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The Spore folks reconsidered after a lot of bad press and complaints. So, our pre-orders are back on!

The new John Williams score for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is out. How can an 80’s kid possibly resist?

Not to mention a Richard Cheese-ified version of the Indiana Jones theme on Itunes (Plus, so no DRM, if I read the fine print properly).

Baby chicks–Ameraucanas– (and keets–pied) should be here by June 27th or 28th. With any luck the coop will be mostly done, if we can find someone who can blow in insulation before then. If we’re super super lucky, we will get Squeak and the silkies to raise them.

Icky’s on chemo. So far so good, but he can’t have any doggie visitors for awhile. We still aren’t exactly sure what’s wrong with Cupcake’s liver and lipomas, but she goes in for more work on Thursday.

-epe

News came out this week that EA intends to release spore for the PC with DRM that needs to checkin with the mothership every 10 or so days in order to stay operational. (it will work again once you re-connect no matter how long it’s been). This isn’t the kind of setup I can get behind. There are numerous problems that can creep up with this type of setup not the least of which is what happens to the game in a few years when the “magic servers” go away? Didn’t we just go through this mess with the MSN DRM music fiasco?

Anyway, shame on you EA. Someday you’ll realize that this type DRM only fucks the people doing the right thing in the first place =/. I’ve canceled our two pre-orders from amazon. If they decide to stop doing dumb things we’ll consider picking them up again. If not then we’ll uh.. do something else :).

-pee

See this article about the recent DRM problems they’ve been having. If you’ve got one of the 20 or so defective titles (of which I haven’t seen a list but it includes at least Stranger than Fiction, Casino Royale, The Holiday, and The Pursuit of Happyness), you can call 800.860.2878 and they will take your name, phone number, address, and UPC off the box and will send you a replacement disc.

Glad we didn’t send the player back. I feel certain we would’ve gotten stuck with the shipping fee and gotten absolutely nothing useful done to the player.

Sony, you and your ARccOS suck. Sure, you’re replacing discs. Maybe if you weren’t so anal retentive you wouldn’t be having this problem to begin with. It doesn’t prevent illegitimate use, just pisses off the people who actually bought the damn movie for their own use.

Bravo to EMI for releasing DRM-free music. Now if Apple would sell it in a lossless format, I’d probably even start using iTunes!

We’ve had 2 interesting failures with our new dvd player, and recent dvd releases.

Sony DVP-CX995V + “Stranger Than Fiction” == “Reading -> power off”

Sony DVP-CX895V + “Stranger Than Fiction” == “Plays”

(for 2 different disks, one from amazon, one from netflix, a Sony pictures release…)

Sony DVP -CX995V + “The Holiday” == “Reading ->power off”

Sony DVP-CX895V + “The Holiday” == “Plays”

(Also a sony pictures release…)

The DVP-CX995V also has this annoying quirk, whereby if you turn it on, it turns it self off every other time ;). It didn’t bother me at first, but now… it’s irritating.

I’ve joined the iPod generation. With reservations. Why did it take me so long? Well, a few reasons. One, I’m in the house most of the time, where I can listen to our whole collection of flacs and mp3s over the speakers attached to the server upstairs. Two, I’ve had an mp3 player (a very old Creative 6G hard drive player–one of the first) which I don’t use anymore–mostly because it’s bulky and shaped like a CD player. Three, Paul already has a nice little Rio Karma, which I could technically use if desired. Four, apple players don’t do ogg or flac, which others do, so difficult to justify a purchase I’m not inclined to make anyway. Five, I despise the DRM model used by the Apple Store. Not that I have to use them, but still, it makes me not like Apple so much.

And yet I had nerd wood for the nano ever since they came out. I can’t help it! Apple hardware is so sexy. I love my mom’s Mac mini for the same reason.

So why now? I got a free one from work through our rewards program. :)

I was pleasantly surprised that they sent a 2G silver rather than 1G black nano–looks to be 2nd gen (by color, not black or white). It came with a hard case with integrated JVC speaker. Doesn’t sound much better than you’d expect for a small powered speaker, but a nice idea nonetheless.

I monkeyed around forever getting music to it…had to convert a lot of flacs to mp3, then move assloads of mp3s to my pc off our linux music server so iTunes could sync it. PITA. Inefficient. Plus it took me awhile to figure out the syncing; as I added new songs they weren’t syncing to the iPod…had to wipe out the sync list and copy the music list from the library again. But, it’s working and I’ve filled it to the brim (which seems like not nearly enough…).
Man, nice interface though. Love that click wheel (didn’t know they were touch sensitive); the color screen is nice and crisp. The size is right, too. I already ordered a set of soft covers with lanyards for $9. Now I just need non-earbud headphones…I hate those things…they either hurt my ears or fall out.

Now I must vow never to buy from the Apple store…

Looks as if the Tivo Series 3 won’t have TivoToGo after all. That makes it almost infinitely less likely I’ll buy it…while I’d love a better interface than the piece of shit Scientific Atlanda 8300HD offered by Time Warner, I’m not willing to pay $800, a monthly fee, cable card fees, *and still* not be able to get my content off it.

By the way, Time Warner, you suck, too: “As of January 2006, any new digital services added will NOT be available with a CableCard.” That includes new channels such as Universal HD.

More on DRM.

Finally got the Philips RC9800i all programmed. Good: it’s in color, not bad interface, price, wireless stuff (I guess, seems pretty useless for me). Meh: Not very configurable (no PC software to edit every last button/screen as in Pronto series); the only user editable keys are 8 user defined ones for each device; very limited hard keys (only the ones you define for menu up/down/left/right/ok, mute, volume, channel); no way to mix keys from different devices on one screen or assign them to a hard key (biggest problem one for me is the ‘aspect’ button for TV); locks up sometimes; device icons are listed as very generic ‘PVR’, ‘DVD’ etc so if you have more than one you have to remember what order they’re in; it displays keys on the remote even if they have no code assigned to them; no way to move around or delete keys from the display. I like being able to set up remotes exactly as I like; this doesn’t quite fit the bill but I guess it’ll work for now. I do like the form factor and UI, and it seems pretty responsive.

A CableCard HD Tuner card. Meh: Windows only (probably due to the CableCard requirements).

ReplayTV PC Edition. Meh: no HD support yet. Windows only, even for streaming.

HDTivo (standalone; series 3). Meh: no more lifetime service fees. Isn’t it weird how they announced this right after Replay exited the set-top business?

Blu-ray/HDDVD. Meh: why did there have to be two? And the whole thing about possibly limiting resolution on component outputs (thus screwing us early HD monitor adopters).
I used to be an early adopter. Lately I’m feeling like I’d be a schmuck to buy into any of these half-assed technologies.

The lengths I’ll go to to save $30-$50 (depending on seller) for Texas Ranch House on DVD:

• Recorded in HD on TWC DVR because I wanted to watch it in HD at least once (yeah, I know my final product is SD DVD but at least it’s a nice clean source).
• ‘Save to VCR’ from there to standalone ReplayTV box, wait 2 hours per night’s recording (no, no easy means of extracting data directly, and it’s not mine so I’m not likely to break into it)
• DVArchive to download it to my laptop
• gopdit to determine edit points (remove few commercials, chapter points to skip ‘next time’, credits, etc
• rtvedit to apply edit file from previous step
• rtvconvert to get it from Replay format into something more palatable to DVD (splitting into m2v and mp2 as future steps like that better)
• mplex the audio and video back together (don’t ask why. At least it’s all in sync.)
• take screen shots, edit out music clips, etc; gimp it into menu screens and a bunch more steps to stick it all together
• dvdauthor it
• mkisofs it
• copy the iso back to our media machine
• burn to DVD

See ReplayToDvd wiki for some details.

Just think, this is still fair use. Maybe not for long. If only I didn’t have to go through that additional digital to analog conversion….

I don’t get DRM for music. They’re already selling whole albums in non-protected, unencrypted formats (ie the CD), which you can rip and do whatever you want the songs. But if I only want one or two songs off an album, generally I’m stuck with whatever lame DRM’ed, compressed format they feel like selling. And don’t tell me I can go buy a subscription on one of the non-DRM MP3 sites…I only want a few songs at a time, and very rarely what they’re selling (although I did recently buy a copy of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Code Monkey’).

So what’s the purpose of DRM? To force me to buy entire albums when I only want a couple of songs? To prepare me for some kind of sucky future in which most music is DRM’ed and there are no CD’s? C’mon. Is it so much to ask? I *want* to pay for a copy of these songs. I just want them in the same format I’d get them in if I happened to buy the entire crappy album. You don’t seem to mind selling me a CD that I can rip to whatever format I like. Maybe it would encourage artists to produce albums that are more than just a few good songs, with the rest being filler?

Speaking of DRM, kudos to Sony for making their first-gen blu-ray stuff export full-res over all connections. It almost makes you happy to be an early adopter (well, early/middle anyway, 3 years) of an HD monitor. Still, even though we had a DVD player within about a month of their original release, I doubt I’ll be getting off the fence with regards to HD or blu-ray DVD. It’s not so much the player as the thought of replacing the media in one format or the other.