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More useful dual-screen tips (Windows)

I can now chuck “calibration loaders” in my startup items (usually added when you install calibration software) in favor for using a powertoy for Windows XP.

It’s called the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet. It’s free, and it’s designed to enable single-card users to load separate color profiles for multiple displays. The operative term here is single-card because if you have two video-cards, or are on a Mac, then you probably won’t have to worry about this. If you’re on a WindowsXP 32bit machine however, and are using a dual head card which is common in gaming GPUs, then you probably will have to deal with this.

Simply download the applet and install it (requires the .NET framework). It will then be available as a control panel applet as seen in the picture above.

After you add/install/load and set the default profiles you created for each monitor (with whatever calibration software you have), simply create a shortcut with the following target path (make sure you include the quotes):

“:\Program Files\Pro Imaging Powertoys\Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP\WinColor.exe” /L

Save the shortcut, and put it into your startup folder and you’re set. It should load the separate profiles natively on startup.

Now if only they update that to support Windows XP 64-bit.

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Awesome week

It was an extremely eventful week.

First of all, I wasn’t dicking around like I usually do since I was subcontracted again by a new employer. I only have to put in 5 hours a day and report at 10am to go over the tasks for the day and 10pm to sign-off. It started as a one week trial, but it seems that I’ve just finished my second week, so I guess he likes what I’m doing.

Next was that I had shelves inspired by IKEA/Bo Concept mounted on my wall. Now I have more storage space… space I so badly needed.

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WRT54G P2P problems?

I noticed that I’ve been getting erratic behaviour with my router whenever I had bittorrent running. After a while it would always slow down to a crawl – where I had to reboot the router to get things back to normal. While rebooting the router manually (or via GUI, after much waiting) solves this. The problem always returned, which suggests that there’s something wrong with how the router handles P2P connections. I decided to look around for cases of the same problem.

The default firmware for Linksys and most routers track old connections for five days, then start to clear dead connections – which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections which the router can’t take. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.

Linksys has yet to address this issue, but there is a fix. If you use alternative WRT54G firmware, you can put in a start-up script to fix this problem.

I just applied the fix they mention down this post, only time will tell if it actually worked. Read More

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A [not so] definitive guide to common audio interconnects

Here’s a very useful post for the travelling audio person.

In BukasPalad, whenever we have performances we usually are dependent on whatever soundsystem the venue has. Knowing how 3rd-world countries work, most of these soundsystems’ equipment and technicians are far from professional. But we’re broke so we just have to live with it I guess.

Aside from worrying about what microphones we have available, the next most important thing was always to make sure their system can play our minus-ones (if need be). This usually meant we had to conenct our iPods (cuz were high tech hahahaha joke) to the PA – and that’s were everything can get lost in translation. I remember the trouble we had in finding the correct plugs and jacks to connect whatever we had, to whatever they had. There were times I would say “yung malaki” (the big one) when I referred to the 1/4″ plug, or “pang-headphones” (for headphones) when referring to a 2.5mm plug; just so I could make them understand the type of adaptor I wanted.

So with that, I’ve taken the liberty of distilling the long text from wikipedia articles and explain what you need to know to communicate what you need to whichever venue sound-technician you talk to. There are a lot of alternative names for these common audio interconnects, and I will attempt to consolidate in one post, the different names used – which I’ve come across over time.

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Some audio mumbo jumbo

After much research on the safety of trying to connect an unbalanced 1/4″ jack (TS) to a balanced, phantom power enabled XLR input on my mixer using a simple interconnect adaptor, I decided that I should just invest in a DI (Direct Injection) box – which will solve the problem beyond any reasonable doubt.

Considering mixers have 1/4″ jacks (which support both balanced or unbalanced inputs) anyway, you may be thinking why go through all the trouble of trying to connect a naturally unbalanced instrument cable to a balanced input? Read More