Worked on my G5! Not sure i really want it, nor what resources it is using. it is a fairly slow and poor computer interface to all of this media I have, but what the heck.

Instructions for the Geeky Minded

While not as scary as Windows, if you use some Sony/BMG cds on your Mac, according to this Macintouch report, it will ask for your admin password (hey at least the Mac asks!) and then it installs two kernel extensions.

A kernel extension lives behind the wall of protection, so any bugs in the kernel extension could crash your computer, or look at data it should not be, etc.

It really is time for us all to boycott these Sony/BMG products.

Ars is reporting that Sony has responded to this issue of them hacking Windows user’s kernels for their CD DRM.

You really should be insulted, infuriated and amused. Sony needs a clue, the industry needs a clue. Look at this quote from Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG’s global digital business division:

“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it,” he asked? “The software is designed to protect our CDs from unauthorized copying, ripping.”

Wow. Utterly wow.

According to this report, when you listen to a enhanced CD from Sony/BMG, it will ask you to sign a EULA (End User License Agreement) to play the content (even just the music)

When you give it permission, a “root kit” is installed on your Windows computer. This root kit hacks the operating itself such that the os can no longer see the root kit. This hides their copy protection from you.

This is evil on so many levels, but guess what? it is buggy. So much so, that if a hacker names a file $SYS$ on your computer, it is hidden forever. Virus scan cannot see it, nobody can see it.

So thanks to DRM and your friends at Sony, they’ve made it very easy for hackers to hide files on your system. Isn’t that great?

Oh yeah, it also scans your disk often, slowing down the computer and even reports to Sony which songs you are listening to. Nice! Don’t you feel violated? You’d better!

Return all enhanced Sony/BMG music CDs now. I know I am seriously thinking of not buying a PS3 now. These companies need to learn they cannot screw with us without repercussions.

A few pictures from Maccamp!

View

Well it took until now to successfully get a three way video chat going, between my friend Totte in Sweden and my mother. Of course my mom didn’t like popping into a 3 way chat at 6:30am with a stranger. ROFL. Interesting UI implications.

Update: After reinstalling Tiger (due to disk issues) I can no longer iChat AV with someone I did the day earlier. Sigh, Apple.

Tiki Bar TV is a bunch of geeks who are making vidCasts (video podcasts) of silly situations to show you how to mix a drink. Quite funny, creative and perfect use of this medium!

Subscribe now via iTunes

Apple yesterday announced:

Apple Computer Inc. has named Tim Cook, the company’s executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations since 2002, as chief operating officer, while Jon Rubinstein, head of the iPod division, will soon retire, the company said Friday.

Now hmm, Jon Rubinstein is stepping down. This made me curious, because on the conference call Tuesday, I heard something that made me say in IRC, “Someone is getting a memo!” Some memo that is. Listen to this segment of the conference call and see if you agree that Jon got much more than a memo.

If you are into new display technologies, check out the BrightSide. Be sure to read the entire article, or you can skip to the Demo using the popup menu.

This is fairly impressive. At $49,000 it will take awhile to come down in price, but the theory behind it (literally) is quite interesting.

If you use dot mac, get Backup 3 from mac.com and fill up that new gb of iDisk!

One nice thing is the easy to add backup of your itunes purchased music to DVD or CDs monthly. I’m doing a backup to DVD-RW right now and it even asked to erase the DVD-RW. This will be a nice monthly reminder.

I’m not sure how to keep the daily incremental backups from filling my iDisk - There are no preferences I can find!

This clip is just too great for words, matey, arrrr.

The upgrade went pretty smoothly - I just had to change a couple of paths and I cleaned a bunch of files up.

If you notice any weirdness with the site, please drop us a line!

Apple released their latest ipod. Holy Sexy as Kristie put it.

Apple ipod nano

Ah too damn cool haha:

Play Asteroids while taking off in an airplane, can’t disable your watch!

I’ve started a del.iciou.us page.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, where you can store your bookmarks, annotate and keyword them. Your bookmarks are shared and then you can cross-reference one bookmark to others sharing the same keyword.

A crew of about 20 guys from Michael’s Communications are digging trenches around the edge of my yard. I wonder what they do with the grass. There really isn’t any

I told them to knock on the door if they needed water.

They didn’t have any info, other than “It was Verizon for telephone or something” heh

Just got home to find a Verizon notice on my door about Fiber Optic broadband coming soon, crews around the corner and paint marks on my lawn all the way around the corner and down the street (they have to drill horizontally underneath)

So it should be a couple of months or so!

Just spoke with a contractor around the corner on Jay Street. They are indeed drilling for Verizon’s Fiber to the Home internet service.

He said they are drilling north on 185th towards baseline this week, and Jay should be drilled in the next couple of months. No word about 178th that I am on - The street has not been marked either.

Update:

Well after watching some 4:3 DVDs i realized the geometry was off. Oops, I used the Full mode dimensions, not the HD dimensions. So more tape, more string, and it is re-reconverged. I also reset white level, black level, saturation, hue and sharpness, just from user mode. It looks fantastic now.

My 480P mode has the same settings but is very, very over saturated in the reds, so at some point I’ll figure out how to fix that in service mode. It must have happened after the last calibration.

Considering this will be a secondary TV, it looks great. If I can get the 480P fixed up for the old DVD player (once the 941 moves to the DLP) I’ll be set.

Original Post:

For those not in the know, I’ve had a 56″ Toshiba TW56X81 HDTV for about 5 years now. About 4 years ago I reset it to factory defaults in designer mode (by accident) and it has never been perfect since.

I’ve never bothered to get any HDTV source for it as I know it is mis-configured and even worse, this set has different internal settings for every source input (s-video, progressive component, 1080i, etc)

So I’ve been looking at these new Samsung 1080P DLP sets coming out any month now on the net and in the process learned about the Samsung HD-941 DVD player. This player is last years model but has one advantage over the newer models - there is an easy hack to enable 1080i upscaling of the 480i DVD content over component outputs. It also has HDMI which my new set will use, but I thought hmm, I could actually play around with my existing TV.

So I bought the thing for $250 (you can find it online at closeout for around $130) and hooked it up to the component in that my Toshiba SD-9100 was using.

First off the signal was red and horrible. Once I told the player to use 480P, everything snapped into place and a few cursory looks at discs showed it very comparable to my much older Toshiba and faster, too.

I should note the 941 has the Faroudja DCDi chip for smooth upscaling (at least on HDMI) so this was a plus - the 950 does not.

So I enter the hack to get the 941 to turn on 1080i for component (HDCP, the protection crap hollywood is cramming down our throats, is not supposed to let HD signals come over analog connections. come on people, it is STILL 480i signal on a normal DVD, sheesh) Once I the hack (press angle, 4, 3, 2, 7, angle) the TV showed “HDCP off” and I could then use DVI Select to choose 1080i!

Of course the image was horrible because the 56pt convergence for 1080i mode had never been touched since the reset 4 years ago. So I went to Fred Meyers and bought some masonry string, some white masking tape and a metric ruler, downloaded a full mode grid from keohi and went to work. 3 hours later i have pretty good looking 1080i signal from a DVD player. Of course the grayscale and colors are off, but I don’t have the tools nor time to really fix that. It is “good enough” until the real HDTV shows up

This makes me want to play with other 1080i sources though.

The only issue I had was the player went into “jaggies” mode for some reason and I had to power cycle it to fix it. There is a firmware upgrade that fixes a blacker than black issue with HDMI, but I have not tried to get it or even see if I have it already. I don’t have a burner on my PC so I am not sure I can eve make the CD-ROM that would replace the firmware.

You can find pictures here.

Many thanks to Huey and the AVS Forum folks for their posts and input.

Why do I always get the chills when Microsoft proposes an extension to something? This time it is RSS.

They want to extend it to handle lists, or e-commerce sites, etc.

I wonder which servers will push this new info first? Hmm, let me tap my forehead and think…

Now they are working with Winer, so that is good, but it better not break anything that already works. Something about embrace, extend…