Drive letters assigned to hard disks, floppies, thumb drives and network shares are ancient technology and we need to preserve the past at all costs.

The confusion that drive letters cause help keep IT support people employed. Please, for our sakes, don’t get a Mac! The economy would crash due to massive unemployment.

It’s also good that you can only have 26 drives attached to a PC. Having too much choice and flexibility like Macs have has been shown to accelerate productivity among former Solitaire players.

Daily warnings that “Your computer might be at risk”. This is good, because you need to know that in the 10 seconds your computer has been running, your anti-virus software hasn’t had time to update its definitions.

Firefox 3.5 is to be released tomorrow morning Pacific time. You can check here for the news. Since I last mentioned Firefox, Safari 4 has been released as well as Internet Explorer 8. Safari 4 stills seems buggy to me. Frequently when I launch it, it just hangs. I changed the home page from Apple’s livepage to the super-simple Google.com to no effect. It was noticeably faster than Firefox 3, but it also lacked Firefox add-ons so I moved back.

Internet Explorer 8 was a disappointment to me. I don’t browse as much in Windows as I do with the Mac, but one thing I could not put up with was the inability to turn off searching from the address bar, even though there is a seperate search bar in IE8. IE7 and previous versions had this feature. Nothing is so frustrating as typing in a local IP address of something that may or may not be up in the address bar and having MSN Live search in vain for 192.168.1.xxx. Dumb! Typical Microsoft. They was probably some revenue involved there. Computer user, Microsoft must really hate you.

It seems like the most noticable change might be a speed increase for java enabled pages. A complete list of changes can be found here. So check it out tomorrow at firefox.com!

It’s been interesting to watch the new titles arrive in blu-ray disk format. As I said earlier, I’m not in a rush to replace my DVDs, but for posterity’s sake, there are a few that I’m ready to replace.

One is The Right Stuff. I’ve owned every home video release of this classic movie. There was the pan and scan version on VHS. Then they released a widescreen version on tape. The second DVD I ever bought was a flipper where you had to flip the disk in the middle to finish it. Finally a two-disk version came out in dual layer format that let you watch it straight through except for the bathroom break for those who failed to plan ahead for this nearly 3 1/2 hour epic.

But for blu-ray, I haven’t heard a single peep on the web sites I frequent. I did drop my DVD into my blu-ray player and it does look very good. But what detail am I missing? What authentic textures of the 40’s and 50’s are being ignored in the mere 480 lines that bad ol’ DVD offers? I have to know!!! I even went to amazon.com where you can usually find a popular unreleased title that you can sign up to be notified about, but it doesn’t exist for this title.

Meanwhile, wack-a-doodle titles like Starman and Blue Thunder are being released this week from that decade. I tell ya, if I ruled the world…

The first six Star Trek movies are on sale at amazon.com for $70 and I’m holding back. I have most of the DVDs, but after seeing the 2009 version, I’m loathe to spend money on what seems to me to be less than excellent material. We’ll see. It is classic sci-fi.

I ran across this article on Ars Technica concerning wireless gigabit networking. It seems at present that we can’t get these fast network speeds to go through walls. You may be happy with your wireless G (802.11g) with it’s 54 Mb/s speeds which is still faster than your internet connection. But what about moving files inside your house? More and more, home entertainment will mean moving huge video files (up to 8GBs for an hour show in Hi-Def) from your server to the device that plays them on the big screen TV in your living room. Wireless n speeds will handle streaming of this content (playing a video file while it’s being transmitted to your living room), but if you want to move the file from one computer to another, be prepared to drum your fingers for a few minutes while it moves at that snail’s pace.

I’ve wired my house for gigabit ethernet. I’ve found this to be more than four times faster than even wireless n. I was able to move a multi-gigabyte file from one Mac to another in less than a minute at roughly 400 Mb/s (megabits per second: a megabit is 1 million bits. 8 bits make a byte. Megabytes and gigabytes are abbreviated with a capital B thus: MB & GB. A byte is what it takes to represent one character or in a computer.)

I do hope that someday, WiFi will surpass wired networks in speed. Cables and wires are the bane of our technological existence. But this bit of news is disappointing to that end.

MacHaters, Get over it!

I read a lot of PC vs. Mac stuff in my travels and one thing that comes up time and again from PC nuts is that there is no right click on a Mac. Yes, I said “PC nuts”. Remember how people used to like Macs and hate Mac people? They’re just as rampant in the PC world. The reason you give Mac fans a break is, like any new convert, they are so relieved to have found a better way. The PC biggots tend to be ignoramouses.

Case in point: Macs have no right click. Ignorance can be the only way this myth has stayed around so long. That and Steve Jobs insistance that there only be one mouse button on his input devices. Yes, it’s true, there is only one physical button on any pointing device that Apple ships. But since the Mighty Mouse was released, you could still click on the right side of the mouse (if you’re a righty) and voila! right click! But even before that, you coud pick the USB multi-button mouse of your choice from any manufacturer and it would work as expected instantly (which is more than Windows allows the first time you add a new USB mouse). Now come on PC biggots, which of you has ever stuck with the cheapo mouse that shipped with your PC?

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the Mighty Mouse. My experience with it is not happy. I found right click to be hit or miss, so like the rest of the PC biggots, I bought a new one more to my liking.

This is how you right-click on a MacBook

“But what about laptops?” Actually, this is where MacBooks shine. I would not have a second button on any future laptop. The Apple solution is more elegant and comfortable. My 2007 MacBook uses multi-touch to achieve right-click. It’s as simple as laying your middle and right finger on the trackpad and clicking with your index (left or right). While it sounds more complicated, it’s actually easier to execute. My hand is completely relaxed doing it. On a PC with a traditional two button configuration, you either have to pull your middle finger all the way back under your palm to get at the right click or you move your whole hand to let your index finger do it. After a day of using that, my hands get tired. Not so on my MacBook.

This same multi-touch gives you scrolling left and right capabilities. Just swish two fingers up, down, left or right to scroll wherever you want. It’s great and it’s all in one place. The newer unibody MacBooks just have one large trackpad that clicks and no button and it works even easier. Just click with two fingers to right click. Multi-touch on these newer machines is nothing less than amazing. You can check that out here. Now that’s a pointing device that I have some serious techno-lust for.

Apple does an amazing job with human factors. That’s why they spend so much more money on R&D than your typical comodity PC maker does. They make the computer and the operating system that runs it which allows them so much more flexibility in adding truly innovative features to their computers.

Just get a Mac!

Last Friday, I received my new 320 GB hard drive and Elgato EyeTV 250 and installed them. As an aside, replacing the hard drive in a Mac Mini is not for the timid. You might do better to add a Firewire or USB 2.0 external drive. I’d recommend Firewire. The EyeTV installation was a cake walk.

Once it was up and running, I was delighted at the quality of the video I was receiving. It’s equal to live TV or TiVo since essentially, EyeTV is just laying down on the hard drive exactly what it is receiving over the air. You can view live or recorded TV in any sized window you want including full screen. I’ll not go into how it works except to say that it’s not really “grandma ready” as is. The software is very powerful in letting you program any number of conditions.

One nice surprise was that while EyeTV is running, it doesn’t work the computer too hard, even while it’s recording. The CPU usage does go up while it’s displaying video, but displaying video is not necessary to recording it. So you can leave it on all day without having the Mini run hot all the time.

My only complaint is that you can only do any or all conditions and no mixture. For example, if I wanted to record talk shows that include a list of people, I can’t make that list of people and “talk” because the list entails the “any” option (logical OR), but the talk requires “all” (logical AND). You can get around this kind of thing in iTunes, for example, by using two playlists, one with the list, the other with the type of program and a reference to the list. EyeTV does not allow this at present. Should be an easy add.

Playback of recorded programs is easy enough, but I want to include it among the other things I watch in Front Row. Google Labs comes to the rescue again with their pyetv EyeTV Front Row add-in. In fact, you can even watch live TV with the add in as long as EyeTV is running in the background. So now you can have a one stop shop, as it were, for all your programming, live, recorded, on DVD, or residing in iTunes, not to mention photos in iPhoto.

There are ways you can use AppleScript to convert TV shows to be iTunes compatible so that you can take them on the road on your iPod or iPhone. But you’ll probably need Elgato’s Turbo264 which uses it’s own special hardware to encrypt the file to be H.264 compatible. Otherwise, you Mac will have to chew on the TV program for a lo-ong, hard time.

So as you can see, this is an extremely versatile DVR solution. TiVo is nice and more straightforward out of the box, but this is a jack of all trades potentially mastering them all. I look forward to playing with it some more. We haven’t even talked about editing video which is easily done.

Yet.

In my last post, I was setting up a new media center computer on my recently acquired Mac Mini. Currently, it is up and running with Front Row accessing all media in iTunes including movies, TV shows and of course music. The next step was to view streaming media from web resources like Netflix and Hulu.

There are a couple of options for this. One is Boxee, but I discounted that because of Hulu’s recent decision to disallow them from using their content on large TVs at the behest of the content providers NBC and Fox. [Excuse me, but this ain't your daddy's TV audience. We like watching at our convenience and not yours. It's up to you to get in line with your audience, not the other way around! You need to stop treating your consumers like the enemy!] I’ll give Boxee some more attention later. The other option is Google Labs’ Understudy.

Understudy is still in early development it seems. In no case was I able to get a full screen view of my programming, nor was I able to rewind a bit to catch something I missed. So for now, I’ll be viewing those sources through the Safari web browser on the mini. At least I can watch from the couch and not my desk.

Tivo is a much better platform for watching streaming video on your main TV. It was pretty trouble free and the quality was much better than I was able to get straight from a browser. But as Netflix’s content is still very limited, I’m not too concerned about this at present.

Let’s not forget streaming new media, i.e. youtube. Now this works. Recently, they started allowing and showing HD content and boy, does it look good! You can watch it full screen just fine from a browser.

So for the time being, we’re still a little stuck for streaming video, but give it time. Tomorrow, I should receive my Tuner and so I’ll install it and report on the results.

As a parting deal from my last assignment, I acquired an older Mac Mini in hopes of making a media server/DVR/DVD player. It has a 1.66GHz Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and a 320GB hard drive running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Out of the box, the computer has a program called Front Row which allows you to play anything in iTunes, iPhoto or the DVD player. It also has a simple infra-red remote. It’s a pretty sweet little machine that sits unassumingly and quietly anywhere you might want to put it. On top of that, it supports Dolby Digital 5.1 without modification, though you do need to change a few settings which we’ll get into shortly. All you need is an optical TOS-link cable that has a 1/8″ jack fitting on one end. Any store that sells home theater equipment has them. I happen to have one from my old MiniDisc player (we’ve come a long way since then!). It will be interesting to see if it passes DTS 5.1 stereo as well.

I already have a TiVo DVR, but I’m selling that. To replace it, I’m going to install an Elgato EyeTV 250 tuner which will include their EyeTV 3.0 software which will let me record and watch HD programming.

The only thing that this set-up won’t do is play Blu-ray Discs. It’s sort of a bummer that I can’t do one stop for everything, but it’s not that big a deal. At this point, I’ve already installed the computer and attached it to my 1080p TV and my receiver and I can say that it looks marvelous. The Mac OS comes up nicely and Front Row really makes my DVDs, downloaded TV shows and video podcasts look marvelous. Oh, and it’s actually a decent computer too that displays very well on a 1080p TV. 720p TVs work, but you might think your display is a little pinched as it is actually lower in resolution than a MacBook’s built-in display.

DVDs played through Apple’s DVD Player look great upscaled to my HDTV. My Samsung BD player does a less than stellar job of this so there you go.

To get video to your HDTV, you’ll need a DVI-HDMI adapter unless your TV already has a DVI port built in (most don’t). From the adapter, just plug it into an unused port. I did a lot of fiddling with the color controls on the Mac to get it to look right. Do this at your own risk.

To get sound, use the above-mentioned TOS-Link cable and plug it into your stereo receiver. At this point, it will only give you Dobly Surround (2.0 stereo). To get Dolby Digital 5.1, do the following: Open System Preferences and click on Sound. Click the Output tab and make sure that Digital Out is showing under devices. You will no longer be able to adjust volume or other sound properties from your Mac and that’s okay. You will be doing that from your receiver now. So there will be no need to check “Show volume in menubar.”

Now, open DVD player without a DVD in the slot, select Preferences from the DVD Player menu and click on Disc Setup. Under Audio, select Digital Out – Built-in Output. I disabled Dolby dynamic range compression because I like a wide range of volume on my movies. Gun shots should be loud and startling compared to the actors’ normal tone of voice. But you can check that if your nerves aren’t up to it.

Now you can put a Dolby Digital 5.1 DVD in. Play the movie and voila! You should see it indicated on your receiver and you should have glorious directional surround sound with discrete subwoofer channel.

In my next installment, we’ll be talking about streaming video from internet sources like Netflix and Hulu. And then finally I’ll be hooking up a tuner to one of the four USB ports on the Mac for DVR functionality. I’m very happy so far with how well suited the Mac Mini is to home media tasks. The built-in BlueTooth that lets you put your keyboard and mouse out in the room and 802.11g networking (in this older one–newer ones have 802.11n) make this puppy very easy to employ as your entertainment system workhorse. If Apple will get off the stick and put Blu-ray drives in these machines, they’ll have an amazing system on their hands.

HDTV is the best thing to happen to television since TV. It’s amazing what the new wide aspect ratio does for telling a story and for making movies with fewer or smaller black bars on top and bottom. And the detail! Cool stuff. Of course, if you’re getting a new HDTV, you’ll want a Blu-Ray player to match. However, I am very impressed at how well standard definition DVDs play on HDTV through a upscaling DVD player through an HDMI (High Definiton Multimedia Interface) port on the TV. When you buy your new HDTV, you must at least get a new DVD player that has an HDMI port if you’re not ready to get a new Blu-Ray player. You won’t have to pay more than $75 for one. They can easily be had for $49 and your DVDs will have never looked better. The difference between an upscaling DVD player through HDMI and one the one you have hooked up to your standard def television is night and day on an HDTV. Don’t believe that comparison you may see at Fry’s Electronics where they show DVD vs. Blu-Ray side by side. That’s a pitiful lie.

But, Blu-Ray is a worthy replacement for DVD technology. It will take full advantage of all those pixels you paid for with that super cool new TV you just bought. The prices of players are coming down. They can be had on sale for around $200 now or maybe even less. However, one of the pitfalls of early BD players is that they can be really slow to operate. One friend who has an early Sony player can wait a full minute for the eject button to work. And even after he inserts the disc, it’ll take a minute for it to load and start showing those idiotic don’t-copy-me messages. (Don’t step on the grass while you’re at it!)

The Samsung BD-P1500 is very quick to eject and load and of course, the picture is phenomenal. Bladerunner on BD will make your jaw drop. The amount of detail that the filmmakers put into that production is beautiful to behold and it’s been hidden by DVD and VHS all these years. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can actually read the instructions on how to use a zero-g toilet that Heywood Floyd is puzzling over on his way to the moon or the various warning signs on the pods. It’s amazing and beautiful. In The Fifth Element, there are whole restaurants full of people that suddenly appear out of the DVD induced haze.

But that doesn’t mean that you need to go replace all those DVDs you’ve accumulated. BD players offer the same upscaling features as their older siblings. Sometimes, the added detail doesn’t matter. If you are watching a romantic comedy, the extra detail in the fabric of someone’s clothes will not transport you any further into the story than the upscaled DVD. What you don’t want is to see a pixel-ly picture and the upscaling takes care of that. Good movies to replace are those where the filmmakers have created a new world for you to enter that is normally not your own. Of course, sci-fi movies come to mind. The more detail you can see, the more you’re drawn into that world. But don’t forget period pieces from Jane Austen movies to Excalibur, Braveheart and even westerns like Appaloosa. The Lord of the Rings trilogy will be coming to Blu-Ray in 2009. But as of this writing, there is no word of Star Wars, but George is definitely working his magic on that. He mentioned Blu-Ray way back in 1998 while we were waiting on his DVDs.

One caveat concerning DVD is old television content. If you’re watching a pre-HD TV show on DVD, some of the interlacing that the old standard definition format produced will become visible. There’s nothing that can be done about it and a format change to BD will not help unless the producers of the disc enhance the picture as they transfer it. One example of this care is the original series of “Star Trek” where they’ve gone in and modernized the special effects somewhat. But your old “Farscape” DVDs may actually look a little worse. It’s not terrible. It’s just that high definition reveals the sins of bad film stock and old video formats “better” than standard definition did.

If you’re just a casual movie watcher, you’re not going to be left behind any time soon. DVD will be around for a long time and will play for decades to come as long as physical media isn’t overcome by movie downloads in the future. But if you’re passionate about movies, this is a pretty good time to jump to Blu-Ray. High definition downloads of BD quality is still years away and people’s desire to own what they love rather than rent the download should keep that medium alive for a very long time.

12/29/08: I watched In the Land of Women yesterday afternoon on DVD through my BD player and found that it is an exception to the rule. There was a lot of artifacting and distracting pixelation on this title on my player.

I also need to add the caveat about quality DVD upscaling will only occur on anamorphic DVDs (DVDs enhanced for 16:9 aspect ratio TVs). Only some early DVD titles are non-anamorphic.