Cash In The Attic


No, not the BBC programme, but me, going thru my stuff that's in my mum's loft prior to moving, to sort and break it down into 3 categories..

1. Keep
2. Ebay
3. Bin

And there are some gems let me tell you!! A whole host of Games Workshop stuff, a BBC Model B, a train set, some really bad ties, a shitload of random computer parts, 123 3.5" cover disks etc etc, I keep so much crap!

Ahh, Rendering...

I often wonder what it'd be like to have a ninja machine that can suck the very life-force from entities around it (such as a PowerMac Quad G5 with 8Gb of RAM), I ponder this whilst waiting 20 minutes for my iBook to render an 1m40s After Effects project.

Hell Yeah! Pt.2

The PC is dead, long live the Mac!

Well kinda, I've finally unplugged my PC and am currently 100% Mac based!! :D This will change, when (after the move) I set up my PC again, so I have a printer & scanner again, but for now I'm wallowing in Mac happiness!

And I've started on the blinging road to pimping out the Powermac, I've ordered a new Pioneer DVD burner (fingers crossed that it will actually work, indications are that it'l be ok!), a 160Gb internal HDD and SATA card.

Basically I've spent too much money over the past week. I've still yet to get the FW800 card and ADC-VGA adapter :/ then the other options are, get another external HDD (probably a LaCie d2 250Gb as a scratch disk and use my existing 160Gb for other data (sound samples etc)), possibly upgrade the graphics card and finally the possibility of a processor upgrade, although that is rather expensive, and for the cost an upgrade I could probably buy a faster G4 Powermac off ebay! I think I'll see how I go with that one.

At the moment, it goes pretty good, rendering in FCP4 is painful, but, that's only cos I'm working on something with several effects and have to re-render each time I make an adjustment, cheers :/

It'll be interesting to see how After Effects gets on when I get it installed on here, mainly how it compares, rendering time wise, to my iBook, if it's about the same I'll be happy.

When we do move and I start to get everything set up again, I hope I have enough room and power points!! There's gonna be a lot of kit...

* Powermac
* Monitor 1
* Monitor 2
* Ext. HDD 1
* Ext. HDD 2
* Behringer Mixer
* Speakers
* DV Camera/Deck
* TV (for output until I get a broadcast monitor)
* PC
* Monitor
* Printer
* Scanner

Then theres the...

* PS2
* iBook
* mobile phone
* Marshall bass amp (& fx pedals)
* Paper shredder

Hopefully I'll be able to put the wireless router in another room...Hell yeah! :/


Lunch in a tiny burger bar, cheese burger n chips. To be honest, it wasn't bad, obviously you can't expect too much, but for £2.99, it was an ok lunch.

Apparently some of the buses up here are fuel cell powered, which i find a bit odd, haven't seen anything fuel cell powered before, i don't even know what exactly a fuel cell is! :/

i'm sure i'll forget to look it up. Got an email reply from an old friend from school this morning too, which is nice :) Hi Tina :)

WHY OH WHY OH WHY?!? Has it been sooo difficult to get hold of a new TV for Vic??

I'm guessing cos she's going for a cheap 28" 4:3 CRT rather than a "super bastard plasma screen" but still, surely it should have been easier than trapesing round Sussex for a day with no joy and eventually me ordering one online from a rather shady looking website via Froogle, who's customer service I now come to regard as utter shite! Last time I buy something through Froogle!

Now I've eventually got them to deliver it when they said they were going to (after giving in and paying out another £8 for a different courier), lets see if it turns up and works eh? If not I'm not gonna be fucking happy.

Rant over, on a plus note, for lunch , I've just had a rather good jacket potato, cheers.

Hell Yeah!

Oh yeah, Matt's got a "new" computer!! New toy to play with!! :D

How come? Richard at Square Donkey very very kindly gave me his old PowerMac G4 (Qucksilver) and the two Sony CRT monitors that go with it (but I've yet to get them home), so A big big THANKYOU to Richard!

Firstly let me tell you that PowerMacs are bloody heavy! Although thanks to my super strength (!) and an Ikea bag, I managed to get it home by train and bus all the way from london.

I've set it up at home to check it out, give it the once over and run a software update on it and to be honest, I'm very tempted to unplug my PC entirely and just run the PowerMac and my iBook, until such time I can set both up (probably after the move), of course this buggers me for printing stuff at home as I only have an old HP Deskjet 690C, with a parallel connection (I can't be arsed to get a converter as i want a laser printer anyway).

There is something comforting about seeing MacOS X on my Evesham monitor, I'm also surprised as to how good the PM's internal speaker sounds, considering it's an internal speaker!

One of the main issues at the mo with it, is that it's running MacOS 10.2.8 (Jaguar) because it's got Avid Xpress DV 3.5 installed which won't run on anything newer :/ Now here's the quandry, I want to run Avid, so I can learn the interface and get some experience cutting with it (Avid FreeDV just isn't the same), but I also want to run FCP 4.5, which needs 10.3.2 at least. Damn. (Plus the lack of Expose has already caught me out once!)

However, it feels surprisingly nippy. It's got an 800MHz G4 (slower than my iBook) and a generous 1.25Gb of RAM, which is clearly helping it along. It's got an ATI graphics card in there, but I'm not sure which model (has both DVI & VGA outputs), 40Gb HDD and, I believe, a Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW), although I have yet to test that to check (I know it's not a DVD writer as iDVD refused to open).

So, I'm looking into how much I can pimp this by, eg: Processor upgrade, optical drive upgrade, add HDD's, graphics upgrade, FW800, and also I'm pretty sure OS X allows you to boot from and external drive, which may be the answer to my FCP4.5 issue, but I'll have to check.

I'm typing this on the PM at the mo, in Firefox, the stripyness of the Jaguar interface is a tad odd, but it's very responsive. It also has an Airport card in there, cheers!, it's an original card I',m guessing as I had to change my router settings to Mixed to allow both 802.11g & b, as the PM wouldn't connect initially.

If I'm honest here, da da da da daaa I'm lovin it! L8r.

Hi all,

I'm nearing the end of my first week @ Square Donkey, I've watched hundreds of video clips on the internet, and all in all I'm pretty happy, going to embark on the mammoth task of getting the shortlisted clips onto DV, through a rather time consuming process of converting them (probably using iSquint) and them importing the MP4 clips into iMovie (cos for this I can't be arsed to faff around in FCP).

So what has it been like commuting up to London again. Pretty much the same as it was before, except I go straight into London Bridge and walk to the office rather than Victoria then tube to White City. There's the usual array of oddities on the train, which is always midly amusing for me (no doubt I'm mildly amusing for someone too).

Still getting into the routine of leaving Vic's flat at 8.00AM and getting back at 8.30PM (ish), plus would prefer to have my OWN flat, but hey :/

Lunches are not quite up to BBC standard, basically no roast dinners every day, first non M&S sandwich lunch was a rather tasty pastrami and colslaw granary bap from a deli on Borough High St. Although it reminded me that I should steer clear of cheap colslaw. :/

Still, I have been watching some awsome clips, although there's some shite ones too, but they won't get included. Have bunged a couple of Extreme ones in for good measure, see what the producers think eh? ;)

Speaking of Extreme, as I've been registering accounts with all manner of social video sites, expect to see ExtremeRetail all over the web once again pretty soon. ;)

Hi all,

Having just landed a job as a researcher at Square Donkey Productions on a pilot for a presenter-led clip show for one of the UK terrestrial channels, I'm sending out an appeal...

I need funny, interesting, weird and entertaining video clips, preferably that you've already uploaded to da net, or if you've found any good ones online send them to me as well (just let me know where you found them!!)

So if you have any, whatever they may be of or about, please send them in, either the clips themselves (I can cope with most formats) or even just a link to the webpage they're on, they may end up on telly!! ;)

contact@mattgrover.me.uk (not sure what my new work email will be yet)

Cheers all, take it easy

Matt

What a gorgeous couple of days!! Blazing sunshine, I've spent most of the afternoon mowing the lawns (they were long!) and the back of my neck feels suitably sore! ;)

So? What's new? I have a job interview tomorrow afternoon with a production company in London, Russ & Harv have decided they would like to contribute to the film review blog and I'm nearly out of Coke :/

Packing is progressing slowly for the big move, yep mum's in the process of moving, and thus since I currently live with her (!) I have to move too, just packed up most of my DVD's and the remaining CD's that weren't already boxed into what is one exceedingly heavy box now! Although everything is in a bit of a mess now and I look more transient than I already am!


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