Coming Soon…

Yes, I have been gone for awhile.  I blame Fallout 3 and Oblivion and Fable 2, hmm, maybe I should just blame the whole thing on the xbox 360 we purchased recently.  Couldn’t be my fault, I’m just an innocent victim here.  :p

I do have a few things in the works though.  Thoughts on Win 7, my new 360, fallout 3, fable 2, the next installment of our digital conversion as well as Android 1.5 (if I ever get it… *shakes fist at T-Mobile*).  So, yea, lots of stuff going on in house and as always my own take on the tech industry and anything else I feel like poking fun at.

Some of this will be here and some will be over at Tech Breaker and I can be followed on twitter as well.

The Digital Conversion Part Two

Now that I have more bandwidth to play with, we are enjoying netflix even more.  The selection of “watch instantly” shows is not wondrous by any means but it is consistently getting better.  We have the second lowest plan which gives us one DVD out at a time and unlimited streaming from the netflix website and it costs only $9 per month.  As an aside we do not pay the surcharge for bluray disks from netflix (which would be an extra 2 dollars a month) and I am not sure that I am willing to pay that extra when netflix admits that it is an arbitrary charge because bluray has a higher perceived value.  Yes, that means it doesn’t cost them anything extra it means they think people will pay it because they want to watch bluray movies more than they want to watch DVD’s.

The issue with netflix is this, you either watch DVD’s (or bluray) disks on you television  or you can stream movies to your computer.  I want to make all the content available to us watchable on both our televisions and computers.  There are a few ways to get streamed netflix content onto a television but I went with a Roku.  The roku lets you stream netflix and also can let you buy or rent television shows or movies from the Amazon Video on Demand website.  The clincher for me is that Roku is adding 10 more “channels” to their little box by the end of the year.  There have been no real announcements as of yet (except the accidental one by blip.tv) however the conjecture is that stuff like hulu.com and tv.com are 2 of the 10.

The Roku is a really nice device.  It has an HDMI port (among others) to connect to your TV and can connect to your home network by 802.11g wireless or by Ethernet.  Note that this is not compatible with 802.11n, for those that are looking to squeeze every drop of speed out of their video enabled home network.  I have a Belkin router and when I put it in “N” only mode I couldn’t connect to Roku to it.  This was a bit of a learning experience for me since I have not played with 802.11n much at all.  On the wireless “G” network the Roku worked very well.  We have experienced one video interruption during playback in the week that I have had this setup.  The netflix stream through Roku seems to be pretty solid.  The setup of the Roku overall was really simple.  During the connection to your netflix account it generates a code that you need to authorize on the netflix website.  There is a similar process for Amazon content.  The Roku box itself is very small, about 6 inches square and 2 inches high so I put it right behind my television.  The remote is pretty small and has a very simple layout which is also true for the Roku’s UI.  All in all easy to setup and easy to use.  The one downer for folks who are really big on true HD content is that the Roku tops out at 720p.  So if you just have to have full HD everywhere, the Roku is not for you.  If you don’t mind 720p and really are into the functionality and currently expending content, this device is definitely for you.  Personally, I love it.

The Digital Conversion @Home Part One

I am in the middle of converting over to DTV and getting rid of our very expensive legacy services and putting low cost IP based services in place. My first step was to get rid of my Verizon DSL service and get Comcast Cable Internet service. Comcast is $10/month more expensive but it offers 5 times the speed (3 meg vs 15 meg) and I really needed a beefier connection to handle the video I am now streaming. Next was my land line phone service (also from Verizon) and that was replaced by T-Mobile @Home and since I already have T-Mob for my cell phones the home phone service only cost $10/month.

By legacy services I mean land line phones, cable/satellite tv providers and anything that is now available for free or very low cost on line. Just to be clear I am in no way advocating piracy and with the on line presence of the major networks and sites like hulu, netflix, crackle, blip.tv (the list goes on) the out right piracy of media content should really be a thing of the past. Understand that I also believe that fair use is another issue altogether and is much larger than this short series of posts.

Next will be a bit about the gadgets and services and network setup that will help me to replace (for my wife mostly) as painlessly as possible, the functionality of our satellite service and the dvr that was part of it.

What’s in the news and why I’m watching movies instead

Wall Street finally likes the stimulus.  Big gains yesterday after hearing about the Gov’t buying some of those “toxic assets”.  Do we love toxic so much we’re buying it twice?  I guess so.  I still struggle with why the DJIA is even marginally relevant and why so many sources live and die by what it’s performance “means” for economic indication.  Oh, well.  Even though the stock market was up and China has some 2 trillion in cash reserves, China is now calling for a different world monetary standard than the US dollar.  I can’t really blame them.  China works really had to make money (even though it berates capitalist values at every turn) and not spend it on infrastructure or services for its own people, they should be concerned.  In case you missed it, that was a bit a sarcasm since we don’t really know how to manage our finances but China has no business bitching since they take so few (if any) steps to contribute to our global social and economic structure.

Apple apparently has some goodies hiding in the wings but I don’t really care since all of their stuff is too expensive for me to buy anyway.  Yes, I know Apple pricing is skewed since they really don’t have any low end equipment (except the mac-mini but how many people even know what that is) so Apple appears to be higher priced than other manufacturers since other manufacturers always try and compare their low end stuff to Apple’s low end, which is actually mid range.  Sometimes I hate marketing.

Facebook has a new look and a high percentage of the users don’t like it.  Although Facebook is relevant in the social media space…  Who cares about the UI?!?  90% of the UI’s in existence look like shit and that’s web based applications, phones, software, you name it.  With all the creative people in the world do you think programmers would get some of them involved in UI design?  No!  I’m so tired of listening to people bitch about getting things to look like they did in Minority Report (good movie by the way).

Anyway…  I could piss and moan for pages about this stuff but I won’t.  All the above and more is why I’ve been delving into some movies that I haven’t seen in years.  The Terminator movies for one.  Partly because there is a fourth coming out and because I want to start over and watch the Sarah Connor Chronicles from the beginning.  Great action stuff but sad also because it is indicative of a social condition of people pulling together in times of great strife and adversity.  If we could only do that on a day to day basis…

Independence Day is also something I’ve watched again recently.  I really like Will Smith and have seen a bunch of stuff recently, iRobot, Hancock, Men in Black etc.  I just saw Iron Man recently.  I find I’m liking Robert Downy Jr more and more as time goes on.  I loved the Iron Man comic books as a kid and I liked the movie but it’s getting annoying all the little changes Hollywood makes in my comic book heroes for no apparent reason.  Spiderman did not shoot webs out of his wrists.  They came out of a device that he invented.  If Hollywood was looking for realism they should have had the webs coming out of Peter Parker’s ass.  I’m just sayin’.

All in all, the news is not new.  It reiterates the same old crap over and over, so pick and choose your sources carefully (think new media) and use the rest of that time doing something you like.  That is all.