I did get a nice, unexpected treat out of Amazon recently:
I bought A Christmas Story several years ago on Amazon digital. With the recent "Movies Everywhere" thing happening where Keychest and UltraViolet have basically merged under one roof my Amazon purchase suddenly appeared in my merged library. Not everything I've bought digitally on Amazon is there, I bought some lame Grumpy Cat Christmas movie for $1 last year and it isn't in the Movies Anywhere library.
I guess it's pretty obvious I do most of my digital only movie buying over the Christmas holiday....
They've got a reasonable catalog but their game-console software is clunky, statically sized, a pain to navigate, truncates descriptions, and is slow. I'll stay on Netflix and Hulu when I can. Hulu has gone from a passable interface to very sleek and usable in the past few months, they used to be in my "sure, if you want to" category to right there next to Netflix. I was extremely happy they stopped trying to cram "clips" down my throat every time I wanted to search for full version of anything.
I use Amazon on both the PS3 and the Wii. The PS3 obviously is better but damn, all I want to do is watch the Tick and get out. The fact they use bait and dump tactics with Prime programming and make it difficult to just look at certain types of selections (for instance I don't want TV shows shoved at me non-stop while looking for movies) and the search function sucks-ass.
For what Amazon does right they sure do screw up their streaming.
Most I've done is four and half days. Even after a simple two day fast I get better glucose readings for a couple of weeks. When I did the four and half day one I had better readings for a month.
I'm gearing up to do a couple of weeks, I think I can probably cure myself outright if I bear down and go long term
I don't do 100% fasting, I still take my medication (all oral), I put vitamin C in my water and take Apple Cider Vinegar. The Apple Cider Vinegar by itself can knock 30 points off a glucose reading if I take it two or three times a day. I'm finally getting to where I can tolerate it, I hate the stuff.
The first day, even two of fasting gives me horrible glucose readings - turns out your body starts out by flushing glucose from the liver when you don't eat. Don't be afraid of it.
I'm thinking that when I do go for more than a week I can probably stop taking my meds after the first week and go for a truer fast. I just have to keep monitoring my glucose levels. I don't want to go full fast no meds from the get-go, I think that could be too traumatic.
Interesting observations about my medical history:
I have two major issues. One is genetic - Factor V liden disorder. Turns out you can have this for a lifetime and never experience an issue from it. My issues were triggered when I was working for 36 hours in a 48 hour period a couple of times a week. I was told the problem was probably stress triggered. I now wear a compression sock to hold my leg together where it swelled up so big from the issue. I used to like the fact that even though I wore a diabetic sock I wasn't diabetic and in fact had perfect glucose readings at all my physicals.
The second is now type II diabetes. Despite perfect readings on glucose year after year when I took my mandatory work physical while I was at NASA it didn't stick. I got another job where I couldn't bike to and from work anymore, but due to financial difficulties I biked to my bosses house and back each day - which was less than half the distance I did at NASA. I gained a lot of weight at this desk job. Then finally despite a lot of continued financial hardship that was stressing me out we finally got a second vehicle, and due to my bosses chaotic morning and evening things surrounding his family I immediately went to driving on my own without that short bike ride. It was about four months after I stopped that twice daily short bike ride I suddenly had diabetes set in. Also, according to the doctors, can be triggered by stress.
You know, getting some exercise and keeping the stress down can really save your life. In my case I was getting quite a bit of exercise when the first one set it, but my stress was near it's peak. I quit biking for about two weeks during that time to accommodate the extra work and a minor case of the flu - that was all it took.
I avoid stress, but in my case stress is applied to me from outside entities and there's no avoiding it.
Not if we've been eating more or less safe foods all our lives. If you grow up eating shit on shingle you'll probably be fine, but if you suddenly eat it after eating nothing but food served by a germ-o-phobe hypochondriac all your life you're probably going to have a problem.
There were some sanitation issues back in the day and if you weren't super rich with a manor full of servants to do the butchering and cleaning there were some serious sanitation issues. If you traded in the open market, and many did, you were probably buying something that would give the common person of today all sorts of shits and puking. Fortunately there were also many who did their own hunting and and small villages were on the whole cleaner than the cities for the most part, but I'm not sure I would want meat from that era. Veggies on the other hand - that's back when they were still nutritious and had the vitamins and stuff they were supposed to unlike our nice looking empty filler of today.
and I read a lot of British origin books, or American books that were well over 100 years old and still retained some of the across the pond ways of doing things. Then as I got older and the Internet became a thing I wound up on a lot of websites either from the U.K. or at least heavily frequented by residents. I may speak with a bit of a Texas drawl, but I often catch myself writing "grey" almost as default and occasionally "centre" on rare occasion I'll insert a u, but that's a rare one for me. The fact the spell checkers in Firefox in my Debian derivative Linux distros seems to default to British English and swaps back even after being corrected on occasion doesn't exactly keep me in American spelling land. I've never gotten into the different ways of describing car types and their parts, nor words like nappy instead of diaper, but whatever got embedded in my head from reading every single Sherlock Holmes story in the sixth grade, the Bastard Operator from Hell in the early 2000's, and countless other bits of literature are rather well cemented.
Add in the touch of autism that I have that prevented me from realizing that having a larger than average vocabulary from where I grew up was why I got into so many fist fights - and it took one of the guys who was covered in bruises afterwards telling me why he started the fight for me to realize it - and I've had to commit myself to a mental game where I shut down my vocabulary with most company and only open up with a select group of geeks. I have found it's important not to let slip with British terms even when they're one of the few that I find I like better than our own in person. The Internet on the other hand doesn't seem to care with the exception of the occasional spelling or grammar Nazi, that deserves and gets ridicule in return.
Now I drive two to three hours a day, I have a toddler at home, and my wife sees me reading and interprets it as time to get close and engage in activity around me because I must feel lonely.
Audiobooks I do on occasion while driving, though I do tend to listen to political podcasts instead. I did listen to a Kevin MItnick one a couple of months back.
I have literally something close to 100 industry related e-books I've gotten from the Humble Bundle I really want to dig into, but as a family man I can't seem to get them cracked open.
I've got a 1080i CRT in the bedroom. I got a grey-market HDMI to Component converter for it, works great. When I upgrade I plan on going straight to OLED 4K. I'm still annoyed static field array flat CRTs were killed by patent issues.
With my Mac Pro Kodi system plugged into it. I would say the Diamatron has certainly held up for for a few itterations. I am however considering upgrading soon despite the thing working perfectly.
I agree with you 100%. I think a 9" e-reader (hard to come by these days) would be perfect.
Here's the deal - flight certification.
On the station they're still mostly using IBM Thinkpads. Not Lenovo Thinkpads, IBM Thinkpads. Let that sink in for a moment.
Everything that goes up into space has to be flight certified other than a few personal effects for each astronaut, and even then there's criteria that must be met. It was a pretty big deal during the last few shuttle missions when the Astronauts were allowed to bring personal iPods for music, but only if they were modified to run on Alkaline AA's and they had to stay on the shuttle, they were not allowed to pass through the airlock into the station which they were not certified for.
Getting things certified for flight is part of the reason so much of the equipment used in space missions is antiquated. The moment something actually passes the certification process and is allowed to fly it's been in the process for so long it's several generations behind, and they don't look to replace it. If something gets certified for use in space and they need exactly one on the station in active use they'll buy a dozen or more, send three up keeping two in storage in case it's needed for a replacement and keep the rest on the ground. Every time they dip into a spare on the station they'll send a new spare up to put back in storage.
If they thought e-paper was the way to go, which BTW I agree - I can tell you about the old system that predates what they're using now - and they were sending up e-paper today it would likely be a Nook Simple Touch or a fourth gen Kindle - the original Kindle Touch that didn't last long, because that's how far back the certification process would have started.
The OLD system before they started sending everything up as PDF's about five years ago, was something that looked a little like a transparency projector, you know the thing they probably used in your classroom in the 1990's, only instead of a mirror at the top it was a bad-ass Sony camera with a super expensive lens pointed at a flight book. Seriously, somebody on the ground would turn a book to a page they needed, set it on this setup and transmit a video signal over the K-Band up to them, and it was likely to transmit for hours.
They're pretty much off the shelf except the connector has been changed to a twist-lock hermetically sealed connector (overkill in my opinion, but I understand why they did it - it's pretty much the standard connector on the station). They also have steel cages around the paper trays, mostly to keep the paper from floating off. I think they use Velcro in space to keep the thing planted, maybe magnets, but on the earth side that particular detail wasn't worried about in the training environment.
Out of pure coincidence after I didn't even work there anymore, I wound up on the phone with one of the people from Epson who was on the project to get the old one going. He confirmed that it was pretty much off the shelf save for the few mods for low-G - such as the a fore mentioned cages. He was just as surprised to talk to someone who knew so much about the printers who wasn't at NASA as I was to actually wind up on the phone with that knowledge for the same reasons....
FYI - working on those hermetically sealed connectors is a pain in the ass. They're not particular difficult in any one sense, it's that if you've ever worked with serial/parallel pin inserters and extractors it's pretty much the same, except the insertion/removal tool is flimsy plastic and tends to bend/break on a regular basis (and just try ordering new stuff on a low end government contract if you're not the right persons buddy - everything is drama in the power struggle between the bottom and the top). The standard tools work, but you run a serious risk of hurting the rubber the pin sits in and even if it's just for training purposes using the standard one will land your butt in a sling. If it were actual flight equipment, even if you did it in such a way you could prove caused no damage they would still rip it out and ding the contract as a whole for such things. I suspect if it actually were for flight equipment those people would have an easier time getting the tools than us ground people did. The flight equipment people were at the cape, us training people were in Houston.
I did the Chrome thing back when that system still had Mac OS on it. It's a first-gen Intel Mac Pro. Apple doesn't support it anymore. I moved to Linux not because I prefer it (even though in many ways I do, except for the issues I don't like to acknowledge where incompatibility creep happens with time if you keep the base up to date). What happened was every time I launched Netflix I got a message in Chrome "This version is no longer going to be supported and no new version is available because you're base version is too old ass-hat, upgrade!" accompanied by the occasion message from Mac OS that would steal focus from Kodi about "we're not going to let you upgrade crap, update your machine! wanker!" At which time I would have to use the touch-pad to close the messages I already knew about and didn't really want to see again. I moved the OS to Linux, which wasn't as easy as it sounds, I discovered I had to get a custom build with a 32 bit loader but a 64 bit OS due to some specific things about that generation of Mac Pro. Still it's been great so far and I haven't bothered putting the Chrome launcher back on there simply because it's so awkward to use. My system just is not configured to use pointing devices well, I have a keyboard remote where the arrow keys, enter key, and esc key are 95% of the navigation and they've very easy to use. Switching to mouse is like having to switch from walking along whistling a tune to walking on ice with leather-soled shoes.
I just don't consider the Chrome launcher the way to go.
I do the same. I used to buy $3 DVD's out of a box at HEB. I guess they had a deal with Redbox, they would take the old Redbox movies and sell them for $3 each, glorious scratches and stickers in the middle, the whole 9 yards. A significant part of my collection came from that. A couple of weeks ago I bought 3 of the 5 Diehard movies and on BluRay for $5 each as well as some block-buster-bombs from Big Lots. I have a huge movie collection, and a not insignificant portion of it came from the bargain bin. That's part of the reason I have five HDD's hooked into that system (four internal that aren't all that huge but hold a different media each and an external 4TB Firewire drive)
scratch the florescent lights bit - those are in the rest of the building (including in that little room behind the wall - and the other little room behind the screen) but that stretch is without. What it does have a is a Creston System to control the lights and the speakers in the ceiling that belong to the Muzac system, not to mention WiFi equipment that you don't see that generates just as much noise as florescent lights. Not to mention that area of sheetrock over the table makes running cables a bigger pain in the ass that it has to be in that room and the fact each of the ceiling tiles is in tighter than most areas with false ceilings and you better not mess up anything in THAT conference room.... Okay I'm off topic, but I have a feeling a lot of you reading this can relate.
At work we have a very nice looking executive conference room that was mostly configured before I worked here. If you look at that picture the audio equipment is behind the wall with the pictures on it. The main screen is behind the photographer, and so is the PC that runs the main screen. The tech who did part of the original setup ran an 1/8" to RCA cable from the TV's output all the way to the audio amplifier behind that other wall, past florescent lights and everything else in the ceiling. To say the least there was a buzz in the system that I could sometimes get rid of by wiggling cables, putting a little shielding here or there and praying for the best. I didn't like that solution.
Now, I can work fiber optics, I learned that from my years at NASA. I had never really worked with TOS before beyond using some cheap plastic light-guide short distances on stereo equipment on occasion and with my Turtle Beach headset on my work Mac, main system sound went to the dongle via TOS and the USB portion did voice - an awesome setup on what would have been an awesome headset had they not used the most brittle plastic they could find to mold it. I started calling fiber suppliers looking for the connectors so I could make my own cable - they didn't call back. It took a little research to find out that TOS doesn't work on standard OC3 cable, or any other fiber I have run in the past, part of the reason my suppliers didn't carry it. I also found mixed information about the range of TOS saying it topped out around 15 feet or so, and some giving it a lot more.
I figured out it's a lot like Ethernet - some who learned Ethernet 25 years ago is going to keep in mind there's a limit to accumulative cable length throughout the whole network, the longer you make one cable the shorter the rest have to be, that it's a collision based system where only two systems can talk at a time, etc... Things that used to be true and are still true on really, really old equipment, some of which may still be in use, but using more up to day components there's a new reality. You can now buy TOS in high quality glass fiber, and it will go further. You still have limitations because the width of the fiber has to be "wide" to accommodate signal - at least I assume it does, I don't know if it's single-mode or multi, but I'm assuming it carries a wave form instead of a simple on/off since the requirements seem to stand. I eyeballed the room - I didn't really measure it, and I shopped. I found a 65 ft cable from a company I had never heard of and I have to tell you it works great. No more static, the sound quality is great. The only complaint is they can no longer use the TV remote to change volume, but the volume keys on the keyboard work. Since they only use the Direct TV in that room during really big soccer matches I don't see an issue.
I don't think I could have stretched HDMI that far. I could have converted it to SDI and changed it back to do it, but that would require an active box on both sides since nothing in play supports SDI natively. SDI is great for professional equipment, but the budgets I get to do thing usually don't allow for true professional grade equipment - not to mention pro grade equipment is usually a little behind consumer grade equipment when it comes to screen sizes and other little features that advertising people lock onto and "must have". I think I'm finally past having to explain to desktop users why they're better off with a wired keyboard and an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and WiFi, the power of news and buzz words is incredibly strong to marketing people and even though pure logic can win a lot of arguments, when the person who controls the money wants the biggest things with the right buzz words you sometimes have to get it, and SDI isn't a modern buzzword, even if modern SDI can support 4K.
When has anything ever changed to accommodate your wishes by shutting up, sitting in a corner, and ignoring the possibilities? I've already mentioned changing code to get plugins to do what I want, so I'm willing to do it myself. Right now the ball is in the court of some other people - did the horrible "Must have the Kinect hooked up to use your XBOX One" requirement go away because nobody said anything or did it get done because everyone bitched?
It's why I've yet to see a single episode or Star Trek Discovery or Constantine, despite the fact Constantine ties into shows I'm watching now, and Discovery ties into shows I watched once upon a time.
Slashdot Mirror
I did get a nice, unexpected treat out of Amazon recently:
I bought A Christmas Story several years ago on Amazon digital. With the recent "Movies Everywhere" thing happening where Keychest and UltraViolet have basically merged under one roof my Amazon purchase suddenly appeared in my merged library. Not everything I've bought digitally on Amazon is there, I bought some lame Grumpy Cat Christmas movie for $1 last year and it isn't in the Movies Anywhere library.
I guess it's pretty obvious I do most of my digital only movie buying over the Christmas holiday....
They've got a reasonable catalog but their game-console software is clunky, statically sized, a pain to navigate, truncates descriptions, and is slow. I'll stay on Netflix and Hulu when I can. Hulu has gone from a passable interface to very sleek and usable in the past few months, they used to be in my "sure, if you want to" category to right there next to Netflix. I was extremely happy they stopped trying to cram "clips" down my throat every time I wanted to search for full version of anything.
I use Amazon on both the PS3 and the Wii. The PS3 obviously is better but damn, all I want to do is watch the Tick and get out. The fact they use bait and dump tactics with Prime programming and make it difficult to just look at certain types of selections (for instance I don't want TV shows shoved at me non-stop while looking for movies) and the search function sucks-ass.
For what Amazon does right they sure do screw up their streaming.
My findings:
There's some hope here.
Most I've done is four and half days. Even after a simple two day fast I get better glucose readings for a couple of weeks. When I did the four and half day one I had better readings for a month.
I'm gearing up to do a couple of weeks, I think I can probably cure myself outright if I bear down and go long term
I don't do 100% fasting, I still take my medication (all oral), I put vitamin C in my water and take Apple Cider Vinegar. The Apple Cider Vinegar by itself can knock 30 points off a glucose reading if I take it two or three times a day. I'm finally getting to where I can tolerate it, I hate the stuff.
The first day, even two of fasting gives me horrible glucose readings - turns out your body starts out by flushing glucose from the liver when you don't eat. Don't be afraid of it.
I'm thinking that when I do go for more than a week I can probably stop taking my meds after the first week and go for a truer fast. I just have to keep monitoring my glucose levels. I don't want to go full fast no meds from the get-go, I think that could be too traumatic.
Interesting observations about my medical history:
I have two major issues. One is genetic - Factor V liden disorder. Turns out you can have this for a lifetime and never experience an issue from it. My issues were triggered when I was working for 36 hours in a 48 hour period a couple of times a week. I was told the problem was probably stress triggered. I now wear a compression sock to hold my leg together where it swelled up so big from the issue. I used to like the fact that even though I wore a diabetic sock I wasn't diabetic and in fact had perfect glucose readings at all my physicals.
The second is now type II diabetes. Despite perfect readings on glucose year after year when I took my mandatory work physical while I was at NASA it didn't stick. I got another job where I couldn't bike to and from work anymore, but due to financial difficulties I biked to my bosses house and back each day - which was less than half the distance I did at NASA. I gained a lot of weight at this desk job. Then finally despite a lot of continued financial hardship that was stressing me out we finally got a second vehicle, and due to my bosses chaotic morning and evening things surrounding his family I immediately went to driving on my own without that short bike ride. It was about four months after I stopped that twice daily short bike ride I suddenly had diabetes set in. Also, according to the doctors, can be triggered by stress.
You know, getting some exercise and keeping the stress down can really save your life. In my case I was getting quite a bit of exercise when the first one set it, but my stress was near it's peak. I quit biking for about two weeks during that time to accommodate the extra work and a minor case of the flu - that was all it took.
I avoid stress, but in my case stress is applied to me from outside entities and there's no avoiding it.
I agree on the spoken part, we're closer to the original and they changed. The written side of things, we diverged.
Not if we've been eating more or less safe foods all our lives. If you grow up eating shit on shingle you'll probably be fine, but if you suddenly eat it after eating nothing but food served by a germ-o-phobe hypochondriac all your life you're probably going to have a problem.
There were some sanitation issues back in the day and if you weren't super rich with a manor full of servants to do the butchering and cleaning there were some serious sanitation issues. If you traded in the open market, and many did, you were probably buying something that would give the common person of today all sorts of shits and puking. Fortunately there were also many who did their own hunting and and small villages were on the whole cleaner than the cities for the most part, but I'm not sure I would want meat from that era. Veggies on the other hand - that's back when they were still nutritious and had the vitamins and stuff they were supposed to unlike our nice looking empty filler of today.
and I read a lot of British origin books, or American books that were well over 100 years old and still retained some of the across the pond ways of doing things. Then as I got older and the Internet became a thing I wound up on a lot of websites either from the U.K. or at least heavily frequented by residents. I may speak with a bit of a Texas drawl, but I often catch myself writing "grey" almost as default and occasionally "centre" on rare occasion I'll insert a u, but that's a rare one for me. The fact the spell checkers in Firefox in my Debian derivative Linux distros seems to default to British English and swaps back even after being corrected on occasion doesn't exactly keep me in American spelling land. I've never gotten into the different ways of describing car types and their parts, nor words like nappy instead of diaper, but whatever got embedded in my head from reading every single Sherlock Holmes story in the sixth grade, the Bastard Operator from Hell in the early 2000's, and countless other bits of literature are rather well cemented.
Add in the touch of autism that I have that prevented me from realizing that having a larger than average vocabulary from where I grew up was why I got into so many fist fights - and it took one of the guys who was covered in bruises afterwards telling me why he started the fight for me to realize it - and I've had to commit myself to a mental game where I shut down my vocabulary with most company and only open up with a select group of geeks. I have found it's important not to let slip with British terms even when they're one of the few that I find I like better than our own in person. The Internet on the other hand doesn't seem to care with the exception of the occasional spelling or grammar Nazi, that deserves and gets ridicule in return.
I've seen quite a bit of it on here, mostly when it comes to politically charged things like climate change.
There appears to be an Apple reputation protection version of it too that occasionally wields mod points.
12!
Got it for about $75 at Walmart.
It's solar, it get NIST time, sure body heat charging would be fine, but as far as I'm concerned solar is proven.
I would say Apple is probably violating a Samsung patent on this one.
I used to be an avid reader.
Now I drive two to three hours a day, I have a toddler at home, and my wife sees me reading and interprets it as time to get close and engage in activity around me because I must feel lonely.
Audiobooks I do on occasion while driving, though I do tend to listen to political podcasts instead. I did listen to a Kevin MItnick one a couple of months back.
I have literally something close to 100 industry related e-books I've gotten from the Humble Bundle I really want to dig into, but as a family man I can't seem to get them cracked open.
I've got a 1080i CRT in the bedroom. I got a grey-market HDMI to Component converter for it, works great. When I upgrade I plan on going straight to OLED 4K. I'm still annoyed static field array flat CRTs were killed by patent issues.
With my Mac Pro Kodi system plugged into it. I would say the Diamatron has certainly held up for for a few itterations. I am however considering upgrading soon despite the thing working perfectly.
I agree with you 100%. I think a 9" e-reader (hard to come by these days) would be perfect.
Here's the deal - flight certification.
On the station they're still mostly using IBM Thinkpads. Not Lenovo Thinkpads, IBM Thinkpads. Let that sink in for a moment.
Everything that goes up into space has to be flight certified other than a few personal effects for each astronaut, and even then there's criteria that must be met. It was a pretty big deal during the last few shuttle missions when the Astronauts were allowed to bring personal iPods for music, but only if they were modified to run on Alkaline AA's and they had to stay on the shuttle, they were not allowed to pass through the airlock into the station which they were not certified for.
Getting things certified for flight is part of the reason so much of the equipment used in space missions is antiquated. The moment something actually passes the certification process and is allowed to fly it's been in the process for so long it's several generations behind, and they don't look to replace it. If something gets certified for use in space and they need exactly one on the station in active use they'll buy a dozen or more, send three up keeping two in storage in case it's needed for a replacement and keep the rest on the ground. Every time they dip into a spare on the station they'll send a new spare up to put back in storage.
If they thought e-paper was the way to go, which BTW I agree - I can tell you about the old system that predates what they're using now - and they were sending up e-paper today it would likely be a Nook Simple Touch or a fourth gen Kindle - the original Kindle Touch that didn't last long, because that's how far back the certification process would have started.
The OLD system before they started sending everything up as PDF's about five years ago, was something that looked a little like a transparency projector, you know the thing they probably used in your classroom in the 1990's, only instead of a mirror at the top it was a bad-ass Sony camera with a super expensive lens pointed at a flight book. Seriously, somebody on the ground would turn a book to a page they needed, set it on this setup and transmit a video signal over the K-Band up to them, and it was likely to transmit for hours.
They're pretty much off the shelf except the connector has been changed to a twist-lock hermetically sealed connector (overkill in my opinion, but I understand why they did it - it's pretty much the standard connector on the station). They also have steel cages around the paper trays, mostly to keep the paper from floating off. I think they use Velcro in space to keep the thing planted, maybe magnets, but on the earth side that particular detail wasn't worried about in the training environment.
Out of pure coincidence after I didn't even work there anymore, I wound up on the phone with one of the people from Epson who was on the project to get the old one going. He confirmed that it was pretty much off the shelf save for the few mods for low-G - such as the a fore mentioned cages. He was just as surprised to talk to someone who knew so much about the printers who wasn't at NASA as I was to actually wind up on the phone with that knowledge for the same reasons....
FYI - working on those hermetically sealed connectors is a pain in the ass. They're not particular difficult in any one sense, it's that if you've ever worked with serial/parallel pin inserters and extractors it's pretty much the same, except the insertion/removal tool is flimsy plastic and tends to bend/break on a regular basis (and just try ordering new stuff on a low end government contract if you're not the right persons buddy - everything is drama in the power struggle between the bottom and the top). The standard tools work, but you run a serious risk of hurting the rubber the pin sits in and even if it's just for training purposes using the standard one will land your butt in a sling. If it were actual flight equipment, even if you did it in such a way you could prove caused no damage they would still rip it out and ding the contract as a whole for such things. I suspect if it actually were for flight equipment those people would have an easier time getting the tools than us ground people did. The flight equipment people were at the cape, us training people were in Houston.
I have stuff like that for DVI with mixed results, but I've had surprisingly good results with some DVI over Cat6 cheap things.
I did the Chrome thing back when that system still had Mac OS on it. It's a first-gen Intel Mac Pro. Apple doesn't support it anymore. I moved to Linux not because I prefer it (even though in many ways I do, except for the issues I don't like to acknowledge where incompatibility creep happens with time if you keep the base up to date). What happened was every time I launched Netflix I got a message in Chrome "This version is no longer going to be supported and no new version is available because you're base version is too old ass-hat, upgrade!" accompanied by the occasion message from Mac OS that would steal focus from Kodi about "we're not going to let you upgrade crap, update your machine! wanker!" At which time I would have to use the touch-pad to close the messages I already knew about and didn't really want to see again. I moved the OS to Linux, which wasn't as easy as it sounds, I discovered I had to get a custom build with a 32 bit loader but a 64 bit OS due to some specific things about that generation of Mac Pro. Still it's been great so far and I haven't bothered putting the Chrome launcher back on there simply because it's so awkward to use. My system just is not configured to use pointing devices well, I have a keyboard remote where the arrow keys, enter key, and esc key are 95% of the navigation and they've very easy to use. Switching to mouse is like having to switch from walking along whistling a tune to walking on ice with leather-soled shoes.
I just don't consider the Chrome launcher the way to go.
I do the same. I used to buy $3 DVD's out of a box at HEB. I guess they had a deal with Redbox, they would take the old Redbox movies and sell them for $3 each, glorious scratches and stickers in the middle, the whole 9 yards. A significant part of my collection came from that. A couple of weeks ago I bought 3 of the 5 Diehard movies and on BluRay for $5 each as well as some block-buster-bombs from Big Lots. I have a huge movie collection, and a not insignificant portion of it came from the bargain bin. That's part of the reason I have five HDD's hooked into that system (four internal that aren't all that huge but hold a different media each and an external 4TB Firewire drive)
scratch the florescent lights bit - those are in the rest of the building (including in that little room behind the wall - and the other little room behind the screen) but that stretch is without. What it does have a is a Creston System to control the lights and the speakers in the ceiling that belong to the Muzac system, not to mention WiFi equipment that you don't see that generates just as much noise as florescent lights. Not to mention that area of sheetrock over the table makes running cables a bigger pain in the ass that it has to be in that room and the fact each of the ceiling tiles is in tighter than most areas with false ceilings and you better not mess up anything in THAT conference room.... Okay I'm off topic, but I have a feeling a lot of you reading this can relate.
and it works great.
At work we have a very nice looking executive conference room that was mostly configured before I worked here. If you look at that picture the audio equipment is behind the wall with the pictures on it. The main screen is behind the photographer, and so is the PC that runs the main screen. The tech who did part of the original setup ran an 1/8" to RCA cable from the TV's output all the way to the audio amplifier behind that other wall, past florescent lights and everything else in the ceiling. To say the least there was a buzz in the system that I could sometimes get rid of by wiggling cables, putting a little shielding here or there and praying for the best. I didn't like that solution.
Now, I can work fiber optics, I learned that from my years at NASA. I had never really worked with TOS before beyond using some cheap plastic light-guide short distances on stereo equipment on occasion and with my Turtle Beach headset on my work Mac, main system sound went to the dongle via TOS and the USB portion did voice - an awesome setup on what would have been an awesome headset had they not used the most brittle plastic they could find to mold it. I started calling fiber suppliers looking for the connectors so I could make my own cable - they didn't call back. It took a little research to find out that TOS doesn't work on standard OC3 cable, or any other fiber I have run in the past, part of the reason my suppliers didn't carry it. I also found mixed information about the range of TOS saying it topped out around 15 feet or so, and some giving it a lot more.
I figured out it's a lot like Ethernet - some who learned Ethernet 25 years ago is going to keep in mind there's a limit to accumulative cable length throughout the whole network, the longer you make one cable the shorter the rest have to be, that it's a collision based system where only two systems can talk at a time, etc... Things that used to be true and are still true on really, really old equipment, some of which may still be in use, but using more up to day components there's a new reality. You can now buy TOS in high quality glass fiber, and it will go further. You still have limitations because the width of the fiber has to be "wide" to accommodate signal - at least I assume it does, I don't know if it's single-mode or multi, but I'm assuming it carries a wave form instead of a simple on/off since the requirements seem to stand. I eyeballed the room - I didn't really measure it, and I shopped. I found a 65 ft cable from a company I had never heard of and I have to tell you it works great. No more static, the sound quality is great. The only complaint is they can no longer use the TV remote to change volume, but the volume keys on the keyboard work. Since they only use the Direct TV in that room during really big soccer matches I don't see an issue.
I don't think I could have stretched HDMI that far. I could have converted it to SDI and changed it back to do it, but that would require an active box on both sides since nothing in play supports SDI natively. SDI is great for professional equipment, but the budgets I get to do thing usually don't allow for true professional grade equipment - not to mention pro grade equipment is usually a little behind consumer grade equipment when it comes to screen sizes and other little features that advertising people lock onto and "must have". I think I'm finally past having to explain to desktop users why they're better off with a wired keyboard and an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and WiFi, the power of news and buzz words is incredibly strong to marketing people and even though pure logic can win a lot of arguments, when the person who controls the money wants the biggest things with the right buzz words you sometimes have to get it, and SDI isn't a modern buzzword, even if modern SDI can support 4K.
I've read some of your comment history.
You do much poking with a stick, you do little in way of contribution.
w00t!
except for h.265
When has anything ever changed to accommodate your wishes by shutting up, sitting in a corner, and ignoring the possibilities? I've already mentioned changing code to get plugins to do what I want, so I'm willing to do it myself. Right now the ball is in the court of some other people - did the horrible "Must have the Kinect hooked up to use your XBOX One" requirement go away because nobody said anything or did it get done because everyone bitched?
Why am I feeding this fucking troll?
It's why I've yet to see a single episode or Star Trek Discovery or Constantine, despite the fact Constantine ties into shows I'm watching now, and Discovery ties into shows I watched once upon a time.