So it just so happens that the MLB world series trophy has made it’s way to Quincy Center, and yes, I got a chance to get my picture with it… Not sure why it is cool, but it is..:)

Not sure what to make of apparent discord in the Iraqi parliament.

A really great editorial puts the Schiavo case in some much needed perspective. Found on Atrios.

The PSP really looks like a winner. In addition to playing the game I mentioned last time, I’ve tried the two grand experiments on my list: play a video game again other humans (online) and get a feature film onto a MemoryStick. I’ve had mixed success with both.

First off, the video game. After playing Need For Speed for a while, I got bored with racing around in a circle. It’s fun for a while and I’ll probably go back to playing it again, but I needed to get online against people with a game that has more action. So, off I went to Best Buy to get another game. After poking around and being shocked at the price of the games (some as much as $49.99!), I settled on Twisted Metal Head On (TMHO), part of the Twisted Metal franchise. The game is pretty much the old Atari game Combat with really cool graphics and more than just a boring square to shoot at your opponents. Seriously, you can just download BZFlag and imagine it with really cool graphics, cars instead of tanks, and different types of tanks/cars instead of the one-tank-to-rule-them-all. That’s TMHO.

The gameplay is fast, the graphics are beautiful and the soundtrack is pretty good. The best part of the game, though, is that you can play online using the PSP’s built in wireless. I had few problems getting online yesterday, though I did hit the 80110482 error a few times. I just re-tried and voila, on the net. The online play is smooth, at least as good as playing online on the computer. A few blips of lag today, but yesterday was as smooth as can be.

There’s something a bit odd about playing an online game (and I mean concentrating and really playing it) while laying on the couch. You’re just not supposed to do that! I swear I would sort of realize what I was doing between rounds and think, man, two years ago I would never have expected to be able to do this. To have a screen with such great graphics, good sound, enough battery power to run the hardware PLUS a wireless Internet connection running at full speed for hours of gaming? You kidding me? This is f’ing awesome.

OK, so I’m a big fan of the wireless connectivity. Let’s move on to the next big experiment, my own DVDs on my PSP. While at Best Buy, I picked up a copy of The Incredibles and a new 512MB MemoryStick Pro Duo card. My goal was to get The Incredibles onto that MemoryStick and playing on my PSP. I ended up with mixed results.

After a bit of poking around the Internet, I found that the process to encode video on a Mac for the PSP had already been documented by a number of uber-geeks that had the Japanese release and more video knowledge than I. So, it was just a matter of finding and noting them to make a list of the software I’d need and the steps to follow. All of this stuff is freeware or very inexpensive shareware, so luckily that was no burden. Unfortunately, all of this stuff was freeware or shareware and so I ran into some cryptic options.

I ended up using YadeX and ffmpegx to do the conversion. I eventually plan on replacing YadeX with MacTheRipper, but for now both work about the same. ffmpegx has a preset for the PSP, but I tweaked a few things along the way. I’ll document that later once I have a complete success story (and can eliminate my tweaks as causes for my current problem).

After a LOOOONG time (I left the encoding running overnight on my 1.25Ghz G4 iMac), I got a copy of the feature down to around 340MB, more than small enough to fit on the MemoryStick. The audio kind of sucked (32-bit/24khz sampling), but it was hard to really tell with the speakers. The video was a little blurry to me (side effect of most of these compressors, at least to me), but in general it was very nice and very hard to notice. The video was smooth and fluid.

The problem was that the audio seemed to be almost 20-30 seconds behind the feature. I don’t know why or how or what is causing it to be this way, but it’s in sync for the first few minutes (basically the entire TV interview segment at the beginning of the film), but after that the audio and video seem to lurch a bit and then they’re out of whack the rest of the way. Frustrating. I tried re-encoding a bunch of times today while at work, but with no success (luckily, my dual G5 at work only takes an hour or so to encode from the VOB).

I’m still investigating, but this may be beyond my feeble knowledge of 24 hours. I’ll post the steps I followed for a successful encoding if I get it to work. Perhaps I’ll try a different movie…

Ready to wear religion…

Everyone get your purple bags out in support!

You can find the resources I’ve found on encoding video for the PSP on OS X at my del.icio.us page. I’ll be adding more and posting here if/when I have any success.

Update: I’ve put more notes and findings on this page.

Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon goes over how to download podcasts to the PSP. Pretty nifty. I’m sure an AppleScript could be written to do the same with NetNewsWire.

Go NetNewsWire… wow, that’s pretty fortunate placement.

Another little tweak for those of you reading but mostly for those of you that post here… I’ve installed a plugin that adds support for Technorati Tags to FatMixx. Those of you that write here will see an extra box on the post page. The field is optional, but allows you to put in what are essentially keywords. This allows you to expand on the standard set of categories.

Please try to use em… I’m curious to see what we all choose as keywords for the various things we write… Oh, and the Categories should get picked up automatically, so there’s no reason to add them to the tag box.

So, the original plan was to buy the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) and then immediate flip it on eBay. Then I saw the little sticker on the box that said it came with a copy of SpiderMan 2, full length and only modified to fit the PS screen. And I thought, hmmm… wonder how good that is?

So, I kept it and opened it up and popped in the movie. Then my jaw dropped. The video is pretty damn good, just shy of DVD quality to my eyes. Battery life is about 3-5 hours, which should be enough to watch a whole movie or two on a cross country flight. It uses normal headphones, but uses a proprietary disc format called UMD. The guys at the store mentioned that movies can be downloaded to the Memory Stick, but I suspect I’d need a 512MB MemoryStick Duo to make that remotely useful for a feature film. But, the interesting thing is that I can pop in Duo’s from my camera (not that I have Duo’s in my camera, just regular MemoryStick PROs). On my list of things to figure out is whether the PSP can act as a host for the camera, allowing me to look at the pictures on the brighter/bigger PSP screen.

The game play is pretty solid. I’ve played around with one before, but it was a golf game that really didn’t push the controls around much. This time around, I got Need for Speed: Underground Rivals to push this baby around and jam on the controls a bit. All I can say is nice job, Sony. The device is comfortable and fits well in my hands. The only complaint I have is that the analog controller is a bit odd and will take some time to get used to. I understand why they didn’t model it after the typical analog controllers found on game controllers, so I’m not criticizing the decision.

Next major feature: It supports WiFi out of the box, but I had some issues getting on my network. In fact, this was the biggest headache of all. I had it resolved within 30 minutes, if that says anything, but still I’m disappointed in the process here. The wireless connection software requires some specific settings on the router and unfortunately, the errors only come back with cryptic codes.

For example, my wireless network is set to use shared key security (WEP is enabled). Well, apparently, the PSP requires open network security. The error message that informed me of this was generic and only gave me this code as a specific reason: 80410D09 . Helpful, huh? After I Googled around for that, I fixed it and tried again. New error: 80110482 . WTF? While poking around, I retried the connection and magically it worked. Turns out the error has something to do with not getting a DHCP response (getting an IP address from the router’s DHCP server). I think I may have tried to test it too soon after changing the settings on the router… it was probably still trying to restart.

I still have yet to actually try to get on the Internet. Need For Speed was having trouble finding other drivers to race against online, but I’m not exactly sure why. Something else to look into.

So, I’m pretty much floored at this point. I think the move of including a movie instead of a full game is brilliant because it gets people thinking about the device differently that the Nintendo stuff that we’re all so familiar with. In fact, I’m more excited right now about using this as a cheap portable movie player and photo viewer than I am about anything else.

What will be interesting is whether movies will be available from the other studios aside from the Sony labels. Quite honestly, I haven’t been paying attention to this space at all. I’m sure the answer could be had for a bit of Googling, but this is a device that will do better with some openness. Of course, they could always go the iTMS route and stick with allowing people to download DRM’ed movies to their computers by leveraging the Duo’s. Mark Cuban (yeah, that Mark Cuban) wrote a while back about how he was able to watch DVD quality feature films from a USB flash drive. In fact, I walk around most days with at least a 1GB flash drive in my pocket. It’s how I transport work between home and office and music back and forth (wish iTunes had a “sync” feature).

Sony could use this device as Apple has used the iPod and iTMS if they can get the breadth of video content. It would be a fascinating move, especially if they could offer different formats for different devices in the home. I’d rather have a higher quality download for my TV than I would for the PSP. This would be very cool if they can pull this off.

I thought about the implications of this as I was getting over my initial excitement and wondered about the benefits of openness vs. proprietary standards. Most technologists would reflexively tell you that being open or using an open standard is better than using a proprietary spec. Yet today, we have a couple of examples where proprietary is beating open hands down: the iPod/iTMS combo and the video game market.

It seems to me that the maturity of a market is a defining characteristic of when openness matters. With the web, for example, we’re heading toward more standardization and openness than we’ve had since the very early days. Around the Netscape era, everyone was happy to use the Netscape extensions (blink tag, anyone?) because that was the only way to get new features. They were driving the market. As the market matures, we’re seeing more thought being applied to creating standards before implementing them. XHTML and CSS specs are now both ahead of the implementations, meaning that the road map for browser developers is out there… no need to make up proprietary stuff.

The online music store market is still relatively young, obviously, which is why iTMS seems to do so well. People are just happy to have a place to actually go shop and get the music they want at a price they can deal with that they’re willing to accept the restrictions of having the best portable MP3 player and a very good selection of music. If Sony were to get into the downloadable market via their online media store, I think they might enjoy the same advantages as Apple has in the music space. They’re first and they’re making it work. The gadget is amazing, and the use cases are there. I kinda hope this makes it.

(while I was writing, I decided to do a quick Google… looks like the mothership is going to release some movies on UMD, but they’re the only non-Sony shop to have signed up. I think this is Sony’s major disadvantage, if I can call it that… they’re a competitor with people they need to partner with, and I wonder if that makes it harder for them to make deals?)

AP survey says McGwire out but Bonds in the Hall of Fame? That’s just unbelievable and completely pathetic. One guy gets knocked down because he had the misfortune of getting called before Congress while the other guy skates because he didn’t get called in front of Congress. Even though the reason he wasn’t subpoenaed was likely because of his his connection to an ongoing federal investigation. Absolutely pathetic. I hope that the HOF voters aren’t this stupid. Either you taint them both or you taint neither, it’s pretty much that simple. We have similar proof to indict both of them. It would be unfair and a miscarriage of what the hall is supposed to represent to separate the two men with different fates simply because of Congress’s choice.

It’s especially galling because the two men have had such different impacts on the game itself. McGwire and Sosa rallied fans around the game after the strike. They were accessible and a positive influence on the game. They helped baseball with their feats and with their accessibility and work off the field. Bonds, quite simply, is a jackass. I can’t think of a player of his stature that has done less to help his sport than this man. If the Hall is a reward for excellence and part of the excellence is helping or hurting the game, Bonds is a worse candidate than McGwire.

I hope the HOF voters do the right thing by doing the same thing to both. I don’t particularly have an opinion on whether they should or should not be denied acceptance, but I know that I think of both of them as part of the “steroid question” in baseball. In general, I think if we were to know, somehow, that they knowingly broke the law, I would agree that they should be denied the Hall. While the evidence is all still circumstantial, though, I think they should stand on their on-field performance only. I don’t really respect either guy as much as I used to, but that seems like the only principled choice here.

Update: AP also published some quotes from a number of the BBWAA HOF voters.

Apparently, Heidi and I should register at Target if/when we decide to get married….

Just so’s you know.

“You wanted me to jump off the bridge; I finally have jumped. You wanted to bring me down; you’ve finally brought me and my family down. Finally done it. So now go pick a different person. I’m done.”

Can someone explain something to me because this has all become tired to me, has Barry Bonds ever said, “Yes, I took this stuff that I knew was like a steroid…” or something to that effect? Therefore, how exactly has he jumped? (not that I’d mind this story going away any time soon).

but just in case you still cared, here is a link.