Re: Rigger's Diary: Jamie will now apologise


"Bill Wright" <insertmybusinessname@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dcSdnRh8_5MlfcbXnZ2dnUVZ8nSdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx

"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:

Oh but Bill, I *wasn't* calling you a liar.
No-one is picking on you Bill, except you yourself.
You convince yourself that people are against you when they're really not,
and then hit out at them, this time by rudely calling me a liar.

Now, being rude to someone like me on a newsgroup is harmless - with a
few well-chosen words I hold you up to ridicule and no harm is done.
But if you carry the same attitude into real life you are sooner or
later going to receive a more physical riposte and suffer real pain.
Much better for you to get your problem sorted now and start making friends.



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.


Well that's a very nice little story, and you certainly know how to fill a
page!
I suppose if I actually *was* picking on you, I'd say there was no evidence
to prove that you hadn't just desperately knocked this up today in response
to my last post, but I'd *never* have thought that if you hadn't raised the
issue, and it's best I stop right there because I'm in danger of lending
credibility to your paranoia.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Riggers Diary: Jamie will now apologise
    ... Ray Porter?s trials and tribulations (A laptop video out problem, ... is because reception on channel 37 from Emley Moor is ... 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: UPS backup
    ... the system will shutdown WHEN the battery reaches a critical ... The communication is fine and I can see the power load, if the UPS system is working on battery or not... ... Network UPS Tools upsmon 2.2.0- ...
    (linux.redhat)
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