What have I been up to?

It's been a while since my last posting. The BluRay vs. HD-DVD format war is over, so we'll see if my prognostications from my last posting bear any fruit.

At any rate, my wait for a new mobile phone is over. I managed to accidentally crack the display on my trusty Sony Ericsson W600i handset, rendering the phone useless.. Well, not totally useless. It wasn't until a call came in that I pulled the phone out of its holster, and saw it was damaged. I tried to make do by putting my SIM card in my backup phone, but that phone doesn't do web browsing very well, and I can't reply to SMS messages on it. I was due to be on-call at work, and I rely on SMS for notification of on-call needs. I needed to do something about replacing the phone, or I needed to locate a temporary phone I could use until whatever 'ultimate' phone became available. I mentioned before how I was either waiting for the 3G iPhone, or for the OpenMoko phone to become usable. I ended up deciding the existing iPhone would be fine for my needs, and bought one. So, I've been an iPhone owner for the past couple of weeks.

(That's not all I've been up to.. We had hardwood floors installed in our living/dining areas and entry way, and I removed the nasty 'popcorn' texture from the ceiling in those rooms, re-textured, did drywall repair -- did you know termites eat the paper off drywall?-- and repainted the newly textured ceilings. Now that the new floor is installed, I'll be doing new baseboards and quarter-round this weekend.)

There are so many things the iPhone does well, but there are so many things that need work. Thanks to the efforts of many dedicated developers, there is a thriving, unsupported, 3rd-party application development scene for the iPhone. So much so, that Apple has decided to release a Software Development Kit, in order to bring this application development community into the mainstream. I doubt Apple will willingly allow the kind of intimate access to the internals of the iPhone that I expect, and I wonder if folks in my position won't be faced with the prospect of choosing whether or not to 'go legit,' and run only sanctioned applications on their iPhones, or choosing instead to continue to use un-sanctioned applications.

There's way more I could say about the iPhone, but most of what I would say is already out there on other blogs and message boards, so it probably does no good to re-hash all that information here. I'll probably have more to say about my iPhone if and when I end up doing something with it that wasn't already thought up by some other developer or hacker.

The future is (not) Blu

I mentioned a month or two ago that I bought an HD-DVD player when Wal-Mart featured them in a pre-Christmas doorbuster sale for $100. I was not taking sides in the format war... I was voting with my wallet. I don't figure it's worth spending much more than $100 for *any* video disk player, regardless of format. Since then, there's been a couple more rounds in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray slugfest. Blu-Ray's on top right now, due mostly to their content availability coup, where they convinced Warner Bros. to go Blu-Ray only. So, all the fanboys are whipping up the rhetoric in the message boards, goading each other about how HD-DVD isn't long for the world. I've got a few thoughts about this topic:

1.) By far, the most popular Blu-Ray player is the PlayStation 3 gaming console. They cost at least $400, and Sony may have, after over a year of production, finally managed to eke out a small profit on each PS3 console sold. The upshot of all this is that few people are buying the purpose-built Blu-Ray player, where there may be some profit. Yes, yes, I know. My $100 HD-DVD player was sold at a loss, too. But that was back when there was much more of a format war going on. Based on stand-alone player pricing trends over the past few weeks, it looks like Sony and other Blu-Ray player vendors are already 'making their acceptance speeches,' as the victors in the format war. Purpose-built Blu-Ray player prices during the holidays dipped below $300, while HD-DVD was more of a threat. Now, you won't find a player for less than $300, and most are back up to $400. Why would I buy one when my $400 would also net me a whiz-bang gaming console, to boot? - Put more simply, if there's no longer a format war, and your standard is the victor, you better make sure you're in a position to make some money by selling hardware.

2.) My HD-DVD player does a *beautiful* job upconverting standard DVDs to HD quality. No, they don't look as good as real HD content, but upconverted DVDs look *way* better than when they are played back on a standard DVD player. I could be satisfied for quite a while watching upconverted Sdandard-Def DVDs... probably long enough to wait for either Blu-Ray prices to drop *significantly*

or 3.) with the purchase of my HD-DVD player, I may have purchased my last disc player, ever. Once Apple, Vudu, or brand x get their online act together, I'll just rent what I want to watch online, and forego the purchase of yet another disc player.

So... There are three alternatives, any of which are likely, and none of which are unique to my household. None of them feature me adding to Sony's bottom line anytime soon, either. Sony may have won the Blu-Ray battle, but they may have lost the high-def disc war.

(Oh, and by the way, the ability to record on any of these discs is a non-event in my mind. Until one of the multi-hundreds of gigabyte rewritable optical disk formats is economical for the average user, I'll keep buying those unbelievably cheap (by comparison) multi-hundred gigabyte USB/SATA external hard drives for my storage needs.)

The mundane side of early adoption

I accept that I will have to keep waiting for some of the gadgets I really want. The 3G-Compatible OpenMoko phone isn't in the offing anytime soon, and neither is the 3G iPhone. I also don't want to have to hack the iPhone to make it do what I want. This is one example of my early adopter status. (For more examples, see my earlier posting on home theater.)

I find myself being an early adopter today on a far more mundane technology. I want 30 watt dimmable PAR 40 compact soft-white compact flourescent lamps to install in the recessed lighting fixtures in my house. I've been using CFLs for several years in lamps and ceiling fan light fixtures. Now, I want to get rid of the 90-watt recessed incandescent floods in my den, kitchen, and dining area. I use X-10 home control, so the lamps need to be dimmable.

One warehouse store near my house has non-dimmable PAR 40's, and one of the local home improvement stores has *one* PAR 30 dimmable lamp. Then I head over to Wal-Mart. They are spearheading a campaign to foster adoption of CFLs. They even had an endcap display from GE, showing a comparison between the various incandescent lamp types, and their CFL counterparts (and it included PAR 40 lamps.) The display read "You can find lamps like this and more on our lighting aisle." "Terriffic," I think. Sign me up, here's my money! Where are they?! Uhh, there's no such lamp in stock.

Luckily, there are several e-commerce sites that have the lamps I want. I shouldn't bave to resort to such measures to buy light bulbs.

Guitar (anti-)Hero

So, Fender and Gibson have licensed replicas of some of my favorite guitars, so that they can be replicated as little plastic Guitar Hero controllers.. little plastic insults to the beautiful musical instruments they are modeled after. That started me wondering. You can buy a *real* Strat replica for probably about the same amount of money as the little verkakte Guitar hero Stratocaster controller. Why didn't either Fender or Gibson insist that Activision (along with the Guitar Hero controllers) make a simple controller for the various game consoles that takes real electric guitar input, and samples and translates actual strum/fretting actions into the representative Guitar hero controller commands? Nobody said you had to actually produce something musical on the guitar with all this fretting and picking. You don't even have to tune the guitar. Just strum the thing, and let the controller calibrate to whatever the strings are tuned to. You could even color the first through 5th frets on your "REAL Guitar Hero" controller green. red, yellow, blue, and orange. (for that matter, how long is it going to be before a real guitarist shows up on stage playing a guitar that has green, red, yellow, blue and orange spots in the first five fret positions.)


My gripe is, why play at playing guitar when you're that close to the real thing. Oh, and God forbid you decide you actually *like* playing the thing, and decide to really learn to pick out notes, and make chords. Then the Guitar Hero gameplay could then have a mode that expects you to play more complex note patterns as the game progresses.

Also, I'm not talking about ruining a perfectly good guitar by cobbling the existing GH controller into a real electric guitar. I mean a black box that has a quarter-inch jack on one end, and on the other end, a connector for the gaming console of your choice.. you can use any guitar. You could even include colored dots to place under the first five fret positions on an existing guitar. In this way *any* guitar would work. I presume Fender and Gibson would prefer to make the profit off sales of real guitars (even cheap ones) over the pennies they may be making off the little plastic controllers (that are breaking left and right)

The high price of early adoption

I had a bad hankering for big-screen home theater five years ago. I already owned a 55 inch CRT rear-projection TV, but I had home theater envy; the kind you get after reading high-end home AV enthusiast magazines. At that point in time, making the statement “I want a really big-screen home theater” was really another way to say “I plan to spend an insane amount of money,” There weren't any $1,000 or less projectors made for home cinema, like there are now. It's still possible to spend $10,000 on a home-theater projector.... Of course, it was then and still is possible to purchase a $6,000 patchcord for your A/V equipment. (I'm sure I'll end up discussing my opinions about ultra-high-end AV equipment in another posting.) I wasn't prepared to embark on a purpose-built home theater room, or to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a home theater-type projector. I decided a data-grade DLP projector was what I wanted.

I did a lot of research. I wanted high-lumen output, and HDTV compatibility. At the time, my 55 inch analog TV was only six years old and was doing a terrific job for everyday TV viewing. Over-the-air digital television was already available, but I wasn't prepared to replace the 55-inch TV anytime soon. I figured I'd get as much HDTV compatibility as I could afford in my new projector as I could afford, and we'd do our HDTV viewing on the projector, with the help of a DTV receiver/decoder card for the PC. This arrangement served our needs for the next five years. The projector was supposed to handle DVI digital inputs, but it ended up not being able to accept DVI video from my HDTV tuner card. I was disappointed, but we ended up sending the HDTV signal over the VESA connector.

A couple of years after we bought the projector, I built my first MythTV box, and it quickly became the family PVR. My wife can navigate the MythTV menus and options better than I can. It quickly migrated from hobbyist project to a home appliance used on a daily basis. Before Myth came along, my wife had her VCR running throughout the day, timeshifting TV to her schedule. Once Myth came on the scene, I heard less and less of the whirring and clicking of her VCR, as she came to depend more on MythTV.

That first homebrew MythTV PC experienced hardware failure at the end of the summer, after almost three years of good service. I decided to upgrade the hardware, and to also move our HDTV watching and recording over to the new MythTV machine. About that same time, the 55-inch RPTV started showing signs of being ready to give up the ghost, so my wife and I decided to replace it with a new Samsung DLP model with LED illumination. (I'll have to rant and rave about that TV in another posting.) I had previously driven the projector with another PC running Windows XP and the HDTV decoder card. When my wife's Thursday night viewing of 'ER' rolled around, we had to boot up the Windows PC, and set up the projector in advance of the start of the program. I was now planning to drive the existing projector and the new TV from the new MythTV box. I decided to have the new MythTV box drive the new TV and existing projector with Component Video, so that my wife and I could easily switch between the TV and the projector. I'd arrange to have the same video signal appear at either device.

Remember from a couple of paragraphs ago where I mentioned I'd had no success running DVI to the projector? Well, it turns out it didn't want to display component video above 480p, either. There was no amount of reconfiguring my wiring scheme, and following recommendations on AVSForum that would get the stubborn projector to accept the signal from the MythTV box. Also, keep in mind that the DVI connection standard (which the projector supposedly supported, but didn't actually support adequately) had quasi-morphed into HDMI, and that HDCP was now on the scene (and the projector was old enough to support neither of these formats.)

Now, add to all that confusion my trip to Wal-Mart that first Friday morning in November, 2007. I and 89,999 other fortunate buyers laid our $100 down for an HD-DVD player. Whether or not HD-DVD took off in the marketplace, I figured it would be a terrific upconverting DVD player. Of course Hollywood saw to it that I'd never display HD content of any type via component video. They expected me to use HDMI with HDCP. (I'll be sure to spew some vitriol about Hollywood in another posting. I've got plenty to spare.) So, now I have a projector that wouldn't display DVI output from my HD decoder card, won't display component video over 480p, and will never display HDCP encrypted video.

I felt like I was out of options for coaxing my projector into working with my A/V system upgrades. My wife and I spent a socially significant amount of money on it, and I sure didn't expect to have to upgrade it after only 5 years. Nonetheless, I found myself in that exact position. I found a 16:9 projector designed for home theater that was on sale, and cost less than a third of what my original projector cost. I ended up buying that projector, and decided we'd sell our existing projector on eBay. I am still frustrated over the money, time and effort spent on the original projector. I am partly consoled by how relatively inexpensive the replacement projector was, compared to the projector it replaced.

I'm glad that the cost of home A/V is dropping I'd just as soon not run into any more high-priced early adoption 'opportunities' like this.