What do overscans and soundtracks have to do with each other? Not a thing, really. But, they are two good things that happened to me on Sunday.
The first one was a bug that I’ve been having with my PVR ever since day one, and it’s been slightly annoying. Basically, the picture on my TV was slighly bowed in on the sides on the top half. Not too bad, but it bothered me because I’m so visually picky. Well, the nvidia module has some settings for X you can put in there (TVOverscan) which I’d played with before, but never enough, I suppose. What I did before was set the variable to “1.0” which, according to the documentation, means to overscan as much as possible. I figured that would stretch the picture and fill in those blank gaps, but it didn’t. Turns out the only numbers that worked were between 0.5 and 1.0. I think I eventually ended up with 0.7, and it looks absolutely fabulous. Of course, now I’m *missing* some of the picture because it’s getting pushed slightly off the screen, but its still much much better.
The second great thing that happened to me yesterday is I won an auction on ebay. That isn’t too exciting in itself, but the fact is that I netted a soundtrack that I’ve been trying to find for years. It’s been out of print and it’s extremely hard to find — so hard, in fact, that this was the first time in as many years as I can recall that I’ve actually seen it for sale. I collect a lot of soundtracks — not so much to have them, but to actually listen to and enjoy them — and this was one of the very last ones to add to my collection. I’m pretty excited. Oh, and the score in question is Patrick Doyle’s Shipwrecked. I tell you whot. 🙂