Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

HDTV PVR: intial impressions

I use my video purely for timeshifting – watching a show that screens at midnight at a more socialable hour. But the quality leaves a lot to be desired.

My grand plan is to retire the VHS recorder, replacing it with a shiney new digital thingy – a PVR, Personal Video Recorder. Which you can buy off the shelf, one or two grand (AUD). And I would. But, then again, I’m a geek, and that means why buy something when you can build it yourself for twice the price and with the enormous expenditure of your own time?

For example, it would be nice to be able to burn TV onto DVD. And most PVRs have a single tuner – while we all know that TV stations schedule the show you want to watch at the same time as at least one other you want to watch; you can only record one; and, incidentally, you can’t watch the other unless you have another digital receiver like a settop box (I’ve seen ’em for $80 at Safeway). Sure, you could tape one and watch the other, but that doesn’t work so great at midnight when it’s a schoolnight. And most PVRs are Standard Definition, not High Def – and if you’ve had the misforturne of trying to watch a SD signal, you know it doesn’t hold a candle to analogue (I’m not going to take a step back here). The biggest hard drive you’ll find in a PVR is 120Gig, and that’s the super-top-end-gee-whiz unit; most come with 40Gig – which might be fine with SD, but bites when recording HD at 15Gig/hour.

So in general, PVRs suck arse. I’m gonna build my own.

I got the bits last night – bottom end PC, two tuner cards (different brands – for reasons that will become apparent), 200Gig HDD (I figure I’ll upgrade to a decent sized RAID array later). Loaded up Windows (I’m using it to prove the concept, then swapping to Fedora 3 once I know the hardware’s good), dropped in drivers (God, what a nightmare; it seems like it eventually loaded) and hooked the whole setup to a bunny ear antenna.

One card can show me Channel 9. That card isn’t happy about the other channels it found, which was nowhere near what’s out there. They’re called things like “Ch@&&el T#n”.

The other card doesn’t show anything, but found all the channels. I think it found Channel 7 twice.

From the bunny ears I’m getting 75% signal strength.

So, now I can play around with recording SuperNanny and Enterprise, but I don’t think there’s much of a future with the current setup. I’ve got to try slightly more sophisticated antenna technologies. And I’ve got to see if I sucessfully can hook my creaky old TV up to the video card – there are a number of adapters that look promising.

I’ll keep you posted.

Ten years ago…

Yesterday, I bought a computer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready on Saturday.

As it happens, it’s not quite ten years since I bought my first “new” PC. (Before that I’d used 8-bit computers and an aging 286.)

Just for a little nostalgia, here is part of the advert from the company I bought it from all those years ago, the now defunct Rod Irving Electronics, of A’Beckett Street in Melbourne. This is from the 6th June 1995 edition of The Age “Green Guide”.

The system I bought from them was the Pentium 60 on the right hand side. I’m sure you’ll be impressed at the spec, as well as the marketing. (At the time, the Australian Peso was worth about USD0.60, by the way).

Rod Irving Electronics catalogue from 1995

This computer was finally disposed of in rather spectacular fashion in 2003, though the speakers and that mighty 4x CD player still work (currently stored as spares).

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

Dan Bricklin on the pod

Back in 1979, a couple of guys called Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote the first spreadsheet program, Visicalc, which almost single-handedly launched the mass sales of microcomputers (in particular the Apple II) into businesses and onto people’s desks.

Dan has gone on to more innovative computer stuff, including one prototyping product I remember from my interface designing course days at university, called Demo.

Bob Frankston has an article about how he wrote Visicalc: One of the early applications for VisiCalc was my 1979 tax form. I created @lookup for that purpose.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post, Cam and Mick at G’day World have wangled an interview with Dan Bricklin. Some of the topics include Visicalc, podcasting and video blogging, tablet PCs, and software (and data) that should last 200 years.

Check it out.

Spoiling for a blogosophere rumble!

Cameron Reilly vs Charles Wright.

In summary:

Cam: We’re doing podcasts. We’ve got a bunch of mates to help, and people seem to like them.

Charles: Your podcasts are amateurish and I don’t like them.

Cam: So?

Charles: I don’t like them. You swear too much.

Cam: So?

…and so on. You know, I enjoy listening to Cam’s podcasts and reading Charles’ columns. But I’ll tell ya, from what I’ve seen, Charles doesn’t take disagreement with his opinions very well.

Fact is it doesn’t matter if he personally doesn’t like it. It would matter if nobody liked it, but this plainly isn’t the case.

(And that bloody use of the plural personal pronoun is stupid, unless he’s had himself cloned.)

More on iTunes AU, CH, SE, NO, DK

Country flagsAppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Old game remakes

Gyruss (the original)All the joys of nostalgic old video games without the guilt of not really owning those MAME ROMs you’ve downloaded: www.remakes.org. New versions of all the classics from your childhood: Elite, Lode Runner, Gyruss, Lemmings, egads even Lazy Jones.

You know, it always puzzled me why they didn’t just let us play MULE in high school to learn about economics.

Damn. No Frak!

Doubts over Podcasting

While Cam and Mick at The Podcast Network are doing great things, I have niggling doubts about the long-term prospects for podcasting. Darren Barefoot has expressed some of them. My niggling doubts primarily come from the differences between blogs and podcasts, and the technical limitations of podcasting.

  • You can’t mass-consume podcasts like you can blogs, via aggregators. (Okay, so you can see summaries via aggregators, but not the content itself)
  • You can’t scan an audio file like you can a long blog entry.
  • Even on broadband, you don’t get instant gratification when you click on a link to podcast content – you have to wait X minutes, then you get the file, which you have to find time to listen to, and to find the bit you wanted… now, what was it I was clicking on again?
  • Most podcasts I’ve seen don’t have the immediatcy of blogs. There’s an element of post-production involved which inevitably introduces delays to getting the content out to the world.
  • You can’t easily quote a bit out of a podcast, or find a permalink to that specific moment.
  • Which means you can’t find podcasts by searching for keywords, unless there’s a transcript.

So will podcasting go mainstream? Will it knock radio off its roost? Or did video already do that? 🙂 Will the technical limitations be overcome? It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out in the long term.

iTunes.com.au

I know rumours of an Australian iTunes store have been around for ages, but it looks like in the past week, Apple has registered itunes.com.au

Domain Name: itunes.com.au
Last Modified: 23-Mar-2005 22
Registrar ID: R00010-AR
Registrar Name: Melbourne IT
Status: OK

Registrant: APPLE COMPUTER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD
Registrant ID: ACN 002 510 054

No web site responding as yet.