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| 14th Aug 2003 | KEN ABOUT ... LOTS OF INITIALS |
Ken Ross |
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OXIDE NO MORE Recently, for a short while, I had a DVD-recorder on loan, so assorted VHS tapes were shifted over to DVD and the results of using
various makes of DVD-R blanks were assessed.
The worst buy was the mid priced 'Golding AQ', (silver top), from Maplins with a 60%, (yes SIXTY) failure rate. As soon as the record button was hit the machine threw a wobbly over the disc. So much that it shut down and went into recovery mode. Oh dear says Ken
(people with long memories will ask about my walk on part in BBC2's 'Money Program'. Alas, the tape had problems so it's no more - boo hoo)
RELAXED FIT To create VCDs on the Mac, Toast will accept some MPEG's but others ... NeroMax has a bit more leeway on the things it likes. Charismac Discribe seems to be happy with even more - hurrah! To be honest all I'd ever use Discribe for is to create VCDs, as creating data & audio CDs are more fiddly by comparison, I feel, to Toast. Armed with updated software I revisited the Prelinger film archives to find they've had a makeover at, FUZZY SCSI Inheriting a SCSI device not that long ago, and still having device numbers free on my chain, I dug out a suitable cable to link it in then fired up. Up comes a report that I can either initialise or ignore a drive with ### MB on it. My external hard drive has 4 partitions on it - one of which is that size. Restart and again the report - but this time another partition. Shut down and take the external HD out of the chain. Restart. The new device is recognized in the 'system profiler', (but in the end I've got to give up as a driver for it can't be found, leaving it to be stowed away). Restarting with the external HD back in the SCSI chain reveals that 2 of the 4 partitions have to be re-formatted & replaced by backups. Presumably if the chain had physically shorter cables the 'impedance' would change and affect things. (to borrow a Hi-Fi term to express things). To test this out I fished out a very long SCSI cable from my odds and ends drawer and put the Zip drive at the very end of things. A test 250MB cartridge was then identified as a Mac ProDOS 1.4 MB! Restoring the cables to normal & reformatting returned things to normal IT'S NUMBER ONE -
IT'S....................... COMMODORE BILLBOARD is back ( http://www.commodorebillboard.de/) and it's being revamped to dispose of real player items, (hurrah), as they've been converted to QuickTime friendly MPEG's (bigger hurrah!). The chap behind it, Jens Schönfeld has also released the site on a CD so you can peruse things at leisure, (as he has to pay for traffic bandwidth). I've got a copy and it's well worth it to come across items that you didn't know existed. To quote from the back of the CD itself
CD-R snapshots of http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/ Also on the CD front is the latest release of the Funet.Fi CBM archive from Marko Mäkelä, with all the files of the /pub/cpm and /pub/cbm directories on ftp.funet.fi onveniently fitted on one handy off line package, which also includes my own creation 'LYNX8017C.GT' (cue Zarathusa). If you are interested in having this CD in your collection , the July 2003 funet.fi CD is now available from me through the post - the usual sort of ICPUG library rules apply - or contact Marko Mäkelä for arranging a download. Beware that the image is several hundred megabytes in size. ON THE B SIDE Ed Shockley the 700 Guru, (B series to Americans) , has been a busy chap recently in creating a 700 series version of my LYNX8017C.PRG . It'll be up in the 700 archives on my site, along with an info file, as well as popping up in other places no doubt . (The LYNX archiver is a non compressing file linking system creating files with an LNX extension. The best known on the C64 is Will Corley's LYNX17. Now for a few words from Mr Shockley himself
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