You can run a JVC Everio without the hard disk! September 29, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentTo get to the hard disk you need to remove 4 screws (phillips size 0) from the side/bottom (they’re all attached to the side panel). Removing the side panel takes a little bit of effort due to some plastic tabs. In here is the hard disk with some big rubber things on each corner, presumably to minimize vibrations.
The hard disk as a ZIF connector which can be removed by pulling really hard or really easily if you flip the tab first. The ribbon cable connects to the camera and it can be removed from there by flipping a bit up.
The camera runs just fine with the hard disk removed. It seems to think the drive is there and will report errors if you try to use it. Simply tell the camera to use the SD card for videos/stills and you’re good to go.
Or rather, you would be good to go if the SD slot wasn’t broken. I don’t think the SD slot in this camera has ever been used and I had to try a few cards before it managed to do anything at all. It said to format the card and it did that but then it said the card was full. Bummer.
So instead of using an SD card I’m going to get a CF to ZIF adaptor and a 133x (slow) 8GB CF card. These will fit nicely in the space vacated by the hard drive. It’ll cost about $55 and the CF card will give me 2 hours of high quality or 4 hours of normal quality recording. More capacity doesn’t seem to be worthwhile for what I’m expecting to use the camera for. Less capacity doesn’t actually cost less to buy. I could get a faster CF card but I wanted this to be cheap and I need to transcode everything as it comes off the camera anyway.
The CF to ZIF adaptor has been ordered. I’ll test it with a spare/borrowed CF card before getting the 8GB card.
ntldr can't count (why Windows has to be on the last partition) September 18, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentWhen I got the new 500GB hard disk I partitioned it up similar to the old drive with all the extra space going to a new partition at the end of the disk. There were a few issues with the backup/restore of the Mac partition. I would have thought Time Machine would be able to properly migrate a system to another hard disk but I have missing directories and symlinks that affect things like apache (won’t start due to missing /var/log/apache). I’ve got Snow Leopard here that I haven’t installed yet so I think I’m going to do a clean install instead of an upgrade.
The Windows partition was … more trouble. I used ntfsclone to move it but there’s a few little tweaks you need to do for Windows to work and ntfsclone doesn’t do them. A quick round trip through WinClone sorted that out though. And here’s where things got weird. The system wouldn’t boot because it said that hal.dll was corrupt. I tried all sorts of things to get it going to no avail. Even installing again resulted in a system that failed to boot from the hard disk. Eventually, kind of on a whim, I tried changing boot.ini to use partition 2 instead of 3. The MBR contained 4 entries, the protective EFI entry and the 3 partitions so the Windows partition was entry number 3. Anyway, with boot.ini using partition 2 the system actually loaded the kernel only to fail mounting the root filesystem.
So here’s my theory.
ntldr can’t count. It sees boot.ini’s partition(3) but manages to mis-count, possibly because of the EFI entry in the MBR and loads partition 4. If you set boot.ini to 2 ntldr is happy but the kernel gets confused because partition 2 is HFS+.
Apple’s Boot Camp assistant only lets you create the Windows partition at the end of the disk and a triple boot guide I found mentioned that Windows had to be the last partition to work (though no actual reason was given for this). I moved the Windows partition out to the end of the disk, changed boot.ini to use partition(4) and now Windows boots.
But it ntldr mis-counts how does it work? I think ntldr gets to the last partition and just goes, “must be this one”. Why isn’t this a problem on most PCs? Normally Windows is partition 1 and even when it’s not there is probably not an EFI protective partition on the disk.
Anyway, I can _finally_ play games again (haven’t done any gaming since my trip to the US) so I’m happy.
Cinema volume rant September 11, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI saw Inglorious Bastards last night. It’s an awesome movie but not historically accurate. I suppose there was never a claim that it was but I’m used to historical fiction being at least based on actual events. Also, having recently seen Der Untergang, it was strange seeing such a different visualization of Hitler.
Now for my rant.
I rarely go to the cinema these days and you know what, the thing I hate most about the cinema experience is the ear-splitting volume they subject you to. It’s not that I expect a cinema to tune their audio the way I do at home, it’s just that I like being able to hear well and going to a cinema is ruining my hearing.
At home, the acceptable volume range of a movie goes from “above ambient” to “loud”. Unless you’ve got a dedicated, sound-proofed movie viewing room there will be a certain amount of ambient noise so the minimum volume you can have at home is higher than what you can have in a cinema. On the other end of the spectrum, you can’t have gun shots scaring the neighbors so the maximum volume you can have at home is less than you can have in a cinema.
There are 2 ways to deal with this, direct scaling of the film volume levels to match your minimum and maximums and compression (where the lower sound levels are played as-is and the louder ones are made quieter than they would otherwise be. I would much prefer the scaling although there does not seem to be any support for this in any equipment I’ve seen and most movies broadcast for TV do not seem to have had this done to them. Luckily, my amplifier supports compression, otherwise even this would not be available to me.
So when you’re watching a movie in a cinema you expect greater dynamic range. This means that whispers are hard to hear and gun shots near the camera will be painfully loud (as they are in real life). What you don’t expect is scenes with painfully loud background music or having the director insist on putting the camera right next to all the loud noises they can find. Sustained loud noises are bad for your ears and when I watched the movie last night, that’s what I got. I don’t appreciate this. It detracts from the movie and causes long-term damage. Maybe older people and people who frequent cinemas or rock concerts (all of whom will have sustained hearing loss) can’t tell that the cinema volume levels are too loud but I can.
Turn down the volume already!