The REAL Blu-Ray Scam

On Christmas day 2008 I received a pretty sweet gift.  It was a brand new blu-ray player fresh from Bestbuy.  The price on their Insignia NS-BRDVD player had dropped to realm of mortals and my in-laws really came through with the gift (Thanks!). 

I already had a 1080p television so I was pretty excited by the prospect of finally watching some 1080p movies on it.  And the movies looked great.  So I chose to ignore all the noise about blu-ray DRM being evil and the fact that there would probably never be a legal way to play my blu-rays on Linux, and started to buy into blu-ray.

Fast-forward a year.  I recently had some friends over and we were going to rent and watch a movie or two blu-ray.  These were new releases, and they wouldn't play.  They locked up right after the menu when starting to play the main feature.  That seemed weired, so I updated the firmware to the latest version available (which was several months old), and tried again.  Still they wouldn't play so I thought the disks were bad and returned them to Blockbuster.  Then I watched something from my existing collection.  A week later I tried it again.  I rented a new release and tried to play it and the same thing happened, lockups on the main feature.  It turns out this is a firmware issue due to blu-ray DRM and almost no new movies will play in my player.  And I am not the only one with this problem, this forum documents other users with the issue.  It seems that because my model has been discontinued, the manufacturer, Insignia (which is BestBuy's house brand) is no longer providing firmware updates.

I took the player back to Bestbuy and they would not help me at all because it has been discontinued and I am out of the 1 year warranty period.  That is the real Blu-Ray Scam.  The players must be constantly updated to keep up with DRM changes, but manufacturers usually only have a 1 year warranty period and after a model is discontinued they usually don't provide new firmware updates.  So they are free to stop providing firmware updates a year after the players are taken off the shelf, and then everyone who bought it has to go buy a new player if they want to watch new movies.

So the question is, which manufacturer can I trust to keep updating the players so I don't go through this again?

Olympics

Why does NBC continue to string us along with horrible Olympic coverage? They show highlights, but spread them through the 5 hour block, so there's no way to plan ahead. "And coming up in 17 minutes, the semi-finals, featuring Ohno. See if he makes it to the finals, but we can't tell you when those are."

If I wanted to watch a show about athlete stories, I'd tune into the History Channel.

I want to see the sports. I'd like to be able to plan my time. And for that, please let me know that, hey, Speed Skating is on at 9:00. Snowboard cross coverage is at 7:30, and Curling, well, that's all day long.

But no, NBC wants to sell me a drama about Vonn and the Olympic gold, only stay tuned, because after this commercial for yet another asthma drug, the significant conflict in this story unfolds.

NBC Sucks.

The Last Straw

On Saturday night I had need of an additional wifi access point at my house.  So, I scrounged up an old Belkin access point and plugged it in.  Since I already have an access point running on channel 3, I just left the new one on channel 6.  Some time later my son noticed that the Wii controllers would not sync.  He had been playing the Wii for several hours so my response to his desperate plea of "Fix it", was "Go outside."

I thought nothing of the problem until Sunday when the Wii controllers still would not sync.  I started to wonder if that additional access point caused enough interference to make the Bluetooth Wii controllers in-operable.  Bluetooth is designed to handle interference by hopping to the next 1 MHz wide channel.  However, I don't know how well that works when syncing.  To get a feel for the situation I ran a nifty little program called wifi radar.  According to it I live in what could aptly be described as a "wifi rich" zone.  Every 802.11 channel had at least one, and usually several active access points.

My need of the extra access point expired on Sunday night and as soon as I unplugged the access point I tried to sync the Wii remotes.  This time it was immediate Wii sync success, and they have been fine ever since.  I guess that extra access point was the Wifi that broke the Bluetooth's back.

Picasa 3.5 on Linux

Since Google has dropped the ball on the Linux version of Picasa 3.5 I had to find my own way to install it.  The method from here did not work for me.  When I tried to install the windows version of Picasa 3.5 on my version of wine (1.1.30) it just hung and used up all of my memory. 

What I realized is that the 3.0 version of Picasa for linux that I already have installed runs on wine.  So I just used that version of wine to install the 3.5 version of picasa.  On my machine the binary is in /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/bin.  Using wine from there Picasa 3.5 installed without a hitch.

The biggest advantage of Picasa 3.5 is the facial recognition feature, it scans all of your photos, identifies the faces and lets you tag them with names.  The cool part is that once you have tagged a face the program attempts to find all the matching faces and automatically tag them for you.  It works pretty well, and it is a lot of fun to go through your photos to see who is there.

Now, if only I could get Netflix to work without Virtualbox...

All a twitter.

Awesome codebook. Now I can start twittering.

Almost Android

I just got a cool new cell phone.  No, not the iphone, the other cool new touchscreen cell phone.  Nope, not the Tmobile G1 either.  Give up?  I'll give you a hint, my carrier is Verizon.  Doesn't ring any bells does it?  That is because Verizon has a great network but for some reason they haven't jumped on either the iphone or android bandwagon.

My new phone is the xv6900.  It is an HTC touch stripped down for Verizon.  The important part is that it has a touch screen, is fairly small and lightweight and is pretty sweet.  The main problem is that it runs windows mobile.  When I use it I feel like I am stuck on the Island and we timetraveled to 1998.

To improve my lot in life I started searching for solutions, it turns out that other people have decided that this phone is a great canidate for Android (I agree), and they have put some work into porting it.  The site is here http://it029000.massey.ac.nz/vogue/.  I downloaded his latest work and put it on my micro sd.  After running haret.exe, my phone magically rebooted into Android.  I was so happy to see the green litte robot icon pulsating on my screen.  After that things went down hill.  First my phone would hang and I discoverd I needed to edit a defaults.txt file to set my radio version, so then I upgraded my phones firmware and tried again.  Now it works much better, but it is still not perfect.  The main drawback is that the dialer app craches, and it doesn't notify me of voicemail.

Android, even in a primitive state does show me one thing, how much better my phone would work.  Windows mobile is sluggish and feels outdated.  Android is fast and modern.  Why Verizon wouldn't jump on the opturnity is beyond me.

Psychedelic Ubuntu

I have been trying to get ABC.com to work in Firefox under wine on Ubuntu 9.04, here is what I get:

 

I don't know why it happens, but I have to reboot to return to normal.  It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer smokes pot and then tries to shave.  He starts to bleed in rainbows.  My guess is that compiz doesn't play nice with the wine/firefox ABC.com media player.  I'll post updates as more information become avaliable.

Update: I discoverd that my suspicion is correct, the problem is with compiz.  If I disable visual effects then the problem goes away.  ABC.com still doesn't work in wine, but I don't get the psychedelic screen effect either.  Tie?