Live from Austin!

Apparently “Canadian” is the new replacement for the infamous ‘N’ word.

I’ve worked out how to take a typical AVI file download (generic MPEG-4 with MP3 audio, such as XviD) and convert it to something the Apple TV should be able to play without re-encoding all the video.

There’s also the elgato turbo.264, which approximately quadruples the speed of encoding video for AppleTV.

I tried re-encoding a good quality downloaded show that’s unavailable in the USA, using the QuickTime AppleTV preset. The result was indistinguishable from the original. So I’m really seriously considering AppleTV now.

So, how does AppleTV stack up as a way of replacing cable or satellite?

Mythbusters: $50 (30 episodes)
South Park: $24 (14 episodes)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $20 (13 episodes)
Venture Brothers: $20 (13 episodes)
Reno 911: $21 (14 episodes)
The Soup: $6 (per 8 episodes)

If we imagine Dr Who and Torchwood were also available at similar prices, that’d be about a year’s TV for maybe $200, or about 4 months of cable or satellite bills.

This ignores the option of watching shows by renting the DVDs from Netflix. Do that, and it’s an even more cost-effective option.

I’d be inclined to spend some of the freed-up money on “This American Life”, Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit”, and other shows that I currently don’t get to see.

I’ve looked at Trac and RT. Any other recommendations from anyone? Comments on Trac vs RS?

Of those two, I’m tending towards Trac, because of the built-in wiki functionality, and because RT is butt-ugly.

Is it just me, or are these CAPTCHAs getting a bit ridiculous?

That’s a screenshot of what I see when I try to use gizmosms.com via Firefox. Or via my BlackBerry, which is where I really wanted to use it from.

I’m by no means a survivalist crackpot–I’m entirely too reliant on modern pharmaceuticals–but the Eton FR1000 is really cool. It’s an FM, AM and GMRS radio (walkie-talkie) with vox activation. It’s an LED flashlight and emergency siren. It’ll charge your cell phone. And it can be powered by AA batteries, rechargeable NiMH, AC adaptor, or hand crank! All it’s missing is shortwave.

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

I did one of those online religion questionnaires. I’m not going to reproduce the whole list of what it suggested for me; the interesting part is it rated Buddhism above Secular Humanism. (Specifically, Therevada Buddhism.)

Intellectually, that’s spot on, but the problem I always have is observance. Somehow I seem to be unable to sustain a practice of regular meditation. And without at least that, I don’t see that I could honestly describe myself as a Buddhist.

On the plus side, I managed to keep exercising through until the Christmas vacation; and now that the new year has started and my back has settled down a bit, I’m back to exercising daily, at least during the week. (It didn’t happen this weekend, for various timing reasons.)

Most people manage to keep going to church or otherwise practicing religion, but fail to exercise. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my problem is the other way around.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, I awoke to what sounded like a loud explosion, followed by a noise a little like breaking glass.

I turned on the light and went to investigate. Possibilities ran through my mind. It sounded a bit like a car bomb a few streets away, but that seemed unlikely. More plausible was the idea that an electric substation had overloaded and some glass insulating conductors had fallen from melted cables.

Of course, as an avid Mythbusters fan, I also had the tiniest fear that our hot water tank had exploded through the roof.

I got to the kitchen and discovered that the bread machine, which I had set on timer the previous night and forgotten about, had shaken itself at just the right frequency to waddle across the countertop and take a dive over the edge. It had landed on its side, the metal casing making the loud boom I had heard. The lid and contents had then rattled across the floor making a noise like shards of broken glass. Sitting in front of it was a neat ball of dough.

I picked up the pieces and put everything back together. No significant damage; the machine looked like it would still work. I put the dough back in, plugged in, turned on, and went back to bed.

And in the morning there was bread.

Human beings have different kinds of memory; they remember things in different ways. Three common classes of memory are spatial memory, visual memory and verbal memory. (There’s also chronological memory, but that’s not relevant to my point here.)

I have excellent spatial memory. It’s what I rely on most. For example, if I start to think about how to get to a given place in town, I literally find 3D visualizations of my route flashing into my consciousness. I also have pretty good visual memory; when I make the journey, I verify that I’m going the right way by comparing the visual appearance of buildings and landscape that I pass with the scenes I remember.

My linguistic memory is terrible. If you asked me to name the actual streets on the route, I’d have a hard time remembering them. My mental map of London, for example, only has 6 street names. This makes me a really bad person to get directions from. “You take the narrow road that heads off at a thirty degree angle, right at the place with the green copper roof, over the light colored bridge…”

There’s an upside to my condition. If you rely on verbal memory to navigate, as soon as you step outside your known area you are pretty much lost until you can find a familiar street name. In contrast, I have a pretty good chance of navigating between two known points, even if the area in between is totally new to me.

This hierarchy of types of memory also applies in my interaction with computers. When I want to find my password manager, I don’t remember its name. Instead, I remember that it’s in the bottom hierarchical menu of my KDE menu, positioned near the top, and has a green icon.

I know this experimentally, incidentally: back in the System 6 days there was a joke Mac INIT that removed all the text from the menus. I tried it, and was quite startled to discover that I could still use most of my favorite applications.

With that background out of the way, I would like to talk about why for me, the new KDE 4 application launcher is a user interface disaster of epic proportions.

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This week the ACLU decided to stick their oar in regarding the vexed question of whether Larry Craig should have been prosecuted for soliciting gay sex in a restroom stall in Minneapolis Airport. Their logic was interesting. There is apparently case law in Minnesota to say that one has an expectation of privacy when in a bathroom stall, even if the stall is in a public place.

Therefore, the ACLU argue, it is entirely legal to have gay sex in the stall of a public toilet in Minnesota, since you’re doing it in private. Therefore, they conclude, the police had no reason to charge Larry Craig with lewd conduct; he was merely expressing an interest in pursuing perfectly legal private toilet sex in a public restroom–or to use what I gather is the technical term preferred by enthusiasts, ‘cottaging’.

Now, I don’t know whether it will stand up in court (ho ho), but it seems to me that the expectation of privacy pretty much ends once you stick your hand under the partition and wave at the guy in the next stall. Larry Craig wasn’t being spied on; he drew attention to himself. The ACLU’s decision to support Craig seems strange; I can only assume that they are trying to be fairer than fair.

What I find more bizarre, though, is the claim from many right-wingers that liberals would all have been defending Larry Craig if he was a Democrat. Maybe I’m out of touch. Perhaps they’re right, and the ACLU are merely speaking for all liberals in defending the right to cottage.

Well, I’m going to leap out of the toilet stall here and now, and declare that as a liberal, I am not in favor of cottaging.

See, when I go to the bathroom, I have only one kind of job in mind. I just want to find a clean toilet, perform whatever regrettable business is required, wash my hands, and be out of there. I do not want to be solicited for sex by a politician, not even if it’s Barack Obama. In fact, if Dennis Kucinich’s wife snuck into the men’s room, I still wouldn’t be interested. When I’m looking out for Number One, or Number Two for that matter, I don’t want a conversation. I don’t to make eye contact, let alone any other kind of contact. In short, I do not want to know that the rest of humanity exists. I just want a quiet, private moment to myself.

And that’s under the best of circumstances; because if it’s an airport restroom, I’m not going to be feeling at my best. I am not going to be feeling sexy. Although I may be about to take a ride on a jumbo, I’m not going to be interested in yours. While I’m always excited to get a glimpse into a cockpit… You get the idea. In the airport, you can pretty much guarantee I’ll be tense, tired and irritable. Sex of any kind will be the last thing on my mind.

OK, so you’re a Republican and you want to pick up guys for anonymous sex? Go to a gay bar. If the lavatory stall thing is such big turn on, I’ve got a radical idea: hang around a lavatory stall at a gay bar. You’ll be far less likely to bother someone who doesn’t want to be bothered.

In fact, if there’s enough pent-up demand, someone will probably start an exclusive vacation resort that offers toilet stall bridal suites, perhaps with nice padded seats and a ventilation system that can dispense a range of exciting fragrances. But in the mean time, your local gay bar will have to do. Life is harsh.

See, it’s all about context. Things which are perhaps appropriate in one context, may not be appropriate in a different context. Just because it’s appropriate to lie naked in a harness and get fisted at a private S&M club, that doesn’t mean we have to consider it appropriate in other similarly exclusive venues, such as the NorthWest Airlines executive lounge in Lindbergh Terminal.

Context, OK?