BunkBlog

Here’s my Halloween playlist.  The cretins at work probably don’t know any of the songs. Hi, cretins.  😉

In case you feel that Microsoft doesn’t have enough control over your computing experience, read this little article.

“Validation will fail if the software detects a substantially different hardware configuration,” the spokesperson said. “At that point, the customer is able to use the one reassignment for the new device. If, after using its one reassignment right, a customer again exceeds the tolerance for updated components, the customer can purchase an additional license or seek remediation through Microsoft’s support services.”

Great. So, you can buy an OS and upgrade your hardware, then buy the OS again. Fan-freakin-tastic.

Ubuntu is a very nice alternative. Just sayin’.

This is awesome. A compilation of The 50 Worst Video Game Names Of All Time. My favorite has to be “Wild Woody” – who thought that was a good name for a kid’s game?

I actually remember a few of these, including “Tongue of the Fat Man” and “Jumpman,” from the Commodore days (that’s the late 1980s for you whippersnappers).

I know, I should let it rest for at least an hour or so before I start to dissect the browser, right?  Anyway, the new version of Firefox is out today. Two good things I’ve noticed already: the functionality of the essential SessionSaver extension is built into the browser now (one extension nuked); and there is a spellchecker for fields that just works. So far, it’s tagged “SessionSaver” and “spellchecker” as not real words.  Too bad, I’m keeping them.

The bad things I’ve noticed?  It takes at least a tenth of a second longer to load. And, I can’t seem to get rid of the useless little green button next to the address bar. Even IE 6 allowed me to nuke the “Go button.”  What’s up with those buttons? You’re willing to type the URL into the address box but you’re not quite capable of hitting the RETURN key when you’re done?  Is it really easier to move your hands off the keyboard, move to the mouse, twitch it to the right, and click the green button?  Naturally, I see this sort of wacky-ass behavior from coworkers and my boss every day, but they’re OLD!

Creative is removing features from its Zen MicroPhoto and Zen Vision:M players. If you thought that FM recording feature you bought it with is a good thing, then you should never update its firmware. Creative has followed the Sony PSP approach of deleting features upon addition of new features. You can now use Audible files, but your recorder doesn’t record the radio. I’m sure the RIAA had nothing to do with this.

I just got a request for a new “friend” on Friendster. Does anyone still use them?

It’s gotta suck to be one of the early pioneers of something and watch the customers/users bypass you for something else. I was a member of Six Degrees ten years ago (or so); they were the first attempt at a social networking site around. Before Friendster, Orkut, or MySpace, there was Six Degrees. They shut down in 2000, after four years of no profit. Friendster is still around, but they turned down the Google offer of 30 million in 2003. Anyone think they’re worth more than a buck fifty today?

I noticed that the “review” category has not had much activity, so I’ll remedy that.

In March of 2005, I bought a Rio Karma. This MP3 player was fantastic, with 20 gigs of storage space (enough for about 1/6th of my music collection), a fantastic interface, on-the-fly playlisting and all that jazz. It did not have an FM tuner or voice recorder, and it did depend on proprietary protocols to save music, but the ability to rearrange music and choose popular songs and all that were great. Sadly, the Karma is a delicate beast, with its hard drive not being the most durable they could find. Since it broke and Rio is gone, I was quite happy that I had paid for the 24 month warranty from Buy.

In June of this year, I replaced the Karma with the warranty money, getting a Sandisk Sansa e260 4 gig flash player. At the time, it was a 200 dollar player; it’s now routinely available for 150 or less.

With the most current firmware installed, the Sansa is a wonderful music player, although I do miss the Karma’s interface. The Sansa has two protocols: MTP and MSC (sometimes called UMS). In MTP mode, the player works only with Windows XP; in MSC mode it works with anything that recognizes USB removable media. Playlists are transferred only via MTP, although MSC mode is a faster system for simple transfers.

The Sansa also has a cool feature few players do these days: expansion. You can plug in a tiny little memory card, the microSD, to add up to 2 gigs of memory in theory (so far I can only find 1 gig cards at most). The expansion card can’t hold subscription content, and it’s not visible in MTP mode on the computer, but for music you want to keep on the player, or if you use MSC mode anyway, it’s another drive letter in Explorer.

That covers connections, but what about features? It has an FM tuner (and recorder), a voice recorder, and can manage videos (through a converter), photos, and either MP3 or WMA audio files. It supports the PlaysForSure stores, including subscription content, but I’m told does not support Audible files.

Playback is from a rather straight-forward interface, using a wheel and six buttons. Playlists from the computer are visible and usable, as well as one on-the-fly playlist on the player. I can’t tell you how well PlaysForSure works, as I refuse to participate in DRM. Thankfully, I can tell you that it works wonderfully with MediaMonkey in MTP mode. I don’t try to sync in MSC mode, so I’m not sure how well that works with MM; MSC mode is useful for clearing out old content you decide you don’t want to listen to, and it’s mandatory for firmware updates.

Photos are bright and sharp, although there is no zoom and a 1.5 inch screen is not exactly usable for a photo album.

You can play all your music, an artist, an album, a playlist, a genre, or a single track. In any of these, you can have shuffle engaged or not. There are several equalizer settings, and a custom equalizer (with latest firmware). Album art is displayed when you are playing a track, and you can cycle through a fairly useless spectrum analyzer, a larger view of the album art, and the next song in the queue. I rarely can tell what the next song will be before the player switches back to the default view, though. You have about three seconds to see it before it changes away, but it scrolls slowly through artist/album/track so if you have an artist and album with too many characters, you’re out of luck.

So, other things I dislike about the player? You can’t delete content on the player. The voice recorder button can’t be disabled without locking all controls; you will end up recording yourself without meaning to. You can’t edit playlists, except the “Go List” on the player. I really miss the “songs of the 80s” type playlists that the Karma had. Of course, with only 4 gigs of space, some of those modes are less useful than they were with 20. The videos are pretty pointless; not only is the screen only 1.5 inches, the videos are converted to an incredibly inefficient codec to play: the MJPEG format in Quicktime.

My son is able to navigate his playlist without any hassle, the radio works pretty well, and overall it’s a great and reliable player. Highly recommended for anyone who hasn’t already paid too much for DRM-infected files from iTunes Music Store.

The FX channel in the UK has decided to start displaying still images for 30 seconds during some of their ad slots. Apparently Sky+ PVRs don’t jump 30 seconds, they play at 12 times the normal speed when you want to skip commercials. ABC recently said they want to disable fast-forward on DVRs, as if that’s remotely possible from the non-hardware side of things.

In case you are unaware, there are PVRs that will let you jump forward, not just go faster. There are PVRs that will automatically mark commercials for skipping them without any interaction from the viewer at all. You just can’t buy these PVRs any longer. The one that was on the market was ReplayTV, which is gone. The good news is that you can still get the functionality, but you need to build it yourself. Look into MythTV – one of your geek friends can build it for ya for about 400 bucks; ABC and FX and everyone else will then have no control over what you can do with your own recorder, and you’ll at least have the same ability with your new machine that we had with VCRs in the 80s.

I find it amazing that MS has still not figured out how to avoid punking their customers and partners. The wonderful DRM embedded in earlier versions of Windows Media Player is bad enough. Then came PlaysForSure, which many people say is more like “PlaysForShit.” There are many instances of the PlaysForSure files not transferring, or requiring multiple updates of software on the PC and firmware on the player. Plays For Sure as a slogan implies that your music will Just Work, but that is obviously not the case, based on how many complaints you can find online with mere seconds of research.

So, MS decided that the whole integrated solution thing Apple has going is a good idea. They partnered up with iRiver and MTV to produce the Clix and Urge. The device and service were designed together, to ensure that things actually would Play For Sure.  So far so good, even if it did effectively snub all the previous MS partners who had signed on for the Janus DRM train (anyone think it’s interesting that Janus had two faces?), as well as the hardware partners whose machines hadn’t been tested and certified for the MTV Urge service. They’ll probably work, but if it’s not marketed together, many people will assume incompatibility.

And now the latest change to Microsoft’s music roadmap – Zune. Not only does this get Microsoft involved in the hardware market for media players, effectively telling all the manufacturers who thought they were partners to piss off, it also introduces a new Zune-only store. That’s right, the Janus DRM-encumbered music you thought you owned from Rhapsody or Napster or whereever won’t play on Zune. You’ll have to buy it all again, if you want to play it on that new slick MS-branded player.

Might I suggest never buying any DRM-encumbered media? The result of ever buying any music or video from a service that puts DRM on it is that you don’t control your own property. You may think you own the latest Beyonce album, but if you bought it from Napster or iTunes, you don’t own a damned thing. You have a right to listen to it only on the device you bought it for and any new technology is likely to render your music collection so much junk.

Just for an added stab in the back of their customers, the Zune’s vaunted wifi sharing system will add DRM to any file, including public domain and Creative Commons files. For the public domain files, that’s just evil. For the CC files, that’s actually a violation of the CC license, which states unequivocally that no encryption can be applied to the file by anyone.

To recap, DRM is evil, Microsoft hates their customers, Microsoft can be trusted only to betray their business partners, and DRM is evil.

Dwarf planet formerly known as Xena.

I just saw an anti-net neutrality ad from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.  They portray Google and its allies on the pro-neutrality side as “multi-billion dollar tech companies” who just want more money from you, the poor consumer.  Why, we all know that the cable and telecom companies have always done what is best for the consumer, right?

Lots of people have spilled lots of ink over net neutrality in the past few months, but if nothing else this one ad would make me side with Google.  If it comes down to who I trust more, Verizon or Google?  Easy.  Which one of those companies has ever charged me a dime?  Which one of those companies has a history of near-whimsical pricing and abuse of government-sponsored monopoly power?  Yeah, exactly.  Hell, just last month, Verizon wanted to punk their cellular customers with an invented new fee to recoup the losses from the FCC cancelling the Spanish-American War tax.

Who do you trust?

A friend once mentioned that his children wondered why he called Hastings a record store – what are records? It goes even further afield when I think of my son. He doesn’t really deal with CDs even; it’s all a playlist to him. In fact, his current playlist is posted online, just because I’m that kind of geek.

Proving that he is definitely my son, notice the totally eclectic nature of his choices. It’s important to note that I only add songs to his playlist when he asks me to. He recently asked for the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” and I was astonished to realize that I didn’t have that ripped yet – soon that will be rectified.

Seriously, what other child nearing his seventh birthday wants Harry Belafonte and Elvis Costello and The Beatles? What other child has even heard of Ozomatli? I have a cool kid.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, Alex’s mother also has very eclectic musical tastes. One of our earlier conversations when we first met was our mutual astonishment that the other had heard of, much less listened to, Ani DiFranco.

Off for five days of vacation fun with my son.  Don’t break anything while I’m gone, ok?

And

are really going to love this post…

Sure, I’m on vacation, but there must be something better to do with my time than play Dice Wars all night long, right?  Oh, there isn’t?  Cool.

OK, someone suggested I put together a quick tutorial or how-to on digital video creation.  Home videos have grown increasingly easy to record, and the output is so much better than the old super-8 film days, but it’s still not easy for some. So, without further ado, Gary’s Video Tutorial. It’s on a wiki, so if you have something useful to contribute, feel free.  I’ve still got to add something about titles and overlays.

I can’t imagine what one could add to the headline to make this story any more clear. Can you imagine buying one of these drives to play Blu-Ray movies in your new home theater PC and finding out that you can’t? Are they just encouraging piracy now by their total incompetence at this Digital Restrictions Manglement crap?

The following is somewhat reformatted from a recent discussion on Cnet about DVD camcorders.

I know many people are considering a digital camcorder for the first time, as their old 8mm and VHS-C cameras start to die. Many people think that a DVD camcorder is a great idea, because it’s so simple: just record to the disk, hit the “finished” button, and play it on a DVD player (although you’ll be recording about 20 minutes on that disk, not the two hours you expect from a full-sized DVD). That works great if you want the exact same capability you had with a simple analog video camera. If you want to produce nicer video, though, the story is quite different.
There are some people who don’t edit their videos, who don’t mind that their home videos look amateurish and contain fingers over lenses and heads blocking shots and poor audio. For those people, a DVD camcorder is a great fit. They neither want nor need the editing quality they are denied by recording in a lossy format; they need and want, however, the ease of taking their videos and dropping them in nearly any DVD player and watching them.

Recording to a DVD in DVD-standard formats means lossy compression and the joys of MPEG formats that anyone who has tried to edit an MPEG can understand. The MiniDV camcorders can dump uncompressed video to your computer, where you can delete the scenes that look bad, you can punch up the color balance and contrast, you can add a music soundtrack if you like. All these things are wonderful, and I do them with all my home videos, producing slick DVDs with titles and transitions and menus for my relatives. That niche is where I want to be.

DVD is a great medium to VIEW video with. It’s even a great medium to shoot video if you understand its limits.

DVDs and MiniDV and hard drives and flash memory all record digitally. So, talk of capacity should include RAW storage in bytes, not just in minutes. Any talk of minutes gets you embroiled in compression issues.

A MiniDV tape holds 13 gigabytes of data. An 8cm DVD (the smaller ones used in camcorders) holds 1.4 gigabytes. An expensive SD card holds 4 gigabytes. A hard-drive based camcorder holds (as of today) around 30 gigabytes. That’s the actual storage capacity, folks. Now, how much do each cost? Well, the best price per gigabyte is the tape, as it has been throughout digital media history.

The cheap nature of tapes convinced the DV forum to make DV standard very close to uncompressed. This makes it easy to edit without losing quality.

The low capacity of 8cm DVDs, and the need to make them compatible with DVD players, means that DVDs have the worst video quality (among hard drives, DV tape, and DVDs at least – some of the flash recorders are toys). The compatibility of DVDs is their greatest asset. Hit “done” on that camcorder, and two minutes later you can be watching your home movie on a big screen. Not so with tapes.

DVD format does have an inherent flaw – lossy compression.

Tapes still exist for every high-capacity recording system in use today. High-end video recorders use tape. High-end data backup systems use tape. The reason is simple: high density at low cost.

If the video was recorded to the DVD as an uncompressed video file (like the DV standard used on tapes), you’d swap disks every six minutes. Also, the DVDs would be DVD-ROM format, and wouldn’t play on your DVD player – which is the selling point for most DVD recording camcorder users.

When you export a DVD format video to edit it, you are taking an MPEG (with I, B, and P frames) and editing it into a different compression scheme for whatever your target system is. If it’s DVD again, you compress an MPEG to MPEG, each generation producing another set of MPEG compression artifacts.

So, you can get high capacity and high quality on tape. You can get easy compatibility with DVD. You can’t get both. If you want DVD-player compatibility, then the DVD camcorder format has an inherent flaw – MPEG.

The hard drive recorders, at least those that you see marketed for typical consumers, use compressed video because they don’t generally have removable hard drives. With a fixed disk, you want more capacity than a single tape, obviously. So, the JVC Everio and others have MPEG-compressed video and the same issues with editability as the DVDs.

To me, the DVD camcorder is to video what the point-and-shoot camera is to photography. Just because we geeks want the best quality and ease of editing, doesn’t mean that “good enough” matched with “really easy” is a bad thing. So, if you know what you want to do with your video, that makes all the difference in the world for what type of camcorder to buy.

The Army is mandating Trusted Computing for their new machine purchases. Of course, Trusted Computing only works with Microsoft Vista, which is vapor at this time. And, doesn’t having to trust Microsoft instead of you users imply that you believe the soldiers you have trained are less responsible than a large faceless blameless corporation?

I watch the military system administrators and their contract counterparts struggle with Windows 2000 and XP on a daily basis. Our unclassified computers currently have at least two errors popping up every time we log into them. They also reset the internet homepage and proxy settings seemingly at random. The standard response to almost any error on Windows is, “we don’t know why it’s doing that.  Reboot it.” I can just imagine when the SysAds are no longer even capable of doing anything on the machines that Microsoft hasn’t previously approved…We’re doomed.

As I was clearing out old documents and files from my email attachment directory, I came across a receipt for a Micron computer, purchased in December of 2000. Understand, I never buy the top of the line, but usually something more reasonable.  This is what passed for reasonable in 2000:

AMD Athlon 1 Ghz CPU
128 MB of RAM
20 GB hard drive
8x CDRW drive
12-40x DVD-ROM drive
GeForce2 AGP card
Soundblaster Live Value edition
56k Modem
100 Mbps network card
MS Office Small Business edition
Oh, and I got a free Zip drive.  That was useful.

And all of that was a mere…1800 dollars and change. After shipping and tax, it was just over two grand.  And now that machine would make a dandy footrest. I was looking through the Sunday paper today and came across several laptops that have 2 Ghz procressors and a gig of memory and 100 gig hard drive and dual-layer DVD burners, for 800 bucks.  What a difference five years makes, eh?