bazza.blog

App of the week

Quickrip is the first all-in-one dvd ripping program I've come across that's managed to do this so easily, and have it all in sync too, without needing to fuck about with it afterwards, just put in the dvd, click on "Scan DVD", and select the chapter with the running time that looks like the film, put a check in the "Rip" column, and hit Rip DVD, it goes off and does its thang, and you're left with an avi of the size you specified! (yes, it works out the bitrates based on that to do it all for you), ta-fucking-da, now why can't easydivx for windows and stuff do it this easily? who knows, and everything I've done with that (which even tries to autodetect the framerate, the biggest cause of the problem) ends up getting audio and video out of sync

Spot the difference ...

betweem the previous bm pic and this one :) other than it being a nice day, though having rained, and the wider angle on the older pic

okay, if you can't spot it, the grille surrounds are now back, easy enough to do, pop the bonnet, remove the plastic covering at the very front (to direct air flow to the fan) and push out the sides individually (can be a wee bit tricky). Seperate the black plastic rear bits (the slots) and the front chrome bits, clean with white spirits, spray a couple of coats of primer on (as per on-tin instructions) let dry for a few hours, repeat with black paint, let dry, put back on :)

new phone

I got a new phone this week, a Siemens S55, has a colour screen, gprs, bluetooth, mms, camera and all that stuff, I'd take a picture of it with its camera, but I kinda can't :)

it looks like this (nabbed from one of siemens' sites)

the camera on it's okay, will do for pub visits and stuff, haven't got too many pics in the "high quality" size (640x480) but the low quality ones look like this

have email and stuff working on it too, so you can even email me to my phone, if I ever bother getting it to check the pop box I made for it

swm's been bitching at me that I'm not writing enough crap in this, so for him, we'll write some shite. Having some hard drive problems in pisces :( not good, I really need to pull the drives and get some nice 18gb ultrawide scsis in there, and a 36 for /home, should improve things no-end, both as far as speed goes, as well as being more stable.

Other news, replaced the stereo in my car, no pics, as it was wee buns, the replacement I got is this

Well, I spose this is techy, just in a different way, stuff I've done to the car since getting it

on Saturday I got new bulbs for the headlights, much whiter light comes out of them, although this picture is during fairly bright daylight, you can see a good difference.

also, I'd been having trouble with power going to the cigarette lighter, now, while I don't mind the lighter itself not working, I like being able to charge my phone in the car, and want to use the power so I can have a cd player in the car until I replace the stereo head unit, but, it suddenly stopped working! So, I borrowed a multimeter from chris, poked at the wires under the lighter, nothing, wiggled them, all that, nowt. Eventually, I got around to checking the fuse box, lo and behold, there was a blown one where it said was the cigarette lighter! So I went and got a couple (figuring I may need them, they were only 29p each) of new fuses, unhooked the negative terminal on the battery, shoved one in place, put the terminal back on, *fzzzzt* eep! after this I left it alone for a bit, figuring there was a short somewhere, and it'd probably require a bit of effort to find, but it then occurred to me that the little lighter bit itself may be causing it, and as I don't have any need for it, I may as well take it out and give it a shot (hey, it's only 29p for another fuse if I need it), so I repeated the process, and it didn't go boom this time, yay!

bag of shite

fucking windows and IIS, the only box running windows in here that has an external IP (Citrix Secure Gateway needs it, and needs IIS on the go to talk to it, bleah!). Anyway, yesterday I'd noticed things seeming a little sluggish going out over the 'net, but just thought it was some routing being odd somewhere, today I noticed lights flashing a lot on the main router, so took a quick look, the one going to the cisco to the outside world, and the windows server, so, I logged in to check it out, the IIS ftp server wasn't running, and nothing odd in the iisroot dirs, checked out the recycle bins ... hmm, "Cannot delete warcraftIII.frozen.somethingorother, the file is in use" ... ah hah! So, in a command prompt, a hunting I go, and I find d:\recycler\s-1-5-21-165900-4503-2049760794-725345543-500\ containing a dir called desktop, and a desktop.ini. I netstat and see a lot of connections on port 5040, but netstat under windows doesn't let you see what's got what ports open, so I get a tool (thanks to dw) to see what processes have what ports open, http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/tcpview.shtml and see that svchost (something you'd expect running) has the port open. I check out the services control panel, and lo! a serv-u ftp server is there, so I kill and disable that, and go to where it's running from (C:\WINNT\config\) and there's a svchost.exe, and a few ini files for serv-u, BALETED! so ... now that's gone, I get iislockdown, and basically allow nothing to happen out of the ordinary on the IIS install, and I reinstall citrix secure gateway (just to make sure, in case iislockdown killed anything it needed), which then demands a reboot. So, reboot away, box comes back up, things are running as they normally are, go about deleting the crap that the box has been getting stuff in (at 200 oddk/s). but I can't get at the files! no deltree under NT systems, if I browse to it, explorer lets me see nothing! so I go to delete the desktop.ini, nope, won't let me, check the attribs on it .. oh look, system and hidden! remove those, del desktop.ini and now I can see the dirs again in so wave byebye. Windows, IIS, big bag of shite.