Logo by Tom Purves

5:31 PM
Matrox Rainbow Runner review
I've written a lot about the different quirks and problems people have found with this card so far...I think it's pretty informative.  I'm not done yet, but you can see what's been finished here.  Just ignore the pictures...I'm using the Daytona PCI review as a template.

4:14 PM
Cardinal Connecta 56K
This is the modem I ended up buying.  The external model was $159.99 - $40 rebate (ending 12/31/97).  I'm still considering whether or not to keep it, but I really needed to see if X2 would work or not here.  There really isn't any other way of seeing if X2 will work for you, short of talking to other people in your area and seeing how they do.  Cardinal is offering free upgrades to the ITU standard, of course, as is everybody else.

I'm overall very impressed with the connection speed.  I typically connect at either 49,300 or 50,600.  About 66% faster than 31,200, which is what I used to get.   Considering how slow modems are, any improvement like this is worth a decent amount of money.  I still have to decide whether or not I'm going to keep this thing, but I am happy with the product.

The modem I really wanted was the serial/USB combo coming out for US Robotics, but they don't seem to be out yet. 

4:27 AM
Eh...Happy Christmas?
I missed the update on Christmas, but consider this a belated well wishing to all the regular visitors.  Thanks to everybody who wished me a happy birthday last week too!

I was actually working on that Creating Video CD FAQ, you can take a look at a very preliminary version here.  I also figure that since I'm a little less busy right now I'll try to review a bunch of the junk that I've come across in the past couple of months, like the Rainbow Runner, the Winnov Videum AV, and the MobilePro 400/450, to name a few.  I already wrote a bunch of stuff regarding these products in this news section anyway, so it shouldn't be too hard to rip some of that out and do a little editing to clean things up.

Overclocking bust
I tried to overclock this Gateway P2-266 to 300 and the damn thing wouldn't even boot up...not even the monitor came on.  Bad luck, I guess.  On this motherboard, you have to switch a jumper which allows you to modify the processor speed in the BIOS, then you have to switch back for the processor speed change to take effect (or, I guess, in my case, to not take effect).  It's possible I missed something, I guess, but I seriously doubt it.

The other problem right now is that the computer has a piddly two ISA slots, filled by the sound card and the ISA SCSI card for a CDR.  I, therefore, cannot buy a dirt-cheap X2 modem because I will have nowhere to put it in the computer.  An external one will cost a lot of money.  What to do?

Bad reviewing
What happens when you have somebody reviewing sound cards that doesn't know anything about them?  Well, for one thing, you get misinformation.  The two latest sound card reviews at http://www.anandtech.com contain passages referring to "enough processing power on the sound card to prevent the playback of audio from breaking up," to paraphrase.  In particular, the Guillemot Home Studio Pro 64 review there is full of complete B.S. regarding this subject.

If you search a way back in the archives, you'll find reference to a document which explains exactly why sound can break up when you scroll up or down in a window.  It has to do with video card drivers misbehaving by locking up the bus, not with processing power on the sound card.  This is intentional on the part of video card manufacturers because this misbehaving can improve video performance/benchmarks, but it's very annoying for everyday use.

Pretending that you know something when you don't is one of my pet peeves.  Few things get me angrier, and I typically lose all respect for such people.  Don't do it!  I hate to get down on other people, but the truth's the truth.

5:42 PM
DVD's and regional lockouts
One thing that is really annoying about DVD's is the regional lockout.   Serving no real purpose except to screw the consumer, regional lockouts prevent discs from being played on any other player than the region of the world for which your DVD player is set.  Much like Playstation games, don't you think?  The PC-DVD Encore allows you to change this regional code up to five times, after which is it set permanently.

Luckily, somebody has produced a hack to reset the counter and change the region an indefinite number of times.  The hack is available from http://www.xs4all.nl/~evdberg/.

Rebates on Compaq C120+/C140 PC Companion
As if $99 wasn't cheap enough, it turns out that there was a $50 rebate floating around for these things for all PC Companion's purchased between June and December 1997.

My local Office Depot (Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles) had a huge box full of
these.

The coupons are not an item in themselves; they are contained in a booklet
packaged inside a promotional CD-ROM. The promotion is a join effort
between Compaq and the TV show Mad About You. The CD title is "Go Mad With
Compaq". There is a picture of the Mad About You couple on the front, and
the CD spine says "Compaq". Inside is a CD-ROM containing a video-enhanced
CD single from Mad About you and a booklet of promotional offers and
rebates from Compaq. One of the offers is for a $50 rebate off any PC
Companion C120+ or C140 purchased between June and December 1997. There are
hundreds of offers in the booklet so it doesn't surprise me if a Compaq
employee doesn't remember the details on one particular offer, but they
ought to know about the "Go Mad With Compaq" promotional CD-ROM.

The part number on the back of the CD is 167713-001 and the serial number
is 43172-50917. The CDs were shipped to all authorized Compaq resellers,
including Office Depot.

Yes, a WinCE machine for $49.  I don't know of any left, but if you managed to get one, you've got $50 coming to you when you find the rebate.

2:42 AM
Christmas buys
Several things have been sorely tempting me since I got back.  First of all, my friends here bought each other 56K modems for Christmas.  One has X2 and the other has K56flex.  They are hitting speeds of 4.6-4.8K and loving it.   There are some crazy rebates going on internal modems, so right now we are seeing these modems get as low as $40-50 after rebate.  I really want an X2 modem (for Worldnet's X2 support) but 3COM's USB modem isn't out yet. 

They are also selling 24X CD-ROM's for $50 after rebate.  Yikes!  I've always said the increasing speed of CD-ROM's is useless, but at $50 it's not much to think about.

So basically I've been holding off on those.  I'll probably just get RAM or something.  We've been playing with the PC-DVD Encore.  It has an S-Video and a composite output, which is nice.  It also has an S/P DIF output (digital connection) for AC-3 receivers.  The PC-DVD Encore does all AC-3 decoding on-board in addition to the video.  The image quality is overall very impressive, as you might expect.   Both Terminator 2 and Reservoir Dogs were quite nice.  We didn't have a 5.1 Dolby Digital setup to try out with it, unfortunately.  The DVD we are really looking for is Contact, with Jodie Foster.  Supposedly this is the finest example of the proper way to utilize all of DVD's features and the video has been transferred/encoded very well.  It's sold out everywhere.

WinAMP 1.61
Minor bugfixes and improvements.  Get it at http://winamp.lh.net.

ICQ 98a betas
Mirabilis seems to be slipstreaming new versions of ICQ 98a beta into release without letting anybody know.  Meaning you can't really find out short of downloading it or hearing it from somebody else.   They're up to 107 now.

Don't you just love it when companies do that?

4:03 PM (Central Time!)
Moving around
Guess what, I had to fly home to Houston.  Naturally that took a little out of me, but now that I've set up FrontPage 98 down here, I'm ready to roll again.  The lovely thing about FrontPage 98 is that I can remotely administer the web site from here even though the actual page structure resides on my computer at Penn.   Makes my life a hell of a lot easier.

In other news, my friend purchased a Creative Labs Dxr2 PC-DVD Encore kit.  The price on this thing seems to have dropped to $299, making it a rocking good deal if you want a DVD player.  Not only that, but this 2nd generation DVD player is compatible with CD-R and CD-RW discs (the initial drives were not) and I believe it spins at twice the speed of 1st generation DVD-ROM's (making it a 20X CD-ROM).

Oh, and thanks to the kind folks at Ligos Technology, I have a newer version of LSX-MPEG to experiment with.  The biggest change I've noticed is the SMP support, which, of course, allows you to take advantage of multiple processors to greatly speed your encoding time.  I'm going to be playing around with this one a lot more.  I made some suggestions which I hope will get put into the encoder eventually.