Much Ado About Everything

Despite looking like writeoff even by 18:00, by 19:30 the sky was mostly entirely clear! If I haven`t looked through the window, I wouldn`t have even realized it. From my apartment nothing was visible but when we got out of the building we were able to see it immediately. What luck! The total eclipse of [...]

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As the title says.  Toshiba stops manufacturing equipment, and finally it’s official.  Blu Ray wins.  Now I can hope for some fire sales of HD-DVD movies.  I don’t have high hopes – after all, large scale UMD fire sales didn’t really happen either though eventually there were a few cheap movies to be bought.  Although [...]

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I took these pictures last fall… The first one is a nice combination of fall colours in front of Joyce station. The second is the same thing. Have to decide which one to keep as official. The next one is sunset at False Creek, at Science world (and no, I won`t be calling it Telus [...]

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The Kyoto part of the trip started with arrival at the Kyoto train station. It is a very impressive piece of architecture. Very massive piece, too. The station is just too big to be captured by one or two pictures. There’s a train station – both Shinkansen and local trains, subway station, big department store [...]

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Weather yesterday was weird and uncomfortable at times but mostly just weird, with every imaginable weather phenomenon occurring (more or less, I didn’t see any explicit fog but it’s a big city, somewhere it could’ve happened).  Today it was much worse, in the afternoon it started snowing vigorously and the wind blew it horizontally at [...]

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Today is yet another day of freaky weather in Vancouver.  This morning I got up to see snow falling and everything was white, mostly.  When I left the building for work an hour later I expected snow as I walked out – instead I got hit by rain and had to quickly retreat to pull [...]

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To play Apple Lossless (ALAC) or FLAC files with Windows Media Player in Vista, you need to download and install several programs.  One of them is DirectShow source filter.  On this website you can download the latest version of DC-BASS Source.  I tested the installer version and it ran under Vista 64-bit.  This only lets [...]

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I tried to make a HTPC yesterday using AsRock 4CoreDual-Vsta motherboard and the new Radeon ATI 3450, released only this week.  From various discussions on the web, it looks like this old motherboard using VIA 880 Ultra chipset does not fully implement PCI Express specification.  It only has 4 lanes where 16 are supported by [...]

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