Monthly Archives: January 2009

Density Calls

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The “Lost” season 5 premiered with a two-parter, “Because You Left,” and “The Lie.” You can tell that they’ve finally mastered the “Lost” formula because they aired two full hours jam-packed with over a dozen characters, eight or nine locations [...]

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The “Lost” season 5 premiered with a two-parter, “Because You Left,” and “The Lie.” You can tell that they’ve finally mastered the “Lost” formula because they aired two full hours jam-packed with over a dozen characters, eight or nine locations all over the world, multiple flashbacks, a genuinely surprising reveal of a familiar character, multiple shoot-outs and double-crosses, and at least three extremely cool action sequences (including flaming arrows!), and still nothing happened.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to point out that they’ve decided to go all-in with the time travel angle, especially since Desmond’s back-story and the Dharma Initiative orientation movie for “The Orchid” pretty much said it outright. I am extremely disappointed, though, that they didn’t include an appearance by Bubblegum Tate or any of the other Space Globetrotters.

I guess it’s unfair to say that “nothing happened,” since they at least laid the groundwork for answering a lot of questions, without actually answering those questions. And those questions, as far as I can make out (including spoilers, so don’t read the rest until you’ve seen the episodes), are:
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On the Air

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About two months ago, I did the unthinkable and cancelled my satellite TV service. It was both an attempt to save money as well as a social re-engineering project on myself: I’d gotten so dependent on having live TV that [...]

clockworkorange.jpegAbout two months ago, I did the unthinkable and cancelled my satellite TV service. It was both an attempt to save money as well as a social re-engineering project on myself: I’d gotten so dependent on having live TV that it never even occurred to me I could go without it. It was an essential utility, like power and water (and now: broadband internet).

Results so far have been pretty disappointing. Not because it’s been torture, but because there’s been pretty much no change at all. I’m not saving money yet, because I somehow convinced myself to buy an Apple TV, and it’ll be another couple weeks before it “pays for itself.” And I’m not able to take pride in “roughing it” because I haven’t had to go without. There’s just too many ways to get TV programming these days; it’s ruined any feeling of frontier spirit.

  • Most of the stuff I want to watch is available through the Apple TV, so I’ve already bought all my season passes (using a Christmas gift) and have them downloaded 24 hours after the show originally airs.
  • For the “Battlestar Galactica” premiere the other night, lots of blogs were threatening to spoil The Big Secrets for everyone, so I went onto scifi.com and watched it at my computer without incident.
  • For stuff that airs frequently, like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” I can watch it on hulu.com if at all. I installed Boxee on my Apple TV, so I can watch it on the television instead of hunched over in front of a computer.
  • All the other stuff I used to spend “dead time” watching — uninteresting documentaries on the Food Network or the History Channel; the sublimely ludicrous “Ghost Hunters;” “MythBusters” and Samantha Brown travel specials which are still fine but lost their appeal from overexposure — I just haven’t watched and haven’t missed.
  • Now that you can stream Netflix movies over the Xbox 360, it’s like having an infinite number of channels showing crappy movies I don’t really feel like watching, at any time of the day.

If I were still working at home, I think cable or satellite would be justified. I just spent the last five days stuck in my apartment with a cold, and things were getting pretty dire by the end there. I ended up buying the entire season of “Psych,” one episode at a time, just to have something to watch. (Not that it’s a bad show, just that I never saw myself as a season owner). But apart from that, it’s been pretty painless.

Except…

  • They don’t secure music rights for re-broadcasting “Saturday Night Live,” apparently, so they can only sell “selected sketches” on iTunes, or via hulu.com, without the musical guests and without any sketches that use existing music. Even with that, it’s unpredictable when it’s going to become available; the Neil Patrick Harris and Rosario Dawson episodes still aren’t on iTunes, and Dawson’s monologue isn’t up on hulu.com.
  • The implementation of boxee on the Apple TV (it’s still in alpha) is pretty nice, but not quite all there yet. I can’t reliably fast-forward or rewind through the stream, so as soon as I sit down I’m stuck watching the whole thing. And if my connection goes south during the stream, I’ve never been able to get it to resume. There’s few things more annoying than having the connection crap out five minutes from the end of a 45-minute-long show, and realizing there’s no alternative except to start over from the beginning.
  • I’ve yet to find a source for the magic Saturday Nights on the local Japanese channel, when they air bizarre game shows and sitcoms. I miss watching the I.Q. Supplement and knowing the entire time that there were more constructive things I could be doing.
  • And it’s a small thing, but I miss turning the TV onto something while I’m eating dinner. Eating in a silent apartment is just creepy.

So as an experiment, I picked up one of those indoor HD antennas. They’ve been warning us incessantly that the switch to all-digital broadcasting was imminent, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I’m not sure what I expected — actually, that’s not true. I expected it to be like analog TV, but with a bigger picture. There’d still be some ghosting and blurriness and occasional static, to remind you that you were too cheap to pony up for a cable or satellite bill.

This is not the case. Over-the-air HD broadcasts are eerily sharp. (And most are broadcast with 5.1 surround sound as well). It’s exactly the same as the local channels over satellite, but without my having to pay Rupert Murdoch 80 bucks a month. And there’s like thirty channels available, at least twenty of them in English. It could be just because I live in the shadow of Sutro Tower, but everything I wanted came in astonishingly clear.

Except, of course, for the two channels that started the whole experiment: the closest NBC affiliate in San Jose, and the local channel that broadcasts Fuji TV on weekends. It’d be relatively painless to invest in the outdoor version of the indoor antenna that I have now; I’d be surprised if that doesn’t give me better results (assuming I feel like climbing up to the roof to install it). The alternative is to wait and see if the situation improves after the Great Digital Transition of February 2009. Or, be true to the spirit of the whole experiment in the first place, and just go without “Saturday Night Live.”

But what continues to surprise me about the whole business is just how readily available all this stuff is; you don’t have to go without unless you choose to. Having broadcast TV feels like it breaks the spirit of the arrangement, somehow, but I can’t say I’m all that upset since I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for it. What I’ve wanted for years from cable and satellite companies was a real a la carte system, where you pay only for what you want to watch and ignore the rest. I’d always assumed that that was never going to happen, but as it turns out, it’s been available for a while now, and I’m just now getting caught up.

Team Possible

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I wanted to say congratulations to my friends at Disney Imagineering for completing the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure at Epcot in Orlando. The attraction went into “soft opening”/preview mode last week, and everything I’ve seen online says that it’s [...]

I wanted to say congratulations to my friends at Disney Imagineering for completing the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure at Epcot in Orlando. The attraction went into “soft opening”/preview mode last week, and everything I’ve seen online says that it’s a big hit so far. One of the quotes from this article about the attraction says, “It’s like a modern day Tiki Room, but on a grander scale — I think Walt himself would get a real kick out of this attraction.”

It’s a great concept, and it sounds like they made all the right decisions when making it permanent after the playtest. Now I’ve got to find some time to make it down to Florida and try it out for myself. And encourage them to install a version of it at Disneyland.

iTunes–

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Apparently, at some point today (while I was sick in bed waiting and hoping for death to come), Apple announced that it was switching its iTunes store music tracks to DRM-free versions. Fair enough, but nothing special: Amazon has been [...]

Apparently, at some point today (while I was sick in bed waiting and hoping for death to come), Apple announced that it was switching its iTunes store music tracks to DRM-free versions.

Fair enough, but nothing special: Amazon has been selling DRM-free MP3 downloads for a while now. And I switched to Amazon about a year ago, partly because of an exceptionally good example of customer service, but mostly because they sell standard, unlocked MP3 files with no strings attached.

Now, I don’t have any major problem with DRM in principle, as long as it’s done reasonably. As somebody whose livelihood is based on digital downloads at the moment — and who’s seen his work being distributed on torrent sites, even though the pricing structure and availability of legal versions couldn’t be more reasonable — I recognize the importance of making sure people are compensated for their work. One of the reasons I had to stop reading Boing Boing was because of the rabid and sanctimonious anti-DRM sentiment, and the glee they seem to take at the sight of people breaking end-user legal agreements.

Plus, from a purely practical standpoint, I’m just barely inconvenienced by it. I’m a model Apple customer with all the pre-requisite Apple-branded hardware, and they’ve kept the licensing reasonable enough that I hardly ever run into problems. So it’s not onerous, but still: if there’s the option of a locked or an unlocked version at the same price (or lower) and the same level of convenience, I’ll take the unlocked one.

Here’s the problem: before Amazon opened up its service, I downloaded quite a bit from iTunes music store. Apple offers a “special offer” to “upgrade my library” to the DRM free versions, for 30 cents a song, or 30% of the album price. When I last checked, it would cost me over $100 to upgrade my entire library, and the figure keeps going up as they update more of their database. If it sounds like I’ve bought an obscene amount of stuff from iTunes, that’s because: a) that’s over the course of several years; and b) I’ve bought an obscene amount of stuff from iTunes.

But you can only “upgrade” your entire library, not individual tracks or albums. And even worse: that includes everything you’ve ever bought from the iTunes store, regardless of whether it’s still in your library. Over four years, I can get a lot of stupid stuff — albums I’m not sure why I bought in the first place, songs I wanted to hear at 2 in the morning but never want to hear again, stuff that seemed like it’d be good but turned out otherwise, and just plain lapses in judgement for which I have no excuse. Most of those got deleted long ago, and they’re not missed. But I’d get to pay to download them again if I ever wanted to go “iTunes Plus” for the stuff I still like.

Or, buy them again from Amazon and end up paying less overall or more per track. Which is the confusing part: it seems like it’d be in Apple’s best interest to get some more money out of me, instead of insisting on $100 or nothing.

But as I said, the DRM stuff is no more inconvenient to me today than it was yesterday, so there’s no compelling reason to “upgrade” at all. And it’s not as if re-buying music is a totally alien concept: most of the stuff I got off iTunes in the first place was from albums I’d already bought in college and had to sell back for textbooks or food. So in the end, it’s just another example of weird business practices by Apple. And another weird side effect of living during a cross-over from one type of media to another. (Expect to hear me complaining more loudly once all the video content starts going DRM-free).

iList

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Because I’m in a year-end list-making mood, and I’ve got insomnia, here’s a handy list of my favorite iPhone apps. All links go to the App Store page on iTunes, so don’t be alarmed. Tweetie iPhone client for twitter.com This [...]

Because I’m in a year-end list-making mood, and I’ve got insomnia, here’s a handy list of my favorite iPhone apps. All links go to the App Store page on iTunes, so don’t be alarmed.

Tweetie
iPhone client for twitter.com
This is the best twitter client for any platform, as far as I’m concerned. I bought a copy of Twitterriffic and don’t regret it, and I’m still using the desktop version on my other machines. But this is one case where the “less is more” philosophy doesn’t quite hold up. Tweetie lets you separate messages into replies and direct messages, search for keywords and on more general “trends,” and most useful: examine profile details. Seeing who’s following you (and who’s following them, and so on) is the best way to build up a network of people you don’t know.

Speaking of people you don’t know: I never saw the appeal of twitter initially, but now I’ve become one of those annoying types who says it’s “indispensable.” My favorite of the people I don’t know that I’m following is Joshua Green Allen, or @fireland, who’s so funny it kind of pisses me off.

Stanza
Free e-book reader
I don’t understand this one at all; it came out almost as soon as the app store opened, it’s completely full-featured and works perfectly, and it’s still free. You can download books from within the app, directly to the phone, or you can add your own. I haven’t tried reading a full-length novel on it yet, but at least for reading short fiction, it’s perfect.

NetNewsWire
Free RSS feed reader
This is especially useful if you use NetNewsWire as your desktop RSS feed reader (as you should, if you use a Mac), since it keeps your read/unread count in sync with the desktop version. The author updates the app frequently, and he’s always looking for ways to make it faster, simpler, and easier to use.

Air Sharing
File transfer and viewing utility
This lets you copy files directly to the iPhone, without going through iTunes or a desktop client app. It contains viewers for most common file types like video, audio, and iWork/MS Office documents.

SimCity
City-building game
This is a surprisingly full-featured port of SimCity; it doesn’t feel like they had to sacrifice much to get it to work on a phone. It’s roughly “SimCity 2800,” since it’s got the art assets and most of the concepts of SimCity 3000, but not quite the entire game (no subways, for instance). Seeing as how SimCity 3K is the only game that I’ve spent literally an entire day playing, this could be dangerous — luckily, the game drains the iPhone’s battery pretty quickly, and doesn’t scale that well to huge cities.

Now Playing
Free browser for movie showtimes and reviews

Kotoba!
Free Japanese/English dictionary
Works best if you enable the Japanese keyboard(s) via Settings->General->International->Keyboards.

Instapaper
Free & Paid versions, saves web pages for offline reading
Simple and easy to use, works perfectly even in the free version. Great for plane flights.

OmniFocus
Task management software
This one is overpriced and a little over-complicated, but it’s the best one available for the phone right now. The UI just plain works like it’s supposed to, and it turns out to be the fastest and easiest at entering new tasks (which is what you do most often) and sorting them into different contexts. It’s very hard to justify paying $20 for a to-do list app (and much, much more than that if you want to sync your list with the desktop!) but if it’s something you use a lot, it’s the best you can buy.