A while ago, I was looking at (and tweeted about) some dude’s travel gear list and noticed a nice pair of binoculars in the pack, a pair of Pentax Papilio 8.5×21 binoculars. I saved it to my Amazon Wish List and this year Heidi bought them for me for my birthday. We’ve taken them on a short hike near our house and I’ve been messing with them here and there. I want to point out a couple of nice things about the set that might make them useful for some of you.

The cool thing about these binoculars is that they can focus at things about 2 feet away. While this may seem sort of silly for the traditional use for binoculars, the cool thing is that you can actually focus on things like bugs, butterflies, and flowers. They almost work like a magnifying glass but from a distance. If, like me, you’re curious about the little critters but are mildly afraid of getting too close, this is a great thing. I suspect kids would have a great time with these out in the woods just looking at all the little things in the woods.

The Papilios are decent at range. They’re not particularly powerful. At 8.5x you’ll find some cameras with more powerful zoom. Binoculars are nice, though, because you can look at things with a larger field of view and in better viewing conditions than a little screen on the back of a camera. I could see using them for casual bird watching or checking out animals from a distance. We’re not serious birders, but our primary use will be on hikes and longer rides.

I was also pleased by how light they were. On our walk, I hardly noticed I was carrying them. If you want a pair of binoculars, this is a good pair to take a look at. I really like them so far.

I promised on my Twitter feed that I would do a review of a few of the free or inexpensive Twitter apps for the iPhone. I was originally going to use them on the train down to NYC, but I ended up driving down. So, instead, I used the three apps while I was at the CT Forum Sponsor Dinner and during intermission and before the CT Forum event.

I didn’t try to thoroughly test each feature of all the apps but instead tried to just use them to tweet, tweet with pictures, and keep up with the feed from everyone else. So, I’m focused on a smaller list of features than the apps support, but the ones I use most often.

Second, I didn’t try the premium versions of apps if the app had a free version. I paid for Tweetie because it was relatively inexpensive ($2.99). Twittelator has a pro version for $4.99, and Twitterific may have one eventually has one for $9.99 (!).

Some general observations before I get into specifics. I’ve been using Twitterific for a while now, both on the desktop and on my iPhone. The iPhone app has a few things I don’t like. It loads all the tweets since you last opened the app. It is a little sluggish and has ads. It also doesn’t have the easy filters for just replies, direct messages (DMs), and everyone. So, I wanted to try some other apps to see if they would be better.

My general preferences are space efficiency (no whitespace, limited animations, etc.) and speed. I want to be sure I don’t miss replies and direct messages, so a filter or distinct colors are critical. I want to be able to post pictures easily from the app, without having to dump out to the Photo app. All the apps considered fit these basic requirements. If this is all you want, you should be good with any of them.

Of all of these, Twitterfon was the app that best matched my preferred usage. The only thing I didn’t like is that it doesn’t have DMs mixed into the main feed. It does have notifications for DMs in the bottom status bar, so this wasn’t a huge deal. It’s fast, covers the range of features I use, and makes it very easy to use just my iPhone to keep up with Twitter. Tweetie was a very, very close second, even though I really don’t like the iChat bubble display (see screenshots below).

I paid for Tweetie, so I’ll probably end up using that the most, but I’m keeping Twitterific and Twitterfon installed. Twittelator Pro, the $4.99 version of Twittelator, might actually be a pretty damn good app based on the feature list, but I’m not shelling out $4.99 for it when comparable apps are much less or free.

Here’s the criteria I paid attention to:

Let me know if I missed anything you’re interested in.

I broke the table into two so it wouldn’t stretch forever to the right. Here’s the rest:

Here are some screenshots to give you a better idea of the apps display setup. You can always find more screenshots in the App Store itself. As you can see, Twitterific and Twitterfon have the best display by my criteria above.

Twitterific:

Tweetie:

Twittelator:

Twitterfon:

Let me know if you have any questions or if I missed anything.

Update: Oops, I missed Twitterific Premium when I searched for the pay version of Twitterific. Not sure what I did to miss it, but thanks to @rvr for pointing it out.

Just a random software post: One of my goals post-vacation ( I was on vacation last week ) is to get back on a more human schedule. I’m failing miserably so far, but I think I’ll get better soon. One of my problems was that I would get wrapped up trying to solve a particular problem and completely lose track of time.

My solution for this used to be to have a little hourly clock chime so I would know that I notice the hours go by. I used to use the clock widget from Yahoo Widgets, but it died when I moved to Leopard and was otherwise a bit of a pig. So, I looked again last week and found Cuckoo for OS X, which basically lets you set up custom chimes on the hour or for any 5-60 minute interval you choose. It’s free for the basic hourly chime, but only $6 if you want to use the advanced functionality.

I have it set to chime every 30 minutes with the beep-beep made ubiquitous with late-80s/90s digital watches. Retro, or something.

After seeing numerous celebrities along with a few friends, including one expecting mom today, with the Flip Video Ultra or Mino, I’ve been tempted to buy one. It seems ideal for a day-to-day video camera.

Then, I thought about that phrase — who needs a day-to-day video camera that isn’t a new parent or a regular concert goer? Or, more specifically, why do I need it?

Then, I thought about the thing that I do use a lot, which is my camera. I currently carry (on most days) my trusty Sony DSC-H5. The camera has been great so far. I love the pictures it takes. My only complaint is that it’s a big camera. It takes up a lot of room in my backpack, including the charger and other accoutrement. I really wanted a very tiny, decent camera to use as a daily use camera. That way, the H5 comes out for bigger events and places where the 12x optical zoom really comes in handy (baseball games, concerts, etc.)

And thus the bright idea dawned on me: find a still camera that’s roughly the same size as the Flip Video Mino that takes video with similar quality for about the same price. Most still cameras take video and with a 4GB card, I should be able to match the 60 minutes that the Flip supports.

Long story short, and with very little research compared to what I normally do, I bought the Sony Cybershot DSCW120 today.

I just got it, so this isn’t really a review. Instead, I just wanted to point out that I’m amazed at the features this thing has. The camera has two specific features that surprised me. Basically, the camera has image recognition features built in so that in can identify what portions of the shot contain faces and then uses those regions to adjust exposure, focus, etc. This same feature powers a smile recognition filter that allows the camera to snap the photo only when everyone is smiling.

Yes, seriously.

That’s pretty damn cool. The reviews I’ve seen so far seem to indicate that the feature actually works. The manual makes it seem like the camera gives realtime feedback of this detection process. It seems almost amazing to me, and I’m hard to impress.

I don’t know if this is typical these days, but I assume that Sony isn’t smarter than everyone else and that this will be widespread soon if it isn’t already. Pretty cool stuff.

Update: You can see a demo of this feature in a number of YouTube videos for various Sony models (this isn’t a new feature, but it’s new to this line). Here’s one in Japanese that does a good job showing it in action. Notice the square around her head in the view screen. It’s giving live feedback of where it thinks faces are in the picture.

I tested it with a couple of videos playing on my monitor and it took pictures any time the faces made a smile-like pose. I might post that if I can edit it down to something useful.

I finally, after many years, cancelled my Netflix membership today. While I love the company and enjoyed their service, it wasn’t something that fit into my life right now. The easiest way to say why is that I still have a movie that we received in December, 2006. Yes, in 12 months I never got around to watching the third DVD. No, I’m not kidding and yes, I’m not proud.

On a related note, primarily because the elimination of the monthly Netflix fee pays for it, I’m going to pick up the smaller Apple TV tomorrow. There are two reasons for this. First, the movie rental service that Apple announced is closer to my dream of on demand all the time video and makes it more likely that we’ll actually rent movies. When I had a more regular schedule, Netflix made a ton of sense… now, finding two hours to spend with Heidi on the couch is often a surprise occurrence. Comcast’s OnDemand service was perfect for that, but since we switched to DirecTV, no more OnDemand.

The second reason we’re going Apple TV is that my XBox 360 setup I described a month ago isn’t quite as good as I hoped. The main problem is weak playback controls and library navigation in the XBox 360 media player. Basically, I can’t make playlists with the video, nor can I view any descriptions of the video shared to the XBox. Not sure if this is a Connect 360 issue or an XBox 360 issue, honestly, but it’s an annoying problem. It showed up most dramatically after I put Season 3 of Lost on my computer from my DVDs. The episode titles don’t have numbers in them and showed up in alphabetical order on the screen. Want to watch the season in order? Good luck.

Audio playback suffers from similar goofiness. I can’t remember exactly what I ran into, but some basic playback issues are there. I think I couldn’t fast forward a song, just skip forward or back between tracks. It’s a weird issue, and it’s just dumb.

We have an Apple TV at work which I’ve used a LOT late at night by myself. The device has its own limitations (720p, lame remote, runs hot as a toaster), but it does a great job exposing the playlists and functionality of iTunes on the TV. I can deal with the 720p thing, for now, and the remote should be a non-issue because of my awesome Harmony remote. It supposedly works with the Apple TV, so I should be able to continue using the single remote for everything.

Anyway, quick update on the whole home theater experiment. The new TV was mounted on the wall today. Love it up there, but it did confirm all the evils of having 100-year-old plaster walls.

I’ve been remiss in my blogging responsibilities and, for that, I apologize. It’s already January 5th and I haven’t mentioned the most unusual of my Christmas gifts this year. It’s the Back to Basics Egg and Muffin 2 slice Toaster and Egg Poacher. No, really!

What is this thing? Well, if you’ve ever had or seen an McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, you know exactly what this machine makes. It’s a combination toaster and egg maker that has a special cycle that poaches the egg and pops the toasted bread at exactly the same moment. Take your warm bread and your poached egg, add some cheese and/or meat of your choice and, voila!, home made breakfast sandwich. It also can hard boil eggs, so if you’re an egg fan, you can just use the egg part.

Heidi and I have been using egg substitute rather than real eggs or scrambling the egg before putting it in the machine since I’m not a fan of the runny yolk in a poached egg. Aside from that, I can add veggie sausage, different kinds of cheese, and better muffins than what McDonald’s might use. Choosing my own ingredients and making a warm breakfast sandwich so easily is worth it.

I found out about this machine from Fahrad Manjoo’s enthusiastic review on Salon. For $29.99, I was willing to give it a try. It works as well as he said, and the sandwiches are much tastier than anything I remember from McD’s. If you like Egg McMuffins, this is the machine for you.

Update: Forgot to mention another egg-related device. A buddy at work who stays fit eats eggs pretty much every day. I had him in our office Secret Santa so I got him the Krups Egg Express Egg Cooker as his gift. He loves it and says it does a great job making hard boiled eggs. So, in case you’re just into eggs without the bread (say, you’re an Atkins person), this is a pretty decent machine. Amazon shows it at $22.32, but I bought it from Amazon for $19.99. Not sure why the price went up.

That’s pretty much the review right there in the headline, but as I continue to stall actually finishing my work for, uh, work (I’m suffering from the coder equivalent of writers block on one problem at the moment), here’s a quick endorsement for the Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes. While a bit expensive for most casual TV viewers, it’s a great device for those of us with more than 3 things attached to the TV. I had an XBox 360, PS2, DVR, Receiver, and cable box when I bought this remote. I have the XBox 360 version which works great for the combination of devices I have. The rest of this review assumes the features of that version, though it should apply to most of them.

The best thing about this remote is that it comes with software for your home Mac or PC to configure the remote. The one thing that drives me insane about most universal remotes, including some high end ones, is trying to program the remote on the remote itself. Too often you have to point the remotes at each other and go through a manual, button-by-button programming for each remote. Ugh.

The Harmony does away with that (for the most part). It leverages a web-based service that allows your remote to pull updated definitions from Logitech. This way, they’re not limited to what devices they can fit on the remote’s memory. New TV in 3 years? Odds are that Logitech will have the device added into their DB. Occasionally, you have to verify which version of a particular model you have and that requires pointing its remote at the Logitech remote, but that’s OK because it’s easier than trying to find a revision number or firmware revision from the TV or device.

The remote also uses an “activity” based approach rather than a device based approach. So, for example, I have an activity called “Watch TV” that turns on the TV, sets it to the right input, and turns on the DirecTV DVR. I chose a couple of shortcuts I want featured by selecting them in a menu, and I have one touch access to common functions like the Guide or the List of programs on the DVR.

The great thing about this approach is that I can create a lot of activities quickly and easily. For example, I have a “Watch DVD” activity along with a “Watch DVD (no receiver)” activity. You can use either to watch DVDs, but the first turns on the surround sound and uses the receiver to control the volume while the second activity uses the TV for audio instead.

Also, because it understands typical viewing patterns, replacing devices is pretty easy. When I swapped TVs recently, I walked through a few menus and the software replaced the old TV with the new one in all the activities where it made sense.

My only complaint is really a minor issue. The remote needs to “know” whether your devices are on or off, so it’s really important that you use the remote only to turn things on and off. Takes some getting used to if you’re in the habit of hitting the power switch on the TV.

Trust me, it’s worth the money if you have a several devices attached to your home theater. I love it and can’t imagine going to another remote.

Just a quick review for now. As you may remember, our TV developed a weird display issue some time ago. The issue was covered under our Best Buy extended warranty, so they offered to replace the TV for a TV of the same or lower price as the first one. After a little bit of waiting, mostly because we were away for the holidays, our replacement TV was delivered early yesterday morning. We ended up replacing our old Samsung LN-S4095D with the Samsung LNT4071F 40″ 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV. The Amazon page goes through most of the features, so I won’t rehash them here. Let’s just say that the TV has everything I’d want and then some. I still go back and forth on whether a slightly larger set would be better in our living room, but the 40″ TV does look great.

So far, after a weekend spent on or around the couch cleaning and coding, I can say that the TV looks awesome. Better than awesome, actually. We watched Planet Earth on HD-DVD which I gave to Heidi for Christmas on this set and it looked phenomenal. There’s a certain clarity to the picture that makes it seem like you’re either actually there or looking at an unprocessed copy of the video (almost like a soap opera or camcorder picture).

I’m now a believer in contrast ratios, by the way. Samsung claims a 25,000:1 ratio for this set, and it really makes a BIG difference compared to our old TV (6000:1). We’ve got great, rich colors with beautiful depth, great blacks, and smooth gradients. Everything I’m reading says that those areas are where the contrast ratio really makes a difference.

If you’re looking for a new TV you won’t be able to beat this one by much. The latest Sony’s are supposed to be roughly the same or slightly better, and the new LED lit Samsungs offer some tradeoffs worth considering. In the end, since I liked my old LCD TV, I decided to stick with that technology for now.

One minor complaint, which is that I don’t like the sound of the new TV. They’ve done some stuff to boost the bass, but it ends up making things sound unnaturally deep. I think in part I’m picky about this because I listen to my music on better than average headphones that have an even frequency response. You can modify the EQ settings, though, so a little time in the menus and I got the sound back where I like it.

Bottom line: Love it, happily recommend it.

On a random topic, this is the first Sunday where I’ve watched football at home in a while. Sunday Ticket is pretty nice, especially since we get many of the games in HD. DirecTV has done a good job with the package, including the enhanced menus and scoreboards in the package. Didn’t know the set top box had the ability to do enhanced menus and on-screen widgets.

Update: Forgot to post this little tidbit: The biggest complaint about the TV is something people are calling the “triple ball effect” where the Auto Motion Plus function creates ghost images for small, fast moving objects (e.g. balls when watching sports). Samsung has a new firmware update out for the TV that helps mitigate the problem when Motion Plus is set to low (the default) or medium.

Speaking of end of year giving (give via Kiva.org!), another organization I give to every year is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I mention this because the entertainment setup I describe below is one that the movie industry would like to outlaw directly and have, with current laws and lobbying, managed to indirectly make very difficult. The EFF fights these laws that are both anti-free-market and anti-consumer (a more common combination than you might think).

In fact, the setup I describe below is really only possible with a little bit of labor and using DVDs as opposed to HD-DVDs or BluRay sources. The movie industry tries to “protect” their movies and music with a technology broadly called DRM, which makes it impossible to view the movies you buy in the ways you want to. New DRM technology is why I’ve sworn off buying HD media. To make this clearer, let’s walk through my new setup.

Here’s what my goal is with the new setup. I want to be able to use my computer as a digital video jukebox with my TV. Basically, I’d like to end up with my movies on my computer so that I don’t need to keep the DVDs in the same room as the TV. This way, I can also copy the movies to my laptop when I travel (again, no discs to break or carry), or put them on my iPhone just in case I’m stuck somewhere.

The first part of getting this working is to get the movies onto my computer. Because of the DRM the studios use, this is more difficult than it ought to be. I’ve written up how I do this on the Mac in an older post, so if you need help, check that out. Please note that I’ve since changed my process a bit, though it involves some commercial software. Specifically, I’ve switched to using a great piece of software called VisualHub. It has presets for every device, including Apple TV, iPhone, PSPs, etc. So, everything from Step 6 onward has been replaced with the simple, “fire up VisualHub, select your device and quality and hit GO.” I typically use the Apple TV settings, with H.264 checked and High quality. I let iTunes cut an iPhone specific version as well when I need one.

Now that I have a version on my computer, I need to get it on the TV. Since I own an Xbox 360, this turned out to be pretty easy. The XBox can connect to a Windows PC and stream videos, photos, and music to the XBox and out to the TV and receiver you have it connected to. It’s not just for playing video games, after all. I assume that the PS3 allows similar functionality, but I don’t own one to try it out.

Now, I don’t own a Windows PC, since I’m a Mac/Unix person and only have Macs in the house. That would be a problem except for a nice little program called Connect 360 made by the fine folks at nullriver. They have a free demo so I downloaded it and fired it up. Within seconds, I was able to fire up the XBox, navigate over to the Media tab in the Dashboard, select Movies and I was thumbing through the films on my laptop on the big screen. These movies are at DVD quality, which is roughly 480p for the HD enthusiasts here. Sure, it’s not as pretty as an HD source, but the XBox does a good job upconverting to 1080p.

I wanted to see if the software and network could keep up with a 1080p video without trouble so I borrowed a 1080p rip of Transformers from a friend because I don’t know how to convert an HD-DVD yet. I’ve streamed that using the above setup with great results. The video is gorgeous and I could still surf the Internet off the same computer. Not a bad setup.

Of course, if the movie industry had their way, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did. Technically, the DRM on the DVDs should prevent me from doing what I did. Because, however, it has been broken by numerous hackers over the years, it merely represents an inconvenience in this process. You could argue that I could easily just buy my movies off of a service like iTunes or Amazon Unbox but that still presents the DRM dilemma.

For example, in my setup, I have devices from 3 different manufacturers and several different movie studios. Microsoft makes the XBox 360 and Apple makes my Mac and OS X and Sony makes my PSP (which I’ve stopped using for video in favor of the iPhone). If I chose iTunes, I would need to buy an Apple TV in order to watch the video on my big TV. In fact, the movies I’ve bought from iTunes don’t work in the setup I’ve described because the XBox doesn’t understand Apple’s DRM. Amazon doesn’t support Macs or my iPhone (yet), so that’s a non-starter as well. The only way to do this is with a DRM-free copy of the movies.

Which brings me to the title of this post. There are two ways to get DRM free copies of your favorite movies. The first is to do what I’ve done, buy DVDs and go through the trouble of stripping the DRM off and encoding them for your computer. It’s a lot of work (takes about 4 hours per DVD on a MacBook Pro).

The other option is to download these movies via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network or BitTorrent or whatever. This is technically both against the law (for the person making the video available) and opens one up to civil lawsuits from the movie studios.

Think about that for a second: To use the devices I own in a way that they all enable, the convenient choice is to download the movies for free. All I want to do is use the hardware I already own with movies I’ve paid for and my choices are to circumvent the DRM on the DVDs or to download them from the Internet.

It’s ridiculous, and really shows the idiocy of the current copyright fight between the studios and their customers. There’s a future here for a nice little video jukebox device with a couple of USB ports for devices like the iPhone or iPod that serves as a nice hub for all your media. My Mac is almost perfect, in fact, but imagine a little $200 device. Believe it or not, they exist already, and the only reason they’re not more popular is because of stupid DRM battles from the studios that do nothing to stop piracy anyway.

Anyway, I’m considering moving my old iMac downstairs so that it’s attached via the wired network to the XBox 360. Leave all the videos on an attached terabyte external drive and I’ll have my video collection available whenever I want.

Also, consider this an thumbs up for Connect 360. The software has made all the videos and music available on my XBox and offers some nice other features that I’ve yet to take advantage of. The software retails for $20 and is worth it if you plan on making use of a setup like this. Enjoy!

Update: PS. HD Podcasts that I download via iTunes look GREAT. No DRM on those, and they look great on the TV. I can recommend the Political Lunch as one to start with. It’s a good rundown of the day’s political news. Good stuff.

I just spent accumulated gift card money on a pair of new headphones in preparation for some upcoming travel, which spawned several conversations at work about headphones and their quality. I’ll post up a review of the set I bought, which are the in-ear Etymotic ER-4P headphones. I’ve read GREAT things about them, so I’m hoping they’re a good match for my listening tastes. I chose the in-ear kind because on long plane rides, I find they block out enough noise to be almost as good as a middle-of-the-road noise canceling set. The Sonys I had before I broke them sounded OK but were great on planes. I have even higher hopes for this set for plane use, leaving aside the fact that they’re just better sounding headphones.

One reason I expect these to be better for plane trips is that I own a pair of noise reduction ear plugs that share the same design as these headphones. They’re the Etymotic ER20BP Ear Plugs, although I bought them from Earlove so I could get cool colors (not kidding!). These ear plugs drop the sounds levels on a plane to a comfortable background noise without diminishing your ability to talk to your seatmate or give the flight attendant your drink selection. They’re awesome and well worth the $11.99. I still travel with them on every plane ride and use them when I just want to read a book or work without music. They were made for DJs, so they’re designed to maintain a flat response across the audio spectrum.

The ER-4P’s use the same ear cones, so I think they’ll fit comfortably and snugly without hurting my ears. And, no batteries!

If you want to try passive noise reduction but can’t handle in-ear phones, I have a great set of cans I use at my desk. They’re the Sennheiser HD-280 Pros. I’ve had these for years and absolutely love them. I managed to break a part of the plastic (by dropping them) but I won’t replace them because I love the sound so much. The sound is even without the thumpy bass of most consumer headphones. From what I’ve been reading, the only things better are the audiophile Sennheisers or a set that our CEO just bought, the AKG – K701, or maybe the beyerdynamic sets.

Anyway, about the 280s, as many of the Amazon reviewers point out, they create a good seal and decent passive noise reduction. When I used them in the noisier office environment at ESPN, I could basically cut out all the background chatter of people talking simply by putting them on. They’re not going to be as good as an active pair like the Bose, but they do a decent job. And, I might add, without batteries.

Anyone else have any headphones they love? Leave them in the comments. Always curious to get more recommendations for when the next pair needs to get replaced.

I can’t wait to get my new Etys.

Update: After a plane ride with the Etys, I’m happy to say that they’re great on the plane. After a little bit of time to adjust how they fit, I had a good seal and significant noise reduction. Maybe not enough to mask an Amtrak train pulling out (as Jishman reports for his Bose QC-2s), but enough to leave the noise of the plane engines behind. They sound great, not thumpy or wimpy and deliver a great experience on the plane.

My only complaints are that the main portion of the cord is too stiff (it’s coated in a tougher plastic than any others I’ve owned) and that I wish the 4Ps came with the color coded ear pieces of the 4S. Trying to put them on in the dark with low light last night (Heidi was asleep), I had to flip on a light quickly to figure out which was right and which was left.

Beyond that, so far, so great! Love ‘em.

Must sell Fanzter for millions so I can have one. BTW, this is an interesting idea from the Mahalo team. Not sure why it makes sense with their stated business plan, but perhaps there’s more than they’ve, um, stated so far.

I’m sitting here realizing I need to manage some files on Amazon S3. I’m currently using S3 Browser which, while nice enough, doesn’t feel like a good client. Ideally, I’d want an FTP-client-like interface. Then, I think, “Gosh, I wish Transmit worked with S3.” On a whim, I fire up Transmit to see if I missed some fancy option. Lo and behold, I’m greeted with a notification that a new version is available. I go over to the web site and what do I see under “New in Transmit 3.6!” but this:

Seriously, how weird is that? It’s like it read my mind. Apparently, this feature came out last week, just in time for me. Thanks, Panic!

If you’re looking for a good FTP/SFTP client for Mac OS X, I highly recommend Transmit. Great client with loads of useful, smart features. Someone here at Fanzter also uses Coda as their HTML/CSS tool, which also comes with a lot of the Transmit functionality built in. I’d be using that, too, except that I already own CSSEdit, which I also highly recommend. Good stuff all around.

Update: Quick review after five minutes: It works great, as you’d expect from Panic. Nice stuff. (ah, except with stuff already on S3. It got confused by paths that are not really paths. Bummer, that’s part of what I was looking for. It does a decent job with stuff that’s put on there via Transmit, but that’s an easy putt)

I was wondering what Diet Pepsi Max was (I bought some today because they were out of regular Diet Pepsi). Now I know, and I’m afraid I’m going to be up all night…

Walt Mossberg reviews the iPhone. This is sounding better and better (and I already have AT&T/Cingular anyway, so coverage isn’t an issue).

(via Jason Calacanis’s blog)

This weekend I finally decided to pick up the SlingBox after struggling with the lack of a TV in my home office. I’ve been in there a lot lately, working late and have been going nuts without the background noise of TV. I’ve ended up buying silly movies from iTunes. I’ve also gone through my DVD collection several times over. I think I just need background noise after growing up in a house that was never quiet.

So, why the Slingbox? I have a house that’s just about 90 years old. That means no cable in most rooms and no phone jacks. As it is, we have an Ethernet cable running across the floor upstairs to connect my office into the router in the other room. The idea of running a coax cable across the floor isn’t appealing. And yes, we’ve thought about having the house wired. That’s coming, but not for now.

To deal with this, and also to get ESPN and live sports into my office, I started looking into IPTV solutions. There was the open source route with MythTV, but that would require another box with a computer’s power supply. There’s enough power getting drawn by devices in the TV room already. Then there’s Sony’s LocationFree. Their devices don’t have a tuner and need a set-top box to control. I don’t really want to interfere with whatever Heidi might want to watch in the other room, so that was a non-starter. On the other hand, Sony has a PSP player and I own a PSP. On the other hand, the Slingbox has a version that has a coax in and has an analog tuner built in, so that’s the one I ended up going with, especially after reading reviews.

So far, it’s been great. The viewer is a bit of a CPU hog (probably because the stream is encrypted) and the box runs very hot, but those are my biggest complaints. Setup was a breeze, installation was painless, and I had TV on my computer within 15 minutes of opening the box. That includes wiring it all up (granted, I’m pretty good around my AV gear).

I wondered a while back whether it would run on a G4 Mac. While it takes up 50% CPU on my dual core Intel-based Mac, Heidi’s 1.25Ghz eMac kept skipping and pausing trying to play the video. Again, the encryption was probably to blame. On my iMac, I can program, run Eclipse, do whatever with minimal impact on the video.

If you look closely at the screenshot of the player, you’ll see what it looks like in it’s smallest mode. It’s tight. Click one button and a remote control pops up where you can punch in any channel. Quick channel buttons are included right at the bottom, and clicking the little inverted triangle to the right exposes more presets. The most important feature, though, is the “Always on Top” option, something that too many players forget (I’m looking at you, iTunes!).

You also may notice the bit rate on the bottom right of the picture. Yes, that’s 6 Megabits, really. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much sustained bandwidth flowing across my home network. Good thing I’m upgrading to Gigabit at home right now. (OK, Gigabit won’t improve anything, but it sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t tell my wife…).

The one feature I haven’t had a chance to test is the remote viewing. Slingbox apparently allows me to watch TV across the Internet, even on some mobile devices. I had some trouble with getting this set up with my router (some UPnP issues for the geeks) so no joy yet. Seems like these network apps are still problematic, and it’s not just limited to the Slingbox. The key feature, not obvious unless you’re a techy, is that the player and the box are adjusting the bit rate dynamically based on connection quality. That feature alone enables Internet viewing of this video. It’s pretty much a must have for a consumer device.

Overall, after the first few days of actual use I’m really happy with the purchase. I recommend the device if you’re looking for TV over your home network.

A small side note: I’m out of network ports in my living room. Basically, I have 4 ports on the router. One goes to my office (where there’s another 5 port switch), one goes to Heidi’s office, and the Tivo and XBox360 take up the other ports. I’ve had to disconnect the PS2 (no major loss). So, right now the Slingbox is plugged into the switch in my office with another cable running across the floor. Needless to say, the 8-port GigE switch is on the way from Amazon.

There are deceptively simple ideas that become interesting products. Twitter is one of those ideas. Essentially a status message web service, it’s a place where i can leave a quick update of what I’m up to right now. There are SMS, IM, and web-based interfaces plus a bunch of third-party apps that integrate this into the other places you leave status messages. (Think away messages in IM)

After hearing about it a bunch on the different blogs I read, I decided to give it a go. So far, so easy. We’ll see how long I use it, though I suspect that depends on how many of you end up following my feed.

If you want more on the service, this post from David Chartier gives you the positives, and Eric Meyer runs down what he thinks could make the service better.

Take a look, and if you’re interested in giving it a try, drop me a line, add me as a friend, or just leave a comment below.

I’ve been singing the praises of the XBox360 for some time now. Between Call of Duty 3, Gears Of War, and Madden, I’ve seen the best that the console has to offer for graphics and gameplay. Hooked up to a 1080p LCD TV, this setup looks beautiful. I even began to believe that maybe Microsoft could actually make a good product.

Playing with these games on XBox Live, however, has reminded my why I hate Microsoft products. Madden was relatively smooth and I have few complaints there. It’s a simple online experience, after all, just 1 versus 1 and basic voice communication. Gears and COD3 have been a nightmare by comparison.

The fact that both games suffer from similar troubles makes be believe that the issue is Live, not the games per se. Both games would’ve benefited from a lot more testing of their online experience, no doubt, but the biggest issues have come up with creating or joining games. All of this functionality relies on XBox Live, and in both cases it sucks.

Gears has specific issues finding and joining games. Every time you attempt to join a game that’s close to full, you have at least a 50% chance of getting an error back from the game. The error is cryptic (connection to host lost), but I think it’s the result of what should be an expected and handled error, the game filled up before you got in. It happens often enough that it takes several attempts to actually launch a game.

There are also several gameplay bugs that are pretty annoying. Chainsaw someone and try to move at the same time and you’ll get frozen to the spot until someone kills you. Join a ranked or player match last and sometimes your voice communications won’t work (you’ll be able to hear everyone else, but they won’t be able to hear you). Join a player match after other people who have been through one round already and you won’t be able to hear or talk to them. Those are the most egregious bugs I’ve seen in a console game.

COD3 is even worse. The game requires the most specific router setup possible with either UPnP on and configured correctly on the router (not the case on my newish Linksys router) or port forwarding configured for the “XBox Live” ports (88 UDP and 3074 UDP & TCP incidentally). Without the proper network setup, it’s more or less impossible to join player matches and very difficult to join ranked matches. The game is pretty much unplayable online in this state.

After spending some time investigating all of this, I was able to get online. It got better, but still was and is a horrible experience. It takes upwards of 10 minutes to successfully join a ranked game (after about 2-5 tries). Joining player matches has the same problem as Gears. Overall, the experience is painful to the point that people who otherwise love the game are complaining about it.

Then there are the gameplay bugs. Often times, joining a game in the Abbaye map will put you in an impossible position. I’ve been stuck so that map is offset (I think I’m at one point on the map, but everyone else sees me at a different point), or I get dropped through the floor of the map and continue free falling while everyone is playing miles above me. While it’s cool to be stuck in this weird, cloud filled globe, I want to play the goddamn game. Especially after waiting 10 minutes and trying over and over again to join it in the first place!

The kicker in all of this is that both of these games have been patched once already!

While consoles have generally focused on the single-player or single-console experience, all of the next gen consoles are emphasizing their connected functionality. XBox 360, for example, allows you to download videos, movies, etc. onto your XBox via XBox Live. The online experience is part of the next gen feature set. That’s why I’m just amazed at how bad these games are so far. If Microsoft wants to keep their momentum, they need to fix these things. PS3s seem to be available everywhere now and Christmas is past, so they should be battling on equal footing. The online experiences need to be better if they expect people to use even more services from Xbox Live.

If you’ve ever wondered what HD-DVD or BluRay might get you compared to your old DVDs, check out this nice comparison of the Fellowship of the Ring DVD and HD versions. He’s done a great job of laying out nearly identical captures of both versions so you can see directly how they compare.

It’s all about getting closer to the way the filmmakers intended us to see their film in my mind, and this is getting us closer each day. I just got the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player and hope to see for myself how much better it can be. Netflix to the rescue!

I’m home today sitting in front of the newest addition to the toy family, a 40″ Samsung LCD HDTV that does 1080p. Now, I still haven’t found a source that can push the TV at 1080p, but this TV is as future-proof as I can get right now. Even though this TV isn’t a 50+ inch behemoth like my mom’s TV, it still commands the room it’s in.

I haven’t really used the TV enough to do a full review, but so far it’s been great. The TV is hooked up via a set-top box to Comcast’s HD Cable service, an XBox 360, and my old Series2 Tivo. So far, I’m impressed with the HD sources and the Tivo looks as you might expect an SD source to look on a TV like this.

The XBox 360 is a surprisingly good upconverting DVD player. I thought it played HD-DVD disks, but that was a mistake (btw, anyone want an HD-DVD copy of Sky Captain?). HD-DVD capability is coming this year, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try it out. I’m watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith which looks really good.

A quick note on the XBox 360: I think Microsoft may have actually built a good product here. This might be the first one since they rolled out Windows 95. I’ve played Madden in HD on this TV at 1080i and it looks gorgeous. The online play looks pretty cool, and the always on nature of XBox Live seems like a really good idea.

I’ll write more about these things later, but I need to get back to work now. The bottom line right now is that I’m really happy, especially considering that I got the TV, XBox 360, Madden 07, and extra controller from Best Buy for right about $3100 and zero interest financing for 24 months. The price on the TV was $2559 after the discounts for the XBox 360 bundle deal, Comcast HD discount, and the discount I found on BestBuy.com. Not a bad deal all around.

• Samsung’s site for the LN-S4095D.

We made our first major post-wedding purchase. We bought a dishwasher, because ours had been on its way out for awhile. Being research fanatics, we bought a subscription to Consumer Reports to research brands. After learning about some of the checklist features, we liked the LG a lot for its low water usage and lower energy usage. We also really like our LG washer and dryer. After talking to some of the salespeople at Best Buy and S.K. Lavery (a local appliance store), we were convinced about the unknown history of LG dishwashers. Funny how it didn’t bother us when we bought the washer and dryer. Ultimately, we had some gift cards for Sears, so we decided to buy from there.

When you’re looking for a dishwasher, you’ll pretty much find they’re all very similar. The major things to look out for:

• Efficiency: Water and energy usage vary a lot, so keep an eye out for these statistics.
• Stainless Steel Tub: Stainless doesn’t hold odors or stain like ceramic or other types of interiors
• Heating coils or not: The Bosch models don’t have a heating element exposed in the tub. We’ve melted a number of stirrers, Nalgene bottle caps, and other things that slip out of the bottom rack, so we dislike the exposed element.
• Adjustable top racks/utensil trays: Flexibility is the name of the game here. Some models, the Kenmores in particular, have racks that can be adjusted without removing it.
• Noise: This seems to be a big selling point but we think it’s overrated. The quietest models will cost you a bit more.

There are incidental things, too. Appearance is one place you have choices. There are stainless exteriors for those of you that want to match your Viking stove, and there are hidden controls for those of you that want to have your appliances just blend into the cabinets. You can get panels for many of the models to really blend into your cabinet finishes.

One other thing: most modern dishwashers have a grinder that chops up food. The Bosch models have a filter system that gets most food but also needs to get cleaned out.

We looked at the various options and the different came down to a Bosch or a Kenmore. Kenmore appliances are actually appliances made by other major manufacturers with Sears specific tweaks or additions, so we were actually looking at a couple of Kenmores made by Whirpool and one Kenmore Elite made by Bosch.

After finding out about the $100 rebate on delivery for buying a Kenmore Elite, we decided to get a Kenmore Elite. The two models we considered were a Kenmore Elite (#13752) made by Whirlpool (with a stainless steel interior, some water saving features — sensor wash, which Consumer Reports says may not be all that water saving) and a grinder OR the Kenmore Elite (#16302) made by Bosch with the sensor wash, a stainless interior, no heating coil inside, and the food trap/filter instead of grinder. Both had adjustable top shelves and numerous other fancy features.

After considering both, we went with the Kenmore/Bosch. We liked the no element design and the simplicity of the look. The Kenmore version of the Bosch was a bit cheaper. The adjustable top rack was also a big draw because it could be adjusted without removing the whole rack. Since we load our dishes over two or more days before running the dishwasher, this made the most sense. We’re not going adjust the height with a half-loaded top rack if we have to take it completely out.

So far, we’re pretty happy, but have found some reasons to second guess our purchase. We did our first load last night, and it does clean pretty well. One glass had some schmutz on it this AM, but overall it seemed to do a nice job of cleaning. One drawback is the drying. The dishes seemed to mainly be dry, but the whole interior of the machine was quite wet. It stayed wet, too. The manual suggests propping the door open after the cycle to help the dishes in drying, so we’re wondering if this is going to be a recurring problem. We’re worried that it might start smelling in there with water droplets on everything, stainless steel or not. We’ll write an update when we find out more.

The salesman did mention that the Bosch doesn’t have an exhaust vent (for the air inside) unlike most of the other dishwashers. Perhaps it’s more important than we realized.

Speaking of the salesman, our salesman was one of those guys who says, “I’m not pushy, because I want you to be customers for life,” but at the same time, he maybe had a bit too much info, info that wasn’t 100% accurate. Some of what he said didn’t match up with what we’d read on Consumer Reports. He also seemed to be pulling water usage quotes out of thin air.

We were pretty dissatisfied with Sears’ service. On top of the less than fully informed salesman, he assured us we would have our new dishwasher installed by Friday (we purchased on Wednesday. He said we’d get a call the next day. We didn’t. We got a call Friday afternoon after we called Sears, and delivery was set up for the following Tuesday.

– Heidi & Sujal

As I mentioned in my review of An Inconvenient Truth, Heidi and I are working on taking steps to reduce our own carbon footprint. We went through one of the easier changes today, switching out nearly all of our incandescent light bulbs for new, energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.

Switching to CF bulbs is pretty easy, but they are different so there are a couple of unique issues to deal with. The first CF bulbs we bought a few years ago have a bright white light like the fluorescent lights you might find at an office. Most incandescent bulbs have a warmer, more yellow light. I’m not sure whether it’s just because we’re used to that color or if it has some deeper explanation, but the warmer colors are much more pleasant to come home to.

Luckily, these days CF bulbs come in the same soft white color that you get with traditional bulbs. The light is a bit whiter than a similar incandescent, but it’s not very noticeable. They still make bright white and daylight CF Bulbs, so check the packaging if the color is important to you. Not all brands come in the different colors, so you may find yourself compromising on this to get packages with more bulbs or whatever.

The brand we liked for color was the n:vision brand bulbs sold at Home Depot. The Commercial Electric brand also sold at Home Depot didn’t have a soft white color style bulb, so their bulbs were a little whiter than we liked. Check the Wikipedia entry linked below for color temps that you should check for on packages. Also, certain brands are only sold in certain stores. For example, Home Depot sells n:vision, Commercial Electric, and some Philips brand CF bulbs, but Lowe’s sells Bright Effects and Sylvania CF bulbs.

Another problem with CF bulbs is their shape. The most common and least expensive CF bulbs look nothing like regular bulbs. The image at left shows two regular bulbs and three different sizes of CF bulbs. Unlike incandescent bulbs, the higher the wattage, the bigger the bulbs. As a result, some bulbs don’t fit lamps or fixtures that are made for incandescents.

As you can see in the image, only the smallest bulb there is the same size as the incandescent bulb. That bulb is a 60W equivalent bulb. The other two are 75W and 100W equivalent bulbs. In applications where you need brighter bulbs, these bulbs may not fit. It’s worth checking this before investing in too many bulbs.

We weren’t able to replace all the bulbs in the house because the bulbs we bought can’t be used with dimmers. There are dimmable CF bulbs, but both Home Depot and Lowe’s turned up a big fat zero. We have a few fixtures that are on dimmers, so those are still running incandescent bulbs until we find the right kind.

Of course, there’s that one nice thing about these bulbs. These are 60W, 75W, and 100W equivalents. The actual wattage is 13W, 14W, and 23W. This is easily worth the initial investment, about $90 in bulbs for every bulb in the house. The bulbs also claim a 7-9 year life span. This depends on use, though, so we’ll see what bulbs work for us.

If you want to know more about CF bulbs, you can check the following resources:

• EnergyStar.gov’s CFL site
• Wikipedia’s entry, which contains color information, how these bulbs work, and loads of interesting info

As Tamar eagerly awaits the arrival of her MacBook, we (I) am faced with an interesting question: How best to run XP on it.

For Tamar this is a less important question as she can probably ignore Windows (as she has happily done since she got her first Mac at birth). I, however, have to use XP for certain applications. Currently I’m crawling around with VPC, so any of the solutions are an improvement, however the question is which one to use. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Since an XP license isn’t cheap, running both isn’t really an option.

So the question is, Parallels vs Boot Camp?

Parallels has two major advantages: 1) Fast Booting and 2) The ability to have XP and Mac OS running at the same time (as I do with VPC right now).

There are also some minor advantages, such as not partitioning the hard disk.

The major Con is that there is no direct access to the video card. This will limit PC gaming (and I may lose one of the function that I want to have but currently don’t with VPC). The Parrallels GUI is a bit sluggish, which won’t matter for work, but will matter for fun.

Neither support iSight, but I suspect Apple will fix that with the final release.

I guess the answer should be clear, but I’m still stuck on the video card problem. Parallels seems almost ideal…but not quite. Oh yes, and Tamar keeps say, “If I have to infect my computer with Windows, it better run games.” More to follow…

Technology Liberation Front has a good article up about how eMusic might represent “The Future of Music.” I found this article via Kareem’s blog, and normally it would just be a headline link here, as it was on reemer.com.

It’s not a headline post because, coincidently, Atrios has been plugging eMusic for a few days and I went ahead and gave it a try because of the 50 free MP3 trial offer. So far, I’ve found some cool Indian-influenced music that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. On the whole, though, I’ve found the whole thing quite daunting. It’s a very big catalog of less-than-well-known music and, because of that, it’s very, very hard to navigate it all. I use the same approach as I do with iTunes, relying on top sales lists, but previewing clips is too complicated on the Mac.

That’s probably the biggest problem I have. The site offers .m3u files (MP3 playlists) for previews. It’s all nicely standards based, but the default behavior on the Mac is to play the .m3u file in iTunes. That means that I have a clutter of random streaming MP3 clips stuck in iTunes that I don’t really want. I tried switching to just using Quicktime for .m3u files, but then it downloads the file to my disk, where I have to double-click it (or the icon in he download center) to play the file. In the end, I stayed with this system, previewing entire albums so I would only have to do it once per album.

I’m open to any suggestions people have with using eMusic on the Mac.

The article is a good read, by the way. You should check it out.

Recently, my mom purchased a Samsung HL-R5067W. Over the past few months, she was able to get a new Samsung progressive scan DVD player for free or low cost, and this past weekend, I helped her get the unit set up with her TV using the HDMI connection. For some reason, I didn’t notice the included HDMI cable, so we went off to Best Buy to pick up a cable.

Holy freaking expensive… we found the cheapest Monster cable at around $95. The cheapest HDMI cable was $63 for a 4′ cable. That’s over $15 a foot. How crazy is that? These cables cost as much as many DVD players out there. It’s unbelievable.

As HD becomes more popular and HD-DVD or BluRay roll out, the prices will come down, but right now it’s a big disincentive to having HDMI components. Anyone have any ideas on why these cables are so expensive? No computer cable is so costly and I can’t imagine that the home theater equipment needs higher tolerances than a data interconnect.

In what has to be a record, I’ve just finished filing my 2005 Federal Tax Return. It’s amazing what owning a home can do to motivate you to file that return as early as possible. That, and well, there’s that looming wedding which makes the refund check more than a nice thing.

One problem I ran into this year was that H&R Block discontinued TaxCut for the Mac. I’ve happily used that software for the last 3 years and was looking forward to using the new version this year. So, I was faced with the choice of either switching over to TurboTax or going the web route with H&R Block.

Ultimately, I chose using the online tax preparation tool, TaxCut Online Premium. A word of warning, I had trouble getting started using Safari. For some reason, I was unable to launch the application and I don’t think it was the popup blocking in Safari. I switched over to Firefox and had smooth sailing from that point on. There were some visual glitches in the interface. For example, some of the buttons seemed to only show their top half (they’re the green slivers you’ll see). I was able to get through the whole preparation interview, though, and file my federal taxes.

Overall, the online offering felt a lot like the Mac program from last year. It offered all the features I needed at a reasonable cost. The help was as robust as the desktop application and the UI made smart use of JavaScript and DHTML. I wish that they had a desktop application, but I’m sure I won’t miss it. Hopefully, filing my state returns will go as smoothly and I’ll have a successful experience with the product.

One nice thing in the report at the end of the product shows you your effective tax rate vs. what bracket you’re in. My effective tax rate was 12% lower than what it should be according to the tax schedule. Had I donated another huge chunk of money to charity (something like $8K more), I would’ve actually dropped a bracket. Something to ponder when comparing our tax brackets to those in other countries.

The Connecticut software hasn’t come out yet, but once that’s out, I’ll be done my taxes earlier than ever. Gotta love it.

My mom just bought a Samsung HL-R5067W 50″ DLP HD-Ready Projection TV this past week and I got a chance to go down and set it up for her this past weekend. I’ve been slow on the HDTV bandwagon… I’ve been waiting for the new HD media to come out (either Blu-Ray or HD DVD) before really investing in an HDTV because I figure I should get it all sorted out at once.

After playing with this TV, I might go ahead and change my mind. The 50″ Samsung has the following basic specifications:

• 720p resolution
• Dual HD tuners for PiP (though you need two sources, more on this in a sec)
• All the inputs you desire including “3 composite, 3 S-Video, 2 component, 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 PC (D-Sub), 2 Firewire, 1 Monitor, and 2 RF inputs” plus some proprietary ones
• DLP technology

There are other odds and ends that you’d expect (stereo speakers, digital audio out, remote, etc.). The TV is extraordinarily light (under 80 lbs.) which makes it easy to find a stand that you like that can hold the TV. It’s lighter than my 220 lbs. 32″ Sony Wega (at least 4 years old). The picture quality is excellent and because the tuner is built in, over-the-air HD programming is a snap. Just plug in an antenna and go.

My folks have a rooftop antenna that worked right out of the box. I had to re-aim it a slight bit to pick up all of the HDTV channels offered by the major networks in Philly, but once that was done I had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, and a lot of random local channels in digital and analog format. I don’t think we were able to tune in Fox DTV, just analog, but I’m going down there later this week to set up their DSL service, so I’ll work on that next.

The Samsung looks like a single-chip DLP solution, but I saw none of the problems that people indicate with single-chip solutions. Don’t even know, quite honestly, whether 3-chip DLP Cinema TVs exist in a similar price range, but regardless, I didn’t see any picture quality issues typical of early single chip solutions.

The main complaint I had centered on usability and on DVD picture quality. The DVD issue I think is actually related to the source, the DVD player, and not the TV. DVDs are only 480i at best coming into the TV as an analog signal. Even with component inputs, the image was a bit blurry if you were closer than 8 ft. to the TV (not a recommended distance, to be sure, but that’s how close I was when I was working on the wiring). They make upconversion DVD players that will play a DVD and output a digital signal (say over HDMI) to the TV at 720p, improving the image quality. That might be something to try, but it’s not important to my parents. It is important to me and if I get a TV like this, I’ll be investigating DVD players that have this feature.

As for usability, I found the menus a bit annoying, especially when it came to adding or deleting channels into the programmed channel list. For example, when I first set the TV up and told it to auto-program the channel list, it didn’t find the NBC and CBS DTV channels. I knew they existed and checked the stations’ web sites to confirm that they were indeed broadcasting. The TV offers this nice signal strength meter to help you fine tune the antenna position, in fact. The problem was that I couldn’t get the TV to tune into that channel so I could mess with the antenna to find it. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how to tune into a channel that didn’t exist in the list so I could add it without going into the auto-program feature. It was the most agonizing part of the setup and something that shouldn’t be so hard to figure out. If I tune into 3-1 and it doesn’t exist, just tune me in and tell me that it doesn’t exist. I suspect that there’s some reason related to way these signals are broadcast that makes this kind of interface better, but damn it stinks.

I also thought that the PiP feature was a bit lame. There are dual tuners, but they have two different input sources on the back. Which is fine when you have two sources, but sucks when you only have the antenna. There was also some restriction on which coax source I could hook the antenna to, which is why I couldn’t just split the antenna source into both inputs. I was also worried about confusion for my folks. The TV autodetects sources with connect devices and would then show both Cable/Ant and Ant in the source list which would be odd. The PiP feature is nice, though, for checking on the game while watching a DVD. Any of the input sources can be used for the PiP feature. Switching between sources for the PiP view was cumbersome. I didn’t find a convenient button on the remote that would do it, so I had to go into a menu two choices deep to switch sources.

Overall, though, I really loved this TV. So much so that I’m considering breaking my HDTV plan and getting one sooner rather than later. Perhaps as a Christmas gift for me. Heidi will kill me, though, especially considering the cost of our upcoming wedding, so I’ll probably wait. But, if I were getting a TV now, this 50″ TV is nearly perfect for a casual home theater buff like me.

OK, if they just had a Phillies or Eagles one, I’d be right there. The Red Sox case is tempting, though…

Update: A good list of iPod Nano cases is here. My favorite so far is the iGuy.

I have to admit that this week’s announcement from Apple (while impressive) left me disappointed on one major front. I was really expecting Apple to do something clever with the form factor of the iPod Video in order to get a larger screen on there. Yes, I know it’s physically larger than the standard iPod Photo screen, but I’m talking another inch or so each way, perhaps in a widescreen orientation.

I expected I would be envious of the new iPod when I compared it to my PSP, but the screen size is so important to me that I don’t regret having the PSP at all. The device can play games and music, I have an iPod anyway to carry the bulk of my music collection, and I know how to take DVD films and dump them to the PSP. Apple also wasn’t able to seal a deal for movies beyond the Pixar shorts that they got. If they’re able to do that, I’ll reevaluate, but without a legal, legit, and easy way to get mainstream films onto the iPod, it’s not quite good enough. Movies for the PSP (on their UMD format) may be a little overpriced, but the availability of titles makes it easy to grab a movie for a trip.

Which leads me to the next point for this post, a review of how the PSP did on my trip out to California last week. I had a number of movies on UMD and movies from my DVD collection with me on the trip. I ended up watching several on the trip. Overall, the PSP was a great portable video player. I was able to watch nearly two whole movies without running out of juice on both trips. The only reason I wasn’t able to finish the second movie was that the flight was too short. My only major complaint is that the sound level on the recordings was too low. The PSP has a UMD volume feature that boosts the audio to compensate, but it wasn’t enough. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sound level on DVDs are also set very low. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s universal enough to make me believe that it offers some advantage in dynamic range or something. The UMDs seem similarly “quiet.” Games, on the other hand, are nice and loud. I actually had the captioning on so I could understand some of the quieter dialog. It’s just a problem on planes, really. When I used it while camping, it was perfectly loud enough.

I mostly watched movies I had already seen, but I did get one movie for my birthday from Heidi that I hadn’t watched yet. Based on a recommendation from my sister, she got me Crash. I really liked this movie. The ensemble cast delivers great performances across the board. The story is pretty simple. As the events unfold, we start seeing how racism plays into the lives of all of the characters (good and bad). It’s the story that makes this a great movie. Good actors and a good story… funny how that makes for a good movie.

If you liked Traffic, you’ll like this movie. Like Traffic, the writer has worked in some portions that just kick you in the gut. It’s not a happy movie, really. I think that’s part of what makes me like it. It’s not a happy ending. There’s some authenticity in that and not in a contrived way.

Rating: 8/10

Apple unveiled the video iPod today. More importantly, though:

With the new version of iTunes, consumers will be able to buy TV shows, in addition to music. Shows available for purchase one day after their initial broadcast will include ABC television offerings “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” and the Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven.” It will take 10 to 20 minutes to download an episode, said Jobs. Each will cost $1.99 and will be ad-free. Users can also download six short films from Pixar Animation Studios for $1.99 each.

We had heard rumblings of this internally a few weeks ago, but for obvious reasons no one could or would confirm it. This is a great thing, though. The video is good enough to play through a TV, meaning that you could literally skip the Tivo and take your shows with you to the gym. No more watching whatever happens to be on while you’re there.

I was thinking about getting another Tivo at some point when we had the money to get an HDTV. Our DVR is starting to show its age. After Tivo announced that they’re limiting storage time based on the wishes of the copyright holder, I’m pretty much never going to buy a Tivo again. I think we’re not there yet, as the flags were set on the shows accidently.