hardware, self

A Very Rare Hardware Failure – DVI Port faulty!

1 Comment

Lately my stuff has been failing. Luckily, ALL of them were still within warranty. Back at this post, I was lamenting that my stuff all seemed to start dying at the same time.

Last week, a new item joined this infamous list – my relatively new 21-inch LCD Monitor. Yeah the one I use to play games on. What happened was that it started showing red dots scattered all over the screen, and it doesn’t ALWAYS happen. It would happen when the screen went into high-resolution mode (ie anything more than 1600×1200) with pictures with dark grey bits. Incidentally the native resolution of the monitor is 1920×1080, and yes that means HEAPS of red dots all over the place! Continue reading A Very Rare Hardware Failure – DVI Port faulty! →

internet

See Singapore in 3D via Google Maps

5 Comments

I have only recently noticed something new with Google Maps – a 3D model view. Off in the upper right corner of a map view, there’s this tab called “Earth“.

When you click it, it runs the Google Earth engine, and shows you the map of the area in 3D! Yes, like in flight sims, where buildings are full 3D models, but the rest of the terrain is flat 2D representations. However if you rotate your POV, you can actually see the relief of the terrain – knolls, hills, mountains, and such.
Continue reading See Singapore in 3D via Google Maps →

review, utilities

AnyVideoConverter – Possibly The ONLY Video Converter You Need

1 Comment

I’ve been using something that’s very simple to convert videos for quite a while now. Some readers may know I make machinimas, ie, movies using games. Sometimes, the final product after editing  is in a format that is not so desirable, especially when I intend to upload to one of the many video sharing sites like Youtube, Dailymotion, WeGame, and so on.

Before discovering AnyVideoConverter, I was manually splitting video and audio tracks, and re-merging them into an acceptable format via VirtualDub. Don’t get me wrong, VirtualDub is still very much part of my video editing arsenal. However with the addition of AnyVideoConverter, it has eliminated quite a number of steps which I needed to take previously. As the name implies, it is advertised as being able to convert from ANY video format to ANY other format. I’ve tested it with the usual .mov, mkv, avi, mp4 and so on, and it does its job wonderfully well. Being simple doesn’t mean it’s lacking in features – it packs enough features, for example, to convert a .wmv (Windows Media) to .avi (Xvid/DivX/etc), while enlarging the video (320×240 -> 740×408) and changing the framerate from 25 frames to 30 frames (PAL to NTSC). Continue reading AnyVideoConverter – Possibly The ONLY Video Converter You Need →

Rants and Ramblings of a Typical Kiasu Singaporean