logomancer | (no subject)

More unpacking. Got TV/VCR set up. May or may not get PlayStation, SNES, and N64 set up tomorrow. Depends on how lazy I feel. Watched Chamber of Secrets tonight with Mom. Very fun. Continuing to watch Star Trek TNG 4^th season, which I got for my birthday. I love late-season TNG. Tried to display on TV using video out on my graphics card. It, oddly enough, didn't display -- it just showed a black screen. Same with any video file -- the background of Windows shows up, but the video doesn't. Methinks it's some DRM thing that Nvidia put on all their cards. I'll be pissed if it is. I own this stuff legally, I should be able to watch it on any damn screen I want.

And that's not the only computer problem I'm having. For some reason, I am unable to send any mail through VT's SMTP server. It just doesn't respond -- all the connections timed out. I've been talking to yubbie for the past couple of days and, so far, a solution has not presented itself. Has anyone else on campus had trouble with this?

Oh, and Trillian decided to eat its own config files for dinner. What was left was a tangled mess, so I had to blow the whole thing away and reinstall it, and all the skins, and all the plugins. That translates to long downloads and many restarts of Trillian to change skins or install patches. So now you know why I've been erratic on IM recently.

It's 1 AM already? Time flies, doesn't it? Mom's working today, so I may go for a walk or something. My wanderlust is starting to get the better of me, and I've been cooped up in my house (for the most part) since I got here. I did, however, go outside yesterday afternoon for a nice, warm thunderstorm. The kind I like. Then Mom called me to "batten down the hatches....the tornado's coming!" Ever since a tiny tornado ripped through the high school during Spring Break two years ago, Mom has been real jittery when a tornado approaches our general vicinity. The frequency of which seems to have increased over the past decade. Hmm...

And preliminary room assignments were posted today...robertliguori and I got our room in Newman like we wanted. Funny how not being a freshman makes RDP listen to your preferences.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Check your driver. You need to declare the TV to be the "primary" device. ATI would actually call it the primary, I dunno what nvidia calls it. The dvd codec (and many other modern codecs) use the hardware accelerator. It can only talk to one video port at a time. Which ever the primary device is, gets the video. The other gets a black screen. If you'd happened to have paid attention to my laptop at bogen's you'd have noticed it; one of the the things I do right before showing anything is hit a macro key I have programmed to switch it to 1024x768 (the biggest the card can do on a tv without scrolling) and make the tv the primary.