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Welcome to Omnibits for Friday, 2 August (Day 0)

9am

Your humble correspondent woke up at 6am to beautiful, clear blue skies, but three hours later, it is solid low overcast. Doh!

Skydive Hibaldstow is a remarkable place, an out-of-the-way, rustic drop zone with a personality all its own. Four-way teams started arriving early today and hopefully the weather will cooperate enough this weekend to get the Cup in.

More soon, stay tuned!

Skydive Hibaldstow

Skydive Hibaldstow, general spectating area. Manifest is the window under the awning.

Skydive Hibaldstow, looking the other way. Judging is in the upper floor of the "packing hangar", the Quonset hut in the background that should never be confused for a "hangar" ;)

View from my B&B window
The view out the back window of my room at the Artie's Mill Lodge B&B. The feathered friends -- a dozen of them -- were in the background for a nicely framed photo, but as soon as I opened my window they made a rush for me. What could they possibly have wanted?!

10am

Resuming where I should have started :)

WELCOME to the OSHD coverage of the 2013 Hibaldstow 4-Way Cup. This is one the largest unsanctioned skydiving competitions in the world and it is an honor and a pleasure to have been chosen by the management at Skydive Hibaldstow to support this competition with OmniSkore!HD.

As you can see, the "OmniBits" part of OSHD competition coverage starts with "Day 0", the day before the scheduled start of the first event of a competition. You can expect "Day 0" coverage to mostly contain boring errata and "who cares?!" setup notes aimed at curious family members, hopeless competition junkies and the terminally bored. I will shift the coverage in following days to field reporting of the competition. Because I'm "flying solo" here, the breadth and depth of that coverage will depend on how busy I'm kept here with other things, so I beg your patience if you only see stale coverage.

Setting up OSHD at a competition site where it has not been used before always presents its challenges, and Skydive Hibaldstow is no exception. Most DZs (all of them?) have been using a lot of analog video distribution technology for a long time, which of course is incompatible with HD/HDMI equipment. Consequently the chief challenge here has been how to get OSHD's HD "DZTV" video product from the judging area over to the bar / viewing area in the next building to the north. It's much too far for an HDMI cable or even a composite video cable, so we're going to try to send a 1360x768 VGA signal extended over Ethernet using a "Cat5 Video Extender". Currently waiting for a couple of parts for the final cable assembly ...

T2 will be very pleased to learn that the NetPost tool now provides integrated management of OmniBits editing. (I'm typing this in KompoZer in the omnibits_20130802.html file launched from the "Edit | OmniBits ..." menu.) Hopefully this will make his life a little easier when we're working the World Cup in Banja Luka in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and WELCOME, ChutingStar, your Skate & Skydiving Superstore, and our newest omniskore.com sponsor!

2pm

The weather remains cloudy but some jumping squeezed in here and there. Stu's plan to use VGA over Ethernet technology ended when he determined he didn't have all the hardware necessary, so Plan B and a Half is going to be to create 720x480 mp4 files using the same tools we use for creating the smaller versions that get linked on the results pages. These mp4 files will get robocopy'd from my dual-NIC laptop to the media player PC in the bar, which will play them with the custom video player I'm now putting the finishing touches on (forward slash bazinga).

5pm

Competition draw is at 9pm tonight!