Quite the Babe

This is Lyar. She’s tough, smart, competent, and built like you-know-what.

This is Lyar. She’s smart, competent, and built by me. I don’t know how tough she is, but I have no intention of sticking her through a wormhole to find out. (I might, however, use her to battle Orcs, Blood Elves, Trolls, and various other Hordelings.)

This is what I did with Lyar’s LightScribe. Closeups below the fold: click on the pics for full size.

As you can see, both Lightscribe and my photography skills have some flaws, although the former is a lot cooler than the latter. Lightscribe’s biggest problem is that it can’t create a very high contrast with its monochrome images. This means that the user has to be sure to pick images that are already high in that. Note that Kanon and Bakumatsu came out rather faded, because those pictures were largely “bright” and did not have much contrast. On the other hand, CC shows up well on the dark background in the Code Geass picture. I tried several different caption styles, and it’s apparent that it has to be watched there as well. Amaenaideyo came out fairly well, though I wanted to shift the picture a bit and it’s fairly obvious that an experiment with the text didn’t’ work.

The software I was using (Nero) seems to work well, although it has several UI drawbacks and quirks I didn’t care for: It wants to create everything in (or load projects from) its proprietary format. For someone wanting to just quickly grab an image and burn it, the UI has a number of drawbacks. Mainly, I can’t move the picture around. When I tell it to “load picture X” for making a Lightscribe image, it will center the picture, no matter what. This is a royal pain if I would rather use, say, the left side. It is possible to load the picture in such a manner as to allow editing, but it wasn’t intuitive, and the picture still can’t be dragged, only resized. And WTF? It uses millimeters for its measurement system? Uh, if you’re having to stretch the corners back and forth to get the right part of the picture to appear on the DVD, pixels would be more appropriate to keep from distorting the picture. I don’t need millimeters to keep from making it the wrong size to fit on the disk, you’ve got the outline right there for me to go by! And where the hell is the “Lock proportions” checkbox? So what I’ll have to do is load the pictures up in PaintShopPro, alter them there, and just hope I got it right.

Dear Nero.
Your software was not quite ready for prime time. Thank you.

On the other hand, I’m fairly pleased with the LG DVD burner. I’ve used their stuff in the past, and it seems to last longer under use than most other brands (most notably, a Memorex that died after a month.) Also watch out, if you go for Lightscribe, some of the burners that claim to be LS capable are pretty crappy. Text is about all they can do; pictures come out looking blurry. Read the reviews and make sure you’re getting a good one.

Finally, a farewell to Misaki.

She’s served faithfully for years, but will be retired as my main PC, and either become secondary (for bittorrenting) or sold off to a cousin. She’s been getting cranky and long in the tooth; sometimes she just gets headaches and doesn’t want to perform at the most inopportune times. You know how we guys are — The womenfolk get old, and we trade’em in for a newer, younger model.

Frankly she didn’t deserve to be re-named as Misaki so late in her life, I should have left her as Rogue. An unkind cut perhaps, but true.