eclecticism

A few weeks ago, Prairie and I got our TV Converter Box Coupons from the government, so that we could happily continue to pump propaganda into our brains watch our favorite shows after the analog stations are turned off in February. I wandered down to the seventh circle of Hell Best Buy and picked up two of the converter boxes (the Insignia NS-DXA1). Rather than hooking both up right off the bat (tempting as that was, since I was a geek with new toys), I just hooked up the larger living room TV. This made sense, as it’s the one that has all the other fancy gadgets on it and requires me being home to successfully juggle five remotes — Prairie just sticks to the little one in our bedroom that only uses two remotes.

After a few weeks of using it…well, much as I like the idea of digital TV, the reality — at least as far as over-the-air broadcast goes — is definitely a bit of a mixed bag.

The box itself is fairly nice: simple to set up and use, with only a few minor caveats. For some reason, in addition to the blue ‘on’ light that’s quite standard for electronics, this also has a bright red ‘off’ light that looks oddly like there’s a Cylon staring at you when you’re not watching TV (incidentally, this is another reason we’ve not hooked one up in the bedroom yet). The on-screen guide doesn’t always seem to be accurate, though that may be the fault of the local broadcasters. Aside from that, I’m quite happy with it — the image quality is nice, and a noticeable step up from analog broadcasts, and the audio, while limited to standard 2-channel stereo (one of the requirements of the coupon-eligible boxes), seems good enough to my ears. The box also allows you to choose how it sends the video to your TV screen: letterboxed to preserve the widescreen aspect ratio; cropped to fill the square screen at the expense of information on the sides; or ‘squeezed’, where the widescreen image fills the square screen, making everyone look really really skinny. This is actually my preferred method when a show is broadcast widescreen, as my TV (a Sony Wega KV-27FS17) has an ‘anamorphic’ mode that ‘squishes’ the ‘squeezed’ signal into a 16:9 area, increasing the resolution and quality of the displayed image (geeky tech-speak for “it looks better this way”).

However, our one big issue is simply this: when analog TV signals dropped or had some form of interference, you got a little bit of snow or static, but you could still watch the show. When digital TV signals drop or hit interference…well, if you’re lucky, you’ll just get some ‘blocking’ in the image, like when a video DVD has a fingerprint. More often, though, the signal drops so far that first the audio, then the video cuts out entirely. This ends up being far more frustrating than the old analog issues, as it’s a total disruption of the signal. As interference seems to depend a lot on weather, Prairie and I have taken to watching TV on the little 13” TV in the bedroom that still gets analog signals on rainy nights rather than even trying to watch the big TV with the digital receiver. A crystal-clear signal is only good when you get that signal, after all!

I keep finding myself wishing they’d tweaked the digital transmission standard so that the video was the first thing to go with a bad signal, rather than the audio. If the video cut out but the audio was still going, you could still follow along pretty well while the video did its little dance of cubist surrealism, but when the audio craps out, it’s just frustrating (especially when watching, say, a show like Jeopardy).

I’ve heard that a good antenna could alleviate the problems, but when we’re living in a rental apartment, there’s not much we can do on that score. Good old-fashioned rabbit ears will have to do.

So, in the end, it’s a mixed bag. It’s great when it works, but when it doesn’t work, it’s a lot more frustrating than the “old-n-busted” system ever was.

Netscape Navigator, one of the first ‘popular’ web browsers, is dead.

Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But American Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.

A sad, if unsurprising and inevitable end. One of my earliest web pages bills itself right at the top as being ‘Netscape 2.0 enhanced.’ Times gone by….

…but a solid F for practicality and safety. At least where my commute is concerned.

According to Google Transit, the best way for me to get from my apartment to North Seattle Community College involves grabbing a bus from the closest bus stop to the transit center just south of the Northgate Mall. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, after that, I need to walk a block, scale a chain-link fence, climb a hill, play Frogger across three lanes of northbound traffic, one express lane, and three lanes of southbound traffic on I-5, go down a hill, scale another chain link fence, hike through some woods, and swim across the lake on the NSCC grounds. Oh, and according to their estimates, it should take me nine minutes to do all this.

I think that I’ll stick to the Seattle Metro Trip Planner for now.

(Yes, I’m sure Google does much better in many circumstances. This one just gave me a good laugh.)

I had to stop by Best Buy today to pick up a new WiFi router for our apartment. Normally, stopping by Best Buy is something I tend to avoid at all costs, and I’ll only go in when I know exactly what I need to get, so I can go in, grab it, and get out as quickly as possible. Today, however, I wasn’t quite sure what router to get (or if it would really be worth getting a new one), so I crossed my fingers and hoped I’d find a sales droid who had at least one and a half, if not two whole brain cells to rub together.

I ended up speaking to two — first, a guy in a green shirt, who was apparently the in-store Clearwire representative, but who happened to be free and knew something about WiFi routers. After describing the situation to him and batting things about, he led me back to the correct shelf, and he snagged a blue shirt on the way. I gave the blue shirt the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of the conversation I’d just had, he recommended a Netgear router to me, and — once again, crossing my fingers — I grabbed it and headed off to work.

(Minor aside: the issue in question was that our D-Link WiFi router seemed to have issues with Hermie, our Vista laptop. The D-Link worked fine over the wired connection with both Macs in the apartment, and connected fine via WiFi to my G5 desktop. Hermie consistently works fine with WiFi in public places — during travels, at the local Panera, and at NSCC — but it had serious issues connecting to the D-Link at home. Some days it would only connect after anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of repeated tries, other days we wouldn’t be able to get it to connect at all. Needless to say, this has been more than a little frustrating.)

After getting home from work, I unpacked the Netgear router, plugged it in, and went through the installation song and dance, using the ‘Installation Wizard’ on the CD from Hermie. Once it said it was up and running, I checked both desktops via the wired connections, and they were fine. Checked the Airport connection on my G5, it was fine. Rebooted Hermie (to cover all my bases), logged in, and started to head to the ‘Network’ icon down in the try to initialize the connection…but wait, what was that? It was already connected! No muss, no fuss, no error messages telling me it couldn’t connect…it was just there, just like magic. Just like it’s supposed to work.

Thinking back on it, I realized that this now makes five times in a row that I’ve had to go into Best Buy for something, and come out with what I needed, and — when I’ve had to deal with any of the staff — actually not been driven to distraction by their idiocy. In this case, I was actually given good information, and they helped me find what I needed.

I must say, while I’m still no fan of the overall Best Buy experience (their stores tend to come across as oppressive to me…too loud, with aisles that are packed too closely together to make the experience pleasant), five consecutive good experiences have to lead me to admit something of a trend. I don’t know if they’re starting to emphasize more or better training that deals in actual knowledge rather than simple salesmanship, but for some time now, the staff has seemed far more competent than I would have expected.

I may not ever get to a point of just stopping by to browse, or remotely look forward to having to dive into Best Buy…but at least at the moment, I don’t feel the need to actively avoid the store or it’s sales droids when I do stop in. And, for Best Buy, that’s saying a lot.

I’m hoping that now that we’re just about a year away from the transition to all-digital TV broadcasting and the government’s TV Converter Program is up and running, we’ll finally start to get some information and reviews on the various TV converter boxes that are (or will be) available.

I just applied for my two coupons towards the boxes, and then started searching on some of the listed eligible converter boxes to see what they’re like. Unfortunately, much of what I found was brief little snippets from über-geek and audiophile sites with comments like this…

…one of the “digital switchover” converter boxes your stubborn granny can buy early next year with her $40 coupon from the government, in lieu of getting a new goddamn TV.

Okay, sure, that’s from Gizmodo. Still — not every geek out there works for Microsoft and has a gazillion expendable dollars…or sees the need to toss out a perfectly good (and, actually, very nice) TV set that works fine, aside from not having the ATSC tuner.

With all the different specialized blogging, pseudo-blogging, or linking websites and services available these days, I’m starting to lose track of how I’m ‘supposed’ to do this one-to-many online communication thing.

It used to be easy. Back in the ‘old days,’ you’d hand-edit a simple HTML file with whatever you wanted to put on it, whenever you wanted to put something on it. Maybe it’d be a link, maybe it’d be a screed. Maybe people would see it, maybe they wouldn’t. Pretty simple.

Then blogging arrived to make everything simpler. Gone were the days of hand-editing HTML and managing pages directly, now you had specialized software that handled the details for you. Databases to store the information, automatically dynamically generated pages, comments, the whole shebang. Still, content-wise, it was still a grab-bag. Some posts would be long, detailed, and in-depth; other posts would be a single small link or quip; sometimes you’d get lists of links that caught someone’s eye.

Now, however, you’ve got a veritable plethora of specialized sites to handle all the different types of information you might want to share. The ones that I either use (in some fashion) or have pinged my radar strongly enough to trigger this little round of rambling, in rough order of depth:

1. Twitter: 140-character messages originally meant to be IM-style ‘status updates,’ but now often used for ‘nanoblogging’ — short, pithy messages. No more, no less. Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will all tweet brief.

2. del.icio.us: Social bookmarking that has evolved far more towards the social side than the bookmarking side. While I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually use their del.icio.us account as a substitute for the ‘bookmarks’ menu in their web browser, I see far more who use it as a ‘microblog’ (often displayed as a sidebar to their main weblog) wherein each post is a single link with short commentary.

3. Tumblr: “The easiest way to share yourself,” according to their splash page. I’ve not bothered setting up a ‘tumblelog’ for myself, but this appears to fill in the ‘miniblogging’ niche, with an emphasis on simple link and media inclusion. Apparently, “this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” Honestly, I’m still a little confused by the niche that this one fills (or attempts to fill).

4. Weblogs (the usual suspects): Finally, the sites and software packages that used to be simple ‘blogging’ tools are now…what? Is this still ‘blogging’? Or is it now ‘macroblogging’?

I’m starting to feel like I’m losing track of what kind of post is ‘supposed’ to go to which service, and I’m more and more wondering if it’s even worth continuing to keep them all separate. However, there are occasional advantages to the specializations of the services (del.icio.us’s tagging and quick bookmarklets, the dedicated clients that are available for many of the services) that keep me using them instead of just using ‘old-school’ weblog posts for everything.

If I had the time (which student life prevents) and design skills (which simply don’t exist), I’d love to put some effort into seeing if I could assemble an über skin for my site that would streamline everything into one stream-of-consciousness approach (along the lines of what I see on Daring Fireball and kottke.org) but still allow me to use those services that I find useful. It doesn’t seem horrendously complex: plugins (some of which are probably available in some form or another) that would automatically convert each post at one service or another into its own post on my weblog, default posting options for each type of post (perhaps tweets don’t need comments enabled, for instance), and possibly some CSS work that would distinguish the types of posts.

But then, would that still be too complex? There’s always the question of what happens when one service or another is having connection issues (which I keep running into with Twitter — apparently there’s some avian flu going around over there). Perhaps I’d still be better off just coming back around to using my weblog for everything. Consolidate everything in one place — after all, there’s absolutely no real reason why I “have” to ramble on for a certain length for the post to be worthy of going on the blog, rather than being posted as a tumble, del.icio.us link, or tweet.

There’s a few things I’d miss, though, which may keep me from doing this. The in-built social networking of places like Twitter are nice, though not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being able to have my tweets and del.icio.us links show up on my Facebook profile is nice. Sometimes I like the compartmentalization (on the weblog, for instance, ‘big’ posts in the center, tweets and links over in the sidebar), sometimes I feel like it’s unnecessarily over complicating things.

Meh. I’ve gone on to just rambling now. Maybe that 140 character limit isn’t so much of a bad thing, huh?

My anthropology teacher had shown the class directly before ours a movie using an actual 16mm film projector, and was rewinding it when we all came in and sat down. I got a kick out of seeing one in use — heck, I was the A/V geek in elementary school who always volunteered to run the projector when I could — but the look of confusion, wonder, and near-horror on the face of one girl in the class was absolutely hilarious.

“What is that thing? How old is it…when was it made, the forties? Thirties?” She watched, absolutely fascinated, as the teacher ran out the last few minutes of film and we listened to the clickety-clack of the gears and rachets and the warbling, jittery audio; as he raised the rear reel and threaded the trailer back in to the hub; and as he patiently waited for the ‘whap-whap-whap’ of the leader slapping against the projector that signaled that the film was done rewinding.

I’ve finally joined the 2000’s — I’m kicked back in bed, typing away on a laptop that’s on a wireless connection.

I mentioned before that last week, Prairie and I picked up a laptop ‘puter. While it came with a pre-installed wireless card, we still had to physically plug it in, as with naught but desktops beforehand, we’d never had any need to go wireless. So, while Prairie was on her trip (where Hermie — named so because, when charging, pink and blue lights glow on the front, prompting Prairie to comment that it’s a hermaphrodite — apparently performed quite well), I picked up an Airport card for my computer.

Theoretically, we should have been able to coax Hermie into picking up a wireless signal from my computer, but no matter what we tried, it didn’t seem to work. As we had a few errands to run, we added a quick run by Target and picked up a little home wireless router from D-Link. Came home, hooked it up…and viola! Wireless is up and running on my desktop and on Hermie.

I am running into one little issue, however — and as I’m just not used to working (er…fighting) with Windows, let alone Vista, I’m hoping there might be some ideas. Right now, in order for Hermie to connect, I have to run the network wide open, with WEP completely disabled. If I turn WEP on, then instead of asking for a password, Vista immediately gives me an error message telling me that Windows did not get a response from the router…however, it pops that message up so quickly that it doesn’t seem to even be waiting for a response. Odd, and a little frustrating. I haven’t tried switching over to WPA yet to see if that works, but that might be my next bet, as all the Google-fu I can muster on the error I’m getting tells me to reinstall the drivers for my wireless adapter. :p Meh.

So far so good, though…

Update: We’re up and running using WPA-Personal. I’m not exactly sure how or why — it took a couple tries and it wasn’t working at first, but for some unknown reason suddenly it got a successful connection. Nifty!

Photo Drop is a slick little Dashboard widget — actually, one of the first that was slick and potentially useful enough for me to download and toss in to my Dashboard, which isn’t exactly the most-used OS X feature on my system. It’s a nice, simple one-trick pony: drag a photo to Photo Drop, set a few quick options for the final look (size, effects, etc.), and you’re done. Plus, it’s free. Not bad!

User Interface Overload, originally uploaded by djwudi.

On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.

However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!

• Line 1 (constant): The global account options.

• Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.

• Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.

• Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.

• Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.

It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!

Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Bill Gates, in an interview with Steven Levy for Newsweek:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

There’s a few other doozy quotes in there as well, but that’s the one that really got my attention.

More under the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Three amusing articles, all via /.:

1. Top 20 Hackers in Film History:

   My fellow Geeks! Below you will find a list of the 20 coolest, funniest, dare I say sexiest hackers and computer geeks that have graced the silver screen. While we may be misunderstood and maligned in everyday life, geeks have always been portrayed with a certain power, mystery and intrigue in movies. Practically since the word ‘computer’ entered the American lexicon, Hollywood and the public have been fascinated with the people who make these strange electronic boxes do such cool shit.

2. Servers in the Movies:

   There are two guidelines for this list. One, they must exist only in the world of movies or TV. Second, they need to fit the following definition: A server is a computer system that provides services or data to other computing systems—called clients—over a network or other communication device.

3. What Code DOESN’T Do in Real Life (That it Does in the Movies):

   I understand that Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they’ve done more than dress things up - they’ve morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass. In other words, they’ve layered a ridiculous amount of extravagance on top of something that in reality is very grounded.

Andy Ihnatko does a wonderful job of slaughtering the Zune, Microsoft’s new iPod competitor…

Yes, Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

[…]

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune’s tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

The iPod owns 85 percent of the market because it deserves to. Apple consistently makes decisions that benefit the company, the users and the media publishers — and they continue to innovatively expand the device’s capabilities without sacrificing its simplicity.

Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, “What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?”

Microsoft’s colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.

Ouch.

(via /.)

As part of an effort to streamline things while I’m in school, I’ve been working here and there on paring down the number of newsfeeds I subscribe to. One of the steps I took a couple weeks ago was removing the majority of my mac-specific site feeds (Macintouch, MacFixit, and various others), figuring that if any big news broke, chances are good that I’d hear about it from plenty of other places.

Boy was I right on that assumption. I can’t count the number of different places I’ve seen mention Boot Camp, and I’m only up to around noon yesterday in my newsreading. Crazy.

Boot Camp, on the off chance it hasn’t crossed your radar yet (not likely, but possible), is Apple’s just-released official methodology for setting your new Intel-based Mac up as a dual-boot Mac OS X/Windows XP system.

You’ve got to love the language they chose to use in their promo materials (emphasis mine)…

> Developers can learn all about the sixth major release of Mac OS X this century at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, to be held August 7-11 in San Francisco.

> Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

> Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

Heh. No, no snark there. None at all.

Of course, since this is an option only available for Intel-based Macs, it’s something I’m not able to take advantage off — my first generation dual 2.0Ghz G5 PowerMac just won’t cut it. Not that (still) being unable to run Windows natively on my Mac is really a crushing blow to me…as long as I can run my math class software under Virtual PC, I’m good to go.

In the meantime, PC world has a ‘first look’ at running Windows natively on Mactel hardware.

> It works. Impressively well. With games, even. That’s our first impression of Windows XP running under Apple’s Boot Camp on our 20-inch iMac. > > […] Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on. > > In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to “High.” > > Our 20-inch iMac came with a 2.0-GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. That’s roughly equivalent to a high-end laptop machine, and anecdotally the performance I obtained was about what I’d have expected from that type of PC.

“Roadblock, The” by Ridgway, Stan from the album Earphoria (1991, 4:40).

Isn’t that about time to start kindergarten?

John Siracusa has a nice look at five years of OS X on Ars Technica today.

> A side-by-side test-drive of Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.4 is shocking. The eternal debate is whether this gap exists because 10.4 is so good, or because 10.0 was so, so bad. That said, Apple’s ability to plan and execute its OS strategy is not open for debate. In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it’s really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century. > > Today’s Mac users span a much wider range than those of the past. Mac OS X’s Unix-like core reached out to the beard-and-suspenders crowd (and the newer source-code-and-a-dream crowd) while the luscious Aqua user interface pulled all the touchy-feely aesthetes from the other direction. In the middle were the refugees from the Mac-That-Was, but they aren’t the story here. Mac OS X is about new blood and new ideas—some good, some bad, but all vibrant. The Mac is alive again! > > After spending half my life watching smart, talented people ignore the Mac for reasons of circumstance or prejudice, it’s incredibly gratifying to live in a post-Mac OS X world. When I encounter a tech-world luminary or up-and-coming geek today, I just assume that he or she uses a Mac. Most of the time, I’m right. Even those with a conflicting affiliation (e.g., Linux enthusiasts) often use Apple laptops, if not the OS.

“Related Vortex” by X-Dream from the album Spirit Zone Vol. 2 (1996, 8:48).