On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:30:41 +0000, Larry wrote:

Hi Larry,
Thanks for the education. Yet again your "techo" enthusiasm comes
through in your posting. I think that that is what I like most about
my job - the Techos. Even though I have worked in IT/telco for 30 odd
years I am rather ignorant about a lot of aspects of it. It is beacuse
there is just so much to know and you don't often get the time to
learn it all if it is not directly relevant to the job at hand which
always seems to be rushed. However the beauty or working with techos
is that when you find someone who does have specialist knowledge and
experience about something, they are more than willing to share it and
quickly bring you up to speed - what works, what doesn't - including
in depth how and whys. There is no-one quite as enthusiastic as a
techo imparting his knowledge. I know it is a generalisation that they
are usually open, lack guile and don't play politics, but that is
another plus as far as I am concerned. They also admit to not knowing
as well. That is one of the negative aspects of sailing and not
working - I miss the contact with some of these people with whom i
have worked, but now I have pactorIII I should be able to keep in
touch better.

You have an impressive setup. I know that i need to buy more hard
drive space and will do when I get this damned boat back in the water.

I still get amazed by hard drive size/capacity and price. I bought my
first for an Apple in 1979 I think. If I recall correctly, it was 3
megs for NZ$6,000, was the size of a printer but was it impressive. I
got a lot of visitors coming to see the new marvel. The mainframe disc
stacks - latest technology in 1985, had 1 meg per platter and were the
size of a washing machine. I saw the inside of my iRiver MP3 player
with its miniscule 6 gig hard drive - shockproof etc. It all still
zaps my mind. Packet data, sat comms and compression algorithms are so
much easier to get one's mind around.

I will try downloading movies now that I know more about it.

Larry, you have induced me into a fetish like hoarding of plastc soft
drink bottles I have so far resisted the urge to browse the local
rubbish bins in my collection frenzy lest I be taken as a bum but it
is so very tempting. I have dug out all the coins and small notes
around the boat from various countries to put in them with the
message. Thanks again for this.

cheers
Peter

Divx-compressed movies come off Usenet in 2 flavors....700MB, so they fit
on one old CDR, or, now that DVD+R is so cheap, 700MB to 2GB for better
resolution and a bigger picture without the computer having to expand it.

A 4.5GB DVD+R stores from 4 to 6 full-length DivX movies that look just
like HDTV in widescreen, if they were ripped from original DVDs. This
makes storage quite easy.

As there are so many available, I'm up to about 3TB of hard drives,
IDE/SATA and external 500GB USB drives, all of which are dirt cheap, now.
I just paid $US179 for a new Western Digital 500GB MyBook USB2 drive.
That's easily 500 movies with a hundred GB left for a few thousand MP3s
plugged into the laptop. No need to carry fragile CDs or DVDs,
commercial or homebrew, out with you...no storage problem at all. The
500GB drive is the size of one small book.

Never saw DVD Shrink. DivX is a much better codec. Download some movie
sets from alt.binaries.movies.divx, combine them with WinRAR
(www.rarlabs.com) and watch them with VLC, the free VideoLAN player from
http://www.videolan.org/ The VLC player has its own codecs, so it will
play many things Windoze is incapable of playing and has many portings to
other OS like Linux, BeOS, Unix, Mac, etc. It's the finest video player
on the planet. Read about the community of genius students responsible
for it. The movie industry hasn't figured out how to trash them, after
they wouldn't cowtow to the threats.

Larry