Rants of a nerd
gadgets
Endoscopes
0Olympus, the world’s largest maker of endoscopes is about to understand what it feels like to have an endoscope inserted up its back side.
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?
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:
PS3 Woes Be Gone
0It looks like the date related problems faced by many ps3s around the world are now gone. I took the less risky path of not turning on the console. So I guess I will know for sure when I power it up in a couple of days time…
In other gaming news, the ps3 exclusive Heavy Rain has been getting some very favourable reviews. It has a metacritic score of 88, and in general has gotten reviews that praise it for its non linear story. Apparently the game pushes the emotional quotient and has as a basic concept a “actions have consequences” twist. Unlike other games where you can die and respawn, here it has consequences on your game. Similarly killing someone eliminates that character from the rest of the game – meaning that if that character could have helped you in the future, no luck.
This is the way that games ought to be. Just as in real life, action (or inaction) has results that affect how things pan out later.
I have been enjoying playing Unchartered (the original game) and it is a blast. Again the development of the story and the detailing of the game is just amazing. It is also a bit of an in-between game (action and platform gaming elements), but it works well and the switch between platforming and action does not feel forced. Now if only they could get GT5 out the door…
Playstation 3 Error
0Apparently there is a widespread issue with the playstation that has appeared over the past day. It seems many of the fat models are having trouble with the date setting today, leading people to suspect that it might be a leap year bug. I haven’t turned the system on today and perhaps it would be wise to turn it on after a day or two just to see if it fixes itself.
This is seriously bad. Date related computer software has been fixed for decades. Even y2k happened 10 years ago, when the ps3 wasn’t around. Hope they fix this quickly. Reports suggest it does not affect offline gaming, which is what I do. Hope that is the case at least.
MeeGo
0Huh?
The marketing folks dreaming up names for tech products are nuts.
MeeGo is the name of the initiative by Nokia and Intel to combine their respective mobile operating systems, maemo and moblin. This is pretty good news. There is too much fragmentation in small form factor operating systems anyway. Moblin started it, but I prefer the KDE Plasma Netbook version. Maemo is a fantastic system in itself and it deserves a much wider space for expansion – on the desktop / netbook for sure.
The funny thing is Nokia’s own Booklet (powered by Intel’s processors and graphics) does not support Linux properly. So how are they going to demonstrate that they can make this work?
Next, the mobile computing environment is largely on ARM processors (iPhone, the various Android phones and the Nokia N900). Intel sees this as a clear competitor. What is their interest in seeing Moblin on ARM?
But overall this is a really welcome step. Intel and Nokia separately have been key drivers of Linux and open source software in the recent past. Especially with Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech and the release of Qt under LGPL and open sourcing of Symbian are pointers to this. Intel’s efforts are equally commendable. Here’s wishing that the new venture is a success.
And Nokia, make sure you port MeeGo back to the N900, okay?
Greatest news on the N900 front
0The wonderfully talented KDE man Aaron Seigo has an N900 now. Which means it is only a matter of a little while before we have plasma on the device. How wonderful would that be! With Nokia firmly behind the Qt bandwagon thanks to their acquisition of Trolltech, the entire Qt / KDE experience should come along now if not on an official upgrade, a community provided firmware.
Spirit Rover: RIP
0It’s not quite dead, but now it cannot move as it is stuck in the Martian mud/sand.
The rover landed on Mars in 2004 with a 90 day, 1 kilometre mission. In reality it did something like 10 km over the next 5 years and more (more than 20 times the initial duration). Mostly the extra duration was made possible by some “cleaning” events that periodically wiped dust off the solar arrays that powered the rover. Little green men with wipers perhaps?
Webcomic XKCD's brilliant tribute to Spirit
Read more at Wikipedia and at JPL. The latest attempt is to try and extricate it from the soft soil by driving it backwards, which apparently has its own problems (probably was never designed to do that in the first place).
Apple iPad
1Okay, Apple unveiled its tablet computer called the iPad. No, seriously, that’s what they called it.
As several women asked around the net, “Are there no women in Apple’s marketing department?”
The jokes are flying thick and fast about the name, of course. Did Apple not realize that MADtv had done a parody of Apple iPad years ago? Comparisons with Maxi Pads are bound to happen. Jezebel.com probably has the best compilation of jokes on the name.
Elsewhere, I stumbled on this joke:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Zune.
Zune who?
Zune, I’ll be the second worst named gadget in the world.
I can sort of understand it if a Japanese company names its product Wii, but an American one?
Technically also, this device falls way short of what it can deliver. This is a Tegra-type device in terms of computing power. So why no multi-tasking? Why limit this to the iPhone OS, when the Mac OS X is probably a much better fit for a laptop replacement? Moreover, this is again in the iTunes ecosystem, so probably needs to be tethered to a Mac for installing apps or loading content. No camera, non-standard SIM card – tying you down to AT&T, non-standard ports – the iPad does not even have a USB port, one needs to buy an adapter for that (and even then its functionality is limited to camera connection).
The worst of it is the condescending behaviour of Apple in describing it as a magical device. Come on, we have much better and innovative products out there. MSI today unveiled a 10-inch tablet powered by Android. Always Innovating actually delivered their tablet/laptop hybrid featuring such innovations as a separating keyboard section (a la Star Trek’s saucer separation).
When the iPod came out, it was not the first MP3 player, it was the first one that made it easy to use an MP3 player. Look at the evolution of that range. Over time, Apple has tried to exert ever more control on what people could do with the hardware they purchase. Firstly through requiring iTunes to sync. Then further tying things down with the App Store. The iPhone (which is an evolved iPod Touch) locked in to a single carrier.
And now, a large iPhone.Well, I’m not getting one. So there!
Remote control software
2Tried to install Irreco / Qtirreco for the N900 a couple of times in the past few days. I was aiming for the ultimate cool factor – being able to trigger my Canon 450d with the N900. That would have been amazing. Note the tense in the previous sentence. It did not work.
For some reason, the only thing I could trigger was the power switch on my Philips TV. Even that was erratic. For the Canon, no luck at all. There is also an interesting app called simply shutter, which seems to be designed for Nikon DSLRs. The author has promised to make a more flexible version. Hope that happens! Still the fact that such apps are possible makes this the ultimate phone / computer.
In other news, Nokia released the alpha version of Freoffice, a KOffice based viewer for documents (compatible with MS Office and ODF). This is brilliant. Now it will be perfectly possible to make presentations with the phone and a TV Out cable. If they could just find a way of avoiding that wire! Perhaps a DLNA server that does a screencast? The possibilities seem endless.
