Subject URL: Oilz

The new Midnight Oil album Capricornia rules. Graham RAN's it. Too Much Sunshine indeed.

Ever have a problem with your VCR where tapes would play with the top 1/5th of the picture wobbling, probably leaning one way or the other so that vertical lines were almost horizontal by the time the got to the top of the picture? I have and for ages I've assumed it was my tapes... and in a way it is but it's also my VCR, and most importantly, my TV.

It's the mixture of all of these things that makes up a good VCR picture, particularly when it comes to tracking. The problem I've been having with nearly all my tapes is probably because of misaligned VCR heads... but plug my VCR into a new TV's A/V input and they're all fine. Every one of my tapes (I assume, I tried three that have never worked) work perfectly fine. Play them through a crappy old TV via the aerial and they're tracking challenged.

Why? This this FAQ went a fair way to explaining it. Out of context it might be a little confusing... so I repeat it here it here.

Because of the differences between the back tensions of different machines, all modern TV's have a dedicated video channel button (usually channel 0) which has a shorter flywheel line-timing duration allowing the TV timebase to lock up more effectively to unstable video sources such as video machines.

Put simply? Because almost all VCRs are different most modern TVs have a special channel that takes their unreliable picture quality into account and go a long way to fixing it.

I'm still getting my heads cleaned.

Subject URL: Paper

One of the lessons I learnt from Uni is that the only way to make sure your data is still going to be there in 1000 years is to print it out on good quality paper with good quality ink. Your computer tapes will be lucky to work in ten years, CDs probably twenty if you're really nice to them, DVDs probably less. Paper'll last forever.

Recently re-installed my parents old 33.6k modem into their machine (as I have moved out and taken the cable with me). I thought I'd have a bit of a surf and see just how bad 33.6k surfing really is, having had cable for two years now. And depending on what you looked at, it wasn't that bad. Various weblogs were ok, from The Null Device to Pah loading in a few seconds. Some sites are terrible though and really point out a problem that has always existed in webdesign and still doesn't seem to have sunk in with developers designing sites on their superfast internal network and not actually trying their sites on a modem.

So I say to Dave @ Scripting News, all this talk of HTML TABLEs layout vs. CSS is (mostly) irrelevant when you insist in keeping your front page over 120k.

At least it's mostly text... it bugs me to have to download 20k+ flash advertisements at The Age website even on cable, it was infinitely worse on a 33.6k modem on a P100.

You have a day off sick and someone puts IE6 on your machine. Argh!