0 Free online tests - not that accurate Posted by Jake-san | at 5:04 PM

I used a free Ishihara Test for Colour Blindness today... Just for the
fun of it. Well, I was really surprised of the outcome. The test
insisted that I got a 80% score, and that I had green-red blindness.
Image what shock I was in, since I always thought there was nothing
wrong in that department.
I had a strong doubt though, that the test was somehow fucked up. I made
a google search on Ishihara Test, and found all pictures used in the
free test, and compared the answer keys provided with that I had entered
as the answer. After cross-checking these differences I found why I got
a poor result.. Two of the pictures on the test were entered correct by
me, but the test flagged them as wrong. The person that made the test
must have accidentally copy-pasted the code poorly and was checking in
the 2 pictures the value entered for the first picture.
Sounds like an error I might have done my self, but still... Lucky I
dodged that bullet after all :-D

0 DVD scratch repairs the simple way Posted by Jake-san | at 1:29 AM

I got in my hands today a DVD that had an annoying scratch that prevented my cheap dvd-player from reading past it, got at least 6 moments in the movie where the picture kept blurring in artifacts and the movie skipped annoyingly in microsecond bits after trying to read it for minutes.. So I decided to go and try a repair that I used once before to make one of my oldest cd-rom games readable. Toothpaste!

Of course I don't mean I just smeared some toothpaste on the dvd and jammed it back in, no. But I used a bit of the toothpaste on my finger and with a help of few drops of water with gentle pressure I smoothed the surface around the scratch enough for the laser to get past it. The whole dvd was 100% playable after wards. Sure, there is all sort of more professional solutions out there, surface grinders and solutions you can use to get the scratches out totally. But I'm way too cheap for that. Besides the toothpaste worked just fine and was available.

And on the plus side, now the dvd smells minty fresh...