Tag Archives: video

Bad Video Card

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My poor little Laptop … something’s gone wrong with it’s video card.

A few days ago I was watching a video on the laptop and something went horribly wrong … the video got completely corrupted.   Even rebooting the system didn’t help.   My initial thought was that my external monitor had gone casters up, so I undocked the system and booted it up.   Video on the laptops display was corrupted too.

Got on another PC and started a chat with Dell hardware support … I was quite surprised that the tech I chatted with quickly picked up on the fact that I was technically competent and didn’t waste my time with each individual mouse click and key press.   He simply said “OK, let’s delete the video adapter from the device manager”.

After we deleted the video adapter and reinstalled the video drivers, the problem seemed to go away.   The tech had me run a few video intensive programs to see if the failure came back.   It didn’t.

Yesterday, however, the problem came back.

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Laptops

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I was just looking at my laptop (Dell Latitude D620) and wondered about a few things …

  • Why do they bother putting RS-232 ports on laptops anymore?   I haven’t seen a device that connects via RS-232 in years.   The only devices I can actually think of that used a RS-232 port was an external modem … and most laptops have modems built in (not that they’re used much anyways).
  • Ditto with a parallel printer port.   Most printers that I’ve seen in the last few years have been connected by USB (‘course my laptop doesn’t have a parallel port, but Ginny’s does).
  • Why bother with a DB15 video connector?   Wouldn’t it be better to just go with DVI?   If you need a DB15 video connector, you can use an adapter.
  • The hard drive on my laptop uses SATA … I really wish there was an eSATA connector.   I tried putting an eSATA card in the PCI slot of the D/DOCK port replicator, but the BIOS wouldn’t recognize it (which is fairly logical, considering there’s no guarantee that the card would be there all the time).

On a somewhat different, although related, topic … I really wish someone would make an inexpensive tablet computer.   I have an idea for a nice little appliance application that would be perfectly suited to a tablet computer.   All it would need is a 12″ display, 512mb of ram, 4gb to 8gb of flash disk, wifi, and Linux.

Global Warming

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This video was found on YouTube by someone who subscribes to my CPF0000 mailing list. Quite enlightening, don’t you think?[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bDsIFspVzfI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Here’s my contribution to spreading the word.

Honu

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Today was our first full day on Maui … I woke up really early … around 2am Hawaiian time (due to the time change). Dinked around with the computer a bit (of course I brought it along). Around 4am I made coffee for Ginny and I and we watched the day break.

Ginny and I went for a walk on the beach with our cameras … nothing amazing to see though. Ginny decided to go to church, so I was on my own for a few hours. I sent for another walk on the beach with my camera … tried to get some longish exposure shots of the waves breaking over rocks. I haven’t downloaded those pictures though … so I’m not sure how they came out.

After Ginny got back we went snorkeling … the water was kind of rough by then, but we gave it a go. It was kind of cloudy in the water, but not too bad. I managed to get a really cool video of a turtle though.

(sidenote: A bit of an observation … this is the first video I’ve uploaded to YouTube … and I noticed that, in a lot of the similar videos (of turtles in Maui), the videographers got REALLY close to the animal. This is expressly forbidden by the Fish & Wildlife authorities in the islands.)

After snorkeling, and rinsing off, we wandered around Kihei and grabbed lunch. Then it was back to the condo for some serious relaxing.

For dinner we’re going to try and grill some fresh tuna we bought at Safeway yesterday.