Live from Austin!

Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.

The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.

(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)

Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.

The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.

This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.

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We’re right in the middle of the city. I discovered a while back that all I had to do was use unshielded speaker wire and I’d pick up AM radio. I checked, and all the TV transmitters are in a cluster less than 10 miles away from us. So, this afternoon while we were out shopping for Christmas meal ingredients, I picked up an $8 UHF loop antenna, plugged it in, put it on the shelf above the TV, and lo—we can get 10 channels of digital TV.

While there’s nothing on ABC, CBS or NBC that I’m going to want to watch, HD or not, this does now mean we can get PBS in HD—at the cost of actually having to watch the programs when they’re on, because the TiVo is SD only.

This evening we watched a program about revolutionary war re-enactors in Massachusetts. I’d always felt like I ought to see the re-enactments, but there was just no way I was going to get out of bed at 5am on a cold spring morning and get the bus out to Lexington.

The whole re-enactment thing seems to be even more bizarre than the SCA. It’s all elaborately scripted—one man was seen being turned down permission to use the word ‘musket’ instead of ‘gun’ in his one line of script. The attention to detail in costume and equipment is painstaking; another man talked about how he ordered the exact correct kind of linen for his uniform, now only available from Russia. And of course, authentic weapons are used too.

But then after all that work, the camera caught them in costume reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I’ve never studied US history, but even I know that the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t written until a century after the War of Independence. They might as well have gone into battle singing Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” for all the authenticity they had at that point. Worse, they didn’t even recite the original pledge; they recited the bastardized post-1950s version.

I notice there are a few Vietnam War re-enactment groups. Most seem to be outside the USA so far. I wonder how long it’ll be before we have Iraq war re-enactment groups? “History enthusiast sought. Must have own attack dog. Bring car battery and jump leads.”