Logo by Tom Purves

9:29 PM
Improving on VHS
If you're a stickler for quality like I am, you find yourself a little dissatisfied with the quality of VHS tape as a recording medium.  It's not very hard to spot the difference between something recorded off the TV and the actual broadcast itself if you bother to look.

In an attempt to provide customers with higher-quality while still maintaining backwards compatibility (the spectre of technological progress!), JVC is promoting a new standard, S-VHS-ET.  The way S-VHS-ET is designed, recording decks are about the same price as S-VHS decks right now, but the decks take regular JVC "HG" quality tapes which are currently sold for VHS decks and are around $2 a pop.  That's a far cry from the $7 you usually see for S-VHS tapes.  S-VHS-ET is supposed to be able to record video at around 400 horizontal lines of resolution, up from VHS's 240.

It's not clear to me how well the medium will stand up to repeated use, but it certainly sounds promising.  Although the decks will initially be expensive, JVC expects to reduce the cost to almost that of regular VHS decks if the format catches up and quantities of scale can be achieved.  The backwards compatibility is certainly a big plus, though.

EE Times' story

3:20 PM
Hard drive roundup
Benchmarks for the Quantum Fireball SE 8.4GB are about done.  I should be starting on the Maxtor tonight.  I need my digital camera back (lent it out) so I can take pictures of everything too!

10:25 PM
People's most beautiful people
A reminder to you all to participate in something which seems to have caught the fancy of thousands of netizens worldwide...vote for

Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf

online here at People's site.  Leonardo DiCaprio must not win!  Hank is apparently a Howard Stern regular whom I've never heard of until now.  However, my friend says he is a very angry, bitter...and yes, drunken dwarf.

4:34 PM
Real3D cuts price of the Starfighter AGP
With the new price cuts, the SRP 4MB AGP board is going for $129 while the 8MB version is $149.  Street prices should be even lower if traditional pricing strategies hold.  The new pricing structure certainly makes the Starfighter AGP a much more aggressive competitor than before.

Real3D's press release

12:48 PM
RealNetworks announces RealSystem G2
The new G2 technology is supposed to be more intelligent, keeping track of and adjusting quality based on available bandwidth.  A different audio codec will be used which supposedly improves frequency response on 28.8 connections by 80%, while video will get better post-filtering treatment.

Most nterestingly, RealSystem G2 is completely standards-based.  Other companies will be able to add their own media types without requiring the end user or the server to download new software.

Infoworld's story

2:51 PM
Having trouble connecting to Battle.net?
The problems is that some router close to Battle.net's end is not working, which cuts many of us off from TCP/IP play completely.  I'm not sure whether the problem is actually that there is a master server that you connect to to get a list of Battle.net servers and whether our connection to that is broken, or whether the problem is that there are a few servers down and Battle.net's autopinger is broken.

Well, regardless of my knowledge of how Battle.net works, I do have a fix.   Download sctmpfix.reg, double click it, start StarCraft, and you will probably be able to get on.  This registry hack replaces the list of servers in your registry with one working server.  Note that as soon as you connect to Battle.net this registry entry will be overwritten with a full list of servers, so if you restart StarCraft you will have to apply the fix manually again unless the Internet connectivity is fixed by then.

Note that all the usual disclaimers apply...I take no responsibility for anything that might happen to your computer when you apply this fix, etc.

That being said, Blizzard should really take steps to improve Battle.net fault tolerance.  I've seen plenty of lost connections to Battle.net for no reason.   It's unclear what happens to your ladder statistics when this happens during a game and needs to be made more clear.  Furthermore, there's no reason why the failure of one server or point on the Internet should cause TCP/IP play to be impossible for a StarCraft user.  This should be taken care of.

7:23 PM
Storage reviews
I'm going to review the Maxtor and hopefully the Seagate tonight.   The Quantum Fireball SE should be here tomorrow so we'll get a chance to look at that too.  Phew!

12:27 PM
Great deal on refurbed Libretto 50's
Just thought I should mention that Big City Express is selling refurbished Libretto 50's for $599.  That's quite a deal and cheaper than a lot of WinCE machines.   Who needs WinCE when you can have a full fledged PC for less?  Well, granted, there are some significant differences, but it's quite a thought, isn't it?  Click on Notebooks/|Toshiba to get to it.