Something Random

Will Rickards

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Jan 23, 2002
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Here
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willrickards.net
We do antenna + tivo dvr + netflix + amazon prime here. Works well for us.
Our verizon is $39.99 / mo for 100/100 service and we use our own router.

For someone else I researched and found philo tv for $20/mo which seems to have a nice selection of channels with what they watch. They'll have an antenna for the locals and no dvr. Disadvantage is every tv needs some streaming device like roku or amazon fire. But paying over $200 for tv, phone and internet was crazy. I'm setting them up with ooma for the phone.
 

snowhiker

Storage Freak Apprentice
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
1,668
I do need to look into alternative internet service. For me that's Century Link DSL. I checked several months ago and I was only able to get 40/10 internet for $65/month. But the local node, about 400-500 yards away appears to have been upgraded so I have to check to see if their 120/10 service is now available.

Not having a BW cap is nice but for me that would be a $50 upcharge ($30 for only an additional 500 GB) so really my internet would be $148/month for 150/10 when compared to SD's.

I have a "Mohu Leaf fifty" antenna + Netflix + Hulu (no ads) + YouTube TV. I'm cancelling YouTube TV and going with Philo or Sling (blue).

I bought 3x Roku Ultras for the houses TVs. A bit pricey but use wired or wireless network and you can plug headphones into the remote for silent TV viewing. I have rechargeable batteries for the remotes as headphones kill the battery pretty quick.

I actually bought an ooma this weekend and will be setting that up as well. It's not completely free as there's a $5/month fee to cover taxes/911/internet access fee/etc but it pretty cheap for a VoIP phone.
 

snowhiker

Storage Freak Apprentice
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
1,668
I'm setting them up with ooma for the phone.

I got my Ooma Telo (wired version) setup in about 15 minutes. Works pretty good so far. Only "bummer" is that there are two Ethernet ports on the device but it's not like a 2-port switch. One port is "in" and the other is "out" AFAICT. I was hoping to plug the Ooma box into my router then plug in another device into the Ooma's second Ethernet port. Does not work. No issues with calls behind my router or Cox cable fucking with ports so it won't work.

Looks like I have a 60 day trial of their Premier service. I'm 99% sure I'll cancel that and just use the "free" service. Not really 100% free...but I can live with $5.11/month.

Ooma fees.JPG

I should probably buy an UPS for modem, router, Ooma box. Probably spend around $100. It will be overkill for just those three devices but I'd have long standby time on phone. Any suggestions from my link?

I also went ahead and bought the wireless adapter you can plug into Ooma Telo box for $19.99 + $1.70 = $21.69 + free shipping. My 4-port router is already full, Computer, Printer, Roku Ultra, DVD (or TV) and don't want to have to swap wires or buy bigger switch.

The one year warranty on Ooma device starts when you activate service, not purchase date or manufacturer date. Which is nice in cause you buy device when wait a bit before you install it. You can extend warranty for 2 years for $40 but device only costs $80 at BestBuy so no point doing that.

I received a $50 credit for international calls, expires in 2 or 6 months. Can't remember.

Ooma send an .mp3 file of your voice mail to your email acct (if you desire) kinda cool. I know this is probably "Congrats! Welcome to 2006!" territory, but for me it's pretty cool. LMAO.
 

snowhiker

Storage Freak Apprentice
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
1,668
I'm lazy and not financially strapped enough. Hence the long status quo before finally doing something.

Same for me. Inertia. I was paying nearly $300/month for cable/phone/internet with no thought. Then Cox told everybody their legacy phones would stop working in six months and I'd have to get a new router with a "POTS" (or whatever it's called) port on it. Then a few months after that they said all legacy cable boxes would need to be replaced with new ones....with new rentals....then I looked at the bill and finally said, enough is enough.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,624
Location
USA
I like TV:), not all that complicated and annoying internet stuff. o_O:confused:
I avoided the Fibres for years due to concerns about power outages. Cable here is unreliable for the phone and sometimes goes out completely for no good reason. I put together several long acting power supplies so I can keep everything running about 10+ hours. Beyond that I'd be looking to get out of town anyway unless there is civil commotion.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
Location
Michigan
Same for me. Inertia. I was paying nearly $300/month for cable/phone/internet with no thought. Then Cox told everybody their legacy phones would stop working in six months and I'd have to get a new router with a "POTS" (or whatever it's called) port on it. Then a few months after that they said all legacy cable boxes would need to be replaced with new ones....with new rentals....then I looked at the bill and finally said, enough is enough.
What pushed me over the edge was the fact that I didn't even turn on the cable box for maybe 4 months starting when I was redoing the room and the system was out of comission. That's when I finally decided it was time.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2013
Messages
1,590
Location
Eglin AFB Area
Swapped 95 A for 95 C on the T2130CS (modified to exclude IE in any form, in lieu of which I installed Netscape Communicator 4.80 ;)) so that I had FAT32 support and thus didn't have to split my 4GB SD card into two partitions. It also came with some updated libraries that I guess made it possible for some stuff to run that couldn't before. Runs about the same, if not a little better due to the >1ms access times and lack of need to defragment the "hard drive." By that I mean it's still relatively slow, but it works I guess. I still prefer DOS on there, especially since I can't get Win95's explorer to properly navigate to my SMB shares on my main Win10 LTSC machine even after enabling both NTLM v1 authentication and plain old LanMan authentication. Whatever. FTP works well enough for what I need on there, and for what doesn't work so well via FTP, I have an SD adapter anyway. I can just rip the card out and shove it in my main and copy stuff over directly. And quicker than I can by going through the network!

It's just quick enough to run Office 97 SR-2 passably, which is great as it's the minimum version to use the proper .doc format. On Windows 2000/XP you can install the Office 2007 compatibility pack which enables 97 to read and write to .docx files, unfortunately that's not an option on 9x/NT4. I edited the msi for it in Orca to set the LaunchConditions from VersionNT => 5.0 SP4 to Version => 4.0 and I could get it to install (with updated Windows Installer libraries of course) on 98SE and NT4 but the resulting install wouldn't work and Office 97 would, to its credit, try to open a .docx but fail. Although I also found out by complete accident that Office 2019 can still open .doc files created with Word for Windows 2.0, it's just disabled by default due to security concerns, thus rendering most of my point in putting 97 on there instead of, say, 95 or even 4.3, moot.

Another thing in the "just quick enough to not piss me off" pile is Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0. Would you believe it's still capable of properly rendering every single PDF in my Documents folder? It screws up the chapter text in my PDF of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but considering it's at most a 10-ish year old file being read by an at least 20 year old program, I can't be too awfully mad. I was reading the 6th edition of Upgrading and Repairing PCs by Scott Mueller in it, a 1550ish page PDF, and it was fine... Graphics took maybe just a tad too long to draw, but 95% of that book is just text.

The SVGA accelerator in it is very disappointing. It's got plenty of VRAM to push greater than 256 colors, and the chip itself supports it, as does the screen, but for whatever reason the 1.40 VBIOS from Toshiba just flat out does not support any hi-color modes. Windows 95 was very vague about why it wouldn't work, just saying that the settings were invalid, but installing DOS/Win3.11 to another SD card and using the officially-packaged Toshiba drivers for it, it was a little more descriptive, saying that the VBIOS didn't support these modes. I have a hunch that if I connect an external display it'll magically be able to push those modes, but if I did that, what would the point be of it being a laptop? It's not like I have an era-appropriate dock around here...
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
Joined
Nov 8, 2006
Messages
3,327
Location
Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Swapped 95 A for 95 C on the T2130CS

The SVGA accelerator in it is very disappointing. It's got plenty of VRAM to push greater than 256 colors, and the chip itself supports it, as does the screen, but for whatever reason the 1.40 VBIOS from Toshiba just flat out does not support any hi-color modes.

Are you sure you have the T2130CS and not the T2130CT? According to this, the CS only has a 256 color display, the CT has a 64K color display... I suspect the VBIOS would have limits on mode selection reflecting this.

Also the C&T 65545 is nothing more than a glorified RAMDAC, so I wouldn't expect anything fantastic performance wise. Note:The video system only has 1MB for the framebuffer, which is at 640x480x256 colours requires 300KiB, so running it at 640x480x64K required 600KiB, which basically means running 64K colours, you loose any ability to use double-buffer techniques on the controller.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2013
Messages
1,590
Location
Eglin AFB Area
Indeed, it is a CS. As for the screen being only capable of 256 colors... well then, I guess that solves it! All those hours I spent tearing my hair out and considering trying a VESA driver... for nothing, as usual. It's interesting that the screen's only 256-colors capable, since the utilities direct from Toshiba imply that it's capable of 4K colors or 222K colors depending on what mode it's operating in, but I suppose they could have distributed those utilities with all sorts of machines. Well, that's disappointing. Oh well. Works well enough for what I'm using it for.

The retro communities I take part in seem to regard this chip fairly well, very compatible and relatively quick compared to other laptop chipsets of the day, though of course having nothing on something with real GUI acceleration like a 5426 or some other VL-bus card. I have to wonder if this chip is connected internally via ISA or by VL-bus, since it seems plenty quick in Doom, although the screen latency could be better of course... Not that it matters all that much. When I call it relatively quick, I mean I don't have to wait forever for windows to repaint. The drivers suggest this has some rudimentary acceleration, as the properties dialog mentions DirectDraw under features.

Using the built in LCD, platformers or anything that shifts too much of the screen around too quickly is a no-go. This means I'm restricted to things like Lemmings (provided I don't go crazy with scrolling around the level), SimCity/SC2K, Theme Hospital, and possibly Transport Tycoon if I can find a copy. Connected to a CRT, Doom and Wolfenstein run fine (Sigil can get into being a bit of a chugfest in areas with more complex geometry) if being rather underwhelming due to the lack of a sound card, although from my 25MHz bus, 16k of write-through L1 cache and complete lack of L2 cache Duke3D has seen better days indeed. Absolutely unplayable even in the 320x200 mode with a postage-stamp sized window. Surprising considering I see plenty of DX2-66 machines run it fine. Then again they're usually running much faster video.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,624
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USA
That was a long wait for practically nothing. The speed is not any better.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
Location
Michigan
B&H sends me an e-mail with some deals in it that require a promo code. Of course the promo code provided in the e-mail doesn't work. When entered in the shopping cart it pukes all over it and says the code is invalid. Nice... :mad:
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
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Michigan
B&H sends me an e-mail with some deals in it that require a promo code. Of course the promo code provided in the e-mail doesn't work. When entered in the shopping cart it pukes all over it and says the code is invalid. Nice... :mad:
I did their live chat thing this morning. After some back and forth and them investigating apparently there is/was a problem with the promo codes. They made me a quote for the item I wanted at the sale price and I called in complete the order.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
That's decent they honored it despite their system screwing up. Shit happens, but it seems like they took care of it for you.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
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Michigan
That's decent they honored it despite their system screwing up. Shit happens, but it seems like they took care of it for you.
Well, I don't have it quite yet. It's a download for Skylum Luminar 4, which isn't released until 11/18 (which I knew before buying, but isn't mentioned anywhere on the B&H listing for it). For whatever reason B&H offered it to me for $49 in the e-mail after a $40 off promo code. Regular price is $89 and the still going pre-order special price (elsewhere on the web) is $79. :unsure:

The reviews and the features seemed interesting enough to warrant trying it out for $49. I presume I will get a download link on the 18th, not within 24 hours. :cautious:
 

Stereodude

Not really a
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Jan 22, 2002
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Michigan
I presume I will get a download link on the 18th, not within 24 hours. :cautious:
And I was wrong. I got an e-mail with a download link and a product key for a 2.8MB installer that I presume downloads the actual software (which says it needs 2.37GB of drive space). When I get home I will install it on my desktop.
 

Stereodude

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Jan 22, 2002
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They changed the database and some other items in V3 are not present or functional in V4. If you are starting from scratch it won't matter.
I never used any prior version. I'm starting from scratch.

The auto distortion correction is turned off by default for RAW files which took me a while to find just poking around. All in all, I'm really impressed with it so far in the few minutes I've been playing. It seems sort of like cheating, since you can easily turn your photo into some super trippy epic looking shot with a few tweaks of sliders.

This is the out of camera JPG (DRO is set to auto):
DSC00833_sm.jpg

This is what I got using the Sony RAW converter + some tweaking in PS:
DSC00833_edit_sm.jpg

This is what I got using Luminar 4 on the RAW (messing around trying not to overdo it):
DSC00833_L4_sm.jpg

(The same scaling and sharpening was done to all of them in PS to scale down to 1600px wide)
 
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LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
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USA
The cropping is different for some reason. Shouldn't this be in the MILC thread.?
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
Location
Michigan
The cropping is different for some reason.
It isn't correcting the lens distortion in the same way as the Sony RAW converter or the camera is. It looks like it's applying less correction. I haven't shot a picture of a grid to see how badly it's underdoing it.

Shouldn't this be in the MILC thread.?
Well, now that this has grown probably, but I was just replying where the prior posts were.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,624
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USA
Goniometers are made from cheap crap these days. Nobody expects them to be golden retriever proof, but still...
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,624
Location
USA
I'm sorry. I didn't intend to cause any problems. :(
I didn't say what I was doing in the bathroom.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
Location
Michigan
Happy times! 🤬 I just got hit with a bunch of fraudulent charges on my Visa card from walmart.com and target.com. They got something like $1.5-2.0k of charges at walmart.com approved from before my bank suspected something was up and started declining the charges and sending me the automated text messages to confirm the charges. Now I will be without my primary credit card for 7-10 days while I wait for them to send me a new card in what might be peak shopping season. (n)

At least all the charges were all still just pending so they never got posted to my account. I was in the grocery store shopping when I got the texts (planning to use the card to checkout).
 
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