In trying to regain some sense of order in my home video recordings, I've been going through and systematically capturing and archiving some older DV tapes. Unfortunately, some of these tapes weren't even labeled. Moreover, a tape may last a month or two in the camera, and obviously contains a number of events.

I give you the website of CDC Software. A site that only a salesperson could love, it was clearly generated amidst a lofty cloud of smoke by repeated automated queries of the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

Now, that's not unique, though they do elevate it to high art.

What prompted this post is the frustration I experienced when I, as an interested prospective customer, tried to research one of their products.

Drupal comes with the excellent Garland theme, which is a fluid-width theme, and additionally a theme called Minnelli, which is fixed-width version of the same theme.

The Image

Fortunately, it's wonderfully easy to create a custom header image for Minnelli:

Click image for actual-size JPEG. Download the example in PSD format

I ran into an issue configuring Linux (Ubuntu specifically) to use the native 1680x1050 resolution of a Dell 2007WFP widescreen monitor. So I came up with a modeline that worked, and thought I'd post it here. Following are the relevant sections my xorg.conf

BTW, I'm using the Ubuntu-provided NVidia drivers, and running a generic FX5200 card. Note that this is for the DVI input only (119mhz). Modelines for the analog input will be different. (Link to Dell's documentation)

SanDisk doesn't publish the steps to accessing the recovery mode on the e250 flash player. So when mine had some filesystem corruption, I eventually ended up with a device that would not boot. It went into database refresh mode, and stopped partway through, frozen.

To install GhostPCL on FreeBSD, first install ghostscript. I don't run X on my server so I used ghostscript-afpl-nox11 found in /usr/ports/print/

Next get GhostPCL, and save the bz2 file in /usr/local/src. For this article, I'm using GhostPCL 1.41, and FreeBSD 5.3.

Compiling GhostPCL on FreeBSD requires some changes to get it to go. Two of the errors you might see are as follows:

I've recently been given some slides to scan, pictures from when Dana was a kid. After trying out the transparency adapter on my trusty Epson Perfection 1650, I realized that for these particular images I wanted more quality than the Epson could provide. It's an excellent scanner, but the slide/film part is a weakness.