And He Blogs

I just need to wait for the store to re-open. Looks like the Mac Mini is getting an update. How close to an HD capable media center will it be?

. . . and the iPod HiFi !

UPDATE! HD Beat thinks the “Mac Mini is perfect for HDTV”.

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It’s a bit of a relief, but . . .

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

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There is not a word to describe this portfolio site. After arrving, I started with the “About Dave” link. Go. See. Be amazed.

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To start this week and this Monday morning off, we have Mark Cuban offering One Million Dollars to Donald Trump. Why you ask? To create the number one moment in TV history. Let me give you a hint. It involves The Donald, Howie Mandel, and a rubber glove. Need I say more? Go read Mark Cuban’s blog entry.

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On and off I have seen some strange behavior from Bloglines (which I love, by the way). The latest strangeness I can document via screenshots. Here is my post on July 20, 2005:

Here is how Bloglines displays the above post and all that come before it:

I also noticed it on Martha’s feed in Bloglines, so it’s not just me. I haven’t see the behavior elsewhere yet.

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Innocent until proven guilty. One of the foundations of our justice system. That’s what we’re supposed to believe. In the movie Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, there is one head-shaking-in-disbelief scene after another about the fraud “allegedly” committed by Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and others in the biggest corporate scandal in U.S. history. OK. Let’s not pull any punches. It is the biggest scandal period. Ever.

Enron is the first movie I received from my new Netflix service, and it couldn’t be a better time to rent it. With the trial underway as I write this, Ken Lay maintains his innocence, attempting to claim victim status. As I looked for the latest news in the trial I stumbled across this editorial by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today. You see Al has a degree in journalism, but didn’t do well in Economics. He states, his chief financial officer could have bluffed him about anything going on with the bookkeeping at his company because “balance sheets were not [his] bag”. Ken Lay has a PhD. in Economics. See the movie, read Al’s opinion, and you decide about Ken Lay.

UPDATE: I encourage you to keep up with the latest in the Enron trial in the Houston Chronicle.

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I offer up this video with no further comment.

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Criminal

Originally uploaded by Elijah.

I guess by flagging items about high definition video, it sort of makes me an “HD Geek”, but I’ve never considered myself geek material. I guess no geek ever does. I just happen to be very interested in video, and HD video is the next step. Eventually everyone will be watching it, and more importantly wanting to save it to watch again whenever it’s convenient. Now a lot of people will probably use a Tivo or some sort of Tivo-like box from their cable or satellite provider to control their HD watching habits. However, many people, like me, will be looking to use a computer with something like Windows Media Center to control it all.

It’s unclear how Windows Vista, the upcoming new version of the Windows OS will implement Windows Media Center, but there’s at least one upgrade issue that will rear its ugly head. Many of you may be familar with the term digital rights management (DRM) and know the additional hassle that it burdens us with. Well you haven’t seen anything yet. Let me introduce you to the world of High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. This is the HD video flavor of DRM and boy what a mess this appears to be. It starts with this article stating this incredible fact - “none of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today (January 2006) support HDCP.”

Now at this point you may not care about HDCP, but you will soon, and the above graphics card fiasco does not give me confidence that the transition to HD will be a smooth one. Moreover, it points to the EVIL THAT IS DRM!

After reading the graphics card article, I tracked down several great articles that are must reads for the DRM era. Cory Doctorow is the leader of the anti-DRM movement and he has plenty of ammunition for the fight. I have links to some of his thoughts here, here, and here. Cory’s basic points are:

1. That DRM systems don’t work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is bad (actually, that’s MY summarizing point)

I also discovered a site summarizing a professional cryptographer’s effort in describing the security weakness in HDCP, but he will not release the paper to the public for fear that it will violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). It is a great, and chilling, synopsis of the current state of DRM-affairs.

After seeing the arguments laid out, it is obvious to me that DRM actually encourages piracy. It is so restrictive and user hostile that it encourages users to break the letter of the law just to allow the playing of audio and video within one’s own home. Who benefits from DRM? Well, pirates have cracked every instance of copy protection. Honest people will experience a “speed bump”, or in other words, a penalty for being honest. Hollywood will continue to charge high prices for ever more average quality content. And consumers in general will be more and more frustrated with the restrictions placed on them. I’m hoping that the everyday citizen will begin to get as upset about this issue as the geeks are now.

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I’m in the experimental stage with the high def stuff (won’t I always be?), but I did a screen grab of the Letterman show to see how it looked. Well, just WOW!

There’s a bit of a back story. How do you do screen grabbing of HD anyway? I’ll give you the setup shortly, but I’ll start by saying that I get my HD feed from Cox Cable of Fredericksburg. The story behind why I have cable HD is a funny one, but for the sake of this post, I’ll summarize. Pre-HD I had Direct TV. In the mean time, my neighbor put an addition on his house (an addition upward). Next, I wanted HD from Direct TV. Nope! Line of sight to HD satellite is blocked by neighbor’s addition. Hello Cox!

Now back to the setup - Cox cable HD. The box they provide (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250HD for those HD geeks out there) has 2 Firewire ports on the back of it. I have a basic Firewire card in my PC (the Dell that runs my Beyond TV setup). A while back I tried connecting the port to see if I could get a signal, but I couldn’t get it to use a proper driver. I forgot about it for a while. Then thanks to a blog I read called HD Beat, I found this post about Firewire ports on set-top boxes. It lead me to this article where I got the drivers (sorry, registration required) for essentially a Panasonic D-VHS deck. The instructions were great and soon I was digitizing 1920×1080 video! It does stress out a computer trying to capture 30 frames per second at that size. Anyway the final piece, the screen grab, is accomplished with Nero Showtime. Now I have a 1920×1080 bitmap image of Letterman, which I reduce down to 400×227 to fit on this page. I’ve only just gotten started and suddenly a 250 GB hard drive is tiny!

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heinz

Originally uploaded by rhombusleech.

That’s what Thursday is . . .

UPDATE: I didn’t

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