The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

More Web Sites That Don't Exist

PaPal - The easy, secure, modern way the buy your indulgences. (But you don't ever want to call their complaints department.)
NovaNova - A central clearinghouse of which BitTorrent directories are up, which are down, and which have been sued out of existence. Updated every 30 seconds.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Web Sites That Do Not Exist... Yet

WTF Overload - Posting pictures of the cutest programming screwups from all over the world.
SlashDigg - An automated, user-recommended, real-time distributed denial of service attack.
PunditSpace - The place for teenage political commentators to expand their social networks.
Blogr - It's a blogging system - only now you can draw boxes around parts of people's posts and leave pointless one-word comments in them.
IRDB - The internet rack database. Know you've seen a particular pair before, but can't remember where? This site has it all, including an innovative 3D indexing system.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:28 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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In Other News

Corel wrote to me and said, essentially, Yeah, our Paint Shop Pro pricing in Australia sucks. We know, and we're working to fix it, but we're tied up in old distribution contracts.

For those who haven't been following the story: I can download Paint Shop Pro online for $59. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

I can buy it in a box for $79, less a $30 mail-in rebate. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

Because I live in Australia, it costs me two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

But at least they have acknowledged the problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:01 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe

apotheosis, commenting at Protein Wisdom:

Clara Bow was the IT girl.

Then there came pixie misa. Who has watched server farms glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Hate to disillusion the fellow. So I won't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:28 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Whoa!

Also Woo!

Got home, plugged the 360 into the new TV (a Samsung LA27T51B), loaded Oblivion and -

Niiiiice.

I was playing it on my computer monitor before. That's a 19" Samsung multifunction, with DVI/VGA/Component/S-Video/Composite/TV inputs, and it's a very nice computer monitor. But it's only 19", and it's 4:3, not widescreen. Effectively (if I can still extract square roots in my head correctly) it's about 17" for a widescreen image.

The new set is 27", which doesn't sound that much larger, but it is.

And the picture quality, even on component input, is superb.

Let's see what my notebook makes of it...

Hmm. Works - almost.

At 1280x768, I get a perfect picture. But it's not a 1280x768 screen, it's 1366x768. 16:9, and bugger sensible resolutions. So if I run it in that mode, everything will be about 6% wider than it should be.

My notebook actually recognises the resolution, and offers an option for 1360x768 (which is what the manual says it should do). But either the notebook or the monitor (and I hope it's the notebook) gets the timing wrong, and the image starts about one fifth of the way across the screen; the leftmost fifth is blank.

1280x720 would get rescaled, but would have the proportions right. But the monitor comes up Mode not supported. Bah. The manual says that it supports all modes between 640x480 and 1360x768, but that don't seem to work so well.

Hmm.

Okay, let's see what we can adjust on the monitor. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. Damn. Even at the maximum settings, I can't get the picture quite right. Well, let's try the Auto Adjust, just for laughs.

Hmm. Close, but there's still grey bars down the left and right, which will get kind of annoying. If I could get rid of...

Oi!

What?

Your wallpaper is 1280x1024, right?

Yes?

And this monitor is?

1360 by... oh. Right.

Okay, now that it's working perfectly, let's fire up some widescren video, like, oh, the Kamichu! opening.

...

Okay. I'm sold.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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