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.