It's official, as of early wednesday morning (GMT), one of the greatest minds of our time Steven hawking died at 76 years old.
suffering from Motor Neuron Disease he was given 2 years to live back in 1963, here we are in 2018 and he finally died of old age.
the man is well known both for his theories of cosmology and physics as well as his lectures and efforts to educate the masses.
he will be missed, one of the greatest minds of several generations is now gone.

RIP: STEVEN HAWKING

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008

I, hereby, shall rant about the difficulties of changing oil on my 2007 Jetta. 

Love this car to death, but the time for an oil change had come. It's an $130 oil change, no idea why really, but it is. Takes six quarts of synthetic oil, which costs me around $30 plus the filter, which is maybe $5 or so. Needless to say, I save a lot of money just doing it myself every 7,500 miles or so. 

Last time I tried to get it changed, however, the oil filter, I swear, was on so tight it was absolutely impossible to remove after hours or work and a few different oil filter wrenches that had costed me more than the oil itself. It was a little frustrating, and I figured, eventually, that perhaps I could get away with just changing the oil itself and forgetting the filter. 

So that being said, this time around, the filter really kinda needed to be changed. It had been 15K miles, and not changing your filter after that long is a terrible idea for the quality of the oil that you're running in your engine, and is altogether not good for the longevity of its internal parts by any means. 

It took wedging screwdrivers in and out of the wrench tool, a lot of tape, three different wrench socket tools and two ratchets, a steel bar that was several feet long as a lever, and hours of arm labor to finally break it loose. The feeling of finally getting that filter off was worth its weight in gold. 

And of course, I was presented with a clogged filter. Figures that it probably hadn't been changed in who knows how long. And additionally, it's doubtful the people that changed the oil before I bought the car bothered to change it. If they did, shame on them for tightening it as much as they did.

Hence, why I always do my own maintenance on my vehicles. I find it hard to trust anyone else.

Since were entering the heart of golf season, i thought i would start another golf thread..

So Right now im watching the final round of this WGC Tourney out in Mexico and 47 year old Phil Mickelson has a 1 shot lead over a host of other players..

i think we can still mention Tiger woods in this thread but just not to make him the main topic of it

i started a new thread concerning the golfing world and the return now of the great tiger woods..!!

Does he have a chance to win the masters this year ?

Alright so I'm going to keep this simple because the RGB scart mod is probably the easiest way to get the best picture from anything before 1998 but after around 1985 or so
so 3rd through 5th gen, 2nd and 1st gen were coax only and 6th gen on wards has decent high quality cables for it.

a good example of the difference can be seen in this video



right away you'll probably notice the image is clearer, the colors are more accurate, sharper, and most notably, that rainbow effect is gone.

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to start with you will need the following.

1 Scart plug Male.

Typically looks like this


1 Video cable for said console. (this is different for every console so do your research.)

1 soldering iron.

Some lead free rosin core solder.

a good length of wire that you don't mind chopping up. (Old IDE cables are a popular choice but you can get multiple feet of cable in various colors cheaply through amazon.)

Some Capacitors. (get the right one for the right cable mod, this will determine the quality of the image.)

at least 1 Resistor, usually 180 ohm but check the diagram first.

Heat shrink cable sheathe/tubing - for protecting your work and making it look nice and neat.

An eXacto knife/box knife. (this is also important, you are going to need to open the casing around the connector that plugs into your console of choice.)

Patience

I can't tell you how many times I messed up due to impatience, always double and triple check your solder joints.

finally if you don't already have one a multi-meter is super handy, you can use it to reverse engineer what wires go to what pin on the Console specific video cable.

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Step One, Take that knife and carefully travel along the part where the case is closed on either end opening the plastic shell around the connector, you can skip this step if you have a multi-meter and feel like reverse-engineering your cable.

Step Two, De-Solder or make note which wires go to which pins, your choice, I will be posting the diagrams at the end.

Step Three, Slide your heat shrink tubing/Sheath along the cable making sure to leave the ends exposed where they go into the connector casings it'll be difficult to do this after you solder both ends on

Step Four, If you have any capacitors or resistors Solder them to the the correct wires/Scart pins now so that you don't forget later, remember, this will most likely determine if you are successful or not, on some consoles those resistors can be the difference between a dark faded/washed out image and a clear one.

Step Five, Solder your wires to the correct pins, if you've soldered any capacitors and or resistors to the pins connect the wires to the other "leg" of them.

Step Six, Make sure to wire your grounds correctly, if you don't properly ground your cable you'll get a lot of audio and video noise and distortion.

Step Seven, Test your cable, better to test it now and not when you have to take the whole thing.

Step Eight, If your test was successful then attach the casings to the ends of your cable, you're done, congrats, you have an RGB cable for "insert console here"

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Q&A: if you've gotten this far then good but I'm sure you're wondering why SCART?

well... let's be honest it's mostly because SCART is the standard for RGB on everything from a sega master system to a SNES to an atari Jaguar.

there's even SCART for the original XBOX and PS2... though those look just as good through component cables so it's sorta pointless.

plus these days you can get SCART to HDMI upscaler's for around $30 allowing you to play your classic game consoles in glorious 1080P resolution at 60 frames per second, no stretching or fuzzy image, you can blame the yellow composite cable for that.

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Diagrams:

Note on these diagrams the yellow squares are Resistors and the double lines are capacitors.

Resistors are measured in Ohms
Capacitors in Micro Farads















Diagrams Provided by Evil Tim over at optusnet.com.au

there are other setups but I'll leave that to another post as most other consoles either can use HDMI, component, or require actual modding of the game console.

if you have any questions please post them below.

Hi everyone. I'm still alive. what's up?

I found it odd that there wasn't one of these threads so here ya go.

Post here animated gif's you find amusing/funny/interesting.

Happy New Year Makestation!

so once upon a time, before MP3's, and CD's and all that stuff there was a style of music mostly associated with PC's, that style was the use of what's now known as general midi.
general midi was a way for games to have music and sound effects without needing the space that sampled sounds and recorded music takes up, you'll find it commonly with older games, especially does games.

these days though midi support has been all but removed from windows, and didn't even really exist in linux or mac osx.  it's a shame really, midi's are a rather unique product of an age back when space was still at a premium, before we had thousands of gigabytes of space in our laptops and desktop PC's.

however there are ways to still enjoy midi even now, there's this nifty piece of software by a company called coolsoft called virtual midi synth.
with it you can load something called a soundfont and play midi's without all the hardware or digging up old sound cards from bygone eras.

there's all sorts of soundfonts out there as well, back towards the end of the midi age soundfonts were a way to get the most from your midi music without having to shell out tons of cash for midi synthesizer hardware add-ons.

if you feel like checking out this dated but still fairly powerful type of sound I highly recommend it, as far as soundfonts go, a good one to check out is called chorium, it's got a good balance of great sounds and leveled audio, plus it's free.

so is anyone familiar with midi's?
for that matter does anyone still listen to them?

Techno-pagansim
has anyone heard of it?
maybe one of you has experimented with it or you know someone who has.

the long and short of it is, applying paganism, typically wicca or some other variant, modified to include technology as a component.

think of it like cyberspace is a separate dimension, your coven need not convene in one place, rather they can do their rituals online where everyone is taking part in their own homes across large distances.

You can also create runes, enact spells, etc, by using technology as a basis/alternative way to do things and still remain firmly grounded in the natural way of doing things.

then of course there's the idea that cyberspace has it's own forces and deities which you can call upon in place of/instead of/along with that which affects the physical world.

there's a lot of ideas out there but nothing truly concrete.

most famously it was claimed by a character in season 1 of the somewhat not forgotten buffy the vampire slayer TV show however there have been discussions and articles in magazines such as wired, and through online user groups such as usenet including a subgroup on alt.pagan.

so what are your thoughts on this?