Re: Rigger's Diary: Jamie will now apologise


"jamie powell" <jamie_p84@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:h3g99n$hle$1@xxxxxxxxxxx

What an amazing co-incidence - I'd just suggested this exact same thing in
this very same thread, a couple of hours before you posted this!
I'd be really interested to view your article online, or hear from someone
who remembers reading it.

I look forward to your apology for calling me a liar. Here's the text you
requested:

Laptop video out problems



Ray Porter?s trials and tribulations (A laptop video out problem, August)
prompts me to recount my own recent experience.

I install and service communal TV distribution systems, and there is often a
need to get information across to the residents. This might be to warn
people of an interruption to the service, or explain the need for them to
re-tune their TV sets and VCRs. The time-honoured way is to push leaflets
through letterboxes, but sometimes this isn?t a good solution. Twelve
letterboxes aren?t a problem, but a hundred takes some legwork. What?s more
some people seem to have an aversion to the printed word, especially when it
flutters through the front door looking like something boring from the
council, and I have found that the message simply doesn?t get across to some
of the residents. Ask them if they have the leaflet and you get a blank
look. ?What leaflet?? This has resulted in a lot of unnecessary visits and
general time wasting. Faced with an upcoming job where I was going to have
to move analogue ?five? from channel 37 to channel 56, I started to think
seriously about some sort of gadget that would display a message on the
residents? TV screens when they attempted to watch ?five? on channel 37. One
hundred and fifty houses and flats were involved. Incidentally the reason I
have to move ?five? is because reception on channel 37 from Emley Moor is
very poor, and Belmont channel 56 is much better. It wouldn?t make sense in
the long-term to use a channel converter just to avoid a retuning problem.

I already had a piece of kit that comprises a colour bar and tone generator,
a frequency agile modulator, a chunky UHF amplifier and some tuneable pass
filters and notch filters. This allows me to replace any channel on a system
with bars and tone, and has proved invaluable when tracing a system layout.
Replace ITV on one of the head-end outputs with colour bars and go door
knocking. Residents will soon tell you if their ITV has ?broken down?! All I
needed was something that would generate captions and send them out as a
baseband TV picture. I would leave the kit running continuously at the head
end for a week or so.

The first idea was to use a very old computer ? the sort that used the TV
set as a monitor. I gave up on this before I even started. The idea of
messing about with antique computer equipment gives me the shivers. Modern
ones are bad enough! Unfortunately my next idea had me struggling with badly
outdated gear even though I bought the equipment brand new!

I bought a graphics generator for £170. This device was supposed to be the
absolute bee?s knees ? the perfect way to add captions to your home video
recordings. Since I bought it in 2004 I rather expected that it would
utilise 21st century technology, but in this I was sorely disappointed.
Strongly reminiscent of the computer graphics technology of the 1970s, this
was the most clunky, annoying, primitive bit of kit I?ve seen for a long
time (excluding my dad?s lawnmower). In the 1970s it would have seemed quite
sophisticated, as did flares and kipper ties. Yes, it did have a qwerty
keyboard, but text could only be inputted very very slowly, with a pause
after each letter. There were none of the modern text features that we take
for granted, such as justification, kerning, and so on. There was no return
key. To move about the screen it was necessary to use the arrow keys. There
were only eight fonts and they were all very dated, especially the ?ultra
modern? one. Remember that strange typeface with very thick and very thin
strokes that was supposed to look ?electronic?? Text had to be fitted onto
a fixed grid that allowed a fixed number of lines each with a fixed number
of characters. After each line it was necessary to wait eight seconds for
the CPU to digest such a massive amount of data. Increasing the font size
caused the letters on the right-hand side of the screen to disappear, never
to be retrieved.

I persevered and spent four solid hours learning how to drive the thing. I
laboriously made up a sequence of primitive pages, letter by agonising
letter. My triumph was short-lived because when I attempted to play the
sequence back the display stopped, started, stuttered, lost colour, regained
it, and finally froze showing the top half of one page and the bottom half
of another. What a useless device! It went back and I got a refund.

Having tried a relatively cheap solution I decided to bite the bullet and
use a laptop to generate my caption sequence. I?ve installed a few systems
in the past where an in-house bulletin board has been carried as a TV
channel, with the picture coming from the video output of a PC. A modulator
converts the video signal to RF. This works really well. I?ve used Microsoft
PowerPoint to assemble and play out the sequence, but for the present
project I decided that a cheap slideshow program would be good enough.

Now, everything I know about computers could be written in large type on the
back of a postage stamp, so I was aware that I was entering a minefield.
Nevertheless I looked round and found a second-hand Compaq Armada E500 for
sale. It had a lot of blemishes on the screen, and it looked and felt as if
it had been owned by a messy eater, but these drawbacks didn?t bother me. I
made sure that the video output worked and I bought the machine, aware that
the battery was faulty and there was no power supply.

The machine came to me loaded with an ATI program that allows you to adjust
and control both the laptop screen and the TV out displays. At first sight
this seemed to be very good. You can adjust contrast, colour, gamma, screen
position, and goodness knows what else. All this fine-tuning results in a
very good TV display. The main snag is that the software attempts to detect
the presence or otherwise of a TV set connected to the video output. I?ve no
idea how it does this, but I know it doesn?t do it very accurately.
Connection to some TV sets isn?t recognised at all. Connection to a ?Vision?
V40-104 modulator (my goal) was hit and miss. If no TV set or other load is
detected there is no video output. In theory it is possible to force
recognition of a TV set, but I couldn?t get this to work. At least this is
better than the software I used for an in-house channel some years ago. That
only allowed ?TV out? to function if the computer screen resolution and
refresh rate were on absurdly low settings that made my eyes water.

The next snag came when I tried to buy a new battery. £138 or more from any
of the usual sources ? far too much for this project. Since the machine
would always be used on mains I considered running it from an external power
supply with some sort of minimal battery back up. I used a bench power
supply as a temporary measure, but it was a bad idea to run the machine
without a battery because the mouse cord caught the power cord and caused
the power plug to disconnect momentarily. Of course the machine crashed, and
wouldn?t boot up thereafter. The man at the shop was very kind because he
made the machine work again for nothing. But when I got it back the ATI
software had disappeared, which seemed to be bad news. However the video out
function now worked perfectly and reliably, as long as a TV set or modulator
was connected before the laptop was switched on. A look on an Internet
auction site found a brand new battery for £50. It didn?t say Compaq on it
but it lasted for about six hours, so I was quite happy.

A week later I set up the laptop at the system head-end and turned it on.
Great expectation turned to great disgust when the laptop came on but then
immediately died. The new battery had failed. Later, in the workshop, I
found that the battery was completely dead and couldn?t be revived. I was
less than happy when I looked on the net and found that the seller seemed to
have disappeared from cyberspace without trace. I entered the battery type
number into Google and found that several other people had bought these
batteries, only to discover that both the battery and the vendor had very
limited durability.

Back on site, I was now in a fix. I had removed ?five? from channel 37 and
put it on channel 56. It wouldn?t be easy to restore it to channel 37
because the big high gain Emley Moor aerial had been taken down. No
explanatory leaflets had been prepared, and in any case I?d foolishly
trumpeted the splendid new computer graphics idea to several important
people and I didn?t want to look like a charlie. Time was of the essence. I
didn?t want to pay £138 + VAT for a genuine Compaq battery, and in any case
it would take a week to get one.

At that point an imaginary light bulb just above my hard hat lit up, and a
voice in my head said, ?Get an uninterruptible power supply, you dummy!? Of
course, this was the answer. The whole point of a UPS is to protect IT
equipment from mains failures, momentary or otherwise, and high voltage
spikes. A UPS is essentially a large lead-acid battery with a charger and an
inverter. You plug the UPS into the mains and the computer into the UPS.
Simple! If the mains fails the UPS maintains the supply for as long as the
battery lasts. Since I was only concerned about short power cuts and since
the laptop used very little power, battery life wasn?t an issue. And a UPS
is a jolly good thing to have at your disposal. It would power head-ends on
new sites where there was no mains supply, for instance.

There?s a really good computer shop near us so I rung them. ?Can you sell me
a UPS??

Instead of Sid?s familiar tones a young voice answered and his words were
discouraging. ?What?s a UPS?? I took a deep breath and asked if Sid was
available. Of course he was out, ?on an emergency?. I asked if Sid could
ring me when he returned, and meanwhile rang another firm, ten miles away.
They were slick and efficient. Yes they had a UPS in stock, in fact they had
several.

I set off through the rush hour traffic. Why is it that the more impatient
you?re feeling the more the idiot brigade gets in your way? After what
seemed like three hours I arrived at the impressive showrooms of Whizzbang
Information Technology Ltd. I bought a Trust UPS 1000 Energy Protector for
£90. My pleasure diminished when Sid rung, just as I pulled into the rush
hour traffic for the second time. ?Hello Bill, sorry I was out. I?ve got a
Trust UPS 1000 Energy Protector here for you. Would £70 be alright??

Since the laptop came without a manual I had to do a bit of random key
pressing. This let me discover that the machine will produce a video output
with its own screen turned off, and will continue to run even with the lid
closed. I bypassed the dodgy DC connector on the laptop so there was no
chance of a supply interruption as long as the UPS was on. Everything was
now perfect.

I installed the laptop and the UPS at the head end. A nineteen-page sequence
of slides went out on channel 37 for the duration of the job. The sequence
covered everything the residents needed to know, including the ?five?
channel move, the availability of Freeview, the need to re-tune the outputs
of VCRs and satellite receivers, and more. Just to show off I included a
picture of my lovely little granddaughter Katie sitting in the middle of a
test card. The laptop, aided by the UPS, ran unattended for six weeks with
never a hitch.

This had been an experiment, and I had not been all that confident about the
outcome. Would all the effort result in happy residents, or would it add to
the unrest? Information overload seemed to be a real possibility. In fact,
the idea was a real winner. We had very few re-tuning problems, only two or
three in fact when a job of that size could be expected to cause dozens.
Seeing the message repeated endlessly on their TV screens seemed to convince
the tenants that they would jolly well have to bite the bullet and get that
TV instruction book out. Now I?ve got the laptop, UPS and modulator set up I
will be able to use them on future jobs with very little trouble, perhaps
adding an audio message to give the presentation a bit more impact.



Bill Wright




.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Riggers Diary: Jamie will now apologise
    ... Ray Porter?s trials and tribulations (A laptop video out problem, ... channel 37 from Emley Moor is very poor, and Belmont channel 56 is much ... The next snag came when I tried to buy a new battery. ... The whole point of a UPS is to protect IT ...
    (uk.tech.digital-tv)
  • Re: laptop batteries....
    ... Using the laptop only with AC is generally fine, but you may want to get a UPS (some people think that this is silly, but a new OEM lithium battery costs $200+, and a laptop is 80% to 90% less expensive). ... "it's best to store batteries at about 40% charge" "Never store them for long periods completely discharged or they might not recharge at all" "It's better not to fully discharge lithium-ion batteries " - note: ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: laptop batteries....
    ... "A laptop doesn't need UPS because its own battery will last 2-3 hours if ... mains fails which is just as good as UPS. ... So just leave the battery in the ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: laptop batteries....
    ... I will be mainly using AC connection to power my laptop and occasionally by ... I will be purchasing a UPS to prevent any power cuts ... For a laptop, the battery certainly is a UPS, it's ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: Best bang for my laptop buck ?
    ... Does someone know of a SIMPLE online comparison of the CPU products from a potential user viewpoint? ... I don't need to buy the latest/fastest CPU for my laptop - I'm gonna use it to run ... ... VISTA thing settles down. ... You can certainly make a case for long battery life. ...
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