Stuff that doesn't go elsewhere

So sometimes noteworth stuff happens but I don't want to fill the front page so I'll put it here.

7/24/07: It's my second day in posession of a 24 inch Sun monitor. It is actually a GDM-W900 by Sony and rebranded as Sun Microsystems, but regardless it is an incredible experience. These were originally used on engineering workstations and by professional artists. When new, they sold for $3000-$4000, but I got mine for $45. Nothing compares to this.

Some basic info about it: 22.5 inches viewable area, 16:10 aspect ratio. Top recommended resolution 1920x1200x80Hz. It weighs about 42 kilograms. It uses a unique Sun video cable with R-G-B on miniature coaxial and others on twisted pair (It came with an adaptor).

When first plugged in, you'll first need to set it up and calibrate it; There's little point having a professional grade monitor that's totally out of whack. You'll never believe that any monitor could have so many options in it's OSD. There are 7 ways to set color, 5 ways to set focus and align the RGB guns, and 16 ways to set the geometry (You will never use 10 of them). After that, it's smooth sailing as you realize just how much screen you have.

Compared to the monitor it replaced, itself a respectable Hitachi CM2198 21 inch (with 5 coax connectors - lol), the change is just unbelievable. This monitor is not pushed to 100DPI, it does it naturally. After setup, every part of the screen has sharp, square pixels. All I can say is: W_O_W.

7/20/07: I hate flash video. I mean really, REALLY goddamn hate it. It's bad enough that there's no link to click to save and now there's rumors of them forcing ads down your throat. Of course, this is the idea. Saving a perfectly good .mpg just doesn't do it for advertisers. So I fired up Ethereal, grabbed 34000 packets, and used "follow stream" to have it assemble the data back into the .flv. A little editing by vi to get rid of some junk at the start, and it actually worked. I didn't do it so much as to download the video as to give streaming video and attempts to take away the user's power a big, gigantic "screw you."