Gears talk

I haven't talked enough about how cool a game Gears of War is. I'm not very far on it, but even so it's been incredibly impressive. Multiplayer is great fun, having someone come in and help me with co-op via Live is a huge boon, and the graphics and gameplay are both top-notch. I'd type more but I've come down with a cold, possibly related to my staying up way too late playing Gears of War...

Bruce Fraser dies

Bruce Fraser was an expert in the area of color management. Way back when I dealt a lot more with color management than I do today, his articles were the ones that brought me up to speed with color spaces, gamuts, why sRGB sucked as a color space, and why other spaces were preferable.

I read today in TidBITS that he passed away after a losing battle with lung cancer. It's a sad loss for the Mac community and the creative arts community.

Article on Fraser in TidBITS.

Some of Bruce Fraser's publications and articles.

Morricone to get honorary Oscar

Woke up this morning and finally read some good news... Ennio Morricone will be receiving an honorary Oscar this year for his years of creating incredible music for the movies. Of course, for this movie fan, the epitome of his work will always be what he created with Sergio Leone: the Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.

Italian composer Morricone to get honorary Oscar

Customer service kudos

I meant to mention these a while back. They were two experiences with products or services where I was particularly struck by how well things worked.

#1: We had an ant problem in our kitchen. "Little damn ants, buddy!" (Boy, now THERE'S an obscure quote.) It was so bad, the kids would be doing their homework on the counter, and it would be write write write SLAM write write write SLAM (the slams being them swatting an ant crawling across their pages.)

We have a pest control service, and they came in no less than four times, to no avail. Still with the ants.

Then we happened to be at the neighborhood hardware store, and at the register they had a product called Terro, the liquid ant killer. Hey, only $3, why not give it a shot, said I. You put these little puddles of the stuff down on some cardboard discs included with the tube, and the ants think its yummy yummy maple syrup, when instead it's good old boric acid. They bring it back to the colony and everyone's dead. And it bleeping WORKS. Ants all gone in two days. Worth every penny and then some.

#2: Target. I bought a videogame there for Theo for Christmas, then in usual kid fashion, he decided to change his Xmas list and wanted a different game. I'd lost the receipt and was not looking forward to the experience with returning it for credit. Little did I know, you just bring the item, they scan it, scan your card, and bingo, instant credit. Damn.

Guest blogger

I've been out of touch for a bit due to massive work overload. Luckily, my new Xbox 360 is perfectly capable of blogging on its own...

My Xbox 360's blog

By the way, I noticed that my previous post complained about the serious launch snags with downloadable HD movies on the Xbox 360 Live marketplace. Well, I am happy to report that I tried again and all worked smooth as silk. The download was surprisingly fast, and the quality seemed equal to the handful of HD-DVDs I've seen (at least on my ancient HDTV). I decided to download Swordfish, not because it's a good movie (it most certainly isn't) but because I could then check out Halle Berry's spectacular... acting abilities in HD.

The 360 weekend mixed bag

I finally scheduled time this weekend with Dave to crank up our 360s and try some Xbox Live gameplay. I'm obviously late to this particular party--people have been playing Halo 2 for a number of years now and seen how fun it can be. Yes, people, mine eyes were opened. It was great fun, first being able to voice chat prior to the game as well as during the game, and then being able to play either head-to-head (Halo 2) or co-op (Gears of War) with someone 500 miles away. We had some snags trying to do the co-op play in Gears, but it eventually worked, and voice came in handy when I had to tell Dave "help, I'm dead again, come revive me, I'm over by the stone statue."

So, flush with our success, after we ended our session I decided to try out the new downloadable movies on Marketplace. I really wanted to see what HD flicks looked like, so I decided to rent Unforgiven. Now, Penny Arcade had warned me about trying the HD downloads (describing it in inimitable PA fashion as akin to doing something naughty to a porcupine), but that was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. By Saturday night, the initial download spike should have been over and all would be good with starting the download going on and then letting it run overnight. Right?

Wrong. It failed almost instantly and created a file on my 360 which, when I deleted it and tried the download again, resulted in my getting charged twice for the failed download. It seems to be particularly screwy for HD content, as I then successfully downloaded a South Park episode (the World of Warcraft one) with no problems.

So, hence the mixed bag. Bill giveth and Bill taketh away. I'll try again, but not for a few weeks.

Burn baby burn! Beryl SVN repository

I kept waiting and waiting for the usual Ubuntu repositories to get the latest version of Beryl out. Luckily, someone Dugg a site that has a bunch of unofficial packages built from SVN versions of Beryl. I added it to Synaptic, added the GPG key, and my software update icon magically told me I had updates to Beryl. I did have to work through a few dependencies, but now all is working. It's a LOT faster, and now when I minimize my windows burn! Woo hoo!

Trevino's Beryl Repository

Firefox 2.0 problems solved

I had seen a lot of crashing after upgrading to Firefox 2.0, but that seems to have gone away after turning off the old Google Toolbar that had been installed previously. Yes, another scintillating blog post! Thank you, thank you very much.

One of my favorite show themes EVER

I was trying to catch up on watching Rocketboom episodes and came across this one with Joanne on a sled. The theme, however, is good old "Tank!" from Cowboy Bebop. Man, that is one helluva song. You can get the live version here... the studio version's good too. The anime series is awesome as it is, but the music just pushes it over into mega-awesomeness.

PS3 scales down, not up

OK, I don't want to sound like a total 360 fanboy, or make it sound like sour grapes that I'm not one of the few people in the world to actually own a Playstation 3. But this report from Ars Technica is a little puzzling. Basically, if your TV (like mine) can only do 1080i, even if you're connected via HDMI, the PS3 will not scale your DVDs or games up to 1080i... it will scale them down to 480p! I can kind of forgive the 360 for not scaling my DVDs, since it doesn't do HDMI for some inexplicable reason. But it's equally inexplicable that the PS3 won't scale.

It's looking like both companies are driving people to upgrade their "old" HDTVs. OK, twist my arm.

Ars Technica article on PS3 and scaling

Xbox 360 first impressions

Did I confess that I got a 360 over the weekend? Yeah, Target had a pretty good deal on them (you got a $50 gift card with your purchase) so I picked up the 20GB version and a copy of Gears of War. Earlier I'd gotten the HD-DVD drive.

It's been a couple of days now and I haven't done much with it (Gears is still shrink-wrapped, for instance) but I have hooked it all up and have some first impressions...

* That power supply is easily the largest damn external power supply I've ever seen for any piece of electronic equipment I have ever owned. What the hell is up with that?

* I'm too used to Apple's elegant packaging. The box-opening experience was underwhelming.

* If you get a Xbox 360, have a USB keyboard handy. It's a lot easier to do all the registration for Xbox Live with a keyboard than with your wireless controller.

* People complain about how loud it is... I can't hear it over my MythTV backend, which is noticeable but not particularly loud. I'll admit it did make me reconsider how loud my backend is. I might have to try to quiet it down some.

* Like I said, I haven't tried Gears yet. All I've tried is UNO and Geometry Wars, both of which are very pretty and surely push the awesome firepower of my next-gen gaming platform to its limits. :)

As for DVD and HD-DVD playback...

* I'm really disappointed in DVD playback. First of all, it's not upsampling... it switches down to 480p since I'm connected via component. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but it's the black level that's the real problem. It's washed out and icky looking. The blacks are fine, however, in game play. So if I adjusted for DVD playback, blacks would get crushed everywhere else. Ugh. Guess the "real" DVD player is going back into the mix.

* I finally got to watch a bit of my bundled HD-DVD version of King Kong. It looked darn good... but I'm not sure it's all that much better than a DVD. People have mentioned this as a problem with both the HD disc formats... people may not notice the difference that much. I'll admit that it could be a limitation of my very old HDTV, so a new TV could fix that. Nevertheless, the picture was good, and I didn't have the black level problems I saw with regular DVD. The only other issue I had was that the soundtrack seemed to lack "oomph." The dynamic range that I'm used to on most discs didn't seem to be there.

All told, I'm pretty pleased. Looking forward to trying out movie downloads later this month!

Uh, I meant to do that

(title should be spoken using your best Pee-Wee Herman impression)

I got the bright idea yesterday to upgrade my Ubuntu install's kernel to one specific for the AMD64, with SMP support, blah blah blah. So, instead of reading about what I should do, I just opened up Synaptic and found the SMP kernel and said "install this."

I rebooted and boom, X server is dead. Turns out when you upgrade the kernel you also may have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers, at least when you're using the beta drivers that are required to run Beryl. OK, no problem, I'll redownload and reinstall the beta drivers. Well, yes problem, because for some reason they won't compile. I tried this, I tried that, I tried the other... and then I gave up and reinstalled Edgy from a CD.

This time, however, I installed the x86 version of Ubuntu... too many things were wonky when running the AMD64 version. I still can't print (grr) but at least the Ubuntu splash screen is in color again. And beryl seems to be running faster. Hm.

Shuffle-flavored beer

Ars Technica reviewed the new Apple iPod Shuffle. I'm linking to the second page of the review, which included a torture test to see how durable the new Shuffle is. When she drops it off of the third-story balcony, it reminded me of the episode of Hey! Spring of Trivia, where they point out that you can drop an ant from any height and it won't be killed by the fall. In fact, the Shuffle survives all but the final challenge...

iPod Shuffle review

Xbox Live HD movies -- rough size estimate

Well, thanks to a screenshot in a GamersReport article, I have an answer to the question about how big HD movies will be. The screenshot shows that fine piece of entertainment, ATL. It clocks in at 107 minutes and is a 1.2GB download in standard def, 4.7GB in high-def (720p). Basically, looks like the standard 20GB Xbox 360 is going to store, oh, _one_ movie at a time...

GamersReports -- Interview with Xbox's Aaron Greenberg

360 to support HD movie downloads

Uh oh, Apple, it's ON, baby! Xbox 360 will be supporting SD and HD downloads of movies and TV shows. They specifically mention HD purchases of TV shows, including classic Star Trek (oooh, gotta tell the neighbors!). They don't mention cost of rentals of HD movies, nor do they mention how blinking long it's gonna take to download something that really is HD (I'm assuming 720p).

Other sites report that rental media will only stick around for 24 hours after you start playing it. That's fine, as long as the price is fair. In fact, most movies I'd rather rent... if I'm going to buy it I'll buy it on a disc of some sort. Apple's FairPlay DRM really needs to figure out how to do a rental of some of its media, as I'm certainly not going to pay Apple's price to own a featureless, menuless, non-anamorphic SD movie.

Anyhow, this makes the Xbox 360 purchase even more inevitable-er.

Watch Movies and TV On Your Xbox

HD-DVD software emulator available

If you buy a Xbox 360, that is... apparently it's a 4.7 million line of code software program that allows the 360 to play back HD-DVDs from its upcoming external drive. Jeez, that's brutal. Hope it works well.

Xbox 360 HD-DVD: Over 4.7 million lines of code

Excellent Beryl - edgy -aiglx HOWTO

I'm very happy that the tutorial below actually got me up and running with beryl. I had to shut off compiz as bad things were happening, and I downloaded the beta Nvidia drivers for x86 instead of x86_64, but after typing a crazy long URL for wget, I got the drivers running, got everything downloaded, and I was off to the races. Oh, the other thing this guide didn't mention is the AMD64 repo for beryl, namely, http://compiz-mirror.lupine.me.uk/ edgy main-edgy main-edgy-amd64

As for beryl, man I hated the zig-zag fading menus. I switched it to a straight fade and that's OK but too slow. Will have to fiddle now that it's running

HOWTO: Edgy, beryl, and aiglx with nvidia beta drivers

Edgy Eft Ubuntu Upgrade

I liked the alliteration.

The goofily-named Edgy Eft (aka Ubuntu 6.10) was released a couple days ago. (It's pretty amazing that Edgy Eft actually makes Breezy Badger look professional as a code name.) I decided to upgrade from 6.06LTS by following the instructions on the wiki. Sure enough, it connected, downloaded a raft of stuff (very slowly, I'm sure their servers were being slammed--it basically took overnight), upgraded my system, and asked me to reboot.

The good news is that my system did not explode. The new startup screen isn't displaying properly, though. Maybe a reboot will solve that. Everything looks good, but I have a feeling I'm going to have to rip compiz out and get beryl up and running... I'm seeing the same problems I saw when compiz wasn't working quite right.

Beyond that, can't say how well this is working. Looks nice though.

EdgyReleaseNotes - Ubuntu Wiki

Halo movie canned for now

Interesting news... Universal and Fox have backed out of their deal with Microsoft and pulled the plug on the Halo movie. I guess another studio could pick it up but the budget was heading towards $200 mil so we're not talking an indie film. Plus Microsoft's desired cut was reportedly steep. Oh well, wasn't that big a fan anyway, and they'd probably screw it up, Peter Jackson involvement or not.

Universal and Fox pull out of Halo movie

HDTV resolution tests

Wow, new issue of HDTV magazine and a big feature on how many of the HD sets they tested failed miserably at deinterlacing... some merely throwing out one of two fields and line doubling the result, effectively dropping resolution to 540p. Plus, a whopping 80% of the sets didn't properly handle the 2:3 pulldown on the test disc. Pioneer sets, of course, handled both superbly. Guess you get what you pay for...

Home Theater: Are You Getting All of the HDTV Resolution You Expected?

Final tracklist for Guitar Hero II

Man, I've got to get on the ball and order this thing. Lots of fun tracks, along with lots of tracks from groups I'm only vaguely familiar with. I can already feel a repetitive stress disorder setting in...

Guitar Hero II Final Tracklist Revealed.

2006 ATM -- a fun run

I'll get the complaints out of the way first... even though I've never worn either a water belt or an iPod for any of my races, I don't see why they should be prohibited. Maybe you want your own special flavor of Gatorade, or maybe you're a Powerade person. And, frankly, if I do the Marine Corps Marathon again, I'm bringing an iPod specifically for the hell that is Hanes Point.

But the Army Ten Miler specifically prohibited both water belts and iPods for security concerns. OK, let's discuss the stupidity involved here. First, we can now carry fluids onto planes again. Why prohibit it from the race? Second, I get MUCH closer to the Pentagon while riding the Metro to the race start. Why isn't anyone screening me on the Metro, rather than at the security checkpoints, if there is a "security concern"? Third, if the concern is for other runners, uh, hello, the race course is wide open. Some evil iPod-listening Camelback-wearing person could jump in at any point.

Whatever. I'm just getting agitated thinking about the stupidity involved. I will concentrate on the positive. Serenity now.

It was a great day for a run, and since I'm about 10 pounds heavier than I'd like to be, I decided to take it easy and run with Maria. We did it in about 8:40 miles... slower than my 7:45 miles for the Cherry Blossom but hey, I got to run it with my wife, which I hadn't done before. We had a great time and, unless they ban Asics from the race next year due to their having the word "Gel" on the side, we'll probably run it again.

A must-have purchase

Easily my biggest laugh of the day. I saw this on Digg... everyone needs one... how have you gotten by without it... I give you, the DVD Rewinder!

The DVD rewinder - DV Guru

Heroes -- I'm done

Watched last night's Heroes this morning on the treadmill. Firstly, the local NBC affiliate forgot to flip the "high definition" switch, apparently, because most off the show was in SD. Then, as an experiment, I have MythTV show me the show at 1.2x actual speed... and the show is still dragging along. Third, the painter also does comic books on the side? Huh? Fourth, they find a USB flash drive in the dead Indian father's office. The college professor son says "what's this?" The cute next-door-neighbor says "It's a portable hard disk!" UGH! And then, after the son has (somehow) stumbled across not one, but TWO people ransacking and bugging his dad's apartment, he starts blabbing on about how the USB drive has the key to tracking the "heroes" down. Do you want to talk a little louder? The multiple listening devices in the apartment MIGHT not have heard you!

Yep, trying to be smart and Lost-ey, and merely succeeding in being dumb. I'm done.

A good quote

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

--Bertrand Russell

Transcoding video under Ubuntu

I've only recently started playing with transcoding my MythTV MPEG2 recordings down to smaller files while still running Ubuntu. Normally I'd reboot under Windows and use something like Auto Gordian Knot or Dr. Divx to do so. But hey, while in Rome. Plus that way I don't have to reboot just to transcode an episode of Teen Titans or Yu-Gi-Oh G/X.

So, I started playing with Avidemux, and it's a pretty nice program. You can mark and delete commercials quickly, there's a lot of available filters for cleaning up the video to allow for better compression, and it's pretty zippy on the AMD64... at least now that I've stopped using the version that ships with Ubuntu. I found the Avidemux wiki site (link below) that describes the newer version of Avidemux, only available by downloading the SVN source and compiling it yourself... that's what gives you the ability to access multiple processors. I followed the compile guide and it works! Now I've compiled in support for x264 so I'll see if I can get versions that are iPod compatible...

Main Page - Avidemux2

Kong packed-in with 360 HD-DVD

So, supposedly the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive has been announced for a mid-November release date, a $199 price, and it'll include a remote AND a copy of King Kong on HD-DVD! Not bad. I agree that the combination of the $400 360 and $200 HD-DVD drive does in fact make for an expensive HD-DVD player, but think of it as getting a $500 HD-DVD player and a $100 game console.

Opposable Thumbs: 360 HD-DVD dated, priced. Now with pack-ins!

Heroes -- complaints

I still haven't gotten through my MythTV recording of Heroes (the new NBC series on superheroes) yet. I had better get a move on as I'll have Ugly Betty to watch after tonight, plus I'll have to study up for the season premiere of Lost next week.

Unfortunately, I have primarily complaints so far about Heroes. Which could explain why I haven't been more eager to watch the rest.

It started with the opening... a bunch of text describing people with extraordinary abilities or some such junk. Who set that type? It looks like they spent all of 5 minutes creating it. Horrible, boring font. Then, for the text listing the cast and crew over the opening scenes, they used some horrible, ugly, scripty font. Is that because that's how they write in India or something?

The sets? Awful. The lack of effects to show people with their superpowers? Annoying. The guy's supposed to be flying. Show him flying already. Oh, and I know Manhattanites are supposed to be jaded, but don't you think they'd notice some guy flying around in the sky?

What else? Oh, the Japanese guy. Why give him a clock with Japanese characters on it? Are we supposed to NOT realize he's Japanese, when he speaks Japanese, looks Japanese, and all his co-workers are Japanese? I think we'll get the idea even if his clock has Arabic numerals on it, or even NO numerals.

Then, the Japanese space-time continuum guy has a screensaver. Some Godzilla-like monster. Oh, look, the smart kid with the hot mom in Vegas is reading a comic book with the same monster on it. Ooooh, wow, connections. Except Lost did virtually the same thing in Season 1 (with Walt and the polar bear), but did it better.

OK, I'm done complaining. I'll give it another chance or two. At least until I get a new episode of Iron Chef America.

Weather report (belated)

I recorded Anna while we were wandering around the Outer Banks surveying the flooding caused by Ernesto at the end of August. Sadly, I should have included a nice lower-third graphic and her credit as a meteorologist. I think she has a fine on-camera presence, but I'm not the most impartial of observers. :)

Chroot chroot chroot for the home team

More on Ubuntu and my new AMD64 X2... I finally got Firefox working again with Flash audio/video and all, thanks to this script. It's not actually using chroot, I just like saying "chroot." I've tried a chroot script howto for Dapper, and it seemed to work for what was listed, kinda, but I couldn't get Democracy Viewer to work. Oh well.

Hm, the Wii60 is a smidge pricey

The mighty Nintendo revealed the launch details on their Wii today, and the good news is that you'll be able to play a game right out of the box... they're bundling Wii Sports with the console. The bad news about this is that as a result, the launch price is $250, instead of the $199 that a lot of people were hoping for.

Wii Launch Center - Gamespot

The sad state of American broadband

Sad indeed. This summary from Ars points out that the Japanese get 100Mbps of both upload and download speed for $35 a month... which is what I pay for 6Mbps of download and something like 512Kbps of upload. Even Verizon's FiOS (which is reportedly coming soon to my area) doesn't improve those speeds that much.

The sad state of American broadband

Ubuntu and I have kissed and made up

A new set of compiz updates cleared out my dependency problems, and a little bit of reading on the forums got me back in business with Xgl and compiz, so now I'm feeling a bit better about Ubuntu again. In fact I'm using it right now. Oooh.

It's the Wii60 for me

After Sony announced its ridiculous $600 price for the full-featured version of the Playstation 3, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get one. Then they announced that the worldwide rollout in November was going to be limited to 400K units in the US and 100K in Japan, with Europe and Australia getting dissed altogether until the spring. It was then clear that, even if I'd wanted one, I wasn't going to get one.

Now they're saying 80% of the PS3s available for purchase will be the $600 version and not the $500 one. That's just a convenient news article to use to post this mini-rant to my blog. I'll probably get a Wii60 (i.e. the Nintendo Wii and a Xbox 360, adding up to the same price as the PS3) this holiday buying season.

Sony: 80 percent of PS3s will be higher priced models

Ubuntu -- honeymoon's over

Won't make this too long, but it turns out that a lot of things that worked just fine for me when I installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my old system, don't work just fine for me now that I'm using the AMD64 version of Ubuntu. In particular, you have to jump through even more hoops to get Flash to work in Firefox, VLC is busted when playing Xvid video (as in when I try to stream a recorded program from my MythTV backend), there's all kinds of wackiness you have to do to get Wine running, and I can't even print to my printer.

Then, one of the repositories pushed an update a few weeks ago that broke the X server.

THEN, another repository just pushed an update to compiz that broke it too. I might be able to fix it, but I also might have just lost interest in fixing all these broken things.

See, buying that X2 CPU did it!

AMD up 6.5 percent today! Woo hoo!

Stocks climb on bullish AMD comments - Yahoo! News

My new quiet computer

I finally decided to get a new computer as the racket from my oldest Shuttle system was getting much too annoying. That system will go downstairs and become a MythTV front end for watching things on the treadmill, bumping off the five-year-old system that was my first DIY computer. All of the pieces for the new system finally came in, so here's some quick notes about what I got, what I liked, and how it turned out. This post is obviously for the nerds out there.

My two goals were (1) quiet (see above) and (2) dual-core. I also wanted to prop up AMD's stock price, so I wanted to go with an AMD CPU. My parts lineup was as follows:

* AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
* Scythe MINE CPU Cooler
* Gigabyte K8U motherboard
* 1GB 400MHz DDR RAM
* Antec Sonata II Quiet ATX Mini-Tower case
* Additional 120mm Zalman Silent Fan
* AOpen 16X DVD/CD burner
* Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA hard drive
* EVGA GeForce 6200 AGP 8x video card

Got all my parts from the fine folk at Directron.com, with the exception of the video card, which I got from newegg.com. All told the price tag was just over $700.

The most notable part was definitely the Scythe CPU cooler. Check out this online review to see how big the sucker is. I was afraid it wouldn't stay on, but it did. It had been a while since I'd done the Arctic Silver thermal paste routine, but I didn't do too badly... only got a little bit where it ought not be.

Once the cooler was on the CPU, the next trick was getting it into the Antec case. The Antec includes an internal pipe system, ostensibly to cool off the internal components with the rear 120mm fan. There was no way the plastic pipe would fit with the Scythe Mine, so off it went. The video card is fanless, so it'll just have to make do with the cooling from the fans (the stock Antec fan, an additional Zalman fan mounted by the 3.5 drives, and the Scythe).

As I was connecting the front panel ports from the case to the Gigabyte mobo, I realized that it didn't have Firewire onboard. That was a bit of a surprise. Luckily the old PC getting retired had a FireWire card in it, so the cannibalization process began (and wouldn't end with just the FireWire card, either).

After everything was hooked up, I got my Ubuntu 6.06 (I hesitate to call it Breezy Badger) AMD64 live CD ready, and started up the power. Wow! It started! It always amazes me that I haven't crossed any cables or connected something backwards, and that the thing starts instead of melting into a slagheap.

And boy, the thing is QUIET. The two noisiest things are when a disc is spinning in the optical drive, and the access on the Seagate drive (it sounds like a hamster is bumping around inside the case). But definitely waaaaaay quieter than the old system.

I booted from the Ubuntu live CD just fine, so I decided to partition and install Ubuntu on 60GB of the drive, leaving 170GB or so for the Windows install. Again, all installed fine (with the exception of some issues with the 64-bit version of Xgl and compiz, resolved by adding some different repositories to sources.list). So I decided to get Windows running on the big partition... and that's where the problems began.

First problem: drive not recognized. Hm. Did some snooping, and guess what? My copy of Windows XP that I was going to install on this system, which is only at Service Pack 1, doesn't support SATA drives. Joy. The two options were loading the drivers from a floppy, or doing something called "slipstreaming," basically taking a Windows install CD, copying it, and then adding useful things like additional service packs, critical updates, and (in my case) drivers. I tried some of the online utilities and tutorials, burned 3 or 4 CDs, but I was obviously doing something wrong, as I couldn't get the slipstreamed discs to recognize the SATA drive.

So it was time for Option 2... ugh, floppies. I cannibalized the floppy drive from the old PC (hey, five years ago I was still using floppies on PC I guess, even though the iMac had done away with them), installed it into the Antec (even though it was beige and the Antec is black, ugh ugh), used the Gigabyte utilities on another floppy-burdened system to build a driver disk, and gave it another shot.

Lo and behold, all worked, and Windows installed. I immediately updated to SP2 and installed AVG anti-virus and ZoneAlarm firewall and Lavasoft Adaware anti-spyware software. It's Windows, after all. But, of course, installing Windows wiped out the original master boot record, so I couldn't boot into Ubuntu any more. Easiest recourse (after reading some of my other options) was just to reinstall Ubuntu.

So now, other than moving stuff from old Windows/Ubuntu machine to new Windows/Ubuntu machine, I'm pretty much done, other than just basking in all that speed and all that quiet.

Superb high resolution wallpapers (up to 2560x1600)

Gotta bookmark this site, so I'll blog it too so I can remember. Many quite-nice wallpaper pictures, conveniently sorted by screen size, etc.

read more | digg story

More on the 360's HD-DVD add-on drive

Hm, apparently a bit more info came out yesterday concerning the HD-DVD add-on drive for the 360. It connects through the USB 2.0 port... interesting. No word about HDMI or the image constraint token. The most interesting bit was pricing: the Microsoft dude said "it's going to be the cheapest HD-DVD player you can buy." Now, does that mean it's the cheapest you can buy if you already OWN a 360? Or it's the cheapest you can buy even if you need to go out and get a 360? If the latter, the add-on drive is going to be pretty darn cheap.

Microsoft: 360 HD-DVD drive will be cheapest - News at GameSpot

Ferdinando Matador

Just trying out VideoEgg. Recognize anyone?

Plasma is a girl's best friend?

Ars Technical posted a link to an article from Oprah's Oxygen cable channel, that claims "three-quarters of American women would prefer a plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace."

To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld: "Where? Are? These? Women?"

Plasma is a girl's best friend?

Running Photoshop with Wine

I installed Wine on my Ubuntu partition a couple days ago and was surprised how easy it was to get going (with Automatix help, of course). I was able to get at least one important application running (KidPix Deluxe 4) and want to try some others. I'll have to see if I can get Photoshop going... this article talks about how to do it and what the pitfalls are.

Philippine News -- Manila Standard Today -- Photoshop in Linux -- aug01_2006

Everyone say "Wii" on 10/2?

Oooh, Ars Technica has a news story on a slightly cryptic Nintendo press release that possibly hints at a 10/2 launch date for their Wii system. The only question is, if I buy it on 10/2, can I possibly stand keeping it in the box until Christmas for the kids?

Nintendo slyly hints at Wii release date

Ubuntu is bustin' out all over

All over my household at least. The next lucky computer was my work MacBook Pro. I screwed up the Parallels virtual install of Fedora Core 4 in a big way, so I decided to create an Ubuntu-based virtual machine this time. It booted from a 6.06 install CD image, seemed to install fine, but then the virtual machine froze when it rebooted. After Googling a bit, I realized I hadn't picked Debian Linux when I told it what kind of OS I was installing. Tried again, same problem. Googled a bit more. Aha, apparently there is a problem for some reason when giving the virtual machine more than 512MB of RAM. Dialed it down from 604 to 512, and bingo, it started up fine. I even used Automatix to install all kinds of stuff in the partition (and even had to do the same tricks to get Flash video playback to maintain audio sync). Working great. Yahoo! Or should that be, Ubuntu!

Insanity with Portal

Found this on Ars Technica... a video showing how an upcoming game from Valve called Portal will work. It is truly insane. I'm not sure I'd be able to think that quickly while playing what appears to be a first-person shooter. Oh, and this will be my first post with an embedded YouTube link. Wacky.



EDIT: the fine lads at Penny Arcade have posted a direct link to a 720p WMV HD version of the above clip. Warning, it's a 56 meg download. Use VLC to play it on a Mac if you are so oriented.


http://www.valvesoftware.com/ep2/teaser/
portal_teaser01_720p.wmv

Wow. I'm just stunned at the possibilities of this whatever-it-is.

Hopefully I won't hear my next computer

Although I should build my next PC to keep my geek cred high, I think instead I'll buy a computer from these guys. My current Shuttle system is incredibly noisy, particularly when it starts working away on things. The idea of a silent PC is wonderful. And hey, it's the greatest machine John Dvorak has ever owned!

Quiet Computers - End PC Noise

Various Ubuntu nits to pick

Well, I got in a new GeForce card with DVI and my video quality, to no one's surprised, is improved. No need to twiddle with gamma settings and the like; everything looks correct.

The problems I'm having are of the more-mundane variety. Dumb example: I've finally gotten into the world of digg and the wacky videos that people find. One wacky video showed a pair of quick-change artists that appeared on America's Got Talent (a show I refuse to watch in the same way I refuse to watch American Idol). Unfortunately, when I play it from YouTube under Ubuntu, the sound goes out of sync.

Of course, if I Google "ubuntu youtube sound" I uncover various suggestions and workarounds, and the ultimate culprit isn't really Ubuntu but the Linux implementation of the Flash plug-in. And I guess that's part and parcel of running Linux... having to take care of the fit and finish stuff yourself. It's just, well, annoying.

Edit: for my own records, here is a page that discusses how to fix the asynch sound under Ubuntu. Easy enough to follow... if you've been playing with command line stuff for a few years now like I have. For everyone else, they'll say "now tell me again why you aren't using Windows or MacOS?"

Edit #2: that page did indeed work, after I tried searching for just "firefox" rather than "mozilla-firefox" preferences. Next hurdle is trying to print. I've managed to get a single page to print out one time to the Color LaserJet 1500L I have hooked to my Ubuntu machine. In true Washingtonian fashion, I am throwing money at the problem and I bought an HP JetDirect print server; we'll see if that makes things any easier.

Rumor alert: HDMI port on new 360s. Early adopters look nervous

I'm blogging this because (a) I'm interested in getting a 360, (b) ever since Microsoft claimed they were going to provide HD-DVD playback as an extra add-on, I wondered how they were going to swing that since the 360 didn't have an HDMI port, (c) if they really are adding a HDMI port, I'd want one of those, and (c) I wanted to check out the Blogger button in the Firefox extension I just added.

Opposable Thumbs: Rumor alert: HDMI port on new 360s. Early adopters look nervous

Macs and anti-virus software -- no need

In the process of researching a question about anti-virus software for Macs for TC the brand-new Mac user, I turned up this excellent post on the MacFixIt forums of why anti-virus software for Macs actually does do more harm than good.

Macs, viruses, and anti-virus software

Dual booting fun

No, not my MacBook Pro. I'd been hearing a lot about a new bunch of eye candy called xgl that runs under Linux. (Actually, I first heard about it on This Week in Tech.) I wanted to check it out but knew that doing so under Parallels on the MacBook Pro wouldn't be fast enough. So, I decided to get back into the world of dual-booting, by setting up one of my PCs to dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux. This went much MUCH easier than I expected. Kinda.

Friday night, I did some research. Turns out that there's a SystemRescueCD that will let you resize NTFS partitions. I was only using about 40 GB of my 160 GB drive, so I booted from the System Rescue CD and ran QtParted and carved off a 30 GB partition for installing Ubuntu 6.06. (This was guided by a good illustrated tutorial on how to dual-boot Windows and Linux, although the latter parts of the tutorial deal with older versions of Ubuntu and thus don't line up with the current installation procedure...)

Snag #1: the Ubuntu installer didn't seem to like the partition without it being formatted first. So I rebooted the SystemRescueCD, broke up the new 30GB of free space into a "/" and a "swap" partition, and reformatted them as ext3 and linux-swap. Restarted with the Ubuntu install disc, used the "manual partition" option, picked the appropriate partitions and deselected the others, and install went smoothly (it even set up my dual-boot options for me automatically). This took about 2 hours in all... stayed up a smidge too late Friday night.

Saturday, I consulted this excellent tutorial on getting Ubuntu all spiffied up, including installing drivers, automatix, and xgl. Snag #2: the instructions for installing the ATI drivers didn't work for me. Did some more searches and found out there were problems with my ATI card (a Radeon 9000 Pro). Found the workarounds (it involved replacing some library, but this is all moot by the way as you'll see...), did them, and I was back on track.

I did all the fun stuff for getting xgl running and... nothing. No cool graphics, certainly, and some weird bug where the main menu was wiped out. I then started checking around, and it appeared that my dumb old Radeon card just wasn't going to work with xgl. Grr, how annoying. That all took me probably a couple more hours off and on on Saturday.

Sunday I went to Staples to get a big honking uninterruptible power supply to power my VoIP setup if we have another tree take out a transformer as happened on the Fourth of July (thereby losing power for 12 hours). Lo and behold, they had a GeForce 5500 on clearance for $60. I was sure that the answer to my woes was to go nVidia rather than ATI--their Linux drivers are just plain better. I was sure I could get it cheaper online, but there it was, and it was only $60. So I got it. Darn spur-of-the-moment decisions.

About 9PM I deinstalled all the ATI crap out of Windows, and installed the new card and Nvidia drivers. Snag #4: stupid me bought a card with no DVI output. I can't believe they still sell cards with only VGA outputs! Well, they do at stupid old Staples, anyway. Got a VGA cable and connected it to my display. Got WinXP up and running, then tried to get the Ubuntu install I'd already done working with the Nvidia card. I came close but didn't quite get there, so I just reformatted those partitions and reinstalled from the Ubuntu CD. Redid all the steps for getting Ubuntu spiffified, did all the xgl stuff again, rebooted and picked the xgl session (all told taking another couple hours, I'm getting good at this Linux thing, lemme tell ya) and...

WOW! Cool eye candy. Wavey windows, cube-transition like OS X when going from desktop to desktop, dialing up or down a window's transparency with the mouse wheel. Neat stuff, and that's just the default settings... I haven't even gotten into the program that lets you adjust these options (I think it's called compiz).

So now I'll probably spend another $40 to get a video card WITH DVI output, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the results, and that it's a LOT easier to get a dual-boot machine setup than it used to be. Believe me, if the above doesn't sound easy, trust me, it is relative to what it used to be like.

10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

Found this linked to from this week's This Week in Tech. Interesting commentary on why they feel both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are doomed. Interestingly, this weekend I was able to see Blu-Ray on a real nice Sony rear-projection screen at the local Sony Style store. The clip from Chicken Little was pretty awesome. The clip from Ultraviolet was less so. Then I went to the Best Buy across the street and saw their HD-DVD player hooked up to some crappy $2K Westinghouse screen. Not sure if it was the Westinghouse screen or the poor quality of the clips, but it was truly underwhelming. Cinderella Man in particular looked downright poor.

10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

HD-DVD? Blu-Ray? How about a nice Oppo?

Now, I'm linking below to the good old Digital Bits and their "My Two Cents" daily posting, so after a day or two you'll have to scroll down or follow the link for older postings. But today they looked at the first lineup of Blu-Ray discs and the Samsung player, and they were pretty unimpressed. They noticed problems when outputting 1080i instead of 720p, and also noticed a slight stuttering during playback which sure sounds familiar... I could accept it with my home-grown MythTV box, but not with a $1000 brand-spanking-new Blu-Ray HD player, that's for sure. They also said that The Fifth Element--certainly a movie that has and should be used as a benchmark--looked decidedly un-HD. They said the Superbit DVD, played through a good upscaling player like the Oppo 970HD, compared quite favorably to the Blu-Ray disc. Hm, $1000 for a Blu-Ray player, or $150 for an Oppo? Hm.....

The Digital Bits - We Know DVD!#mytwocents

Opera browser for DS here soon?

Oooh, what a cool thing to run on my new DS Lite... the Opera browser. Only $33 but so far only a Japanese date. Maybe my first foray into the import market?

Opposable Thumbs: Opera browser for DS given date, price for Japanese release

Some pretty cool Parallels results

I've been playing with the Parallels virtualization software on my MacBook Pro and finally had a chance to put it to a real test. Well, I'm not sure how good a test it really was, but it was a test nonetheless.

http://www.parallels.com/

OK, here's the rundown: MacBook Pro with a dual-core 2GHz Intel processor, against my three-year-old work Alienware with dual-1.7GHz Athlon processors, against my work PowerMac G5 with dual-2.5GHz PowerPC processors.

The MacBook is running Parallels, which has Fedora Core 4 installed under it as a virtual machine. (BTW, after some searching, I found an xorg.conf file on the Parallels forum that allowed me to run in the MacBook Pro's native resolution of 1440x900 (something like that)). The G5 is running 10.4.3, and the Alienware is running XP.

On each setup, I installed the open-source 3D program called Blender, as well as Python.

http://www.blender.org/
http://www.python.org/

I used a Python script I found online that allows you to import molecular model data in the PDB format. I of course imported a stretch of DNA...

http://www.malte-reimold.de/blender/pdb2blend.html

I stopped timing when it was done converting/importing. And the results? Pretty amazing.

G5 dual 2.5 GHz: 8 min
Dual Athlon 1.7 GHz: 6 min
Dual-core Intel 2 GHz: 2 min!!!

That's running IN A WINDOW while inside of OS X! Now, other performance wasn't that great, but I know one thing... I'm going to need to get a faster PC at work!

Aronofsky does Ogami? No way!

So I'm viewing my home page to make sure some new movie reviews appeared correctly, and I notice a random quote at the bottom of the page I don't remember, from some character named "Tappy Tibbons." I search for the name, and up pops Requiem for a Dream and I say oh yeah. Then I decide to see what Darren Aronofsky (director of said movie) is up to nowadays... and what's top of his list due for completion in 2008? A live action version of Lone Wolf and Cub! Now, no one's listed as being in it at this point, but man, that could be quite quite cool. Not to take anything away from the live-action versions that have already been done, but an updated version, maybe a bit Westernized, could be awesome. Must find out more info about this project...

Lone Wolf and Cub at IMDB

The answer is no no no no no and no.

The question? "Should three-year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms?" Hell, if I have anything to say about it, my kids won't have TVs in their bedrooms when they're teenagers. Of course by then they'll have their neural implants so it'll be harder to control. But still, c'mon parents, get a little backbone for crying out loud. The best way to monitor what they're watching is to have the TV set in a public location, not in their room. Same goes for the Internet.

Should three-year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms?

Two for the price of one?

Engadget reports that the Nintendo Wii will come in at a street price of $250 or less. Let's see, $250 for the Wii, $400 for the Xbox 360 deluxe version, and you're just $50 over the price of the PS3. Yep, I'm there.

Wii pricing: $250 or less - Engadget

"A Disgrace"

Strong words for the first HD-DVD player to hit the streets, but that's what Charlie White calls it in his review. About the only favorable thing he had to say is that the image quality was remarkable. Everything else was not good: it was ugly, big, loud, took something like 40 seconds to start up or load a DVD, upsampling of standard-def DVDs was mediocre, HDMI problems cropped up everywhere... yeah, I guess that all might total up to "a disgrace."

Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD Player

HD-DVD on Xbox 360 -- what about HDCP?

More E3 news about Microsoft's external HD-DVD add-on player to the Xbox 360. I don't believe any price was announced, nor a firm release date beyond "before Christmas 2006," but one thing that came out is that it apparently connects via USB to the 360. It's not that USB 2.0 can't handle the data--it can--but more that I don't believe it's possible to implement HDCP protection over USB. And if you can't protect the player's output via HDCP, a disc has the option of falling back to standard-definition resolutions. And you're then in the same stinky boat as the purchasers of the non-HDMI version of the PS3 mentioned in a previous post.

I've just realized that (a) the previous paragraph is totally incomprehensible to most consumers who just want to play some friggin' games and DVDs, and (b) I barely have a grasp on the issues involved and I kind of do this for a living. I think both these thiings indicate that Hollywood have shot themselves in the foot with their futile attempt at locking down their HD content. They've made it so annoying to navigate the minefield of copy protection that it's more of a disincentive to purchase the new format than the promise of HD playback from a disc.

Budget PS3 & Xbox 360 HD DVD accessory run into ICT issues - CD Freaks.com

$500 PS3 to lack HDMI, WiFi, card reader - Engadget

Wow, I go off to Rome for a few days and I completely miss all the E3 announcements, including this biggie from Sony. So the PS3 is pulling an Xbox 360, where they have a lower-priced model (although as Engadget points out, it's hard to call a $500 console "lower-priced"... maybe less highly priced?), and a higher-end model. Everyone picked up on the 20GB vs 60GB hard drive, but others like Engadget picked up on some other big differences. That lack of HDMI will really bite those people if studios decide to implement downsampling their movies over analog connections, as previously discussed in this here blog.

$500 PS3 to lack HDMI, WiFi, card reader - Engadget

Ciao from Roma

Posting to my blog from Rome since I can, courtesy of a public wifi zone provided by the city of Rome (SPQR, baby) called Uniwifi and a cafe in the Campo de Fiore called Magnolia. Speed is very good, not good enough to stream The Daily Show from my MythTV backend but that's probably more due to my lame-o upstream bandwidth.

Vonage VoIP via PSP or DS?

Just saw this on Engadget while sitting in the airport waiting to take off to Rome. It would be sooooo cool to be able to make phone calls on my DS back home while I was there... I'd be able to bring a lot less stuff (then again, if I left my Mac at home, I couldn't be blogging...)

Engadget article on Vonage and DS and PSP

Breaking HDCP

Heard this mentioned on This Week in Tech, and finally got around to reading it. Ed Felten is discussing how easy it's going to be to break HDCP, which is how high-def digital signals are supposed to be copy protected on its way to your monitor in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Apparently, the HDCP designers (due to some design restrictions) used too-simple math to combine the keys, which in turn will make it easy to brute-force solve the private key identities. Or something like that. Anyhow, maybe I'll buy a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player once an offshore hack deals with the copy protection... it looks very likely to happen given this article.

Freedom to Tinker Blog Archive Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes

Why Blu-ray and HD-DVD could easily fail

Found this linked to by Penny Arcade of all places. It's a CNET discussion of HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, and the linked article discusses the infamous ability to downsample your disc if it's not connected to a HDCP-compliant TV set.

In some of the discussion as to why this isn't such a bad thing (according to the studios, of course), they have this bullet point: "Proponents of downconversion argue that people have a hard time telling the difference between downconverted and true HD resolutions in the first place."

If that is true, and I actually don't doubt that it is true, this does not bode well for HD content on disc. If people can't tell the difference between 540p and 720p or 1080i, then I'll bet they can't tell the difference between the DVDs they have right now. And if they can't tell the difference, why would they want to go out and replace their DVD library with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs?

Blu-ray and HD-DVD: crippled HD analog output option - Alpha Blog - alpha.cnet.com

Doughnut burger

I saw this on a Boondocks episode and thought they'd made it up. No, apparently there is a real food item that is created by making a standard bacon cheeseburger but then using a Krispy Kreme doughnut for a bun. And there's even a Snopes.com page concerning the burger, as it's apparently called a "Luther Burger" after the late Luther Vandross. This is all fascinating, and no, I don't plan on eating one.

ESPN.com - MLB - We're lovin' it: Minor league team's doughnut burger

One hour, seventeen minutes, thirty seconds

Ran the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler today and decided to try to run it in less than 8-minute miles. Managed to do so. Yay. I averaged about a 7:45, slowest mile was an 8:05, last mile was 7:20. I'm not sure I could have run it any faster. By the way, my 1:17:30 would have gotten me a first place finish... in the 70-74 men's category. Yipes.

ABC News: Fast-Food Ice Dirtier Than Toilet Water

A seventh-grader's science project... good hypothesis, good testing. Poor reporting in the ABC article.... only a particular strain of E.coli results in the illness outbreaks mentioned, and it's unlikely that the strain found in the fast-food ice was the virulent one. Nevertheless, it's quite gross.

ABC News: Fast-Food Ice Dirtier Than Toilet Water

Q - Windows emulation on Intel Macs

Hard on the heels of the successful installation of Windows XP on an Intel iMac comes this new project called Q. You create a virtual drive on your Intel Mac and install Windows (or hopefully whatever flavor of Linux you want) on it. Start it up and you've got Windows in a window. Yes, this is basically Virtual PC, but open-source and free. Apparently they are working on "virtualization mode," which would run the programs directly with the Intel CPU and not require any emulation. But even without that it reportedly runs pretty well.

This guy posted a brief description of Q and how to set it up. Sounds like I'll have to give that a shot if/when I get a MacBook Pro.

How to Run Windows on an Intel Mac with Q

Grade school memories

With the kids both in grade school, I tried to think back about the things I could remember from my early grade school days. It's not much, lemme tell ya.

* I remember my folding mat I used for naptime in kindergarten
* I remember going to the library next to Norman School and checking out books on UFOs from noted kook George Adamski
* I remember Ms. Zook
* I remember not being able to tie my shoes

Interestingly, all that is from kindergarten, and I think primarily from my first half of kindergarten, which was on the Kansas side. I did the second half of my kindergarten on the Missouri side and it was apparently far less memorable. To me anyway. Don't remember much about first through fourth either. I remember answering some math problem correctly. I remember singing "The 12 Days of Christmas" (yes, in its entirety) in front of some class. I remember Flutophone lessons. I think in fourth grade I remember a girl named Janatha. Oh, and I remember actually missing a word in a spelling test, when I used the British spelling of the word "theater." I was quite mad.

Hm, all this talk is dislodging more memories. I recall one teacher's punishment of drawing a circle on the blackboard and making the person put their nose up against it. I remember the excitement of being chosen to go clean the erasers on some strange eraser-cleaning thing in the basement.

Oops, that's it. No more memories until I hit Bryant and fifth grade.

PS3 in November 06

Sony finally fesses up that they won't be able to make their originally-planned Spring 06 release of the PS3. Now, however, they're claiming an early November release, worldwide (originally it was going to be a Spring release in Japan and Fall release in the U.S.). We'll see if they can do a better job of getting units into stores than Microsoft did with the 360 launch (which you STILL can't find in any quantity in a store).

The other interesting note about the announcement is that it will require the hard drive, and something about Linux being on there. This part is vague but I'll bet it made Linux hackers out there start salivating.

Next Generation - Kutaragi's 10 PlayStation Points

Too good to be true? Sony won't downrez Blu-Ray movies

One of the problems with the upcoming high-def disc formats is everyone's assumption that they won't play the full resolution through analog component connections, thereby requiring existing HDTV owners to either have a HDMI connector, or to get a new TV.

Turns out that the decision to downrez a movie is up to the studio that's authoring the disc... and one of the more influential studios has supposedly claimed that they won't be doing that with their movies. Sony, that is... the ones pushing Blu-Ray. If this is really true, and if other studios releasing on Blu-Ray follow suit, and if Sony can get the friggin' PS3 out the door at a decent price, that just might be enough to tip the scales toward Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Interesting. IF true. I'm highly skeptical.

Sony decides against downsampling on analog HDTV

Apple's newest stuff -- Ars's take

A nice "day-after" summary of Apple's latest product announcements. People are yelping about the new Mac minis having integrated video, but if that integrated video can really handle playback of HD material, then Apple has a shot of turning the mini into a nice, relatively cheap frontend.

I particularly liked the comments about the new iPod HiFi, particularly after Jobs's comments that he is an audiophile and that he is getting rid of his stereo. What a huckster. Anyhow, another audiophile says that the iPod HiFi could actually be capable of good-sounding playback... "in which case it'd be a complete waste to play your average iTunes-store-sourced lo-rez lossy-compressed MP3 through it." Right on. I was listening to my iTunes-store-sourced version of "Baba O'Riley" yesterday and man, those cymbals were swooshing all over the place. Sounded bad.

Infinite Loop: The day after: iPod HiFi and Intel Mac mini

Darren McGavin RIP

I'm old enough to have seen the original Night Stalker when it first showed as a made-for-TV movie and then as a short TV series. It starred Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, a reporter who searches for all kinds of weird phenomena. It was a great movie and series, and it was of course a huge influence for the creators of one of my other favorite series, The X-Files. Others might be familiar with McGavin with his role as the father in A Christmas Story.

He died of natural causes yesterday at age 83. Rest in peace, Carl Kolchak.

"Night Stalker," "Christmas Story" Star Dies - Yahoo! News

Boycott Blu-Ray and HD-DVD

So says Mike Evangelist (creator of various DVD authoring programs) and I am quite inclined to agree with him. Yes, the movie studios would like to make it as inconvenient as possible to watch their new HD disc formats (if you don't have a HDCP-compliant HDTV or computer monitor, a HDCP-compliant player, and a HDCP-compliant computer/video card, you are SOL), while still charging us yet again as we buy yet another version of Lord of the Rings and Matrix and Star Wars.

Let's put it this way: I'll boycott until AACS is cracked. I still have my DeCSS t-shirt that is illegal under the DMCA: hopefully DVD Jon is working on a DeAACS...


The HD boycott begins now

Put your CD on your iPod, break the law.

At least according to the RIAA, who, along with the MPAA, are trying to make their customers into thieving criminals rather than happy consumers.

Apparently, the RIAA does NOT consider copying a CD that you've purchased onto your MP3 player to be a "fair use" in the legal sense of the term. They merely consider it a temporarily authorized copy... and it's only "authorized" because they really have no way of stopping you. If they had a way, you can be sure they would not allow you to do so without charging you for that privilege.

Unreal. I think if the RIAA and MPAA could come up with a way of charging people for THINKING about a song or a movie clip, they would do so.

EFF: DeepLinks

Finally found a pic of my first computer

I'd forgotten that I was given this toy when I was a wee lad. It was basically my first computer. A very goofy computer, but my first computer nonetheless. Finally entered the magic words in Google ("toy computer plastic wire") which led me to one picture, which led me to this better picture. Behold! The Digi-Comp1!

Digicomp-Kit-1963

The Great HDCP Fiasco

More consumer-hostile fallout from the upcoming high-definition disc wars. Regardless of whether you're in the Blu-Ray or the HD-DVD camp, you are going to be screwed when it comes to watching your discs on your computer. Not only will it require Windows Vista (ick) and a HDCP-compliant monitor (which virtually no one has), but it will also require a HDCP-compliant video card. And Firing Squad reports that NONE of the current shipping ATI or Nvidia cards will work. They all support HDCP, but none of them actually have the key on the card that allow them to tell the monitor it's OK to display the HD video.

Add that to the recent cable card news that only certain manufacturers will be able to make/sell cable-card-ready systems, and you're basically talking about a business plan that makes it as difficult as possible for its customers to purchase a working product. Hollywood is slitting its own throat.

The Great HDCP Fiasco

If you turn me up...

Not sure if this link requires registration, but it's a review of the all HD (well, pretty much all HD) Super Bowl XL. It's favorable overall, with one glaring exception, which we all noticed at the time. Namely, the audio for the Rolling Stones. It was so bad over HD that I switched back to SD (ick) for a while just to see if it was a Dolby 5.1 problem. Basically, it was just plain horrible, in either mode of audio. You want the Stones to be loud, but you could barely hear them. Ironic that Sir Mick had a bazillion audio monitors all around the tongue-shaped stage, but we couldn't hear jack. Someone's head should have rolled.

Super Bowl XL Review

Sorry, no more questions for the President.

We had a very very fortunate opportunity to take a tour of the West Wing--yes, the real one, not the set of the soon-to-be-defunct series. The only place we were allowed to take pictures was in the press conference room. So we all clambored behind the podium for our turn. The room is amazingly smaller than it seems on TV. Maybe Anna will be standing behind the podium for real taking questions one day... hopefully as President and not as Press Secretary, but I'd be proud of either...

Keith Olbermann rips Bill O'Reilly a new one

Excellent abuse of the egomaniacal Bill O'Reilly by MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann. Love it love it love it.

onegoodmove: Olbermann Skewers O'Reilly, Again

Oscar Noms are out

Interesting little tidbits about this year's Oscar nominations...

Glad to see Howl's Moving Castle and Curse of the Were-Rabbit nominated for Best Animated Feature, and very glad to NOT see Chicken Little or any other dreck in that category.

In Best Special Effects, a BIG-TIME dis to Lucas! Revenge of the Sith only gets a makeup nod, nothing for special effects! Whoa.

The Best Documentary Feature is going to be a tough one, with Enron and Murderball up against those insidious penguins.

And for the first time in recent memory, every director of the nominated films for Best Picture was also nominated for Best Director. Usually one director gets dissed for some reason; this year, everyone's in.

Nominations List | 78th Annual Academy Awards | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Oh No! It's DEV2.O!

Thanks to Mark R. for tipping me off about this... this... I don't even know what to call this.


See, kiddies, once upon a time long long ago (like 1979 or so), there was a musical group called DEVO. I remember seeing them on Saturday Night Live and wondering what the heck was going on. Anyhow, I don't think they were ever an enormous success, but they certainly had a few hits, including a cover of The Stones' "Satisfaction," and everyone's favorite, "Whip It." Actually, my favorite was "Come Back Jonee," but I digress.

Anyhow, the band went their separate ways and other projects--Mark Mothersbaugh, for instance, started doing scores for things like "Pee Wee's Playhouse" and "Rugrats." Time passed.

But now, we have DEV2.O. Apparently Gerald Casale (another founding member of DEVO) took part in this. It's a bunch of kids kind of doing DEVO songs. I say "kinda" because (a) it's a bunch of kids, and (b) it's Disney. So you're certainly not going to see a 12-year-old singing about how he/she can't get no satisfaction. But even barring that, they've also gutted at least two other DEVO songs. In "Freedom of Choice," there should be a line about "Freedom _from_ choice, is what you want." Nope, not in the Disney Kidz Bop version. Similarly, in "Beautiful World," all traces of irony have been erased: the line "Not me" is not to be found. Just a bit too nihilistic I guess.

Anyhow, at least they found the same red plastic flowerpots.

Walt Disney Records - Devo 2.0

HD DVD and Blu-ray content to be degraded for analog displays

Here's a rundown of how HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will degrade their HD signals when output to an analog HDTV. This was known all along but some of the details are slightly new... it'll downgrade to 960x540 instead of 480 lines, plus it will reportedly then upsample the downgraded image back up to 1280x720. That last move is just dumb enough to be true, sadly enough.

HD DVD and Blu-ray content to be degraded for analog displays

Sandvox

I listened to the Steve Jobs webcast and was interested in their iWeb addition to their iLife package. The only problem is that their iLife stuff is so closely tied to stupid old .Mac, which costs $100/year, which is a lot for hosting.

So, lo and behold, Karelia Software (of Watson fame) has come out with something called Sandvox. Looks like it's similar enough to iWeb, but not locked so closely to .Mac, and will be extensible. Interesting. Going to go DL the beta now...

Introducing Sandvox | Karelia Software

HD Format War -- so much for the neutral third-party

Way back, about six months ago when it became clear that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray weren't going to come to an agreement to merge their formats, Samsung said, "hey, that's OK, we're making a dual-format player that will play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray." Sounded good to me. As it turned out, a little too good... now, Sammy sez that licensing agreements prohibit them (or anyone else, I assume) from making a dual-format player. How convenient for consumers. Not.

Samsung sez combo HD DVD/Blu-ray player is a no go? - Engadget

TerraPass

I saw this in a little ad on one of my leftie pinko commie liberal blogs I like to read. Interesting idea. You have their website estimate how much CO2 your car emits per year, then you pay for a "terrapass." Your payment is then used to fund renewable energy of various forms so that it offsets the CO2 your car emits. It's not too expensive and you get a nice sticker to put in your car. Hmm.

TerraPass website

A DISincentive for buying a Xbox 360

After some initial denials by various Microsoft shills, Bill Gates has confirmed that an HD-DVD drive is coming for the Xbox 360 sometime in 2006. But, and these are some big buts, (a) it will be external, (b) it will apparently only be used for movies and not games, (c) no one has an idea on how it will actually connect to the Xbox 360.

Now I'll grant you that this isn't as big a dumb move as it could have been. If the external drive HAD been announced as being used for games, Microsoft would have split the game developers even more than they did when they announced the no-drive Core 360 in addition to the "real" 360. Having said that, wouldn't it have made more sense to put a HD-DVD drive in the thing to begin with? I just shake my head in puzzlement and disdain.

Opposable Thumbs: Bill Gates puts rumors to rest and admits to an external 360 HD-DVD drive in '06

Water Cooled Xbox 360

With all the reports of Xbox 360s overheating, it was bound to happen sometime... an article on how to convert your Xbox 360 to a watercooled system. They got a pretty hefty 50 degree F drop in CPU temperature with the system, but given my skill with a set of tools, I'd be likely to turn things into a soggy and expensive mess. Pretty cool, though.

[H]ard|OCP - Water Cooled Xbox 360