Simon Griffiths Blog

It’s my sons first day at school tomorrow and I am really nervous!

Don’t know why really as he has been at kindy for a while. I guess that you have just bought them up to be someone you really like, and there is a chance that school will change them to something different. Of coarse this is actually a schools job, but as a parent it’s a frightening thought.

I have to say that he doesn’t seem to be worried at all. Went to sleep faster than normal, and didn’t do the after dark chatting he usually does.

Oh well, we shall see tomorrow!

I have just bought the AWA DP747 DVD player and have set it up and watched a couple of videos on it over the past 12 hours or so.

First impression was a good price for the features, which include playback of mp4 format video from a memory card or USB stick.

When setting up you get the typical Chinese, rather garish splash screen (I often wonder, do they think apples designs are drab and lacking in colour). Running the setup on the tv was painful though. I have connected my standard def but 16:9 format tv using standard yellow (video) and red and white (audio) cables supplied in the box. I am not sure that these connection are important, but I cannot select the tv format to be 16:9, the option is just greyed out. Other options are pretty standard, but that one means that I cannot get full use of the widescreen format (and let’s face it, the native resolution) of the DVD. I will try other connections over the next few days, but that is just annoying.

On the flipside, video reproduction seems good, and the discs themselves spin very quietly, making my foxtel iq seem even more annoyingly loud.

Mp4 playback was interesting in that it didn’t pick up a mac formatted disc, but when I moved a film to a memory stick, it worked well, again with good reproduction. I have yet to try an h.264 formatted movie with the m4v extension iTunes uses and will report back on that.

Overall I would recommend this DVD player if you connect by hdmi or component, or have a standard def 4:3 form factor tv. If like me you have a 16:9 tv and want to use standard video, yellow cable, stay clear as the squeezing of the image will drive you nuts!

UPDATE: 26 October 2010

This DVD player has just died, so you can get a rough idea that this one lasted about a year and a half. Overall it has been a good machine. The only problems I have come across are: -

• It has crashed a few times, particularly when you try to access something when it is first starting up. Once it has done this it just locks and the only way to restart it is to pull the plug. Once you’ve done that a few times you just make sure you wait for 20-30 seconds after hitting the start button before you try and eject a DVD.
• When it finally died, it did so with a DVD in the tray. To get that DVD out of a machine that had no power meant that I had to take the whole thing apart, literally! Even the DVD drive itself didn’t seem to have a manual way to eject so I had to take that apart too!

Okay so this is a bit of an over the top title, but I was hoping to attract attention because this might just help you, as it has me over the last year.

First things first though. What is iritis? If you have it you probably know all too well, but in short form, it is:-

• Swelling of the iris in the eye
• Caused by your immune system attacking your own body (auto-immune issue)
• Can be caused by a million different thing

I first started getting iritis about 3 years ago, and was getting it increasing frequently until recently. I have been tested for all the usual suspects, genetic markers and even some forms of deseases I would have hated to have told my girlfriend about. All were negative.

Each time I got iritis was pretty much the same. I had a cold or viral infection of some kind, fought it off, then my immune system seemed to look for other things to sort out, which was usually bits of me! I always got a big ulcer in the roof of my mouth, followed by iritis about a week or so after the ulcer. This could be a good few weeks after I’d originally been sick.

To sort out iritis when I got it, I did the usual. Drops to dilate the pupil, and steroid drops to sort out the problem. Uncomfortable, annoying, and potentially giving me cateracts way before I want them.

In the last year I have managed to avoid iritis completely, and with very little effort. I read an article on immune disorders saying how good Yakult like drinks were (you know the lactobacillus little drinks you get in the shops). Since then I have been taking those. This may be a complete fluke, but I am convinced it helps. When I start getting the ulcer, I up my dose to 2-3 bottles a day, and the ulcer goes, and no iritis.

By the way, I also tried the powder in the bottles, but this didn’t seem to work as well.

Anyway, if you are reading this. Please give it a go. It has helped me.

If it does the same to you, please put a comment in this post as I would like to pass it on to any researchers who are interested.

I have just been working on my first PDF portfolio. This is the new Acrobat 9 feature that let’s you put a heap of different file formats together and make them into almost a mini Ajax website.

I had thought this would be complicated, but actually it was a piece of cake when you just customize their templates. Managed to add a load of PDFs, flash videos from animoto and other bits and pieces in a few minutes.

Probably my only negative comment would be that navigation is not consistent sometimes there are breadcrumbs, sometimes not. Also not checked yet in older versions of acrobat.