Category Archives: General

Pride & Prejudice Blu-ray

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I bought the Blu-ray version of the 1995 BBC miniseries “Pride & Prejudice” a little while ago. They did an excellent job of the transfer.

Take a look at Elizabeth Bennet’s first glimpse of Pemberley:

DVD

Blu-ray

Just to be completely fair, these are not actual Blu-ray stills. Rather, they’re stills from an mkv down-encoding of the Blu-ray. But they’re of sufficient quality as to demonstrate the amazing difference the new transfer makes. All the colours have been corrected. As well, the soundtrack is much clearer – you hear things you never heard on the DVD.

I’d give this Blu-ray a 9/10 — I took one off because the dark scenes were too grainy. But I suspect this to be the fault of the equipment and film that was used during original filming, not of the Blu-ray transfer; you can’t make it better than the original film, after all.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Recent 'Net Stuff

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There is a new book that could be as important as
Version Control with Subversion
was several years ago.
It’s called Pro Git,
and the source for the book is available on
GitHub.

Another item of note is an online
Settlers of Cataan dice-rolling app
that Vartan should like, since it keeps track of how many of each roll there has been.
However, it does not track who rolled what each turn, so perhaps not quite up to scratch. 🙂

Then there’s two sites for Mac OS X users who like the QuickLook feature:
QuickLook Plugins
and
QLPlugins.
Between the two of them you should be able to hit spacebar with a huge variety of files.

Finally I’ll mention
the Google Maps API V3,
because it has lots of stuff in it aimed at mobile devices (specifically iPhone, Android).
The major feature is going to be how fast it loads up.
I can attest to the fact that V2 does take a long time sometimes on the iPhone.

Success! ASUS A7N8X + terabyte hard drive

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Tnir, my household Linux box, has been down for a couple of weeks now.
I hit a bit of a roadblock when the motherboard erfused to recognize a new hard drive I had bought.
It was too big — 1 TB (which is 1000 GB, or perhaps 1024 if you’re a programmer, or 999 if you’re a sales droid).

So I did my usual check for a new BIOS, which would normally fix things.
There was a moderately new BIOS, only a few months younger than the one I had, but installing it had no effect.
Still no drive.

After googling around I ran across
an article
that laid out all the steps I had to take, which included creating my own BIOS. Egad.

That scared me a bit, so I put it off for a while.

But today I tried again, and realized that the BIOS is really like a zip file, with a bunch of other little files in it, and I was just replacing the (SATA) disk part with a new version.
And sure ernough, I got my new drive listed, with 938 GB (damn those marketing droids!)

TWiT HD harangue

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Getting tired of people screwing this up.
Especially people who should know better.

On either “This Week in Tech” or “MacBreak Weekly” (I don’t remember which)
the participants were constantly *incorrectly* saying “1080p” when describing all sorts of cameras.
The cameras they were talking about are all unable to do 1080p, at least at 60 frames per second (fps).

All of the cameras, however, can do 1080i.
That one letter makes all the difference.
‘i’ stands for “interlace”, which means it only records every other line.
I like to call 1080i “squished 540p”, since that’s how many scan lines are recorded.

Some cameras can record at a slower number of frames per second.
e.g. the Canon I want to get can record at 30 fps and 24 fps.
At both of these speeds it may be able to record at 1080p.
However, since 1080p implies 60 fps, it would be better to include the frame rate somehow,
and call it something like 1080@30p (I think I’ve seen that notation somewhere).

The only video cameras that can do 1080@60p are very expensive.
Over $5,000.

Well, not counting
the new stuff from Red
coming out tomorrow.
That might be a game-changer.
At least I hope so..