Recently, we have been experiencing a bit of appliance stupidity in our house.
Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit center for GE and our microwave was clearly designed by jackasses.
Read on for many too many details.
From the press release, this device contains features such as “a 28-in-1 media card reader, front IO, USB and fire wire connections, dual NTSC and HDTV tuners (with CableCARD shipping soon), 8 channel HD audio”, etc.etc.etc…
Sounds neat enough. Especially with the six terabytes of potential storage. Put some decent multimedia control software on it and… well.. not bad!
Except who the hell designed it? Clearly not someone who actually thought through how to use it!
Anything that sticks out at all from any of those “front IO” ports is going to obscure the screen! Can you imagine trying to download photos or video with your video camera balanced somewhere — because, most likely, this behemoth will be inside a big old media center cabinet — while trying to deal with a touchy/feely UI with cables constantly flopping on the screen?
And, of course, you’ll probably want to plug in a keyboard and/or mouse to be abel to properly annotate and edit whatever media you capture into said unit. That’ll be convenient.
I wonder if it is even smart enough to know not to open the DVD drawer when the screen is in the retracted position (assuming, of course, the screen retracts).
Update: Embedded the BoingBoing TV segment on reading AmEx blue cards.
American Express decided to “automatically upgrade” my plebeian green card to an American Express Blue card.
Beyond giving me the “privilege” of paying AmEx a monthly exorbitant interest rate if I don’t pay the full balance, the card has an embedded RFID chip that is used to “wave and pay” at a bunch of locations.
Hell, AmEx is so proud of the RFID feature that the card is transparent such that the chip and antenna are clearly visible.
How incredibly stupid.
Why?
Because this is the exact same chip that can be read and decrypted with about $8 in hardware and a some freely available software.
Without touching the card.
From a distance, even.
Better yet, AmEx embeds a bunch of personal information in the card.
Now I have to call American Express and demand a replacement non-RFID card. Others have done this and been stymied. Or, alternatively, I think I’ll just take a drill to this one and apply some rotational entropy to the RFID chip.
Sadly, I’ll have to renew my passport in the next couple of years and US passports now also embed equally as insecure RFID accessible chunks of personal information.
Update:
Evil Mad Scientists Laboratory has made the foundation of this build available as The Peggy for $80.
In typical EMSL fashion, that link includes tons and tons of information, including full details, board design, source, and loads of implementation notes.
So, apparently, it is being called Aqua Teen Day. Good enough.
Better yet, though, is that the fine folks of boston — the level headed public that makes the city such a great place — are celebrating the first annual “Aqua Teen Day” by decorating the city with LED art.
On January 31st, 2007, the authorities in Boston completely lost their minds. It wasn’t the first time, but this particular date was heavily reported and even the most head-in-the-sand die-hard “OMGWTFBINLADENFTChildren!!!one!!!” fear mongers found it ridiculous.
I am, of course, referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “Hoax Device” bomb scare.
I could go on a political rant about fear based leadership and the general stupidity of the security theater played out in our cities and airports.
But that is boring.
I’d rather remind people of the jackassery that has happened and, once again, laugh at it. Then vote appropriately.
To that end, I purchased memorial kits from the fine folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and put them together over the last few days.
The results are just stunning. And effective. I brought the boards into work on Monday and, on the way home, stopped for a beer with boards in hand. Several folks asked about them and, upon explaining the history of the boards, they became just a touch more enlightened as to the stupidity of certain leadership and just a slight bit more inclined to learn more and vote accordingly.
Mission accomplished. With laughter included.
(The kits were a special edition from EMSL — you’ll have to contact them for availability. The LED “peg board” is generic; you can lay out the LEDs anyway you want to make any kind of similar display, including a “charlieplexed” mode that allows simple animations. I believe EMSL will be offering the generic form of the kit sometime soon.)
We visited the San Jose Museum of Art over the weekend. Roger totally dug it; sketching various scenes that he found inspiring.
Of course, we ended up with a $28 parking ticket. No surprises there. I mean, we parked in a marked parking space that had no parking limitation signs on Saturday near a meter that had no documented weekend rates are anything.
Obviously, a city that is trying to attract more tourists and more nearby residents would make accessibility to the downtown as easy and painless as possible. And a complete lack of posted parking policy is a BIG help. So is the total lack of grocery stores or other services that are necessary to support residents.
But I digress (and fully admit that it was my fault for not assuming that the city wouldn’t maximize revenue opportunities).
So, I went to pay the parking ticket online. Clearly, a city at the heart of silicon valley in the proactively environmental state of California will have an online payment system!
Sure does! And the fine City of San Jose will charge you $3 for the privilege of paying via their web site. Let’s see — $3 surcharge for a transaction that involves no paper, no illegible handwriting, no check processing, and less bookkeeping? Makes perfect sense.
Fine.
So, I’ll just pay that damned ticket via online banking.
Uh, no. The Fine City of San Jose effectively requires that you submit your Parking Violation payment with the Parking Violation Ticket itself.
No online banking for you!
Clearly, the City of San Jose hates them pesky trees.
Update:
So, it appears to boot to the stupid loading screen whenever this disc is inserted. The extended web enabled content looks kinda cool, though I didn’t bother with it.
The movie, itself, is just flat out gorgeous. But, wow, what a stupid user experience to play the damned disc.
Tonight, we dropped Transformers (HD DVD) into the HD DVD player to check out the amazing awesomeness supposedly contained within.
No such luck.
The stupid disc booted to a stupid “updating advanced web content” screen.
And then it sat there.
Only indication that someone was going on was the silly horizontal rule would occasionally have a rolling highlight.
But nothing happened. Not after 2 minutes, not after 20.
But, hey! There is a [CANCEL] button.
Except that there is no cancel button on the remote, nor does the UI respond to any random key-presses on the remote, nor does it do anything when you hit OK.
Or, maybe it does? Eventually, the “loading” UI went away and the movie started.
Looks really really good, too.
But, wow, what an incredibly broken, stupid, and horribly designed user experience.
This generation of media will hopefully die a quick death. I can’t imagine Blu-ray is worse, but it doesn’t sound like a party either.
I’m very much looking forward to the Apple TV software update. Depending on the experience, Netflix will either be downgraded by a disc or eliminated entirely.
It has now been nearly a week since we added an HD DVD player to the home entertainment system.
Some impressions.
We watched Serenity this evening. It is visually stunning. I’m sure the audio is pretty amazing, too, but I don’t currently have the 5.1 pre-amp / speakers hooked up.
By “visually stunning”, I mean: It looks better than it did in the theater. As an added bonus, I make better popcorn, have vastly superior beverages for far less money, and can watch a visually stunning movie while sitting in front of a fire.
No wonder the theaters are running scared. Hell — we paid $19 for Serenity on HD DVD which, accounting for the evening’s expense, is about 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of actually going to a theater (depending on babysitting expenses).
Anyway — HD DVD really delivers in terms of the visuals when paired with a decent TV; 46″ 1080p Sony LCD, in my case.
The Planet Earth really drives it home. I have watched it on DVD, via Satellite, and on HD DVD. At 1080p, The Planet Earth is an awesome — a moving — tour of the awesome breadth of life on this planet.
As well, we watched the remastered HD DVD version of Blazing Saddles. The difference between it and the DVD is quite noticeable, but mostly in that HD DVD so clearly displays the noise and imperfections found in the original production process.
And, of course, if the discs do so, the extras on HD DVD can be considerably richer and more deeply integrated with the primary content than regular DVDs. Speaking of regular DVDs, the player does an awesome job of upscaling legacy content (though, honestly, I have no idea how it compares to the various $30 to $70 upscaling DVD players that are commonplace these days).
And that is pretty much where the happiness ends. Click on through for a bit of a rant on the vasty stupidity that is next generation media….
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About a year ago, we picked up a 46″ Sony Bravia LCD TV (KDL46XBR2). Generally, a gorgeous monitor that has loads of inputs and, thus, has become the all-signal-switchbox for the various game consoles, media players, and computers that may be hooked up at any one time.
Great picture and generally easy to use. Amusing, too, that the manual came with a GPL license notice with a hyperlink to download source. Turns out that the UI is implemented via Linux (and, yes, Sony has a whole “source distribution center“).
However, it is not without its flaws and some of them are just so embarassingly stupid in terms of the concious Industrial Design choices made.
Click on through for the gory details.
So, I was all set to go see Frank Miller’s new flick 300 as I heard it was a completely spot on documentary of the Battle of Thermopylae. I mean, Frank is clearly one of the best documentary directors of our times as he so accurately put down a good chunk of Batman’s life story and Sin City was a milestone docu-drama of inner city criminal activities.
But now I learn that Miller may have diverged from the truth in the telling of 300?
And now the Iranians, gays, lesbians, Persians, brown people, handicapped people, and others are offended by the inaccurate, gross categorical, mistreatment of their particular groups within 300’s plot?
And….
I have been a my.yahoo.com user for a long long time (a decade maybe?? Not sure — a very long time). It gave me a nicely configurable portal through which I could monitor weather, market status, business events, and a bit of entertainment all in one page.
My original layout was 2 columns; a narrow column on left with a list of stocks I care about followed by a bit of weather and some of the photo feeds. The right hand, wider, column contained a set of headline summaries.
With this layout, I could make the window as narrow as I wanted with the only lost information being the right hand, least useful, bits of the headline.
With the “upgraded” layout, the WIDE headlines are on the left and the stock crap is on the right. Stupid. But the worst design sin is that there is now this big bloody fracking square advertisement at the top of my right hand column.
Without scrolling, the information that I care about in my right hand column is now pushed off the bottom of the window. Instead of a banner ad that was outside of my customizable content area, I now have to deal with a non-rectangular content area when laying things out the way I want.
Upgrade? Yeah, sure, I’ll take an upgrade. Google’s personalized homepage is looking like a damned fine upgrade, thanks.