What Tiggers Do Best

Simon called me up to sing Happy Birthday down the phone at me, and invite me out for a little drinkypoo. But seeing as I'd overdone the 'scoff chocolate and watch Blake's 7 all night' thing, I declined.

This birthday will be spent doing what I do best. Feeling slightly ill...and tinkering with computers. You see, of the 13+ in the house, I own three, named after Terry Pratchett characters:

Greebo - 3GHz PC, used for video recording, editing and recoding, music composition, vocal recording, mixing, surfing, email, and a load of other miscellaneous stuff.

Desiderata - 1GHz PC, used for recording DAB and transferring vinyl and cassette recording to digital form.

Rincewind - 3GHz laptop, used for...erm...occasionally making CDs, occasionally watching films, but mostly sitting halfway up the stairs gathering dust.

The thing is, Greebo does most of the work, and Rincewind barely gets switched on. And Greebo has decided to frequently crash when processing video - I think the video software or codecs are in some kind of conflict with something in the loads of other stuff that's installed, because it works fine when they're not installed.

So, the plan is to reduce Greebo's system and workload to recording, recoding and burning video material, plus recording vocals and probably mixing.

The rest can be transferred to Rincewind, leaving Greebo uncluttered and Rincewind actually in use. It also means I can do stuff on Rincewind while the video work is hogging the CPU on Greebo.

The recording of vocal tracks will have to stay on Greebo, because it's the only computer that (a) has the speed and (b) can accommodate the super-duper soundcard I bought specially for the purpose.

All of which requires lots of reformatting, installation, and movement of furniture. I will be incommunicado for a little while.

One small irony. I bought Rincewind as a portable recording studio - which turns out to be the one thing it's no good at.

1 comment:

  1. Jelous? Moi? Here I am with an 800mhz P3 called...erm... Git, and two ancient macs, called Hinge and Bracket.
    To have a 3Ghz Laptop gathering dust is just criminal. Rincewind wants to be out frolicking and gadding, not waiting for his next once over with a damp duster and a spot of pledge.
    Honestly the youth of today.
    Pooh to you too.

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