Given a bit of a break from Jessica courtesy of the grandparents, Chantelle and I thought it best to start off the weekend with a delicious breakfast at the delightful Lourensford Deli on the Lourensford Wine Estate in Somerset West.
This was followed by some chasing down of tame peacocks, followed by an amble through the Saturday morning family market.
There is just something too cute and adorable when it comes to babies sporting hoodies with fluffy ears, and of course there was no way Jessica could avoid this, at least not with me at the helm any way!
Taken a couple of months back when she was still a little too little for the car seat, here’s a pic or two of Miss Jessica Madison Lotter all strapped in and ready to go – followed by a couple of pics from around the same age when she was obviously a lot less ready to go anywhere! :)
(Ready to leave)
(And not so ready to leave)
A redhead, a brunette and a blonde are pregnant and sitting in their doctor’s waiting room.
The redhead says, “when we conceived, my husband was on top, so we’re going to have a little girl.”
The brunette says, “when we conceived I was on top so I’m going to have a little boy.”
The blonde thought for a second and then broke out into tears.
“Oh no… then I’m having puppies!”
Billing itself as the smallest MKV media player in the world, the Sumvision Cyclone Micro 2+ HDMI high definition media player may very well live up to its tag – when I opened the box I couldn’t believe that the device lying inside was literally the same size of my credit card in terms of dimensions!
Anyway, what it is, is a simple high definition media player with upscaling abilities that doesn’t come with any built in storage but is more that capable of accepting anything you bring near it sporting a USB output or SD (plus derivatives) card, like your USB thumb drives, external hard drives or even camera memory cards.
Sporting HDMI output the Cyclone Micro 2+ (there were two versions before this one) is able to play back material in full high definition (720p, 1080i, or 1080p), and thanks to its digital coaxial port, it can push out full 5.1 cinematic digital audio as well when needed. Needless to say, it can also handle photos as well as do MP3 music playback, and as an added bonus, also in its box of tricks is the ability to handle subtitle files and even e-book files! (It also comes with a fall back standard AV output mode for those of you who might not have a HD television set).
In terms of supported video codecs and formats, it turns out that there is very little that this little media player monster can’t handle, with support for all the major video file formats of today, from H.264 through to XVID and even RMVB if for some reason you need it.
Build quality is sturdy enough on what is a pretty lightweight device, and everything clicks nicely into place when you plug it in. The single power state LED isn’t blindingly bright and the remote control works pretty well for the most part, though you do need a good line of sight and be on a close vertical and horizontal level to the device when using the remote.
The user interface is exceedingly simple, basically an initial menu to select source or change the device settings, and from there, just a basic file system browser which lists all your files in alphabetical order, with a small preview window for each file.
Playback options via the remote control includes all manner of nice things, like being able to set the video playback dimensions, the audio source, subtitles and even a nifty little goto function that lets you quickly select a point in time of a video that you want to skip directly to, in amongst all the standard functions like play, stop, pause and of course fast forward/rewind.
Finally, the winning factor of this little Chinese beauty – the price. At only R440 from www.takealot.com, this little HD media player is a steal, making it well worth the effort of grabbing if you don’t already have such a device. Sure it doesn’t have all the nice bells and whistles like built in storage and network streaming capabilities, but it does what it does VERY competently.
(Just a note. The box comes with the device, a power cord, an AV cable, an audio cable and the user manual on a disc. No HDMI cable included, so you’ll have to pick that up yourself. But they are pretty cheap these days, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem.)
Specs grabbed from the official website: (http://www.sumvision.com.cn/searchResults.aspx?ptype=47)
In summary, a pretty good purchase thus far.
Can you guess which character, and from which anime series, Korean cosplayer Tasha is cosplaying?
If you want to enjoy some classic 90′s OVA animation in a short little burst, then AIC’s 1996 action comedy Ninja Cadets serves this up rather nicely – unfortunately from director Eiji Suganuma’s point of view, there really isn’t any other reason for picking this up though!
Split into two thirty minute episodes, Ninja Cadets throws you into the middle of it, as six young nina cadets are tasked with their final ninja exam – infiltrating Byakkuro Castle and retrieving a powerful scroll from the scroll room. Oh, and one of the cadets is actually secretly the Byakkuro Princess who was forced to flee when only a baby, though she doesn’t know this and it doesn’t really matter all that much in the greater scheme of things, outside of the fact that she should technically be able to trigger the strongest scroll that still resides there.
As the six go on their mission, a group of bandits all of a sudden appear who for no apparent (or rather given) reason, are now searching for the princess, and have decided that she must be in this group of ninja, who they now set off to foil by summoning minor demon creatures to block their path. Oh, and when that fails, to cause the suicide of their summoner so that he can be transformed into a big spider-demon to try again. And when that fails, then there is always mind control or the big robot approach to try.
There really isn’t much of a story to Ninja Cadets and even less in terms of character development. Instead the entire OVA appears to be an excuse for battle sequences and lots of slapstick humour revolving around the high-strung girls in the group, but the events and pacing are just so haphazard that the show feels like a whole lot of pieces stuck together with Prestik putty. Sure there are some amusing bits here and there and some pretty cool fight scenes to take in, but for the most part it really is a bit of a hit and miss.
Ah ha! I knew that my newly reinvigorated training regime would pay off. Only a few days back in, and already I have shown my remarkably increased strength by callously snapping my nail clippers’ compound lever right off the device whilst in the process of clipping my fingernails this weekend!
Ryan can attest to this seeing as I was speaking on the phone (via speaker phone) to him when this calamity occurred.
I need to be more careful in the future now. Don’t know the extent of my own strength any more…. handing out hugs might be dangerous from now on in.
Because off-peak varies from provider to provider, I thought it a good idea to jot down just when exactly Vodacom’s off-peak minutes are in operation, seeing as my contract shows that I have somehow managed to rack up a fair bit of these over the last couple of months.
A quick shout out to Vodacom customer care netted me the following information regarding off-peak operation:
And now we all know, which of course is pretty nifty! :)
Craig Lotter is a web developer based in Gordon's Bay, South Africa, who seems completely incapable of shaking off that pesky inner child within, the one that forces him to love all things animated or hand drawn.
The Rugged Rock of Craig contains snippets of his life, popular culture and all the important things like anime, manga, games and comic books. The CodeUnit of Craig on the other hand contains the more serious stuff like code snippets and tutorials, while the House of C chronicles his foray into the world of web comics.
For which it never seems he has enough time anyway.
The Rugged Rock of Craig The CodeUnit of Craig The House of C
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