I thought they were just full of air.

Can a person who watches Fox News and believes their “newscasts” be trusted to make informed decisions? More and more the Faux News channel plumbs the depths of outright lies and fear mongering. Latest hit? Terrorists set forest fires in CA.

How dumb do they think we are?

Bad UI is a huge pet peeve for me. For example, the Scientific Atlanta box I have from Time Warner has a shockingly primitive interface from the standpoint of basic search functionality (which is pretty much non-functional) inability to hide channels I dont watch (about 400 of them) a hit-or-miss abiliity to record shows in the future where you either get it, dont get it or get every single airing of it even if it’s recorded the same episode 2 hours before. oh, i could go on…

I lost my Tivo when I moved and gave up DirecTV. I only ended that relationship because Tivo, which I loved, seemed to be in a weird place where there was little innovation, new features were stillborn due to the pressure of media companies and their new box didnt work with DTV and cost $800.

So I camped out for a few years thinking that something had to give. Tivo would get out of the bog, SI would, under direction of Cisco, join us in the era of decent UI (stop letting engineers design interfaces!) and DTV would release a DVR with or without Tivo.

Most issues did get solved. Tivo has 2 boxes now and while both are cool looking, no one can tell what the difference is between them. DTV launched “Vegas” which is a good UI and they continue to innovate. Tivo launched new services which were looking like victims of RIAA / Hollywood Greed monkeys and SA, well they still have crappy boxes.

As it stands now, I have to hold out a little longer to see if the new cable cards make it to TW and how they work with Tivo. As it is, the old cable cards dont offer VOD and their functionality is very limited. If predictions hold true, we’ll see a new cable card before spring and it will allow the tivos to have all the functionality of regular SA boxes but without the silly and useless UI.

Tivo also did something that should have happened 5 years ago. Actually, it’s not Tivo’s issue, it’s the cable operators, Comcast is now releasing set top boxes that are tivo powered. SA, wake up, the bell tolls for you right now.

Welcome back to the land of the living Tivo. May we be reunited very soon. (When i figure out what the difference is between your new boxes…)

I went through an exercise a year ago where I made a concerted effort over 3 months to inform all junk mail / catalog companies to just knock it off. It does work for the most part. I get very few catalogs now that I don’t order from and even got a number of the pesky “have you seen me” cards from advo to stop hitting my mailbox.

With the unsolicited phone call law still in peril of lapsing (if people start getting cold call sales there will be a riot in the streets) and the postal service getting worse by the day, we’re at the precipice of either being completely deluged by marketing through every real and virtual orifice. Frightening.

I do advocate doing some research on stopping the direct mailers (there are a number of good sources on line) as well as making sure your number is on the do not call list. That’s a good start. And with catalogs & junk mail? The BEST thing to do is let them pile up in a box by your home computer. Let it fill up for 3 months or so which will probably give you a nearly complete picture of everyone who is junk mailing you. On a nice rainy Saturday go through the box, tossing out duplicates and discarding all but their contact info and the mailing label (which shows your customer ID , name address) and start calling them one at a time. If you’re swamped with this stuff it’s going to take a while but if you’re sick at home on a weekday, it’s a great way to pass the time when there’s nothing good on the TV and there’s 8 hours before your next ebay auction ends.

It takes 90 days for the dust to settle since most junk mailers have their crap sitting at the USPS locked and loaded for their marketing campaigns.

It’s also nice to call your bank / lenders and tell them to stop sending your statements packed with coupons. Or better, most banks offer on-line statements. You don’t actually NEED the paper ones anymore. They have records ya know… Is your Feb 02 bank balance something you need to have at the ready? No.

SPAM

Email spam is another deal altogether. The stats are, 98% of all email on the internet is spam. Another stat is that 75% of all traffic is porn and illegal media sharing. Lovely.

Filtering is a band-aid on an axe wound. While companies like Frontbridge (now a MS property) are at the forefront (I’ve used them for years and it’s near perfect with one or two out of a thousand getting through) but the trick is to STOP that stuff from even being sent. The real fix is quite simple, a new mail network and protocol.

Talk of fixing spam through authenticated mail servers creating a “safe web” where unauthenticated servers cant enter the closed system has been around for a while and I have to wonder why it’s not gotten to the point where the talk ends and the work begins.

The hammer of Thor solution is to simply replace SMTP with a better protocol and force email clients to be patched to use the system. Mail servers then only talk to other servers that have an authenticated SSL-type cert. Yes, that would break everything, but for a short time while all email clients get replaced or patched. It’s a huge and unrealistic idea but it would solve the problem.

Some ISPs are blocking “personal” mail servers which is what a zombie becomes when your buddy’s computer is infected with malicious software and then become spam-bots. Sounds silly but MILLIONS of systems are zombies. I think this is a good stop-gap measure but not the answer. Can we stop zombies and viruses? I doubt it, there will always be some Dutch teenager who writes a script to impress his friends and gives another melissa virus.

No solution will be painless, but forcing all mail servers to authenticate with a cert would kill a substantial amount of the SPAM. Is it fair to make everyone shell out a few hundred bucks for a cert? No, but that’s the cost of doing business. I could go on for hours but we need to see this fixed, I’m tired of getting emails telling me that $9.3M is waiting to be wired to my account from Nigeria. Got that one AGAIN this morning.

It used to be so simple, pick an AM/FM Cassette Deck that fits your budget, and jam that new Police album in the HS parking lot. A lot has changed since High School. With XM, MP3, CDR, USB, Bluetooth, in-car video & TV, 5.1 surround and everything else, picking out a head unit requires as much thought as a home theater setup. Possibly more.

I recently posted about a head unit that is diskless from the innovative people at Balu that accepts an SD card. Could I completely give up the CD? Not quite yet. I’d more likely buy a DVD enabled head unit so I could burn music to a DVD-R and get 4.2GB of MP3 wonderfulness. Or even try out some surround sound. Why not (ok it’s gimmicky). This new unit, the MP 57 is USB friendly which I have to say should now be considered the standard bar for head units. iPods being cool and all, I still have perfectly good 2GB USB sticks from trade shows that would be VERY useful in the car and in fact, the iPod is just a storage device in the car so all things being equal, I’d rather plug a USB memory stick or portable drive into my car and not cry when the heat / humidity / my dumb hands wreck it.

What I also like about this new unit is that it comes with a complete Bluetooth hands-free rig & mic! I was just pricing out having my wife’s FX35 kitted out with a Parrot BT setup. $400 clams… This unit is listed at $319 msro which makes me think the street price will be closed to $250 and that’s a huge deal since this does more than most stock units can right out of the box.

I’ve been an Alpine fan for a while but the new stuff from Balupunkt are making me change my mind.

I’ve had a Blackberry attached to me for almost 10 years. And I hated it. Or I thought I did. It ends up that I hated the content of the emails, not the phone. As personal phones go, I’ve gone back and forth between utility simple phones and wacky smart phones. While I always loved the idea of Windows Mobile, the execution ended up being a little awkward for real use. Until WM6. HTC has been quietly making phones for carriers and getting almost no credit except for phone nerds like me who know who they are.

When T-Mobile released the MDA I waited on line the morning it was released. And sold it a week later. It was SLLLOOOOWWWW and the version of windows mobile didnt actually close any programs, so the memory would just fill up until the phone had a stroke and locked up. Not ideal. But I knew they were on their way to something cool and I’d just wait.

T-Mobile launched their Wing which looked pretty cool and I waited to hear the fallout if there would be any. And people LIKE it. Could it be? Could the right features be in a phone that is peppy and doesn’t die from overloaded RAM? Did I mention that the MDA had such low ear piece volume you couldn’t have a conversation if there was ANY ambient noise?

I hit up Craigs List and found a Wing for $225 which is about $100 less than a good deal on eBay. Nice lady, she just didn’t need all the features and frankly it scared her. Works for me, new phone, no contract. I spent 2 days waiting for the phone to annoy me. It didn’t. I waited for it to do something terrible, it didn’t. In fact, the phone is damn cool. There are a few minor issues:
1. 64MB RAM? It should have 2GB minimum. Charge the extra $40 for it, I’ll pay.
2. The processor is just a tiny bit slow. Not a lot but enough that I wait for something to load or change screens 2 seconds too long
3. The slider is a little bit loose. Could be a bit sturdier.

See, nothing fatal here. It takes micro SD so I can download 50MB or newsfeeds through the RSS reader as well as keep a full length divx movie or two.

So, is this better than an iPhone? in a word, yes*
The iPhone UI is superior BUT unless you’re happy to have AT&T and Apple tell you what apps you can have on it, it’s not cool at all. Not one app, nothing, you take it as is or not at all. Unless you hack it and like DirecTV, when it updates you have a brick. Joy. So while the fanboys will continue to whiff the vapors of iAnything, I prefer to have a say in why my device does and doesn’t do. Sudoku? Yep, installed it. xvid codec? check. Edit my file system and remove embedded extras? IM client for all flavors of IM? check, check.

I have a problem with closed systems in the same way I dislike amusement parks. Too many rules. The WM6 interface is not as slick as the iPhone and I think WM7 should be a UI upgrade more than anything but as it is, if I want to install something and control the behavior of my device, I’m happy. Thats why I bought it.

But not to sit on their laurels, HTC came up with a new device with a 400mhz proc, 128MB RAM (still too small but better) and a built in GPS. Do they get amazing press saying it the most feature rich portable communications device ever sold to the public? No. And that’s silly because the new phone, Tilt for AT&T is the best thing in phones out there by a mile.

I’m playing with YouTube’s Custom player. You CAN scale it. it’s very cool.

Makes no sense, right? Exactly. I’m the person my friends go to when they want to know what kind of home theater stuff they should get. My process is simple, budget and requirements. It was pretty straight forward for many years, since keeping tabs on DVD players, TVs, receivers, amps and speakers was FUN. Going down to the local high-end AV shop made sense. These days, it’s a challenge to stay on top of the amazing breadth of options.

The PC is not quite part of every living room, but through media extenders, media player enclosures, multi-format DVD players, iPods, satellite radio, HD radio, USB and Ethernet enabled receivers the permutations of a living room entertainment setup nears infinity. And I do still enjoy the process of helping a friend figure out what to buy but I spend so much more time just explaining how now they can use a network connected projector to show a netflix VOD movie from across the house that I end up more teacher than consultant.

I am undeterred. I have been crowing about convergence for a decade and now that we’re well on our way to everything-to-everything connectivity, I cannot complain. Nor will I. BUT, sometimes I see something and it just makes my head hurt…

The new Toshiba HD DVD player records HD to… DVD. Regular DVD. WHAT??? Ok, so if I can get 2 hours of HD on a regular DVD-R why EXACTLY do I need a 25GB HD DVD? I smell tomfoolery here.

So, if I use logic here (gasp) I should be able to record HD video to a DVD-R and put it in a 1080p DVD player (a normal one) that upconverts. Right? I need a Tylenol…

I fool and his money are soon parted. I love nice AV gear and have a decent Rotel receiver (no, it’s not separates) and B&W speakers. Most people just don’t care enough about the fidelity to spend $2500 on speakers which in the AV wirld is actually pretty cheap. This is not a judgment on peoples taste in AV gear, most people don’t care. Those that do fall into a few categories but the main two are, people who understand the reality of tech specs and those that think they can tell the difference between $200 speaker cables and $7500 cables. Those people need to save that extra $7300 and read up on the limitations of adult hearing.

James Randi of the James Randi Educational Foundation is also fed up with audiophile silliness and hype and puts his money where is mouth is. Prove that and he’ll write you a check. While the money is there I doubt anyone will step up and take that challenge or else the whole premise of fancy cables falls apart.

I spent $200 on my cables. Nice ones from Belden. Same ones used at pro mixing studios like Skywalker Ranch. If it’s good enough to master Star Wars it’s fine for my little rig.

The same goes for video cables. I use Canare from Blue Jeans Cable which is the SAME EXACT CABLE used by the majority of broadcast facilities (TV Production). Again, it’s used to master HD video at the source, so it’s good for the rest of us. Don’t waste your money on “fancy” cables, you will NOT notice the difference.