Kevin's Musings

We went to see the movie Sunshine which is in limited US release. Sunshine is Sci-fi about movie about taking a trip to our sun which is dieing in order to place a huge bomb on it to “jump start it”. It is a really beautiful movie that is often believable. Most of the story is really intriguing and well done, but sadly it isn’t perfect. It is mostly 2001, sometimes Aliens (without an “Alien”, well, not really). It does the 2001 parts really right. I thought the scary part (toward the end) could have just been removed and somehow rewritten, but I did enjoy it – it was just one of those movies where I said to myself “if they had just done X it would have been perfect” – oh well 🙂

On Friday after the movie, we went down to Scholastic (in Soho?) to see Harry Potter pre-launch festivities. People are (obviously) really excited about the new book. We saw the latest movie and enjoyed it, I have read the first four books, but these people are fanatics. Fun, though.

On Saturday we got caught up on the show Ice Road Truckers (History Channel), which is pretty interesting and I played some Call of Duty 2 on the 360. I played the first few missions on “Veteran” difficult which proved to be a touch too frustrating. After dropping the difficulty down to “Regular” I enjoyed the game a lot more. Went back and got a few more achievements in Crackdown (again, on the 360). I also got to the 8th and final set of songs on GH2 on Hard, and they are pretty hard

We’re continuing to watch John From Cincinnati on HBO – which is getting (continuing to be?) very bizarre. The missus likens it to Twin Peaks, which is probably pretty appropriate. We are enjoying it but have no idea where it is going (well, a few ideas, but…).

Sorry, I know E3 is now old news — I started this post a week or two again and didn’t get it finished… 

I’ve been following the 2007 E3 coverage via television, podcasts, rss feeds, etc. and I have two things to say… the first is that G4 did a terrible job of covering the various press conferences, especially Microsoft – they cut to commercials at completely inappropriate times. Their timing improved for the Nintendo and even more for the Sony talk but they did a terrible job at the Microsoft talk. Oh well.

It seems that all three (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo) are pushing more to show 2007 coming games than “future” coming games, which is nice. It seems to me that Sony had the best presentation but there were really only maybe three or four games that really grabbed my attention: Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Killzone 2, and possibly Little Big Planet and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

The 360, on the other hand, has a bunch of interesting looking games coming out: Bioshock (really looking forward to this one), Halo 3,  Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, Rock Band, Guitar Hero 3, and maybe even Scene It. To be fair, several of those games are coming out for the PS3 either at the same time or eventually, but, I have a 360 and don’t have a PS3 – it continues to be there isn’t anything coming out on the PS3 that entices me to get one.

The Wii, on the other hand, is getting Super Mario Galaxy and already has the new Zelda game… I am still on the fence for Wii, I suppose I could get one, play Zelda and Mario, then sell it and make somebody’s holiday (I have heard they will continue to be difficult to get through the 2007 Christmas season, but I have some confidence I would be able to get one if I decided to).

I watched the movie Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon this weekend. It is a very meta look at horror movies, a fake documentary following a killer (think Jason, Fredy, Chuckie, etc.). It was fun – not for everybody, but if you enjoy movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc. you’ll probably get a kick out of it. It is a nice combination of horror and comedy.

A while back (days after getting my TomTom One GPS) I picked up a Garmin c330 GPS at a yard sale – the c330 was pretty bare, just a mounting bracket and the GPS itself – no charger, etc. which is why the guy said he was selling it (he had lost the other bits) – he also stated it didn’t keep a very good charge when he was using it. Anyway, I bought it for cheap to play with it. It charges fine over USB, but he was right – it doesn’t hold a charge for very long, after less then about 90 minutes before shuts off. To combat that problem, I found a website where I can order a replacement battery for about $15 which should run the unit for 8+ hours per charge. Having used both the c330 and the TomTom One, I find that they are both decent units but I would say I prefer the TomTom user interface in pretty much every way – I am glad I bought the TomTom One.

I did want to try to find a use for the c330 other than just as a “backup GPS” for travel or whatever… so I decided I would try to mount it on my bicycle. After trying various methods and techniques I found a method that seems to work quite well. I’ll provide pictures and a description in the near future, but I’ll just say now that it is neat being able to just ride around and when I am done just saying “Navigate to Home” and I don’t have to worry about getting lost – I can explore the surrounding neighborhoods without any worry 🙂 Yes, it is silly, but hey… For those who might ask, I did look for a bike mount for this GPS, but didn’t find anything that seemed to work better than what I jury rigged myself (yes, it is definitely jury rigged). While riding I did get a couple comments along the line of “Wow! You have a GPS on you’be bike?? That is so cool!” Maybe I’ll start a new trend.

Had a pretty nice weekend – started it off late Friday afternoon with some relaxing time in Central park listening to part of an audiobook (The Terror by Dan Simmons). Went swimming with the missus. Started playing Halo2 again (I don’t think I finished it the first time, though – that was a long time ago – playing it on the 360 this time). Started the books Blaze by Stephen King and The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. On Saturday I went for a bike ride around New Rochelle (about 5 miles) and watched the movies Taxidermia (a very, very bizarre Hungarian movie – I won’t even try to describe it) and The Devil’s Playground (about “Amish teenagers experience and embrace the modern world as a rite-of-passage before deciding which life they will choose”). On Sunday we watched Deliver us From Evil (about an Irish man who was a Catholic Priest in California in the 70s and 80s who abused a bunch of kids and how the Catholic church essentially covered it up) and went to a BBQ at my bosses place and met lots of great people – I am pretty sure we were the only Americans there – always fun to meet people from other cultures.

The restoration of my desktop PC is now pretty much complete. I hit a few snags restoring files using JungleDisk (which I think I mentioned recently) – it would occasionally give some odd errors which slowed things down a bit. I have reported this issues to the JungleDisk support staff and I hope this will be solved soon — I really do hope so because I like their product. Oh well, it’s done now. I have most of the software reinstalled so everything is back to useful again.

Nothing major planned for the week, probably just go watch the fireworks from Roosevelt Island.

One more piece of software to recommend, TeraCopy. Handy for copying large files or large sets of files around. Especially nice is the ability to pause and resume the copy plus it has the ability to test after the copy is complete. I tried this once and fell in love immediately. Also, if a copy fails it won’t kill the entire copy, it just notes it so you can check it out afterward.

On to the tragedy… I came home tonight and everything on my desktop machine looked hunky-dorey. Vista wanted an update (no surprise) so I let it go at it. About 20 minutes later, the missus comes in and mentions “the computer is beeping”. I put down the GH2 controller (I have almost 3 sets complete in Expert! woot!) and come to investigate. Yup, beeping. Checking to see what is beeping I learn that it is the main hard drive (C: drive). DOH! It has, indeed, crashed. The drive is a 3.5 year old Maxtor, 2.5 years out of warranty – now the system doesn’t recognize the drive, it just makes odd beeping and other noises. Oh well. Moved a drive from a machine I wasn’t using and reinstalled Vista (Yes, Matt, I know I can install Linux – blah blah – it still would have crashed, most likely). I have the absolute worst luck with hard drives, probably because I leave my machines on 24×7? Anyway, all my running drives are now Seagates with 5 year warranties and the drives are about 1 year old, so hopefully I’ll get a few more years on those. Luckily all the “critical” data was backed up. I don’t recall if I mentioned before, but I started using JungleDisk and am pretty fond of it – worth checking out if you are looking at online backup solutions.

For what it’s worth, I did consider (for a few minutes, while trying to hunt down my Vista install disc) just going out and getting a Mac and being done with Windows. I don’t blame Vista for the drive crash, but…

I recently came across two very nifty pieces of free software. The first is Launchy. Launchy tries to do (a fraction) of what (Mac) programs like Quicksilver do (link here, in case you have a Mac) which is to make launching programs faster – at any time press Alt-Space then start typing what you want to launch. So, if you want Firefox, press Alt-Space then start typing “f..i..r…e….” until it matches Firefox. It has some level of learning so even if you had to type “fire” the first time, next time you probably just have to type “fi” or even just “f”. Note: you don’t see the program you want just wait a second and see if it offers the desired program in a drop-down list, then select it from the list. This will work for programs on your Start menu, common web site, etc. It also supports plug-ins so it can be a calculator or many more things. Neat stuff.

The second is PicLens which is a Firefox plug-in that helps with viewing images in full screen. It works with “Media RSS” that a page can link to. Once you have the plug-in installed image thumbnails (on many sites) will have a little “play button” (>) on them. Click the “play button” and you will be switched to a full-screen mode to view the full size images in a slideshow. After you are done looking at the images just press Esc and you will be back to the previous page. This works with Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Picasa Web Albums, and others.

I finally obtained the elusive five stars on Institutionalized on Medium (on Guitar Hero II). I think my primary issue was a mental block on part of the song – once I overcame the block the five star wasn’t all thaaaaat hard. I’ve even finished almost two sets on Expert but Psychobilly Freakout still eludes me on hard – oh well. The missus has finished medium and is now working to improve her medium scores and has even finished a few songs on hard. We’re just crazy Guitar Heroes.

Spent the day Friday and the American Museum of Natural History, which was fun. Then we saw Evan Almighty which was a lot of fun – it’s cheesy at times but is a nice, family friendly story with a good message – we think we enjoyed it even more the Bruce Almighty.

Since they (finally!) released Twin Peaks Season 2 on DVD, I’ve been watching Twin Peaks during my commutes. Start to finish, I watched the pilot, all 29 episodes, and now I am watching the Movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The show really held up nicely – I really enjoyed it. I watched a fair bit of it when it first aired (while I was in college), I watched it on VHS (I had the complete set of tapes), and am now happy to have the complete set on DVD. The quality quite good (much better than VHS). Of course it is all in 4:3 aspect ratio, but that is to be expected – the source material was TV broadcast long before people even thought about HDTV. Sadly, the “extras” are kind of slim but it is still a great show. All in all, it was fun and I know I’ll enjoy the movie (I saw it in the theater and once or twice since then).

I’m still playing Guitar Hero II on the 360. I am missing a single solitary star on Medium to have 5-star’d all of the Medium songs campaign – I have only been able to get 4-stars on “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies – sometimes I think I may have the 5th star but it continues to elude me. I have completed a touch more than 6 of the 8 sets on Hard and they indeed are pretty hard. I barely squeaked by on a few of them. Several times I have hit a wall on Hard, but after extensive practice (and some luck) I was able to complete songs. “Woman” by Wolf Mother had me pulling my hair out for a while as did “Crazy for You” by Heart, but I finally beat both of them. The missus is even playing a fair bit of GH2. She has completed Easy and is about half way through Medium. It is fun to watch her improve (she isn’t a big game player) – this really is a game that can cross the game player / non-game player lines. I am taking a trip next week and she told me I couldn’t take the 360 because she wants to play GH2.

I saw Hostel II. It was decent (if you’re into that kinda thing). It wasn’t just a re-do of Hostel – it was somewhat easier to watch than the first one and was interesting in that it showed the “story” for more points of view. If you liked the first one it is probably worth seeing.

This one is going to be a rant. If you don’t care to listen, just wait until my next post 🙂

The folks at Scientific Atlanta (and Comcast, and Cablevision, and others) should be absolutely ashamed. Their “DVR” solution, the Scientific Atlantic 8300HD is absolutely retarded – and saying that is doing doing an injustice to the mentally handicapped folk of the world – at least they can often have a useful place in society. The 8300HD is a piece of junk. How can the software engineers who work on this thing go home at night and feel like they had a productive day? Do they know tons people think they must be absolute morons? Have they ever tried >>any<< other DVR? Have they ever even looked at a TiVo box, even a Series 1? Did they even glance at screen shots of ReplayTV? Have they ever even seen the case of a PC running Windows MCE or MythTV? I have my doubts.

Don’t get me wrong… the 8300HD records HDTV with decent quality and does have two tuners. You can watch live TV on it. You can watch recorded shows. You can even record shows and watch shows at the same time. It has a (mediocre) program guide (like 1 week or less?). It has a few recording options (but not never many). But…

How about… not having frequent audio (and some video) dropouts?

How about… Remember the playback position of a TV show you were watching? If you are watching a recorded show and leave the show for any reason you will have to start back form the beginning. If you start a show, pause it, and walk away for a little bit, it just un-pauses. When it finishes playing the show and you don’t delete it (or whatever) fast enough it just replays it over (and over…). Sure, I understand they want to prevent burn-in but this is not the solution.

How about… the guide could provide more than just a few days of data. Every other DVR out there holds about 2 weeks of information.

How about… not using those stupid A/B/C buttons. What the heck? I am constantly having to move my fingers from the direction/selection to A (or B or C) buttons to do anything. Stupid design.

How about… let me filter the guide. Every channel, regardless if you get it or not, like it or not, always show up in the guide. Always. There is no way to filter the guide to the channels you like. What do I care for CMT and BET and QVC? I called Cablevision and they said “just lock those channels”. Sure and then they have a nice “lock” icon next to them but they still appear in the guide, I just get an error if I try to select it. Their response: “well, that’s how it works.” Stupid. Double stupid.

How about… telling me when the disc is getting full? Wow how difficult would that be? It just stops recording your shows. It did have an un-obvious message on some buried screen but it took me like 2 days to figure out why it wasn’t recording anything.

How about… actually make the guide show when it is going to record something? Often it does, but I have seen it not highlight something it is going to record then record it anyway. I just don’t get it. Their guide just sucks. Once, it didn’t seem like it was going to record something so I placed a manual record on the show. It recorded it twice from the same channel. Stupid.

How about… put a reasonably sized disc in there. You know I am going to be recording HDTV but it will only record like 24 hours or something. I guess I might not do better on TiVo Series 3 (I know, I can add an external hard drive to either), but 24 hours? That just isn’t enough. Oh well. I was really spoiled with MythTV and its ability to transcode shows into MPEG4.

How about… you don’t need monster fonts and tons of wasted screenspace – I am sure with decent designers you could fit more on the screen and make things look nice. The UI just looks like garbage. They should really look at any of the other DVRs (even the ugly ReplayTV looks tons nicer).

I am sure I could come up with a dozen more things, but… So what are my alternatives? Right now, I think the most serious alternative is a TiVo Series 3 with Cable Cards or QAM. I know, I could go with MythTV or Windows MCE and HD Tuners such as the HDHomeRun and record the QAM signal, but this poses two potential problems. The first problem is that it doesn’t provide any pay-for channels (such as HBO). The second problem is that cable companies are encrypting more and more (especially HD) programming so QAM doesn’t work for those channels, only CableCard.

My biggest worry with a TiVo Series 3 (or MythTV or …) is  more and more cable companies are moving some portion of their new (and maybe existing) video to Switched Video. Switched video isn’t supported on QAM nor on CableCard, it is only supported on their own set-top boxs. I doubt this will ultimately really happen to any degree, but who knows.

Went to see Les Claypool in concert at the Nokia Theater last night. Two Gallants (a two man band from San Francisco). Two Gallants were decent, a touch monotone for my personal taste – not bad, just not my personal preference.

Claypool, on the other hand was fantastic – I highly recommend catching one of his shows. Claypool plays the electric bass and is absolutely amazing. Accompanying him was Gabby La La (homepage) on an (electric) Sitar, a percussionist (playing xylophone and drums), a drummer, and a guy on a bari-sax. The combination sounded incredible. When they come back through here I will definately try to see them again. Here’s a music sample from his latest CD (streaming mp3 from Claypool’s site).