Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

Oh yeah, this is internet connecting via dial-up with a standardish 56k internal (with an enumerator thingie), plausibly I should have mentioned that.

things never to say to your next-door neighbours, #1 in a series of #1:

"guys, i can connect to your wireless network from my flat. do you want me to set up the security on your router?"

at least, don't say this unless you're willing to spend an hour on a sunday afternoon tooling around helplessly after you manage to FUCK THEIR ROUTER COMPLETELY so nobody can connect to it AT ALL. shit.

luckily i managed to a) fix it and b) make it secure. and c) set up an iBook and a flaky-as-fuck vaio to connect to it. given i know arse all about windows PCs, i consider this a grate triumph.

still. bah, computers, etc.

I'm so glad I don't live southside.

you're in denial, that's all.

next week we're having a bring-your-own-laptop party at syxties. complete with candles.

Right.

So this weekend I'm throwing a party in a pub. I want to plug my laptop into their projector and run a PowerPoint thing we've made, on a loop all evening. So far, so simple - just buy the appropriate lead and all's well, right?

But.

The projector is bolted to the (very high) ceiling and completely non-accessible. And it's permanently plumbed into a VCR on a different floor, with all the relevant leads (just SCART, as far as I can see)actually painted into the fittings, if you see what I mean.

My question:

If I only have access to the end of a SCART lead which is currently plugged into the aforementioned VCR, can I "simply" create a lead which has a monitor plug at one end and a "male" SCART plug at the other?

Or do I absolutely have to somehow access the monitor socket on the projector?

We're fucked without the projection...

HELP!

so, to recap.

my laptop has this socket:

http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/FBEguide/Computing/Projector/Copy%20of%20laptop_back_close.jpg

so i need lead with a plug that will fit in to that socket at one end, and in to this -

http://www.cybermarket.co.uk/ishop/images/923/756.378.jpg

- at the other.

yes, I mean *into* this as opposed to, er, just *being* this - as I said, i have no other way of attaching anything to the projector.

the key quesion here is of compatibility: are laptops SCART compatible, in principle?

bump...

forlorn bump.

Does your laptop also have an s-video out?

no :-( just an rgb.

i'm hoping there's such thing as an rgb-to-scart converter, then i'm sorted.

Looks like you are out of luck:

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136811&page=1&pp=15
http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/

Sorry :(

how to build vga to scart converter:

http://www.nexusuk.org/projects/vga2scart/circuit

One you can buy:

http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/STARMK10?speedtrapid=mwfroogle&lead=mwfroogle

I know connecting s-video to SCART is straightforward. I mean I've done it myself with a cheap adaptor from Argos of all places.
So is there no such thing as a VGA to s-video convertor?

I've not done any research, so y'know take with grain of salt kind of thing.

xpost

the thing above is also a vga to s-video converter.

ok, i'm getting a bit lost in acronyms now!

what's vga?

(i only need this once, for a one-off event, so i'm not splashing out over 50 quid. thanks anyway, ed)

in fact, i've discovered that a simpler solution would be to convert my ppt presentation to vhs, so that's probably what i'll do. but for that, i still need some way to connect my laptop to a vcr! gaaaah.

Can anyone recommend good DVD/MPEG-2 to DivX/3ivX transcoding software for Windows?

I've got a requirement to do this for work. SMP support would be good. Low cost also good.

NEW QUESTION: My Mac clone is languishing at home for want of a systems disk; apparently something got corrupted and needs to be re-written but I haven't hit on the right generation of OS yet. OS 8 was too old and 9.2 too new, so now it's time to experiment -- does anyone in the States have an 8.5, 8.6, 9.0, or 9.1 universal systems disk you wouldn't mind loaning out?

bump

ed: i use mencoder on linux which works a treat. the windows port didn't do as expected this morning when i tried it (using lavc ffmpeg4 encoder just crashed out, didn't try it with anything else). i'm sure there are a million other mpg-avi encoders out there, mencoder is just the one i know.

here's a bunch that i haven't used:
http://www.videohelp.com/convert#4;13
this looks promising:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=259841
as does this:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1271288#1271288

(if only because the mention libraries i recognise - tmpgenc and ffmpeg respectively).

I pay a guy to update a website. The most time consuming part is the photos. We take the photos using a pretty expensive top quality digital camera. It doesn't have options for 600dpi or anything, it's just set to take them at top quality which I think is 8 megapixels. It results in jpegs which are about 3mb each.

So we send these photos to our website guy each month. He scales the pics down each time, to about 13kb so they're usable for a website.

The first time, the photos all went up fine. The second time, all fine again. The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly. I mailed him and asked why. He said it was because we were taking the pictures at 72dpi. Either that, or when we were taking them off the camera, the program we used was converting them to 72dpi. Thing is, we don't use a program to take them off the camera, we just drag them off. And the settings on the camera haven't been changed ever, they're all taken at the best quality.

Plus, saying that we take them at 72dpi doesn't make sense because surely this would make the jpegs much smaller than 3mb?

So, I'm confused. Is it the camera at fault? The website admin guy says that pictures can still be taken at 72dpi and be of a large file size, but this doesn't make sense. These photos can be printed on an A3 sheet of paper and still be great quality so saying they only have 72 dots per inch sounds mighty wrong.

We sent the most recent batch of photos over and he said that when he opens them, they're 72dpi again.

Here's one of the pics: http://s49.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2BGUVE28MVREY2VZ9FOJ1DZF33

Does anyone have an explanation for what might have happened here?

he's an idiot? that picture looks fine - it's 2000x3000 pixels and will scale down nicely (resolution doesn't matter here - the target for websites is about 72dpi anyway)

> The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly

this sounds like either a compression problem ie they are too compressed or like he has them one size and is forcing them via img height and width in the code to be a different size.

http://home.clara.net/koogy/photos/01s.JPG = same image resized to 300x450 (75dpi, jpeg quality = 50%, filesize = 21K, done using gimp) (50% is quite low)

Thanks Koogs, I thought as much. Thing is, the guy's having a huge sulk at me for daring to doubt his website mastery. But that's a whole other thread...

Thanks again for clearing that up.

Laurel, I have an 8.5 disc. It's out on loan but I can get it back this weekend.

Resizing without resampling? That's what it sounds like. But why would the problem only crop up the third time?

Why, on my iBook, is VLC's maximum volume three times louder than QuickTime's, with no distortion, even playing the same movie file? Is there some behind-the-scenes hack to let everything have as much volume range as VLC?

Ed, if you don't have the answer, email me at [email protected] and I'll forward it to a few people I know and ask them.

Whoah, Paul, somehow I never saw your post above. Thank you thank you thank you -- have you got it back yet? I'll email.

"An error occurred while evaluating custom action attribute "null" with value "null": A null expression string may not be passed to the expression evaluator (null)"

That's a great error message!

(we need one of these threads for programming problems i think. and general algorithm talk)

ok, Java. i have a list of things (for a particle system), only some of which are currently active. i've currently got them in an array and everytime i want to draw them i go through the entire array and draw the ones where the state is ALIVE. when i need another particle i go through the array until i find one that is DEAD and re-initialise that. this strikes me as bad and i'd rather have a list of ALIVE elements and a list of DEAD elements and swapt things between the lists as the state changes. in C (i am a lot more comfortable with C) i'd malloc a bunch of space and modify pointers as required. what happens in Java? can i change pointers? can i switch things between lists (Vectors? Arrays? what) without having to recreate them? will the vm be continually deallocating and reallocating memory? how fast will it be?

(can i just say in advance: threadkilla! thanks)

The VM will take care of memory (likely quite inefficiently). You could probably do the pointer-style stuff with the two lists, but I imagine this would be hideously inefficient when done in Java.

I would consider using a linked list rather than an array (you could even store the linked list in state order, hence dead ones could always be at the front of the list, so you'll get O(1) performance on re-initialising dead particles).

cheers. i will probably do more with ALIVE particles (moving them, drawing them, collision detection etc) so they are best at the front.

if i use an ArrayList can i add ALIVE things to the front and DEAD things to the end? i guess so (array is fixed size (at the mo). i never need information about DEAD things so i can delete them without worrying). if i add things or delete them will that bollocks up the indexing for the rest of the list i'm iterating over? i remember vaguely having to make a copy of something because i couldn't modify it whilst iterating over it. (maybe that was j2me only.)

in C you had to write all this stuff yourself (until glib came along) but at least you then knew how it worked 8)

I believe the ArrayList has add(Object, index) so you could easily prepend items. Adding and deleting will change indicies, but you could store the particle in a wrapper class i.e.

class ParticleWrapper {
    int id;
    Particle p;
}

with a unique id.

that's not quite what i meant by bollocksing up the indexes. i'm not really bothered about which particle i'm dealing with, they are all the same.

if i'm trundling through a list, processing the alive ones, and get to element 4 and decide it's now dead (due to aging or collision or whatever) so i mark it as such and move it to the end. but what is element 5 now? is it what used to be element 5 before i deleted #4 or is it what used to be element 6 because everything's moved up to fill the gap?

i think i need to write some tests...

Everything moves up I believe.

cheers tissp. will post results on monday.

Ok this is very boring and no doubt very simple but I've googled and googled and googled to no avail: how do you partition C: drive?

I've got a 300gb C: drive (Windows XP, 1gb ram, 2.21ghz) and foolishly chose not to partition it when I first set up my PC. Now the hard drive is about half full and running r e a l slowly, so I guess I need to partition it. But how do I do it without wiping everything off my pc and starting again from scratch? Do I have to download a new program or can XP do it quickly and easily? (sorry for sounding like a st00pid newbie moron)

hmmk i think this is what i need to do as well, so ill join in the clamour for an answer

ed is this what i need to do?!?!

I don't know of a free tool that can do this but Partition Magic was always the recommended thing to buy if you didn't want to lose your data. I dunno if this has changed in the recent past (they were bought out by symantec, i seem to remember)

yes Partition Magic is the tool I use as well, I'm pretty sure it's still the leader in this field.

Defrangment not partition is the way to go in this situation (although partitioning on install is not a bad strategy). After defragging set the swap file size so it is not variable. That will stop the swap file from getting fragmented.

Right click on my computer
choose properties
select the advanced tab
Click on the performance 'Settings' Button
Click on the Advnanced tab
Click on the virtual memory change button
select custom size
Set the inital size and the maximum size to the same value, minimum 1.5 times installed RAM, maximum 3 times installed RAM

Does anyone know how to get Evolution (the Mail/Groupware client) to see outlook public folders over an Exchange connection?

Ok, bit of a nightmare problem here. We got a bunch of photos of last night at Big Sexy Land and we've just stuck the memory card reader into the pc and ALL the photos have disappeared. What we see are dozens of folders all named things like '_&.%_&.%_&.%_&.%'. When we double click on any of the folders we get an error message saying 'the file or volume is incorrect' or '.... refers to a location that is unavailable' or similar. It won't let us drag any of these folders off the card and onto the pc.

The memory card is inserted properly and we've tried a different card and that works fine. We've put the card back in the camera and it says 'no pictures', but we took another picture and it said '1 out of 60' so that suggests there are pictures still on there. It recognises any new pictures we take, but not the old ones.

Probably grasping at withered straws here but does anyone have a magical solution for making these pictures come back to life? It's seriously important as there were a lot of vital shots for people on there. The camera is a Canon EOS350D (similar to yours Ed, I do believe) if that's any help. Has anyone had this happen before even?

i'm rebumping this thread to remind myself i'm going to need VBA/Excel help later. anyone qualified?

Affection - there are plenty of programs designed for recovering photos off corrupted memory cards. They usually have a free trial version that shows you what you could restore if you bought them. I can't recommend any in particular (maybe someone else can?) but have do a search on download.com for a PC or versiontracker.com for a Mac (can't remember which you use) for "photo recovery" and you'll get plenty of options.

Albo, thank you. Didn't even know those programs existed and doubted very much that they'd work. But they do! Annoyingly, all the photos have PICTURE RETRIEVER slashed across them - until I pay $24.99. Emule is on the case right now, and will hopefully save me the cash. Thanks again.

I have just acquired MSN, but to use it is says I have to disable my Norton firewall?, which is something I'm not too comfortable doing. So my boring question is: does anyone here know a way round this, so that I can use MSN with Norton firewall fully operational?

Not to worry - just worked it out!

Does anyone know of a good online guide to updating a website in Dreamweaver? I've been paying a guy £30 a month to update a website but I've decided to take it on myself, and I want to get my head round Dreamweaver myself.

I've got the username, password and ftp details. I'm getting hold of Fireworks (for the photos) and Cuteftp to upload the photos to the ftp server. But I'm clueless as to where to begin with actually sticking this stuff up on the site.

I guess it's all there in the help file but there's so much to wade through I thought I'd try here first. Is it a simple task? (I only need to add some text to a few pages and upload some more photos to a gallery). Can anyone give a quick idiots guide on how to begin?