Live from Austin!

On December 23rd, my MacBook Pro died. The screen started flickering, and the entire graphical layer died. The underlying Unix system was still responsive, and I could SSH in, but that was it. Rebooting the machine, it would run for a while, then die with the same fault.

I used rsync to create a full backup–I already had a Time Machine backup, but better safe than sorry. After a couple more reboot cycles it stopped booting entirely.

I took the machine to the Apple Store. Based on the problem description and my apparent cluefulness, they said they’d need to get a replacement motherboard. Unfortunately, motherboards for my particular model of MacBook Pro are apparently in short supply, so I’d have to wait.

I took the machine home. Christmas came and went. In the new year, I got a call from the Apple Store. The replacement motherboard was in. They warned that they could only reserve it for me for 6 days. I said that wasn’t a problem, and was at the store half an hour later to drop off the machine.

The next day I got a call. Swapping the motherboard hadn’t fixed the problem. The machine needed to be sent to the main Apple service center. Make it so, I said, confirming that I had a full backup.

The service center received the machine…and put the repair on hold, because they needed another part that was in short supply. And so I waited, without a Mac, using Linux for all my computing needs.

Yesterday the service center flipped the status on my Mac to repaired, pending return shipment. Just now, it arrived back in my hands by overnight shipment.

The accompanying paperwork says that they replaced the motherboard, the display, the cooling fan, the DVD-RW drive, and some internal cabling. Basically, I have the original casing, hard drive and keyboard, and the rest is new. So once again, the extra cost of 3 years of AppleCare has proven to be an excellent move, this time saving me from having to drop $1500+ on a new machine.

I’ve had similar experiences with IBM (and Lenovo) laptop hardware. Always buy the extended warranty for a laptop. Consumer Reports agrees. It’s not like I’m rough on my hardware–I travel infrequently, I’ve never dropped a laptop, and I’ve never spilt coffee in one either. It’s just that laptop hardware is inherently less reliable than desktop hardware–you have smaller components, and more heat-producing hardware in a tighter space. My Mac probably died when it did because I’d just been encoding and burning four different DVD projects.

So, what was it like using only Linux instead of Mac and Linux for almost an entire month?

On the whole, not bad. Linux does the job for most day-to-day tasks. The two places where it still falls down are sound and video.

Ubuntu 9.10 has seen major regressions in sound functionality–any kind of Flash audio frequently results in fragmented looping, like a CD skipping. Applications also tend to grab the sound interface and not let go, preventing anything else from playing sound until you quit them. The user interface for volume control is a total disaster too, and Bluetooth headsets don’t work.

In video land, there just isn’t anything to compare with iMovie HD plus iDVD. OpenShot looks promising for the editing piece, but it’s still very young.

There are quite a few other Mac apps I missed. iTunes doesn’t really have a good equivalent, functionality-wise. Organizer software on Linux isn’t as advanced. But if you don’t use sound for anything more than soundtracks to video, and don’t do much video editing, then Linux is probably good enough. It’ll certainly cope with web browsing and office documents.

Would I switch? Well, if you ever need to jailbreak a Mac, that’s the day I switch. Failing that, I suspect Apple can keep far enough ahead of Linux that switching won’t be a temptation.

The first video camera I ever used was the Sony HVC-2000P, with its “outstanding” 6X zoom lens. It weighed a “lightweight” 2.5kg, so you had to brace it on your shoulder and peer into the monochrome viewfinder.

That was just the camera. To actually record something, you needed the SL-3000 portable Betamax VCR. That was the size of a small suitcase, and weighed an additional 9.1kg. You wore it on a shoulder strap, on the shoulder that wasn’t supporting the camera. The proprietary cable allowed the camera to start and stop record on the VCR.

The battery was about 1kg of the weight, and was rechargeable, via a charger the size of a shoebox. The VCR didn’t include a tuner, so it wouldn’t record TV shows; if you wanted to do that, you needed another shoebox-sized box.

Once you had recovered from a couple of hours of shooting and went home to watch the result, you got 260 lines of video resolution, in color, with mono sound. There was no real way to edit it, of course, other than to have a second VCR and use the pause button a lot.

All of which reminds me of my first bit of home video editing: I ran the audio from the camcorder through my Mac, running Cubase. I manually synchronized Cubase with the video, and it mixed the soundtrack in real time according to my prearranged instructions. At the same time, I ran the video directly from the camcorder to the VCR. I then operated the pause button on the VCR according to a list of start/stop times, in order to edit out the appropriate bits of video. Audio latency was low enough that the end result looked pretty good. When I finally got hardware capable of DV editing, though, I went back and did it again that way.

Anyhow, yesterday I got yet another video camcorder. It’s about the size of a pack of (long) cigarettes, a bit bigger than a BlackBerry or iPhone. It records on an SD card, in h.264 QuickTime format, 720 line HD video. You can get about 80 minutes on a dirt cheap 4GB SDHC card, then plug in to the Mac and copy it all straight into iMovie, no tedious conversion required. It’s powered by two plain old AA cells, so you don’t need to worry about running out of power while on vacation. How far we’ve come in 30 years. And the most amazing part, to me, is the price: it’s the Kodak Zi6, which you can pick up factory refurbished for as little as $99. (That includes a pair of rechargeable batteries and a charger, but no SD card.)

Sure, it’s not a pro quality tool by today’s standards. It has no zoom lens, no image stabilizer, no exposure controls… But think about it–it shoots sharper video than the professional studio equipment used to make all those great 70s and 80s TV shows, it fits in your pocket, and it’s under a hundred bucks. At that price I can keep it kicking around in my shoulder bag, or use it on the beach and not worry too much about accidentally ruining it. I can give it to someone else to use to record me, and it’s simple enough that they’ll be able to operate it. For trivial home movies, small, cheap and simple beats big, expensive and complicated. Plus, in a couple more years an SLR upgrade will get me a still camera that shoots good video through high quality zoom lenses with image stabilization.

YouTube has started offering HD video. I’m not sure it’s really HD, but it’s way better than the crappy pixelated video they used to offer.

I re-encoded the video of our new parakeet meeting Chester for the first time. I’ve uploaded it in HD. The result is much clearer. Now to re-do all my other movies…

For anyone else hoping to do the same, the magic settings for QuickTime / iMovie are: 1280×720 progressive, MPEG-4 H.264 1024kbps, AAC 224kbps. It takes a while for YouTube to work on the video before the "watch in HD" link becomes available.

The ‘keet now has a name: Lola.

Eeyore’s Birthday Party

Yeah, I’ve edited last year’s just in time for this year’s. I had a sudden outbreak of weddings to deal with.

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

How would you like a digital video camera that records 15fps video in 3GP format (QuickTime-compatible) direct to flash drive, is small enough to fit in a pack of gum, and has 33 hour capacity?

It’s currently $295. In less than 10 years cameras like this will be so cheap anyone will be able to afford one. Phones will be able to upload their video live to the Internet, in case of confiscation.  The future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming, whether you like it or not.

While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.

London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.

I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.

Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.

We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.

We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.

We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.

Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.

As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.

We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.

By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.

The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.

Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.

Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.

We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.

Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.

The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.

One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?

Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.

Breakfast with a squirrel. Experimenting with the new MPEG-4 camcorder.

I’m not sure why Google video always seems to hose the first few seconds of the video.

The first one shown is Blacktip, who we haven’t seen in months. Maybe this time he’s gone for good. He never did learn to leap at the corn.