The Spam Thread!

[huckleberrypie]

It strikes me odd that Photobucket is still in business with this paywall of theirs that no ones gives a rat's arse about.

[cpd2009]

I may have found a use for Greta besides being a travel laptop...

a TV recording device.

I recently acquired an old Dazzle DVC100 video capture box from a thrift store, complete in box and looks like it was hardly ever used. It can run on Windows 10 as long as you can find and download the 64bit Windows Vista drivers. I was able to capture great quality video and audio through Magix Movie Edit Pro, and I can later adjust the video quality and make direct edits to the footage.

I only have one Magix license though, but I do have a bundled version of Cyberlink PowerDirector that came with a Kworld ATSC USB stick.

In light of this, I will sell off my Toshiba set-top DVD recorder unit to free up some outlet space and video inputs on the TV.

[huckleberrypie]

I may have found a use for Greta besides being a travel laptop...

a TV recording device.

I recently acquired an old Dazzle DVC100 video capture box from a thrift store, complete in box and looks like it was hardly ever used. It can run on Windows 10 as long as you can find and download the 64bit Windows Vista drivers. I was able to capture great quality video and audio through Magix Movie Edit Pro, and I can later adjust the video quality and make direct edits to the footage.

I only have one Magix license though, but I do have a bundled version of Cyberlink PowerDirector that came with a Kworld ATSC USB stick.

In light of this, I will sell off my Toshiba set-top DVD recorder unit to free up some outlet space and video inputs on the TV.

Lol would you mind if you send me the driver files? I could mirror it for those interested.

In other news, I've just tried out Titanic: Honor & Glory on Samantha for a while, and while the game did look gorgeous, its optimisation leaves a whole lot to be desired. Some less complex scenes run fine, while others are a struggle for the rig to render, e.g. the first-class diner and reception rooms. Granted my rig isn't exactly high-end, but still it should be able to play complex titles like Dirt 4 without a hitch.

[huckleberrypie]

Mafia III is also something of a PortingDisaster and an ObviousBeta, as I played through it for a bit and it looked somewhat like mollasses. Not that it's a horrible game though, at least 2K allowed you to play the game in any audio language you want yet the subs and interface audio are still in English.

[cpd2009]

I'm being reminded of The Pinball Arcade on Wii U. The dev team dragged their feet on it's release, and when it dropped, I was a bit disappointed. It doesn't look great at all even for the anemic specs of the Wii U, and there are numerous audio issues as well. With the Wii U nearly being dead now, TPA hasn't received any additional updates or table sets in comparison to their PC and MS/Sony counterparts.

Remember "XPTV"? It was this very short lived sketch comedy series that MS released through their defunct WindowsMedia.com website in the summer of 2001. The name alone gives away what the premise of these skits are. They were designed to hype up the forthcoming release of Windows XP. I barely recall streaming these around that time, and noticing one guy in particular, Pat Cashman, playing some news anchor/TV host types. His voice is very distinct, and he was most famously the "camera guy" in the PBS series Bill Nye the Science Guy. He appears at the "Talk Show" host in XPTV episode 5. Four more are on this guys channel as well.



Anyway, that reminded me of the days when you needed no less than three separate browser plugins to view videos on the web; RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime. It was a perpetual format war. Many sites even had to provide videos in multiple formats just in case someone didn't install RealPlayer or QuickTime for some reason. Then came YouTube and Flash Video, and that set the stage for a single plugin handling web video. Now that Flash is dying, most websites are transitioning to MP4 or other formats that browsers can decode on their own.

Finally, as for Windows XP, I wonder if MS or the producers of "XPTV" knew it would take 13 years to reach unsupported status, and it still gets used in several Asian countries today?

[huckleberrypie]

I've heard and read about the "cyber sitcom" Microsoft produced to promote Windows 95, but not about XPTV. And yes, back in the day you had to choose between low and high-bandwidth versions depending on your connection. It still is the case to this day, though not as glaring as it was when a 56K dialup connection was still considered golden and broadband a luxury.

As for XP itself being a zombie of sorts, yup, I still see some establishments here cling on stubbornly to XP, like for instance a computer at a vinyl sticker shop with XP (presumably SP2, I doubt about SP3 catching on for some reason despite being a bit more secure) and CorelDRAW installed. Certainly this insistence on an ancient operating system with more than a dozen glaring holes accounts for the numerous data breaches and malware attacks carried out on PCs these days. I moved on to Windows 7 since late 2008-early 2009 when the beta came out, somewhat skipped 8 (I largely skipped it, but was forced to use it as the hard drive on my old rig went south) and migrated to 10 when it was first released. Sure, W10 has its own share of issues, like privacy concerns and the lack of finer-grain control on system updates, but downgrading to a less secure OS is not worth the risk for me.

[cpd2009]

Whenever I send off a email to a childrens literature illustrator, I worry if I end up coming off sounding awkward, or at worst, annoying. Mostly what I ask about is how they create their illustrations and what kinds of technology they use, even if it's mostly a Mac-based field.

I have gotten nice responses from some illustrators in the past, but others, I got none. I don't know if it's because they are simply busy or if they chose not to respond to my answers? I recall emailing one specific illustrator, who is a Mac user, his opinion on the Windows OS and PCs in general among other unrelated questions. He answered the other questions, but not the Windows/PC question, which I felt was quite odd. Maybe he has no experience with Windows or hates MS' business practices and prefers not to respond? Or does he potentially view me as a PC/MS fanboy? Hard to tell, but since I want to maintain good relations, I didn't press the question on him any further other than asking why he didn't respond to that Windows question. He didn't answer that either, but did give a reply to other topics like before. The ironic thing is this particular illustrator lives in Seattle, which is not that far from MS HQ in nearby Redmond.

Part of me wants to get into digital illustrations since I already have a lot of ideas I been keeping to myself over the years, but I don't draw really well. The only way I can improve is to practice and draw regularly, but I hardly have any free time at the present.

[cpd2009]

Since the NES Classic was released in (possibly intentional) limited quantities, Chinese knockoffs have flooded the market, mostly online. To my complete surprise, I found a mall kiosk in a nearby city selling these things yesterday! The specific knockoffs the Indian guy was selling were the "CoolBaby" HDMI Game Console and the FC Pocket. A video review of the CoolBaby unit is embedded here.



The kiosk was called "Retro Zone" or something similar, and it had both the CoolBaby and the FC Pocket connected and running as demo units. They also had Pandora's Box arcade emulator boxes, preloaded with 800 games. The prices were a bit insane though. The CoolBaby was $75, the FC Pocket at $65, and the Pandora's Box was a staggering $280!

Obviously, what that guy is doing is illegal since all those consoles are filled with unauthorized copies of NES/Arcade ROMs, but even so, I wanted to buy one of these things so bad, especially seeing that the CoolBaby knockoff appears to have very high build quality. The Pandora's Box arcade box was also very cool and features similar high build quality. I didn't have the money though so I'm passing for now.

I also wanted to get a picture of the kiosk, but due to the very sketchy copyright situation as explained above, I refrained from taking a photo. I feared the man would become very suspicious of me and treat me like I'm some undercover copyright cop or something.

I remember back in my youth, I visited the same mall and saw another kiosk selling those Power Player Super Joy clones. I wanted one of those too, but I'm kind of glad I didn't buy one at the time. Reviews state the build quality of the Power Player bootlegs was very poor.

[cpd2009]

The Groove Music and Movies & TV apps in Win10 are nifty, but they lack the advanced features Windows Media Player or VLC have. You can't even import CDs with Groove. :/

Back to WMP...

[huckleberrypie]

The Groove Music and Movies & TV apps in Win10 are nifty, but they lack the advanced features Windows Media Player or VLC have. You can't even import CDs with Groove. :/

Back to WMP...

It's either VLC or Winamp in my case. I am not really sure as to why VLC crashes if I force GPU-accelerated video decoding. It's either I need to do something I haven't found out yet, or it's a serious bug the VideoLAN team should address.