in the guise of Laura Norder, doesn't seem to be as cost-effective as was initially thought. (Source.)

Hand me that envelope...

As I'm about to post a pair of warranty registrations, it seems only appropriate to contemplate the two envelope paradox.

Back, at 16:16. I've also emailed the support folk at DVDO since I have a dirty little secret to share with them:

hdmi problem

So, for any keen-eyed reader who might have been wondering about recent upheavals to my already-deranged A/V system, that's why the Edge has, erm, fallen off the edge at the moment... It may just be a 1080p timing problem. It may also be fixable with a firmware upgrade. It is certainly a mega damnable nuisance, and it can equally certainly all safely be laid at the door of the idiots who chose to impose hdcp/hdmi "standards" on us to soothe their paranoia about hi-def content piracy.

Still, in happier news, I've been able to find (and unfix) the Pioneer screen's deeply-buried "auto" size setting and thus force it to use the full 1920x1080 dot-by-dot pixel-perfect mode all the time instead of having to set that mode every time I switched from one video source to another. I've also been able to find (and unfix) the equally deeply-buried inappropriate colour temperature setting that my oh-so-confident young installation chap had initially decided was "right" in the three minutes or so during which he raced through these various setup menus.

My evening meal having been supped — it's 19:34 already — I can now admit I learned quite a lot from this well-written Yamaha Guide to hdmi (PDF file). <Sigh> Experimenting will resume, but not until I've made a fresh cuppa.

We still have some way to go (another PDF file):

hdmi pitch

Well, guess what?

Following a factory defaults reset and careful replugging of all the hdmi leads, the DVDO Edge scaler is back and working apparently flawlessly on all signal sources. I'd feel more confident if I knew exactly which change fixed the "problem"... Mind you, now the Audiolab sometimes fails to display the pattern of LEDs that reveals which surround sound channels are active although it still goes ahead and decodes everything. Again, go figure. It's 22:32 and I need another cuppa.

  

Footnote

1  Tomorrow, at about 4 p.m. — young John has just rung to make the appointment. And the NAD CD player should arrive on Friday.