Rants of a nerd
365days
Audio Formats
0As a follow up on the Home Theater troubles from earlier. I decided to keep the current system until the new crop of receivers hit the market. To test the setup, I fired up the PS3 and inserted a movie disc I borrowed (this was my first attempt at a BD movie). And it threw up a firmware upgrade message. I went ahead with the upgrade – thankfully no problem there.
Then I ran into the main problem: the movie soundtrack was in the Dolby TrueHD format with no alternate option (except languages). The receiver did not support that and saw it as a stereo LPCM stream. If I recall it correctly, there is a limitation on high bitrate / sampling rate in my current receiver. So I guess the argument for an upgrade is better. The mess of wires that accompanies any home theater setup is a pain. I can understand why there is demand for the sound bar type of speakers which promise surround sound from a single speaker.
I guess there are many PS3 or BD owners who don’t even challenge the poor output from their systems. There are surely more folks out there like me who have a generation old equipment. When studios release discs that are incompatible with the older hardware, it is really planned obsolescence coming into play.
On the web, I came across a criticism of the DRM schemes in the various media we consume. The commentator (and this was not a blog rant) pointed out that with store bought media, there is no certainty that the media will play in the equipment we have (thanks to the above incompatible format, hardware incompatibility – blu ray vs. HDDVD, region coding, etc.). In addition, the media companies treat us as thieves making us sit through non-skippable piracy warnings. Lastly the prevalence of trailers at the start of many movie discs. Compare that to pirated stuff. Pop it into the dvd player and the movie starts with no interrupts. Or download it and be assured that the codecs are installed on your PC already. Is there anyone in the media world who understands this?
Auld acquaintances
0Had dinner with some old friends / former colleagues (including my ex boss). Good to catch up after six months. The occasion: my treat for losing a bet on the stock market. The last time we got together was my farewell at the old shop and so it was a sort of five gainst one bet.
We have set up a new bet. A little more balanced this time as we went around the table to get a clearing price at which we had three bearish and three bullish views. Settlement is on June 30.
I am not revealing the clearing level or my position!
Music Review: Timbaland
0I’ve given a listen to Timbaland’s follow up to the debut Shock Value entitled… wait for it… Shock Value II. I did not find the first album all that good, but this one is much better. The songs seem much more developed and distinct. Perhaps at the time of the first album, there were too many Timbaland produced stuff around that the album just could not find its own space.
Home theater setup is a mess
0I am redoing my home theater setup. And it is a right royal mess.
The equipment has been bought over the past six years and the oldest pieces are the AV Receiver and the Speakers. The speakers are okay (one of them is showing some signs of problems) by and large: these are Mission’s M5 set of small satellites and sub-woofer. The receiver is a now aged Yamaha RX-V540. It works well, too well to get rid of in fact. The problem is that it was designed for the last generation of a/v equipment.
For starters, it does not support HDMI. So my DVD Player and the PS3 cannot go through it. It supports component cables (two sets only) and that takes care of the Wii. Lots of composite connectors, but only the satellite television box uses composite now.
Fortunately my TV has two HDMI inputs. This Philips unit also has an SPDIF out, which I can route back to the receiver. So for HI-Def playback, my TV is the a/v receiver and the receiver acts only as an audio decoder-amplifier. The fact that the receiver does not do any kind of upscaling means that the TV input cannot be fixed. For each source the TV has to be set apart from the receiver. This is sub-optimal and is not the way it should be. Till a year or so ago, this worked well as I didn’t have either HDMI source.
So the question is, what is to be done? The new generation of receivers from the likes of Onkyo, Denon and Sony promise upscaling, HDMI 1.4 support and so on. But many of these will hit the market only in the coming months. I guess the best option is to wait it out. Buying a receiver when many technologies are in the cusp of change is probably not the best thing to do.
Talking about HDMI 1.4, it has support for 3D video. I believe this calls for the use of special glasses to view the content. Why should this be the case? Is it not possible for the TV to trick us into thinking we are viewing three dimensional images? There is a demo 3D TV at the local mall which seems to do that reasonably well. I wonder if 3D video technology will finally deliver motion sickness to armchair travelers!
Link of the day is once again xkcd:
No Post Today
0It has been a long day and I am tired. So no blogging today.
Just wanted to point out one bit of heartening news. The Supreme Court ordered the release of some prisoners who had completed their terms. Ordinarily this would not have been news. Except that they were Pakistani prisoners who were being held even after completing their sentences because Pakistan was refusing to release Indian prisoners in an exchange. I can’t believe that the Indian government which berates Pakistan for the way it treats its people can treat anyone in this manner. For once I can say to the court: bravo!
Oscar Upset
0Looks like a major upset at the Oscars for Avatar, with The Hurt Locker walking away with the best picture and best director awards. Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock won as many anticipated. The latter apparently being the first person to win an Oscar and a Razzie in the same year. It also seems that Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win the best director prize!
Christoph Waltz won an award for best supporting actor for the brilliant portrayal of a Jew-hunting Nazi in Inglorious Basterds.
The Hurt Locker did not even play in theaters here, I think. Hmmm maybe after this win, things will change.
Madrid Photos
0Finally got around to uploading a bunch of photos from my trip to Madrid. This was back in January and the first of the bad winter storms across Europe was under way. Temperatures were below freezing most of the time, and indeed when the temps hit 2 degrees my taxi driver remarked that it was a relatively warm day!
![One of the old gates \](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4017/4412409979_7cf03e2867_s.jpg "One of the old gates \")
There are a few photos from the Museo Raina Sofia. This was the only museum that I visited that allowed photography. However its collection is mostly crazy modern stuff. So I picked a few Picassos and Dalis here. Dali’s Girl at the Window is one of his best and is really worth the trip to the museum. Most people would visit it for Picasso’s Guernica – though I could not really find it to be extra special. The Guernica is one painting they do not allow anyone to photograph. In the neighbouring room, there is a study of the Guernica (included in the gallery above) along with many other details from the grand picture.
Among the three museums, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza was the one I liked best. Strangely, I found the collection of Carmen Thyssen to be the more interesting and nicer. The collection of paintings range from the 13th to the 20th centuries. They had a special exhibit called Lagrimas de Eros (Tears of Love), which featured famous art pieces depicting love and death.
I had very little time after this for the biggie: Museo del Prado. The importance of this museum is stressed in the fact that all three museums are connected by one road called Paseo del Prado. It has a good collection of Spanish art including many by Velasquez and Goya. I especially liked the painting called Las Melinas (The Young Girls), showing the daughters of the royal household.
Among other sights to be seen are Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun), Espana (where there is a memorial to Miguel de Cervantes – author of the Don Quixote story), some churches (Madrid Cathedral, San Francisco and San Andrea are in the gallery). Thanks to the extreme cold, I did not venture out into each of these places. I did brave the freezing conditions to get some snaps taken here and there. Was I ever happy to get back into the taxi and warm clothes then!
Right in the heart of the city is an Egyptian temple – Debod – taken out brick by brick and reassembled in Madrid. It was offered to Madrid by the Egyptian government as the temple would have been destroyed under the lake created by the Aswan Dam. Around the temple are some nice walkways (file away for a later visit in better weather) and a breathtaking view over some forests and the city.
For another trip to Spain, there is much to explore in Madrid. There are also the other cities like Barcelona and historical sites such as Alhambra to be seen. Till then…
Mac Day 2
0Well, the first full day with Leopard. Mostly the experience has been decent. Getting some hardware working was difficult. As with Linux, not all hardware makers offer Mac drivers. But the struggle with some basic stuff like keyboard and mouse were unexpected. Even after getting some fixes in, it still freezes sometime with the keyboard and mouse not responsive (if I leave the machine for a while). The last thing not working is the microphone. Sound is playing through the speakers, so this is probably a configuration issue. Perhaps it thinks that the mic port is a multi channel audio out port?
Applications too are not as easy to find as in the alternate worlds. Windows apps are everywhere of course. And Linux distros have had “app stores” for a long time (Synaptic / rpmdrake / whatever). But I like the way of installing new apps: just copy the application install to wherever needed (e.g. the applications folder). Discovering what apps are installed already and how to manage them is still a problem for me. Given that Darwin is a BSD kernel and the underpinnings are Unix style, will a ports type of repository work for mac?
The presentation is very good. However it feels very restrained / claustrophobic in some ways. The fact that everyone adheres to the basic user interface guidelines means that Firefox looks like Safari, VLC like Quicktime and so on. I guess the reason it is so successful is that it is a controlled system. In the same way there is the tight-knit ecosystem of itunes, ipod, etc. where the choices of what is available has been made for you. This feels so wrong for someone coming from an open environment like Mandriva (which is what I’ve been using for the past few years).
The basic reason I went in for the change in operating systems has not been tested yet: that is Adobe Lightroom 2. Unfortunately this nice piece of software is only available for Windows or Mac, and after trying XP for a while, I am not going to stay with it. Being perennially worried about viruses and other harmful software is not something I want to do. Loading the system down with a firewall, anti-virus, etc. is the surest way to slow the machine down to a crawl. I even tried running XP in a virtual environment (VirtualBox), but Lightroom runs like it is moving through molasses in that configuration. Tomorrow I shall test Lightroom out. It will also give me an opportunity to test how the export / import of the catalog of photos works.
Mac OS X
0Tried out Mac OS X today. The install of Leopard went remarkably smooth and here I am typing this blog post from within Firefox for Mac. Thanks to cross platform applications like Firefox, the learning curve is small. However there are enough painful differences.
Firstly the Mac OS does not seem to have an effective application menu. The only options seem to be the search icon at the top right of the screen (works if you know the name of the app, I suppose) and the Applications folder within Finder (Finder is a sort of file manager cum various other things here).
There is no task bar. Open applications add themselves to the Dock. I think they get a sort of blue dot beneath if they are running. Surprisingly clicking the red “x” button on an application only seems to minimize it. Can’t really say.
Now that I’ve tried Windows, Mac and Linux, it is easy to see where a lot of “inspiration” for new features and look-and-feel items have come from. Apple is clearly the leader in many aspects. However, I think KDE with the Plasma desktop have managed to really out-innovate Apple in some areas. Notably on the widget / plasmoids space (and not to forget the Plasma Netbook).
Windows is really the poor cousin here, it seems. I haven’t used Windows 7 to comment on that, but KDE and Mac show up XP and Vista in a bad light. The fact that a default install of either a recent Linux distro also throws in several applications further demonstrates the head that open source / free software has made in making the operating system usable out of the box.
P.S. Firefox for mac seems to have problems in laying out the WordPress dashboard.
10 billion itunes songs
0So apparently Apple has sold 10 billion songs on itunes. The store has been up for a few years now and is currently one of the biggest music retailers in the world. Ergo it is reasonable to expect that the best sellers during this time would reflect the best music of the decade. Maybe the top seller would be an all-time classic? The top three songs are:
3. The Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow
2. Lady GaGa – Poker Face
1. The Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
This site has a listing of the top 10. All of the top 10 are very recent hit songs. Even Kesha made it on the list!
How does that happen? Perhaps the growth rate of itunes is so rapid that the newest hits are automatically the best selling ever. Perhaps the buying public are teenagers and they listen to these songs the most. Perhaps in ten or twenty years we will hear Tik Tok on the radio and think back to the good old days when music was good!
A fallout of the digital age is the shrinkage of time between fads. A decade or so back, movies used to run for several weeks. 100-day runs were reasonably common. These days the movie has gone to TV and DVD within 100 days. The rare blockbuster like Avatar plays for a couple of months. Part of the reason for this is the explosion in available media for consumption. The Economist has got the data deluge on its cover this week (have not read it yet). So there is utter fragmentation of the viewing public. Niches have become easier to fill. For example, smaller movie theaters don’t mind showing offbeat movies that appeal to smaller audiences as compared to the larger auditoria. Equally it is rare for a “cross-cultural” movie (or album or book or …). Perhaps the Black Eyed Peas and Avatar are examples of these breakout cultural examples?
