Gerhard Potgieter

After moving about a month back, I decided that I would need to get signal to my new place. Lucky for me it was only about 1km from my parents’ and los was great towards my new place.

So I modified the kit a bit, and now broadcast with a 14dbi panel towards Bellville Larochelle area.

This weekend 2 members had great success in connecting to the site, one is a brand new member and the other one just moved over from bot so pings and speed will be allot faster for him.

So if you are in that area feel free to scan and if found do the right thing and connect.

In a country like South Africa where Telkom dominate the local telecoms market, local communication is extrodinary expensive. That was untill a group of local citizens had enough and started their own wireless based network called a WUG (Wireless User Group).

The first WUG started out in Johannesburg, and then spark interest in other provinces where users started their own WUGS aswell. Recently JAWUG (Johannesburg Area Wireless User Group), PTAWUG (Pretoria Wireless User Group) and PWP (Pretoria Wireless Project) finally got to a point where they could link up their networks and bring their total connected nodes to just over 200 and covering +-140km of area.

If you are interested in finding out more about a WUG in your area please visit wug.za.net for a complete list of wugs in South Africa.

For a complete article about the networks check out the MyBroadband article.

Firefox 3 got released today. And with the release is an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. So if you are a Firefox fanboy, help contribute to the world record by downloading Firefox 3 here.

South Africans have until 17:00 hours today to complete their downloads for it to count toward the world record.

Last year’s recall of overheating Xbox 360s was caused by Microsoft trying to bypass  ATi and going straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to save cash, according to analyst outfit Gartner.

Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, said that the overheating problem in the Xbox 360s was caused by Microsoft trying to avoid using ATi.  It designed the graphics chip on its own, cut ATi out and took it to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to make.

However the chip overheated and in the end Microsoft had to go back to ATi  to redesign the chip so that it worked. Lewis that if Microsoft left the graphics processor design to ATi in the first place it could have designed a graphics processor that dissipates much less power.

It cost Microsoft $1 billion to conduct the recall.

For all you flat file junkies out there.

So you own a couple of DVD’s and they are just lying arround the house gathering dust and scratches, well I had the same scenario this weekend.

I’m had just moved to a new place and with the move I discovered a few DVD’s packed away so far I forgot I owned them. So I thought wouldn’t it be better if I just digitize them, I mean I watch all my movies via my xbox streaming them from the PC so why not just backup the DVD’s to the PC and then they are available in my playlist aswell.

After carefully thinking it through I decided not to just make ISO images of the disk, cause then I won’t be able to stream to the xbox, and the space could become a problem as your collection grows. So I opted for the DVD to DivX conversion.

After searching high and low on the internet I couldn’t quite find a suitable free product that could do this for me, and all the paid ones was a bit pricey. So after searching a little bit longer I came across a nice application called AutoGK. It is a application that allows backup from DVD to DivX / XviD, and best of all its free.

Program features support of:
- DVD/VOBs(unencrypted from hdd), MPEG2, MPEG1, transport streams (including multi-program ones) and AVI/DV input sources
- XviD or DivX(5/6) output formats
- AC3, DTS, PCM, MPA input audio tracks
- AC3, DTS, MPA, CBR/VBR MP3 output audio tracks
- two audio tracks in AVI
- external (vobsub) or internal (burnt-in) subtitles (with support of forced subs)
- HDTV input/output resolutions(upto 1920x***) and frame rates (50/60fps)
- automatic crop and resize based on compressibility of the source to achieve best results
- automatic detection of input source: PAL, NTSC, FILM, HYBRID
- automatic deinterlacer and IVTC
- automatic split into CD-sized chunks for main video and external subs

The program is really good and it doesn’t compromise quality at all, and if the default quality settings isn’t good enough for you , you can always adjust them to your liking. I think AutoGK is a must for every DVD collector wanting to back up their collection to PC. So if you have a few DVD’s lying around go dowload AutoGK and start backing up those DVD’s.

For all you die hard Call Of Duty fans out there, seems like Nvidia released the 1.6 Patch 2 days earlier to their SLI Club Members.

If you are interested in getting the patch before the rest you can download it here.

Just a word of warning, you won’t be able to play on your usual servers if you install this until the server runs 1.6 aswell. This patch adds the new killcam (follows grenades/RPG rounds/noobtoob rounds),  more maps (four I think),  bug fixes (not sure what bugs).