Rants of a nerd
Posts tagged technology
2 months ago
Via Information is Beautiful, this report from the Guardian on how tech is being used in India for various things from visualization of bus routes to “missed calls,” a peculiarly Indian form of communicating.
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?
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!
A good day
0A good day on the internet today. This is a sort of thanksgiving post, so nothing of substance.
After three weeks of regular blogging now, I have gotten comments on the site (thanks, Anand!).
I got a pingback from (of all places) BucharestExpats.com as a related article bout Air France. Why did my Photographs from Geneva post fit as a related post?
Someone found my picture of a Russian Orthodox Church in Geneva good enough to be favourited and invited to a group on Orthodox Church Architecture.
I also started getting serious amounts of comment spam (14). So my blog is getting around. This is probably a benchmark. Perhaps spamming software crawl the web on a monthly frequency? Todo: get an anti-spam plugin.
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.
A 13-year old tries the Walkman for a week
0When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman
I owned a few “other” brand Walkmen during the 90′s and it really is so easy to forget what life was like without MP3s. Now, the real portable music player award goes to my dad’s “portable” record player. That could play 16 to 78 RPM records through its in-built speaker. And it would fold up into a suitcase for portability!!
