2011 — 16 November: Wednesday
One hesitates1 to step into the climate change 'debate', but the 2011 Angus Millar RSA lecture on scientific heresy seems to strike a particularly clear set of notes. Source and tiny snippet:
At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.
In more mundane news, I made the mistake of buying "Bridesmaids" on DVD yesterday. At least I did not make the mistake of buying it on Blu-ray as that would have been an even bigger waste of money. But a comedy that fails to induce even a smile in the first 20 minutes is an uphill struggle.
A walk in the...
... November gloom, a couple of goldfinches (topped by a heron circling overhead back in Chandler's Ford), a demonstration of the ridiculous ease with which a video title can be eased off its DVD and onto the Tablet PC, a hasty late light lunch, and it's already 15:01. Tea, Mrs Landingham — it was quite cool out there today. (8C or thereabouts on my front porch.)
Brian mentioned that floods in Thailand had affected production of hard drives in Samsung and Western Digital factories, doubling prices. There goes a cunning plan to digitise my video Life in the way I've already done to my audio Life for the time being. But it's still an intriguing thought.
Nearly two decades...
... ago, when one of my self-appointed tasks was assembling and typesetting as complete a collection as I could manage of Shary Flenniken's wonderful cartoon artwork, I would quite often leave my Acorn RISC PC with its ARM7 (and, later, 203MHz StrongARM) processor running overnight, transforming large greyscale bitmap scans of the art into much smaller, scaleable vector graphics artwork to help cut down on the overall file sizes of the 200-page DTP output. Just think how much speedier the process would nowadays be with this!
Is it hot in here?
As a precaution, I switched the two large fans in BlackBeast from minimum to maximum before I began my next little set of video transcoding experiments. It got a bit noisy, but not all that hot, though 65C would be very hot to the touch, of course:
I then repeated just one of the transcodings with the fans set back on minimum — I was quite surprised to see that it made less than 3C difference to the highest temperature reached by the AMD processor. It cools down again very quickly, too.
So it seems I can turn four 43-minute episodes of a standard definition NTSC widescreen TV show on DVD into almost exactly 1GB of MP4 video and audio data in less than 30 minutes. Granted, the video quality is less than the source DVD, but to my eye, on the 60" plasma screen, it's quite acceptable; certainly at least as good as I remember my Tivo (with its fixed video bitrate) being. On the Tablet PC's 10" screen the picture is essentially 'perfect'.
I'll be surprised if Len doesn't have some tweaks to suggest to the Handbrake settings tomorrow to help me increase the quality without too much impact on the file size.