Category: Media

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t have the spare income to indulge myself in all the new toys that come along. However, I considered the Sprint refund to be ‘found’ money, and used it to buy myself not one, but two new toys: a Kindle eReader, and an AppleTV.

The AppleTV is a little box that connects to your TV through an HDMI cable and to your computer and iTunes either wirelessly, or via an ethernet cable. I can use the box to look at video podcasts, watch movies or television shows, peruse photos from my local drive or via Flickr, watch YouTube videos, and listen to music.

Before the recent software update, I had to find podcasts through iTunes on my computer and sync to the AppleTV. Now, I can search and browse on podcasts directly from AppleTV. Apple still needs to filter the podcasts to those that can only play on AppleTV, but most can so it’s not too much of a hassle. Many of the podcasts are pretty lame, but some of the podcasts, such as those for the Hubble podcast and the Spitzer Science Center, are in HD and absolutely exquisite. Best of all, the podcasts I’ve checked out to this point are free.

I can sync television shows and movies from my computer to the AppleTV. After the recent software update, I can also rent movies and buy TV shows directly through the AppleTV interface. Apple is still adding movies to its library, but about 70 are in HD, and at least a couple of hundred are in SD. I don’t know how the movies look on the 50 inch televisions, but they look great on my smaller 27-inch 720p TV.

The movies aren’t cheap. An older movie rents for 2.99, 3.99 for HD quality. A new release is 3.99/4.99. If you have Netflix, it’s going to be cheaper to get your movies through that service. However, I’ve found that blu-ray movies sent from Netflix fail about 50% of the time. Being able to rent through Apple provides a second avenue for HD content. Plus, it’s a nice option when the weather is cold and there’s nothing else to watch.

The movies are ready to view in about one or two minutes after making the purchase (TV show) or rental (movie). I’ve found, though, that waiting until about 2-3% is downloaded works best.

You can sync music, but I only have the smaller 40GB machine, and don’t want to load it down with music. I also prefer to listen to music through my other computer, which is connected to nice speakers.

I can watch YouTube videos through the AppleTV, but I’ve not found it worthwhile. The YouTube photos look bad on a computer monitor, much less on a bigger TV screen.

Where I’ve found the AppleTV to be particularly useful is with photos. You can choose to sync a local directory with your AppleTV, copy photos to this directory, and they’re automatically uploaded to the machine. I can watch the photos in a slideshow, which is a great way to check out the pictures for flaws, bad cropping or focus, and so on.

There’s something about seeing the photos on the larger screen, while you’re seated several feet away, to get a good, objective view of the images. Since the AppleTV is connected to the TV through an HDMI cable, I get a nice, sharp view of the pictures. In addition, I can have the AppleTV use my photos, rather than its own built-in pictures, for the very nice screensaver. I’d like to have that screensaver for my Macs.

When I get bored looking at my own work, I can connect to a .mac or Flickr account, and add as many Flickr contacts as I want in order to look at other people’s photos. So, who has a .mac account I can try?

The AppleTV interface is very easy to use, and the box is small and out of the way. It runs a bit warm, which is typical for an aluminum Apple product. Whatever you do, do not stack it on your DVD player. The remote is very small, about the size of an iPod nano. So far I haven’t lost it, knock on aluminum. Unfortunately, AppleTV is restricted to US access at this time, but the Apple company has stated it will be rolled out to other countries hopefully later in the year.

Is the AppleTV worth the money? I wouldn’t buy one of the larger hard drives. The AppleTV is not separate storage from your computer, because it works by syncing so you’re really not getting any additional space. I do think the smaller versions are worth the money, especially if you don’t have a computer that supports a DVI or HDMI connection. It’s been fun viewing the different podcasts, and the device is a nice alternative if you don’t have cable (which I don’t). If you’re a photographer, the photo slideshow capability is especially useful.

Note that Apple has refurbished AppleTVs for sale for 199.00 at the Apple store. It’s not much of a savings, but thirty bucks is thirty bucks–enough for 5-10 movie rentals.

I must admit to being impressed with Amazon’s new download service. I’ve already made my first list of wishlist songs and albums, at prices that seem much more affordable than iTunes.

Speaking of Apple losing its gloss, I was scanning the jabber today about iPhones being ‘bricked’, yet another instance where a noun becomes a verb. It’s a good word, though–deliberately turning a useful electronic gadget into a useless ‘brick’. It’s not something I worry over much about because a) I won’t buy an iPhone and b) it’s unlikely I’ll be buying another iPod.

My iPod’s battery is dying, and it irks me that the only way I can replace the battery is getting out my old soldering iron, or sending it in to Apple and paying $65.00 dollars and getting a re-furbished replacement back. This isn’t what I expect when I spend that kind of money, especially when other MP3 players are a fifth the price.

Don’t need another cellphone, either, because when the cellphone contract comes up in February, it’s being terminated and the cellphone I have donated to whatever organization wants to reclaim it. Don’t need a cellphone, don’t want one. Think of the money I save that can be used to buy music.

This is the slow dissolving, long lasting stuff edition:

• Photography is dead. From Erwins Home: The essence of film-based photography is not only the fact that the mechanism of capturing an image and fixing it in a silver halide grain structure creates a final picture that can hardly be altered. The fundamental issue here is the fact that the laws of physics create the image, in particular by the characteristics of light rays and the interaction between photons and silver halide grains. Photography is writing with light, and fixing the shadows. Human interaction and manipulation are minimized and reduced to the location, viewpoint and moment of exposure by the photographer. Reading the new book about Cartier-Bresson, the Scrapbook, makes one aware of that peculiar and forceful truth that photography is not only intimately linked to the use of film, but in fact depends for its very existence on film.If photography is dependent on film and not the photographer’s drive, interest, eye, skill, and talent, than all I have to do to become a great photographer is blow the dust off my old film camera, load it with film, stand on a corner and, every once in a while, snap the shutter.
• Now is not the time to hear that global warming is going to increase drastically, though I have at least two years to move before it gets really bad.Not everyone agrees with the predictions, though. Freeman Dyson a physicist at Princeton states, My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. (via 3Quarks)

  An interesting read, but in the end, Dr. Dyson doesn’t convince one of anything. His arguments are based more on anecdotes and opinion, rather than presenting anything factual that one can then review and either accept or reject. He also has too much belief, in my opinion, on humanity’s ability to ‘fix’ things at some future time if predictions of climate change do occur. He then wraps all of this in his ‘heresy’, as if to make himself seem a maverick, when there have been people who have argued against the prevailing views of global climate change. He strikes me as man who doesn’t want to see what the climatologist are predicting, but rather than focus on the sacrifice of today’s people, he disputes that any such prediction can’t be possible because of all the variances that exist in the world. The thing is, from what I know of climatological models, these do account for all that ‘messiness’.

• Loren Webster wrote an in-depth review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM). I enjoyed reading the posts, and hearing Loren’s views.I read ZAMM once, a long time ago. I remembered thinking after reading the work that this was a book written by a man for men, though there is nothing in the work that is even remotely sexist. I felt, though, that I was reading a book written in language I’ve learned to speak fluently, but wasn’t my native language. After Loren’s reviews, I might try reading it again, and see if I still suffer the same disconnect.
• If you haven’t seen the South Korean film The Host (Gwoemul), I can’t recommend it too strongly.I was expecting a creature feature, but I wasn’t expecting such excellent special effects, darkest black humor, and a fascinating look at South Korean culture, which may, or may not, match what actually exists in South Korea. Not to mention subtle and not so subtle digs at the US.

  I don’t want to give away much of the storyline other than a huge creature terrorizes Seoul, capturing the youngest daughter of an amazingly dysfunctional family. The rest of the movie is then taken up with the family’s attempt to rescue her from the beast, taking the members to hospitals, along water fronts, and into telecom companies.

  This is not a ‘likable’ family, either, at least not in the beginning. But as they traverse the shoals of bureaucracy and the lies of corporate and military leaders alike, not to mention the homeless, ecowarriors, and, well, the beast, they rather grow on you. One reviewer described it as …a mutant hybrid spawned from the improbable union of Little Miss Sunshine and Godzilla, which is as good a description as any.

  There was one scene, in particular, where the family is seated at a table eating their dinner. It was seemingly incidental to the movie, but it captured simply, without edging over into the maudlin, the relationships within the family–all without one word being exchanged. It was brilliantly done, unusual, but captivating.

  I watched it in Korean with English sub-titles, which I recommend; in my opinion, dubbing destroys movies. I wanted to see The Host at the St. Louis film festival last year, but they were out of tickets. Too bad, too, because I bet the movie was exceptional on the bigger screen. Still, it translates to the smaller screen nicely.

  Rotten Tomatoes critics give it a 92%, unusually high for that site. Out of five stars, it gets a five star rating from me.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

For all Stargate Atlantis fans who watched tonight’s show, see this site for information about today’s story.

Also, in the news today: the next season of Battlestar Galactica, the fourth, will be the last. The producers promise a wild ride.