Coolspotters is live to the world! Check it out, add some content, give us some feedback in the forums (link at the bottom of the page).

So far, things are going well. We’ve got lots of people signing up, adding content, and even more just browsing around checking stuff out.

The “for most of you” in the title is just that we pointed “coolspotters.com” at our actual site instead of the placeholder site we had. That change takes a little time to show up at your ISP, so for some of you, it may not have flipped over. It should by tonight.

I want to watch the Phillies game, but don’t want to spend $200+ on DirectTV’s MLB package or $120 on MLB.tv’s package. So, it’s MLB.com’s radio player instead. Not quite the same as being able to watch any game, any time at my desk.

For a while I’ve been torn between supporting Obama, and my lingering feeling that John Edwards was the better candidate. Looks like the choice has been made for me. It’s weird. A year ago I wouldn’t have predicted seeing Guiliani and Edwards dropping out this early.

Update Sigh. You know, I’ve always respected Nader, but these gadfly White House runs strike me as a waste of his time and energy, which could be better put to use elsewhere.

Update 2 Salon has an interesting article on the dilemma.

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.

So, a little more about my struggles with Verizon. It wasn’t enough that they mislead all users who want to switch their plans online. After I switched my plan on Sept 5, they continued their general “evilness” by billing me incorrectly. Not just by billing me for the higher priced plan. But, FOR BOTH PLANS. In Sept, I got my bill for Oct (Verizon bills their customers one month in advanced) and it was $134.52 (the price of both plans).

I called customer service and at first they wanted to give me a $40 credit. I pointed out that if that was all I got, I would still be paying more that month than my bill was before I switched to the lower plan and they responded with, “huh.” After spending over 30 minutes with a very nice, but not numbers smart person, they finally responded with, “So how much of a credit do you think you should get?” If only I wasn’t such a nice guy. I finally talked through the fact that I should receive a credit for the over payment in Aug and Sept and that the extra plan should be removed from my bill for Oct. They finally got it and agreed to give me a $114.28 credit and they said they would remove the extra plan from my bill.

I let them know that since this happened through an automated process, they should tell someone in management about it. I truly believe this will happen to anyone who changes their plan online (unless the computers only hate me and are planning my demise).

So, I get the bill for Nov, and my credit is $111.70 (a difference of $2.58). And I wouldn’t care about it at all except they CHARGED ME FOR BOTH PLANS AGIAN!!!!

BBB.org got another submission.

So, yesterday, I break the switch on the mic from my XBox 360 so I can’t talk. Today, a nice, 1-pixel wide, vertical blue line shows up on my 1+ year old Samsung LCD TV. Everything online says it’s a hardware issue, so I’m looking at warranty service and no TV for some time. Joy.

And the DirecTV guys are supposed to come on Friday. Wonder if there will be a TV here when they show up?

Anyway, I have no point… just whining. Carry on.

I’m working at home today and was thinking I could catch up on Heroes on my computer. So, I go over to iTunes and realize that iTunes doesn’t have Season 2 because NBC pulled their content from iTunes. Wonderful.

So, I have to watch it o NBC’s web site, but since I can’t float the video like I can the iTunes window, I’m only able to watch a sliver. A screenshot of that half of my laptop screen is below the fold. I also couldn’t tell you what the TV commercials are for. I’m assuming that’s the revenue NBC wanted, but I’d like Sprint (the ads on the page) and whatever other video advertisers know that I ignored the ads on the NBC Video Rewind Player. It’s too easy.

And, on top of that, NBC/GE shareholders, they just lost $1.99 an episode from me. I missed 4 episodes, to that’s $8. Yes, yes, I can download Heroes episodes from Amazon except that I don’t own a PC. I don’t want to store them permanently on my Tivo. I’d like to take them on my iPhone and iPod. I can’t with Amazon’s inferior product. I’m not saying that you HAVE to go with iTunes, but keeping the most popular portable music player, the fastest selling phone, and a rapidly growing platform in mind would be a good thing, don’t you think?

So, NBC, thanks for screwing me out of a good experience and yourselves out of some cash. I’m sure I’ll miss more episodes of Heroes, and I’ll do the same with your online player. The irony is that my views will count just the same for the player, and NBC will count it as a success even though, quite frankly, the advertiser is getting screwed. Page views and video starts are pretty opaque stats, but that’s all that gets reported to advertisers.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I’m talking about this image taken at the local garba at Newington High School. See if you can pick out the funny part:

Not seeing it? Click on the image to see the funny part centered.

We had a good time at the garba, though Heidi enjoyed herself more than I did. It was our first time going as a couple and that made it fun. A nice bunch of undergrads from Wesleyan joined us for the Raas, giving us a nice little group. Nisha and Pat joined us, so that gives me the excuse to post this pic:

See you there next year!

• I just thought of a new Twitter idea. Perhaps someone is doing it. #
• Can’t decide if I like the Radiohead album… love the Radiohead business model, though. #

Just messing around with the TwitterTools plugin from Alex King.

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s best described via analogy:

• Facebook Users: It’s like Facebook status, but you don’t need to use Facebook and it works with your IM client and SMS.
• Bloggers: It’s a micro blogging platform where you can put in up to 140 characters of text or urls and push that to everyone that’s using Twitter.

It integrates with IM so you can update from your IM client instead of having to log in, fill out the form, etc. (though that’s pretty easy, too). If you’re an SMS junkie or have a Blackberry or iPhone, you can have it work with SMS, too. It’s a pretty handy tool if you have friends updating their Twitter accounts. Like most social services, networks effects do make the service more useful.

So, as of today, for the foreseeable future, FatMixx posts will also show up on my Twitter feed. Enjoy!

http://twitter.com/sujal

Hey everyone. I am having an issue and I was hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. I just got a new computer with Vista (yeah, yeah, I know). Well, I am using TivoToGo to transfer .tivo files to my computer. I also have a program to remove the .tivo rapper and turn the files into .mpg. The problem I am having is that in Windows Media Player 11 and Windows Movie Maker 6.0, the total time display of the file is not the total run time of the file (on either the .tivo or the .mpg file). So, WMP 11 only shows 10:23 for the half-hour shows I Tivo and move to my computer. It plays all 30 minutes fine, but the time and the blue cursor stop at 10:23. It does the same thing with the hour shows, only listing 20 minutes for them.

The real problem is in the Movie Maker. When I import the clip it shows the same abbreviated time, but only allows you to actually work with the time shown. So I only get the first 10 minutes of my half-hour shows and 20 minutes of my hour shows. The weird thing is, the problem doesn’t exist if I do it on my laptop running WMP 10 and Movie Maker 5.1. The exact same files show the correct time. Now for another wrinkle. The error doesn’t happen if I recorded the shows using “high quality” on my Tivo settings (but the files are 5 times as big which is a big drawback).

I have only found two posts on the web with people mentioning the problem and no solutions. The only suggestion is that the files are being encoded wrong, which would make sense except they are fine in WMP 10 and Movie Editor 5.1. But, maybe I am missing something. I am just trying to see if anyone has had the same problem or heard of this type of problem or possibly know of anything I can try to fix it. Thanks.

Look who Joe met over the weekend!

So, I am taking a look at all my bills to see where I can make some cuts to save some money. I come to my Verizon home phone account and I re-look at my plan. I am signed up for the Verizon Freedom Plan for $55.99. This plan includes:

Unlimited Long Distance
Anonymous Call Rejection
Call Forwarding
Call Waiting
Caller ID
Voice Mail
Speed Dialing 8 and
Three Way Calling

Now, I know when I signed up for the plan 3 years ago, this was the cheapest plan that included unlimited long distance. Since I don’t get good reception for cell phone in my condo, and I mostly call the west coast, this was the best deal at the time. But, now they have some new plans.

Since I only really use caller ID and call waiting, there is a plan that just includes these options (plus voice mail) for $39.99 called Verizon Freedom Essentials. So, this is good for me. I can cut down what I don’t use anyway and save $15/month. I select the plan and the next screen gives a list of choices you can add on for an additional charge each month. They split the choices into two lists: “Your Current Calling Features” (where the three options included in the package: voice mail, caller ID, and call waiting are all checked and the monthly fee is “included” like you would expect) and the other list is “Add New Calling Features” which have a list of options like call forwarding, *69, busy redial, etc. all for an additional monthly fee.

Well, I like my selection with just my “included” options, so I just select next and find out my monthly bill comes out to be $45.69 with extra charges for “Speed Dialing 8 @ $1.70/month and Three-Way Calling @ $4/month. So, what gives???

I go back to try to look at the selection to make sure they hadn’t check any additional features automatically (which I may have just missed). First, it takes 3 different links to go back one page (an “edit” link on the first page, a “change selection(s)” link on the second page, and another “go” link on the final page). Once I finally get back to add features page (which you can tell they made purposely hard to do), I start scanning for these two additional features: Speed Dialing 8 and Three-Way Calling. They are no where to be found. But, I do find a nondescript link on the bottom of the page called “Show All Features.” Those slime balls. So, I click the link and magically the page expands to show a sublist under “Your Current Calling Features” called “Your Additional Calling Features” which is still different than the other list “Additional Calling Features.”

Yeah it sounds confusing, but basically if you are not pay attention while going through the selection, they have automatically added additional features to your plan and hidden them from you, hoping you do not notice when you proceed with your check out. Even though there is a list of 16 additional cost features which you could choose from to add on to your package, they try to literally hide 2 of them from you so you end up paying more.

How completely unethical. Shame.

For what it’s worth, my sister is in Lima and she felt the quake. She’s fine though and we were able to talk via Skype. Times like these, you wish all computers came with cameras. While she could see us and the fact that we were safe at home, it would’ve been nice to see her.

They just had an aftershock (literally 2 minutes ago, while we were on Skype), so I suspect they’re going to have a fun evening down there. I’m more worried about the tsunami warnings, but at least her current place isn’t on the beach.

(Heidi and I are in Washington D.C. this weekend to celebrate our first anniversary)

Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the National Mall and stand upon the land where history, real history happened, where Martin Luther King spoke of dreams and John F. Kennedy asked us to give to our country, where thousands and thousands marched against war, where real democracy and fierce debates shaped our country and created hallowed ground.

Dissent and debate matter in this country. Every positive change in this country has been marked by both, from the elimination of slavery to the recognizing women’s right to vote. These are marks of a vibrant democracy and a vibrant public and civic life. Without those protests and marches, we would be a different country today.

So, on the way to the Mall tomorrow, I will look toward the White House with great sadness because it’s current inhabitant has not been a steward of this legacy. He does not believe in the debate and the raucous exchange of ideas that have shaped our country for so long.

I’m speaking of the Bush administration’s utter contempt for dissent and disagreement, of loyalty oaths and and fake “town halls” where only loyal Bushies are allowed to attend. I’m speaking of a President who hides from protesters lest he hear dissent.

Of all of his failings, and he has many, this has been the key one. After all, thin skin breeds defensiveness and stubbornness. Those feelings breed rigidity and limited thinking. That creates poor policy and bad judgement. His administration is, in other words, a case study in why dissent is important for the health of the nation.

I wrote nearly a year ago that we should look at the fraud of “bipartisanship”, that “we should reflect upon the past five years and examine our ‘bipartisanship’ moments on the most important issue of our time.” Looking out at Washington D.C. tonight, I ask that we also take a look at the President’s fraudulent patriotism.

Patriotism on the President’s terms have brought us Abu Ghraib. It has brought us horrible lies and more lies. We now may be looking at a resurgent al-Qaeda. Supporting the troops in the Bush administration meant Walter Reed. All because when citizens and officials stood up to question the President or his war plans, they were brushed aside and ignored in the name of patriotism.

Over the last 6 years, those of us that have disagreed with the President’s policies have been called anti-American, defeatists, and traitors. Some, like Sen. Joe Lieberman, vilified even the mere act of questioning the President. The President and his supporters have continually invoked the language of patriotism in defending their long-failed policies. They would like our patriotism to be blind, closing our eyes while biting our tongues, lest we “undermine the President.”

When the President and his supporters speak of patriotism, they are speaking of blind support for them and their failed policies. That’s not America. Real patriotism involves questioning our leaders, following the examples of Martin Luther King and millions of other protesters over the years. We should learn from the patriotism the thousands of brave individuals around the nation who try to line motorcade routes or stand outside Presidential appearances even in the face of aggressive policing by the Administration. Real patriotism isn’t blind or obsequious. Real patriotism can involve dissent, which is the real tradition that binds us all together.