Google Video Problems

I have been having problems with video clips on the internet lately, some with Google, some with YouTube (is there a difference?). I have a longish video (ten minutes or so) that I have been trying to upload off and of for months, and it just won't go. I've let it run overnight and come down in the morning and it is still just sitting there spinning it's little upload-in-progress spinner.

I tried to upload some shorter clips (ten seconds or so) along with a bunch of photos to Picasa the other day. All the photos went, but none of the videos. Had to send them again. It did work the second time.

And then there are the playback problems. Seems like if it is a popular clip, it generally plays smoothly, but if it is anything out of the ordinary there are hiccups and glitches and it's very annoying. I can understand that there are times when you might not be able to deliver obscure video XYZ in a timely manner, but could you at least equip your video player with a "wait till download is complete before starting playback" button?

Right now the only way to accomplish this is to let the download play to completion and then hit the replay button, which means you have to watch it twice, or get up and go for a walk. Wouldn't want to do anything else on the computer that might jeopardize this download.

There was a clip of a deleted scene from "Pulp Fiction" that I wanted to add to my post on communication, but it just would not play smoothly, it kept getting delayed, and not just little hiccups, delays on the order of a minute or more. So I thought I would capture it, upload my own private, re-pirated copy, and maybe that will play smoother. To make a long story short, that was also a bust.

I quickly found, downloaded and installed a demo version of a video capture program. For some bizarre reason, it needs to be started before the browser. Which means replay won't work, because video clips are not cached in the normal sense. So I launch the program, launch the browser, pull up the video clip and go read for a while. I come back and the capture program has stopped with an error. What's the error? No info, just an error. No video today, you come back later.

Horrible Harry Linux Screen Resolution

Linux is as lovely as Windows is wonderful. I'm running Horrible Harry, or whatever version H is called.

I have dots. Many dots. 1024 x768 dots exactly.

Took a while to get here.

First of all I tried the "System/Appearance/Visual Effects" trick recommended by playinpearls. It did indeed cause a new Nvidia driver to be installed, but it cut my choices of screen resolution down to 2. No real help there, and now I don't know which version of the video driver I'm running.

But now, thanks to this thread, this page and a Princeton data sheet, I have dots.

I added these two lines to the monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

HorizSync 30-96
VertRefresh 50-160

The instructions in this thread only mentioned the two key words, they did not say anything about having to append anything, much less what form those values needed. The web page helped there.

So I put these values in and now I can get 1024 x 768, which is entirely adequate, but nowhere near the top resolution of this monitor (Princeton VF912) which is 1600 x 1200. Further, on "System/Preferences/Screen Resolution" when you try to select the resolution, a list appears with a large empty white space at the top. Clicking on "Refresh Rate" gives you a list of five values: 50 thru 55 Hz.

I just realized these limitations may be due to the video card. It looks like there is a way to put in your monitor name and model, but where's the list of valid values?

And why can't you do this super user stuff from a GUI? Why does it have to done from the command line? I could also ask why I have to do this at all, since I did not have to do it for Dapper Dan (Version D). Of course, Dapper Dan had a whole set of other problems. So on balance, this was a minor difficulty.

Oh well, at least I have dots.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Exercise Bike + Fan

This is an idea that I have been kicking around for a long time. We went to the local High School football game last night and they had an exercise bike sitting next to the home team benches, possibly so runners can stay limbered up? Seeing that reminded me of this idea and I decided I better write it down. It's not much of an idea. Put a fan in front of the person riding the exercise bike so it blows air on them to keep them cool. Okay, anyone can do that with a floor fan that's plugged into the wall. The trick is to connect the fan to the bicycle so that the rider is driving the fan, and that's probably why nobody has done it yet. It is a bit of a trick. Any kind of mechanical linkage is going to need a pretty solid frame to support and keep the moving bits aligned. An electric drive would be good, you wouldn't need the complexity or rigidity of a mechanical drive, just some wire. But I don't know whether you could make the efficiency high enough.

A long roller chain with a couple of idler pulleys and a half twist might do the trick.

Text Conversion

I was just reminded about another niggling little problem. When I copy the text from an email and paste it in Blogger's edit box, it comes in with hard line ends. That is, it shows up looking exactly like it did in the email, it does not expand to fit the Blogger edit box. So I have to go through and delete all the superfluous carriage returns. Okay, I don't have to, but it's one of those things that bugs me so I do it. It doesn't happen all that often, but with all the other fancy-schmancy computer programs running around, you would think someone could figure out a way to deal with copying paragraphs from one program to another, especially since both of these programs come from Google.

Size problems when posting comic GIF's

I have not been using GIF file format for posting photos in my blog because they often seem to confuse blogger. They post okay the first time, but if you want to go back and edit the post, you can't because nothing shows up in the edit box. I don't know if that is still a problem or not, but it's why I quit using them. Now if there is a GIF I want to post I will download it and convert it to JPEG using MSPAINT. Up till now that has worked fine.

Now I want to post a cartoon. It is in GIF format so I go through the rigamarole of converting it, but now when I post it, it's too small. So I edit the html and add "width=600", which makes it bigger, but now it's all jaggy. I poke around in Picasa and they have links for embedded pictures that I have uploaded (which is where my converted comic is now) and the sizes are all preselected, and none of them are 600. They have thumbnail, 200, 400 and 800.

Finally I try importing the picture directly from the web site and that seems to work. I still have to edit the HTML to get the right size. Maybe the problem with GIF's has gone away.

I posted this problem on the blogger help forum, but who knows if anyone will see it there.

Power Seats

A couple of years ago I went to the local hot rod show and they had the Blastolene Special there. It was one of the coolest cars I have ever seen. Someone asked me if it had a power seat, and I replied that it IS a power seat. After all, that is basically what a car is. It has a seat. You sit in it, push a couple of buttons (okay, turn a wheel, pull a lever, push a pedal, etc.) and it takes you where you want to go. It is a bigger and more capable version of an electric wheelchair. Electric wheelchairs have the advantage of being smaller and being able to go into tighter spaces, like inside your house. If your house was a barn, you could drive your car into house, and you wouldn't need an electric wheel chair. Kind of pain to go to the fridge for a beer though. And you would need good ventilation.

One of the problems I see with wheelchairs (of all kinds) is that you are at sitting height, which puts you at a disadvantage (at least psychologically) when you are dealing with people who are standing. So I was thinking that a wheel chair that could raise you to standing height would be a good thing to have. Unfortunately, raising a person to that height without expanding your base makes you less stable and more prone to falling over, which is not good when you are already handicapped.

Now we have the Segway which keeps it's balance automatically. Using a base like that for a tall power chair might be just the thing.


And then I got to thinking about the seat. How do you support someone who can't support themselves without using a seated position that puts their knees out in front of them? And then I thought of bicycle seats. People spend countless hours on bicycle seats. Some seats will make you regret that, but there have been some improvements in recent years that make seats, if not comfortable, at least tolerable for long periods of time. Put a bicycle seat on a lift on a Segway and you might have a real improvement in the electric wheelchair department.

People are working on elevating wheelchairs, but I haven't come across anyone trying to use a bicycle seat. There might be a reason for that.

Communicate

Or rather, the failure to do so. The most famous in my mind is the scene from Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman and Strother Martin as the warden:


Last week we had a demonstration in Luann:

A while back I had a very surprising experience on the telephone. My wife was talking to her best friend on the phone. I needed to give her friend some information. My wife hands me the phone and I hear Susan talking away. I say "Susan". No effect, she is still talking to Anne, even though Anne isn't on the phone anymore. I try again. Still no effect. I try once more but she still does not hear me. I give up and give the phone back to my wife.

Last night I was talking to my son about finances. Things like how much it costs to maintain our household, how much it costs to go to college, and of more immediate interest, why I don't have a job. He brings up American Beauty and how Kevin Spacey gets a job at flipping burgers because he wants the lowest level of responsibility.

I mention that my problem may be that I am shooting too low. On a scale of technical competence I rate ten out of ten. However, technical competence is not everything, and my people skills may not be so good. My son tells me I have all the charisma of a rock. He may have been exaggerating, but perhaps not. I have heard similar comments from other people before.

I can talk to one person at a time very well. I do not do so well with a group. My family is a good example. Their conversations just fly. One comment follows another. By the time I have registered that one person has finished and I could start talking, someone else is already speaking. I do better at Thursday lunch, but only because my friends make allowances for me. I think I do okay at interviews because it is a formal setting and people are polite, but my slow response times may be hurting me.

Since I have been so dissatisfied with the management at all the places I have worked, I am thinking maybe that is where I should be looking for a job. More work for me. Hmmph.

Update November 2015. Replace the missing Luann comic. I think I got the right one.