The Underground Man

Apple DVD region encoding problems

Not everything is happy-happy in OS X land.

Last night I was digging through my DVDs trying to figure out what I owned and what I just thought I owned and I found my Region 2 (Europe) Farscape DVDs. This is particularly relevant at the moment 'cause the SciFi channel is bringing back Farscape for a 4-hour mini-series shortly and I've been catching up on Season 4 episodes (which I missed living in France).

I have a Raite AVPhile 715 DVD player which is region-free and Macrovision-free (just so I can back up my DVDs you understand) that I normally use. (Go to this site for a list of modifiable DVD players.) However, last night I popped the Farscape 1 DVD into my Titanium Powerbook to see what would happen with the region encoding. Parenthetically, region encoding is something the movie industry came up with (I believe that there are six regions, 1 being US/Canada, 2 is Europe, 3 is Asia, etc.) to ensure that movies could be released in separate geographical regions on different dates and not viewable elsewhere. If your player "supports" region encoding you only have a limited number of times (like 5) before it will no longer play disks of all regions (at least on a computer) before fixing on just supporting one region. Total cr*p.

Anyway, the OS X DVD player supports region encoding and warned me that I only have five viewings of DVDs from different regions before I must choose which one to have permanently.

So I killed it and fired up VLC which has no such limitation. And which actually plays a much wider variety of formats. (NB: if you want to view DVDs with Videolan you may need to install the open-source decryption algorithms of libdvdcss. It's been a while since I did it and I think you need to install Fink first.)

Thank God for open source is all I can say.

Gmail

I've finally got a Gmail account, courtesy of my friend Gary. I guess they have finally decided to expand beyond the first beta trial.

I like some things immediately about it (beyond the 1Gigabyte of online storage and the capability to search stored emails). Namely, that it seems to have a great spam filter. Perhaps my email address there just hasn't been "harvested" or "guessed" and that will change. But for right now, I love not getting any spam at all.

Secondly, mail conversations are threaded, a la newsreader. So one can see the entire context of an email conversation without having to either include it in every message sent back and forth or searching for it throughout the Web site.

Time will tell whether it remains this useful. But I do love having an address again where I do not have to worry about the size of attachments I send or receive.

Weddings..

So I'm in Phoenix (actually Flagstaff) at the moment. My oldest friend is getting married (we went to junior high school in Alaska together) and I am a groomsman for him.

It's interesting to reflect on all the ceremonies surrounding marriage. I think this has to be a thousands of year old tradition and while its lost a lot of its meaning in the modern age it is still kind of cool to be part of the ritualized ceremony. I was thinking that yesterday as there was minor panic trying to figure out what side the groomsmen would be on when they led in the brides maids. I guessed that we should be on the right (to keep our sword arms free) and everyone seemed to think that would work. Hope I was right.

But giving away the bride, asking if there is any reason one should not join the two, the cutting of the cake, the tossing of the bride's bouquet (and garter). Someone of these seem purely American traditions, some must go back to medieval England and France. (Did you know the tiered wedding cake only goes back a couple of hundred years? A baker on Fleet Street saw a tiered church steeple that Sir Christopher Wren had designed and thought of building a wedding cake to match it).

It does seem sad that where once the two families mutual interests would ensure that the couple stays together today we just have to depend on love. With a 50% success rate, we know how well that works. Maybe Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was a warning against this romantic tradition?

As far as the location goes, if I ever get married I want it to be at an old French farmhouse with a convenient meadow for ceremony and dancing through the night. We had to knock off at 11:30 last night (hotel rules) and that just sucked.

Palm Tungsten in my future?

I'm seriously considering upgrading my Palm.

I've lusted after having a color one for a while now and that, combined with massively increased storage space, is giving me a woody. I have a Vx and I've overclocked it and am using all the space (see my last post on the number of books I carry in it).

In any event, I wrote down the specs for my dream Palm the other day. Before I even looked at what was available out there:

The Tungsten line from Palm looks like what I want and I just saw a news release that they have made available a WiFi expansion card for all the Tungsten models (Bluetooth, while cool, just didn't hack it). I've wanted the ability to read and send email and do some occasional browsing with a Palm for quite a while. Throw in the ability to bring some of my music with me (just 30-40 songs with a shuffle-capable player) and I'm a happy puppy.

I think the time has come for me to seriously consider upgrading..

Maybe I can overclock the Tungsten as well!

Books on my Palm Vx

I thought this might prove interesting. I carry a ton of books around on my Palm so I never want for something to pass the time:

Deutsche spam

Got my first German spam tonight. Blacklisted 30 seconds later.

Oh joy. Our spam culture has spread to Europe.

Olympics hype

I confess that I'm a little perturbed at all the hype surrounding the Olympics. Having watched the Tour de France I had kind of gotten used to fairly even-handed coverage (from Paul Liggett and Phil Sherwen). Basically, with the exception of a little Lance-worship, all the racers were well-treated by the commentators.

I mentally contrast that with the jingoism and partisanship I see on NBC/Bravo's coverage. I find myself rooting for the Aussie swimmers just 'cause I'm sick of the type of coverage given to the US swimmers by the network.

Don't even get me started on the admission of professionals (aka Dream Team) to the Olympics. To my mind that makes a mockery of the whole idea of amateur athletics.

Jim Thorpe must be rolling over in his grave.

Windows XP

I do a little technology consulting on the side, installing and configuring hardware and software. While I really don't like working on Windows variants, I have found the one thing that I think Microsoft has done right in the last five years or so.

That's the "System Restore" feature of Windows XP Home/Pro. I've been doing a roaring business of late removing spyware and installing firewalls. Before I can really secure a machine I have to make sure that I've poured the purifying waters on it.

That's where the System Restore comes in. Generally, a business or home user calls me when they have just grenaded their PC by launching a virus. Occasionally, they have been backdoored and notice the PC doing weird things in the middle of the night. Sometimes it just starts moving too slowly. With System Restore I can bring the machine back to a point where the infection is more limited and remediable.

Yesterday, I worked on one XP Pro box that had 179 pieces of spyware installed. Yes, that's 179.

Redmond has a lot to answer for.

Sport keeps changing..

Boy.. tumultous times for me as a fan of sport. First, Terrell Owens and Jeff Garcia are traded away from my beloved San Francisco 49ers and now my favorite soccer star, Michael Owen, has become a Galactico.

Yes, Michael has been traded to Real Madrid for a measly 8 million pounds. Pretty stunning. Yes, I know Liverpool got a player back in trade but remember that three or so years ago he was valued at over 25 million pounds. The market isn't what it was (since TV revenues have dropped) and he hasn't really fulfilled his promise--chiefly because of injuries.

So it made sense for Rafael Benitez to trade him. He now has Cisse and Baros, both of whom are near the top of their form. Besides, Michael needs new pastures to regain both his form and his mental strength I think.

It's better for England.

At least, that's what I tell myself as I cry myself to sleep.

Photo competitions

I've never entered a photo competition before. I have always been pretty happy with my own photography and haven't really sought external validation.

I'm not the photographer my uncle is but occasionally I take what I think is a really good photograph. Our local village fair just concluded and this year I submitted a couple of my photos in the competition.

There were quite a few entrants (maybe as many as sixty or seventy) and I thought some of the entries were quite good. I rushed about the morning the submission was due and had my 8x10s mounted on matt board and then made up labels.

Entries were submitted on a Thursday morning and preliminary judging took place Thursday afternoon. There was a second round of judging after this to determine the top three entries overall in the fair (which I didn't know about).

This photo got second overall in the color photography category (I've previously posted it on this page):




I was like a proud parent picking it up after the fair. I took it early in the morning near Concrete, Washington with my Kodak DC290 (a 2Mb digital camera).

Current Toll of the War in Iraq

From Meet the Press this morning:

and Condoleeza Rice finally admits that there is no linkage between Iraq and the events of September 11th.

To my mind it's going to be a religious state sooner or later. I say pull out of Iraq, found an independent Kurdistan, and drain the Mosul oil field through a pipeline that runs through Turkey. Enough Americans have died for a meaningless war in Iraq.

She tried to defend Bush II's inability to act when told of the September 11 bombing (he sat in front of the 3rd graders he was talking to for another seven minutes). Not that I think it would have made a significant difference (I don't think they could have shot down the second Twin Towers plane or the other two because of communication and control difficulties) but I thought at the time and still think that his reaction highlighted a lack of experience and/or imagination.

At the very least, wouldn't a prudent leader of the free world have excused himself from dealing with children and turned to meet with his advisors?

Opinions to the contrary..

I am not in hiding in an undisclosed location nor have I retired to a tropical island (mores the pity). I've been moving house and my back is seriously out of whack after more than a week of effort with refrigerators, washers, boxes of books, filing cabinets, tool chests, etc. I think a visit to the chiropractor is in order shortly.

Anyway, caught a little bit on the morning NPR show about how the terror alert on Sunday ("Orange" alert for certain financial institutions in NYC) was kind of bogus. Apparently, the scouting of these institutions by Al Qaeda took place THREE years ago.

So for some mysterious reason, and there is no evidence that there is a current threat (the administration said so this morning) we decided to up the threat level to Orange?

Sounds like a little political one upmanship to me. While John Kerry denied this interpretation when asked, I would love to hear an explanation of why we are reacting to a three-year old threat at this particular time. Will the Orange alert be permanent for these institutions? That would be the only thing that would make sense.