Recently in Hardware Category

Remember those days? When everything was good, everyone was happy, and everything worked? Well right now I am longing for them.

I am certain that everyone that you ask about the Good Old Days, will give you a different answer on what exactly they were, but for me, right now, they are about the days when products were not manufactured with built-in obsolescence. Or at the very least, were built with better quality.

Why am I longing for these days-of-yore, you ask? Because my Samsung LCD TV died, today. If I had to guess, I would say that the problem is simply a bad relay, and is probably quite readily fixable for a reasonable amount of money, but that's not the point. I paid top-dollar for a top-shelf TV, and expect top-shelf quality.

In the Good Old Days, my dad built a Heathkit console-style, color TV, and it lasted for thirty years, without so much as a hiccup. Sure, occasionally one of those fire-breathing vacuum-tubes would have to be replaced, but get this, you could test and buy those at any decent drug store, and you could replace them yourself. Now you have to pay $50, minimum, to shake a technician's hand, ultimately to find out that you have to actually pay $200 to replace the main logic-board, because electronic devices today really don't have replaceable parts, like my dad's Heathkit TV did, in the Good Old Days.

My Dad will occasionally spin yarns about The Good Old days, when manufacturers would crimp, and solder connections, making them fairly bullet-proof. Today, you're lucky if you get a second-rate crimp, from a grossly underpaid, ill-treated employee, who could not really care less about whether or not your TV dies one day out of factory warranty.

Sure, I recognize that a 1080p HD TV, is way cooler than my dad's twenty-five-inch, color console TV, but sometimes I am not so certain that these 'advances' are worth it. It will probably be one month before I see my TV again, if they can fix it at all, and it might cost a lot of money. The good news is that I did buy the extended warranty, so hopefully this will all be taken care of at no cost to me.

In any case, this would all be so much easier if I could go down to one of many local shops, buy a vacuum tube, and put it in, myself, but I can't. I'm told that they call this progress.

Ah well. Now where the heck is my record player??

I have a Palm Pilot. Well, I had a Palm Pilot, but it seems that I have one again.

I jumped on the PDA bandwagon right around the time when Palm released their first unit, and I bought one immediately. This would have been circa 1999. I loved the idea of being able to carry around a real computer, in my hand. It kept track of hundreds of contacts, managed my few appointments, and let me write myself notes, to help with my failing memory. The Palm also let you install those third-party applications that one current particular smart phone manufacturer likes to pretend they invented.

In time, I updated to a newer model, and I purchased my third Palm about five years ago, the Zire 31. This was my first color Palm, and I was psyched to get it. It served me faithfully for probably two years, and then one day, it didn't wake up, when I tried to power it on. I assumed the battery somehow went dead, so I plugged it into the charger, and it still wouldn't turn on. Somehow, the unit had managed to brick itself overnight, as it sat in its pouch, in my briefcase.

At this point I wasn't particularly happy. The unit was out of warranty, but it wasn't that old, and I had never abused it. I don't remember if I had contacted Palm, but I don't think that I did. I think I just wrote it off as a loss, and probably used Palm's name in vain many times. The good news was that I had always made regular backups of my data, and had those backups safely stored on one of my USB drives.

I never really ended up doing much with the backups of my data. Occasionally I would simply access them with a text editor to find a needed number, but on the whole, I simply learned to live without my Palm.

Fast forward about two years, to last night. I was chatting online with some musician friends in my favorite IRC channel, and we somehow got talking about Palm Pilots. I mentioned how my Zire 31 inexplicably died, a few years prior, and one of the people from Australia mentioned that her Zire 51 had done the same thing, and that all I needed to do was keep it on the charger for about 12 hours, and it should come back to life.

Well, I did, and it did.

All of my data was gone, but since I had been vigilant about making backups, it took little effort to restore it to its previous state. As of right now, I am only one application away from getting it exactly like it was, before it decided to hibernate. The missing application was an RPN Calculator that I actually purchased. Maybe I can find it online, and they would have records that I had actually paid for it, a few years ago. Since the Palm is basically a dead platform, that doesn't bode well, however.

Now that I have this thing working again, what am I actually going to do with it? Much of the contact info in it needs to be updated, and I am probably going to purchase an Android based Smart-Phone one of these days in the not-too-distant future, rendering the trusty Palm entirely obsolete and redundant.

Also, after having used my Netbook for these last eight months, I now find the Palm screen to be very low-res, and jaggy.

Ah well. Technology marches on, and I guess I will just have to be cool with the fact that the thing never actually died. Maybe I can find a good use for it. We'll have to see.

For the last twelve months or so, I feel as though I've gone back in time twenty five years. You see, twenty five years ago, I bought a Commodore 128 computer, and it was twelve months ago that I bought my first Blu-Ray player. The Commodore 128 was the follow-up to the hugely successful Commodore 64, and Blu-Ray is the new high-definition video disc format which is replacing the DVD format

How are these two ownership experiences related? Through disappointment.

The Commodore 128 was going to be the next big thing because it had better graphics, better sound, twice the memory, and double the CPU power of the Commodore 64. It also had a Commodore 64 emulation mode that would run nearly all of the available Commodore 64 software titles. Sounds like a great thing, right? Perhaps, except for the fact that because of that, many software companies never wrote dedicated C-128 titles, since they could write a C-64 version, and it would run on the C-128, in C-64 emulation mode. While the C-128 was a successful machine for Commodore, I think it would have been more successful if more companies had written dedicated C-128 programs.

I bet you're still wondering what this has to do with the new Blu-Ray format.

Well, I'll tell you.

I am a big fan of independent films, and independent film companies often don't have huge budgets. When it comes time to do a disc-based release of a film, often, Indie film companies will only do a DVD release of the titles that I really want to buy. You see, all Blu-Ray players have a feature called Upconverting. Upconversion is a process that takes a standard DVD, and through some mathematical algorithmic magic, takes the low-resolution of the DVD, and converts it to a decent looking 1080p, high-resolution output, so that DVDs look acceptable on your fancy, high-resolution flat-panel TV. Yes, it looks acceptable, but it's fake. You're not really getting the same picture that you would get if you were looking at an actual 1080p master of the same film. It seems as if these Indie film companies believe that a DVD release is good enough, even though Blu-Ray is the new format, and there are millions of us out there, who prefer, and want the higher resolution releases.

Two recent films that did not have a U.S. Blu-Ray release, that I wanted to purchase, were Man On Wire, and Anvil! The Story Of Anvil. I would already own them, if they were available on Blu-Ray, and I will not buy them, on general principle, until they are available on Blu-Ray. I do not want to encourage this bad habit that the software companies had twenty five years ago, who believed that a backwardly-compatible version was good enough, despite the fact that the new hardware was superior, and capable of so much more.

So to all film companies, I encourage you to embrace the Blu-Ray format, else you won't see any of my dollars.