Thanks to the little shake we had down here i'm in need of a new TV. My Sharp LCD46D84X is kaput.

[IMG][/IMG]

I'm thinking of getting a new TV before the GST price rise next month. Have heard good things about Samsung Series 6? Would like to stay with LCD/LED approx.46"

Mainly used for Movies/TV not sport, budget upto $2500 although that may change if i get an indication as to what the EQC may payout.

So far i'm looking at

Sharp 46" (116cmv) Full HD LED-LCD Quattron Television
LC46LE820X

I've got a Lowrance HDS .usr file that I would like to edit. I've read somewhere the file is a "vector" file bu I have no idea how to open it for editing.

http://rapidshare.com/files/416981196/Test2.usr

Sorry about Rapidshare link, is only a little file though. The file should contain a heap of spots and GPS coordinates.

I know I can open it in a program like GDM6 etc but what I need to do is open it in a way that I can do find and replace in it so that I can change icons in the file to multiple GPS spots at once instead of one at a time which is all these files seem to be able to do.

Hope someone can help,

Cheers,

Haydan

http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/.../3366146g.html

Got woken up by this in Greymouth, must have been pretty rough in Chch itself

SMG Lan 23rd October Labour weekend (This runs every Queens birthday and labour weekend)
Rongotai College Rec Hall Wellington
Check out our event! Nothing can beet SMG lan for a social fun Lan!

Saturday lunch date at the wgtn Pistol Club (Stake and egg samy while empting a Clip of 45's)
A Piss up BBQ saturday night that just cant be missed.
Oh and importantly we have a Network to die for :)

Check out the photos on the website
http://www.smg.net.nz

Regester here
http://www.smg.net.nz/lan/index.php

I am finding Excel 2007 charting a real pig. Incredibly slow and it is widely complained about online.

However MS have only fixed it in 2010 - requiring an upgrade for something they broke in the first place (Excel 2003 was perfect -unfortunately I don't have it any more).

With the move to Direct2D rendering in Windows 7, it should be fairly easy for MS to upgrade performance of Excel rendering by offloading to the GPU. Do existing apps benefit immediately from Direct2D acceleration or do they need to be especially coded for it?

I cant find anything on line that suggests Excel 2007 has been improved by using Direct2D (automatically in Win7 or via a patch?) or whether MS are being their usual b4stard selves and making people upgrade to 2010.

Anyone with any info on this appreciated.

https://myminter.co.nz/Contestants.a...odified+Minter
Search by username: monk

I want free petrol :D

If I win, post in this thread on GP CB&M and i'll give away the lube prize pack ($500+ value) to someone in that thread. The lube might go well with the new tits wrx_lou.
http://www.gpforums.co.nz/showthread...64#post7365464

* may have to register :/

I've always been interested in water cooling and ever since I built my PC I have wanted to someday put a water cooling setup in.

So now that my pc is old enough for me to not freak out about the tiniest little issue I thought i'd have a look into putting some in.

Now for starters, I have no idea about which make/model/brand for each of the parts is good and which is not. I've also heard buying kits is never a good idea because they tend to break and fudge everything up.

Basically I'm a nub with **** all of an idea about how it all goes together and am asking for help and advice about where to start from the people that have done it all before etc etc.

Also I realise its not going to be cheap, but for a semi-decent setup that isn't going to break and that isn't going to cost mega dollars how much am I looking at spending for it all?

We ll finally got all the bits I needed over the weekend and have installed them, I really like the powerbits compression fittings and 45/90` bends which make this case even better to work with, many thanks to Dr Mambo for the case and rad :)

Here are a couple pictures of the finished project didn't really get any pictures while building it but believe me fluid costs a lot and when you spill 1L all in the kitchen wife not very happy :p

Quite likely a shot in the dark here, but can't help to ask.

Does anyone here collect magazines, journals or something of that nature?


I'm not usually a collector/hoarder, but I have one magazine subscription, which I have been subscribed to for some time, and own every issue and I don't plan on stopping in the foreseeable future (EON for those interested).

At the moment I have them secure in a filing cabinet (stacked in a pile) they but are such a massive PITA to constantly get out and read (I do it often).




Anyone know of an elegant solution that will keep them in good condition, but still allow me to easily access them and pull out a single issue to read?

Well, after a bit of a run-around with the couriers, it was delivered about lunch time today.

First impressions: Screen, wow. Thought it was a sticker but the screen you see when you open the box is a splash screen with instructions is the screen on standby.

So I followed the instructions and plugged it into the laptop and it installed the drivers but wouldn’t propagate the drive. It was in the device manager and would appear in the drive manager as an empty volume. Reboot of the laptop didn’t fix it so I had to reboot the kindle.

HINT: To reboot the kindle you press and hold the power button for 15 seconds. The screen will flash a few times and then do its boot sequence.

This got me quite confused for a while and the kindle wouldn’t go back to home when disconnected from the USB. I had to reboot it to get it to connect properly and to be able to read anything. No biggie, but it had me worried for a few minutes.

I then connected it up to my phone and home’s wifi hotspots and it sync’d up nice and quickly. No hiccups there which was nice.

Reading the device is nice, on first use however it felt natural to have page forward on the right, and back on the left (not the forward and back on each side like it has for lefties). My personal feelings are that it would be nice to have the left hotkeys for page turning be sized the other way around, larger left arrow over smaller right arrow. This is coming from a right handed person though, others might prefer it the way it is.

The keys are small but textured slightly rougher than the rest of the unit so feel nice once you get your finger on them. I could see my granddad might have trouble with them, but to be honest he’s never going to use one, and I’m very unlikely to ever use the keyboard for anything serious.

When reading books with images in them I noticed a slight remnant of the image once I’d moved onto the next page. It didn’t distract me, I was just being picky and looking for it.

Screen refresh is fine. I’ve never used a kindle (or other) before so couldn’t say if it’s any faster. It’s by no means instant but it’ll do. It seems to flash up a negative image of the forthcoming page and then flash back to the proper view of the page within a fraction of a second. Slow enough that I can tell what’s happening, but fast enough that I don’t care.

I bought the lighted case for it too. The led lights on the case use the power from the kindle to operate so when the kindle is off, or on standby, the lights won’t work. When on however they seem to work well enough for a small group of led’s.

It’s very light but built well enough that it doesn’t creak or anything if flexed. The back has a light ‘rubberized’ texture which makes it easy to hold but I’ll keep mine in the case I think.

When in standby it has a nice selection of random images it throws up which is good. Lets me know it’s on standby and ready to go.

I used the browser briefly and found it fine. A little tricky without a mouse, but it renders pages in their mobile states so cuts back on images e.t.c. to make life easier.

Music playing is fine, sounds more than adequate for a small device. You need to remember the hotkeys for playback though as there are none dedicated bar the volume.


Criticisms:
I kind of wish the book list had cover images like it does on the PC version but I guess the res. Isn’t quite up to it.

I wouldn’t mind a line of numeric keys above the keyboard (not sure if other kindles had this). They’re hidden in the ‘sym’ menu with other symbols. No biggie either I guess.

The case would be nicer if it was held down with magnets over the elastic band it has. Just a personal preference I suppose.


Some images are below to keep people entertained:

Back to the good old days:

http://www.firearms-source.com/

Many hours of my life were spent on this once classic, and now we get to do it all over again.

Been playing in the US with crappy pings but totally worth it, there are some Aus servers but haven't seen any players yet.

Anyone switched to it yet?

Knowing the draconian shaping Slingshot does to off-peak period for capped users, I was expecting the same being applied 24/7 to their new AYCE plan. And I was right.

While I would love to switch over and knowing how to extract >3Mb/s (400KB/s avg.), which would've resulted in ~1TB/month, what ticked me off is no naked DSL option. $80 + $30 = $110 would've been more reasonable than $80 + Homeline($47) when you account in the 24month contract.

Anyway, for the privileged ones who can pull at least 1TB, I envy you. For the rest (i.e. 99.9%), you'll just have to sip it at 30-100KB/s.

Thought I'd give a heads up to those that are looking for a decent uncapped usage plan:

Snap Internet recently (1-2 months ago) released an 'addon' to their plans (unsure if it is all of them, or just their higher end ones) where you can pay $5 and get 3 nights of uncapped usage between 1am and 7am. You can do this as many times as you like per month.

http://www.snap.net.nz/faq/index.php...=44&artlang=en

My flat is currently on the 60gig a month plan, but I found we were using approx 80-100gigs a month between 6 people. We put together a torrent box so people just queue stuff up. When we get around 60 gigs queued up we activate the 3 night thing and bingo, 60 gigs for $5.

We've done this for 9 nights and we get on average 20gigs a night with it (I'm still baffled as to what crap they managed to download).

Just figured that some of you here may be looking for a replacement for the Big Time plan - this may do nicely :)

OK. I'm taking over a bit of the mailoutage and dispersion of information for a bit!

Here's the scoop on our latest event. Doing a PC & Console (X360) LAN.

DATE: September 18th (Saturday)
START: 12pm
END: Whenever we crash Sunday (as usual)
VENUE: Massey University Refectory
THEME: MONSTER LAN!

Playing on PC:
* Killing Floor
* Alien Swarm (free on Steam)
* Warcraft 3
* Alien vs. Predator
* L4D (most likely L4D2)
* Call of Duty WaW: Nazi Zombies

Playing on Console:
* Halo Reach
* L4D

Console competition rounds will be held on in-venue projectors. $10 entry for PC, $15 for console, $20 for both PC and console.

Poster is here: http://tweetphoto.com/41461280. ALSO, catch up with announcements on Twitter: @TCOSY

I am wanting to build a HTPC type system mainly for music and gaming, I have a low budget so was thinking X4 635, GA-MA74GMT-S2 and 2GB 1333 RAM plus my existing 4850 and decent case, PSU and USB DAC.

Does this sound like a good CPU/RAM/mobo (and GPU) combo with power consumption and reasonable performance in mind? I would have liked to use my E8400 based system and upgrade my main rig but after doing some research it seems a proper upgrade is a bit too expensive.