Zorsts

Came across a link to an advert today for a much modified Chimaera which had quad exhausts. The colour of the car isn't really to my taste - I like my yellows really custardy, and this colour is a bit of a distraction. However, I think that this exhaust conversion could look quite good on my car. Something to think about - miles off getting this done now...

Ouch!

It may have been noticed that I haven't posted any pictures of the front of the car for some time. Well, this is because I banged it into a neighbour's front garden wall in December when it was snowing. Now, many sensible people at this point would say "why on earth were you driving a TVR in the snow? Loads of torque, no weight, short wheelbase etc. etc." Well, they're right, I shouldn't have been. I was delivering it to the garage where it was going to get something done. In the event, they said "your outriggers are rotten", to which I said " I know" and their reply was "well, we can't put it on our lift then, can we?!". Wish I'd thought of that! Anyway, point is, there's been some damage to the bonnet, and the bit you can see is here:



Which is probably the best shot of it. I did mention in my very first post having bought the car that it's covered in stone chips and various other bits and bobs that need doing at the front and elsewhere, but this really does make it look bad. Here are some others:





And a gratuitous fat arse shot:



Car is going in tomorrow to have that dig at the leading edge of the bonnet patched up. Have got two quotes for a full respray so far - a grand apart! However, I can't afford either at the moment, but I don't want to spend the summer explaining to people what an idiot I am for planting the car in a wall in December, so a little tidy up at the front will have to do. Probably reading this you may be forgiven for thinking 'that damage isn't too bad, can't be too expensive'. Well, it's between 6 and 400 smackers to just get that front bit sorted.

Oh, and to all you jokers in the TVR community, yes, the roof is on, but I'm not driving it - I just got it out of the garage to take a picture.

DVD Ripping

As per below, going through the palava of trying to get my DVDs onto a drive on the network in my house to act as a media server. I also want to get some Peppa Pig vids onto a laptop so that we can amuse my toddler on the aeroplane on the way to our holiday destination. So essentially get our DVDs into a one-file format that can be played just on a laptop, or via my PS3. I've probably gone around the houses a bit on my choice of method, but this is what I am doing:

1) Slysoft AnyDVD to unprotect the DVD and have the option of jumping to the main feature and cutting out any advertising/marketing junk
2) DVD Shrink to be able to re-author the DVD to just have the features I need (I can get rid of the French subtitles feature if I want, for example)
3) Handbrake to convert the file to .mp4 to have a one file solution.

The process is pretty slow and painful actually. The bottleneck is DVD Shrink, because this is what's actually reading the DVD drive. Although it does what it does in the background, you can't do any of the other things until it's done. I can use Handbrake to go directly from the DVD drive (and Handbrake is very slow), but then I can't use a feature of Handbrake which appears to be quite useful - the queuing feature. Basically if you have a bunch of files on your hard drive (say from DVD Shrink), you can queue these up to be done one after the other while you're not there. DVD Shrink is useful because you can chop out all the stuff you don't need, and shrink the file down a lot. Trouble is, you do have to be there to do the first two steps. Basically, ripping a DVD into an mp4 file based on my method takes about 1.5x as long as the DVD you're ripping. So if I'm ripping Peppa Pig 'Stars' DVD, I can expect this to take about 50 mins overall, I think, but even that seems to depend on what I do. Mostly it's best to leave steps 2 and 3 overnight.