Sucking less, on a budget

Big Fall

I'm disgruntled about having to wait until Fall for season three of Big Love. Apparently it's due to the writer's strike, which does make some sense, but it'll have been well over a year by the time it airs from the time it went on hiatus. Surely there should have been some writers around somewhere outside the strike.

My eyes and ears?

I've settled on just using the display modes on my TV to squeeze 4x3 DVD content. It's unfortunate since there's no way to automate that. I guess I'm just expected to tell the non-AV-savvy members of my household to press the buttons when the people look horizontally challenged.

The other thing I can't really explain is that I seem to be hearing a lot more from my surround channels now. I can't understand why, I know everything was set up correctly before and the only thing different (besides the source device) is an optical cable vs. coax. The pre/pro is doing all the decoding and signal processing so there's really nothing the PS3 can be doing to affect the signal. I don't get it.

Yes, I'm late to the game, but I finally saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" last night. Hysteric! Now one of my new favorites. The bait wearing the Fight Club tshirt was the best. If you haven't seen it, go rent it now. Oh, yeah, and Brad and Angelina are hotties.

What am I watching these days? Real World, Deadliest Catch, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, PTI, Idol, Americas Port, Hells Kitchen, 30Rock (season's over, booo!), Scrubs (end it already!), Law&Order, Last Restaurant Standing, Survivor, Ace of Cakes, and, last but not least, PLAYOFF HOCKEY!!!! Jo's mad that her Sharks lost, but I'm so used to the Caps losing that there's no point getting upset about it.

Fat people

As a DVD player, the PS3 is insistent on stretching all 4x3 DVD content to fit 16x9. Who ever thought this was a good idea!? I don't want fat people! Show me the content as intended!! I've been through the menus 5 times, I don't think I'm missing anything. Terribly, terribly disappointing.

UPDATE: Setting the "DVD Upscaling" to any value does nothing (it's not upscaling at all, it's still 480p). I called Sony, per their support docs, and they are not taking support calls for the PS3. Period. None. Don't they like having my money?? Because they may not have it for long.

Ooooh, Aaaah

Ok, I got the PS3 yesterday. It's surprisingly slick. Using component outputs it unfortunately doesn't upscale DVDs to 1080i, but it still seems ok so far. I'm going to give it a workout tonight on a couple of movies at 480p and see how it stands up to my Panasonic RP-91. We shall see. As far as a remote, you can use the controller for everything and it has a nice on-screen display. A regular hand-held remote just for the PS3 seems like a total waste, esp. given its lack of backlighting. I still want to run it with my Pronto remote, which some have pointed out (thank you, though I already knew) is possible with extra parts. Maybe I'll give it a try at some point.

Bluetooth controllers? OMG I love them! No cord. I can sit on my couch and just play. No cord!!!!

Grand Theft Auto IV? OMG Awe-some! I played some of the earlier versions and they were fun, but nowhere near as entertaining as this one. The girl at the checkout asked me "Now you know this is rated 'M' for 'Mature', right?" Um, yes. I wouldn't want it any other way. Thanks for your concern, I hadn't heard.

We're putting together a date for this year's Camino Shin-dig the weekend after WWDC. I'll keep everyone posted as details firm up, but it'll only be one day compared to last year's two. I'll just have to talk fast.

Input

The new Grand Theft Auto looks awesome and from everything I read, the PlayStation3 is actually a really good BluRay player. It's less than the price that I'd probably pay for a good videophile-quality player, plus I can play some games on it.

Unfortunately I'm out of component inputs on my Denon. It has three, which are taken up by my DVD player, AppleTV, and satellite box. So I have to pay an extra $250 for a component video switcher just to get to use it. Argh.

Then there's the lack of a remote. No, you can't use a typical universal remote -- it's all Bluetooth! There's no IR port on the PS3! Ok, maybe I'll suck it up and buy the Sony BT remote. Wait a minute, it's black keys on a black remote, with no backlighting. How the #%@!& am I supposed to read that in the dark!? Hello? Sony? How about using some of that R&D on your remotes!? Argh.

I may still impulse-buy it anyway. GTA4 is just too damn cool.

Go Speed Racer

With Speed Racer's impending arrival at theaters, I wanted to share a bit of Camino trivia that I doubt anyone but a select few of us would remember.

There was a time, long long ago, when Camino was in its infancy and Netscape was still working hard on a product they'd eventually call "Netscape 7" (code named Mach-V). Jinglepants kept calling our little Cocoa browser "Chimera" but just to piss him off I'd call it "Chim-Chim". Back then, Camino was still a skunk-works project at Netscape and I thought it made perfect sense that it hid in the back of the Mach-V and caused everyone problems. Hilarity then ensued. Alas, my name never caught on, but if you could go back in time and find the initial public webpages for "Chimera", you'd see images of Chim-Chim and Speed Racer (put there by yours truly, shamelessly violating all applicable copyright and trademark law). Good times.

A screenshot of what Chimera 0.2 looked like, for those who never got to see it. Remember when we thought pinstripe was cool? Remember when we thought Member's Only was cool? Man, what we were smoking?

Go Sharks! (and I'm not just saying that cuz Jo made me.)

Playoffs!

There's nothing better than playoff hockey. Except perhaps playoff hockey in HD. Tonight's Bruins/Canadians game was amazing. I'm not sure if hockey translates well outside of North America (heck, most of the USA has lost interest after the last lock-out) but it really is a great sport to watch.

Please please please, ESPN. Please bid on it next year! Don't let NBC and Versus hide it from everyone. It needs to be back on a channel that everyone watches.

Camino 1.6 Released!

We released Camino 1.6 today, congratulations to the entire team of developers, testers, localizers, bug helpers, irc hangers-on, and supporting fans! As always, it's a bit behind schedule (we talked last Summer about a 2007 release), but we managed to stick to our plan and nail just about everything we wanted.

New features include:

• Improvements to toolbar search - now it's even easier to add new engines to the search bar, with auto-discovery
  
• New find bar - my own personal contribution to this release. No more red-headed step-child Find panel
  
• Scrolling tabs - life really sucked before with a lot of tabs. Now it's much better (but it's still not Tabspose, we're still working on it!)
  
• Software Update - finally! Always stay up to date.
  
• AppleScript support - a contribution from my Google Summer of Code mentee.
  
• Save passwords for multiple accounts - finally finally!
  
• Web-based Feed support - want to use Google Reader (like I do)? Now it's even easier!
  
• ...And tons of bugfixes and improvements so the web works better!
  

I'm quite impressed with this release. Give it a spin for yourself at caminobrowser.org. Now onwards to 2.0 and the new Quartz graphics layer like Ff3.