Happy 2011!

Another new year's eve, another year. I don't drink or "party" or do much to celebrate the new year; it's actually something of a sad time for me, as it means that a) my next birthday is in a couple of days and b) that my holiday vacation time is coming to an end. Ah, well -- in truth I should be happy that I've got a good job to go back to.

That said, and on a totally different topic altogether, for awhile I've been thinking of some "interesting" follow-ons to some popular culture media that I'd like to see -- follow-ons that will very likely never happen unless I write them myself and publish them as anonymous fan-fiction (highly unlikely). Still, I'd like to make a note of them here:

• Star Wars: The Droid Liberation Wars - Ever since the first Star Wars movie, I've been bugged at how the droids -- who for the most part seem as sentient as any of the organic characters -- are very much "second class citizens". Remember that scene in the Mos Eisley cantina where the bartender says "Your droids. They'll have to wait outside. We don't want them here."? I wondered if Lucas might move the series towards "droid liberation", in the end leaving the Empire to be more or less on par with Iain M Banks' Culture. To the best of my knowledge -- I'm not a big Star Wars fan -- this has not happened. But I'd sure like to see it.
  
• Harry Potter and the Wizard-Muggle War - I mean, haven't you ever wondered? It'd sure be interesting if J. K. Rowling and Jack Clancy collaborated on something like this. Rowling has shown she's not afraid of getting very dark -- all-out us-or-them genocidal warfare could get very very very dark indeed.
  
• Sookie Stackhouse: Dead During Wartime aka True Blood: The Human / Vampire Wars - As with the Harry Potter concept above, this could get really dark and "interesting". I mean: homo sapiens encounters a superior apex predator ... this is a situation that's gonna go downhill fast.
  
• Invaders of Gor - Earth takes on the Kurii, Priest Kings, and alternative (and highly non-PC) human cultures of John Norman's Counter-Earth as described in his Gor series of novels (I think he's up to #30, God help us all). You may laugh, but seriously, this could be rather interesting. The non-human Kurii have this habit of kidnapping humans from Earth and transplanting them to Counter-Earth, so there could be a nice X-Files vibe to this.
  
  I once wrote up a short teaser on the concept (which reads rather like a mashup of Gor with Vinge's Marooned In Realtime); I may wake up in the morning regretting this, but here it is:
  

  Jessica Qin was born in 1960AD on Earth in a small town in a province called Illinois, located in the United States of America.
  
  Advances in medical technology -- especially the Big Breakthrough in the mid-21st century -- have kept her youthful and fit. Despite what you may think of her appearance, in 23rd century America, she blends in with the crowd. But in 2235AD, bored with life, she opted for a century-long solo mission to the star Wolf 359, 7.7 light years away.
  
  Arriving in the Wolf system 47 years later, Qin emerged from stasis to find herself under fire by unknown entities. With 80% of her defense capability down and drive severely compromised, she found herself free-falling on a tight hyperbolic path around an object that appeared to be a Tipler Cylinder. With no drive capacity, she had no choice but to bobble herself and her remaining resources into stasis and go for a ride.
  
  Emerging from stasis, Qin found herself with good news and bad news: the good news was that she was on the fringes of Sol system's Oort cloud, rich in raw materials and just half a light year from Earth. The bad news was that the open time-like curve she'd traveled had displaced her 277 years into the past, back to 2005AD.
  
  After her ship self-repaired, she headed back to the inner system, where she was amazed to find Counter-Earth, which at first glance seemed an ideal place to stay completely out of the light-cone of Earth for the next 277 years.
  
  Then she became acquainted with the local customs and the political situation.
  
  Shocked and appalled by what she saw, she thought long and hard and concluded that her most fruitful course of action would be to align herself with the Priest-Kings in their war against the Others, repairing and in some cases augmenting their decaying technology -- Ship engineering AI de-briefs on recovered Priest-King technologies invariably included terms like "idiosyncratic", "baroque", and "paper-clips and silly-putty" -- in return for concessions that would soften the harsher aspects of Gorean human culture.
  
  By necessity feared more than she is loved by humans and aliens alike, she is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. And yet unswervingly faithful to those few she considers her true friends. She has an unpopular cause but near-infinite time and resources to devote to it.
  
  And Jessica Qin is an extremely patient woman . . .

  
  The scary and difficult thing about writing this would be the necessity of having to ingest (and take notes on!) the 30 volumes of "reference" material in the existing Gor novels. I once inadvisably read all 6 volumes of Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant over the course of a weekend and made myself sick. 30 volumes of purple-prose propaganda urging women to accept their place as loving slave to their Master ... that might kill me.
  

So there you have it. I notice that these all involve some kind of war. So be it -- most interesting narrative involves some kind of conflict, and war is about as big and in-yer-face as conflict gets. There's also a pronounced "what if God and Superman got into a fight?" flavor to the last three -- but That's Entertainment.

Holiday Movie Wrap-Up

For some reason I've seen a lot of new movies these past few weeks. Some capsule reviews:

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - It seems as if each successive Harry Potter movie is darker than the last. I expect that for Deathly Hallows Part 2 they'll finally push the saturation knob all the way down to 0 and it'll effectively be an audiobook that you listen to in the dark. Aside from that -- frankly, this was the most boring, angsty Harry Potter movie I've seen so far. I think that breaking the final book of the series up into "Part 1" and "Part 2" is a rather obvious effort on the part of the studio to extract every last possible penny from our pockets. Also -- I'd strongly advise not seeing this unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the rest of the books. My family made the mistake of taking my father to see this while he was visiting, and he didn't know what the hell was going on (and I was a bit fuzzy on some of the plot details myself).
  
• Night of the Demons - Any movie that uses Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting as the background soundtrack to scenes of New Orleans debauchery automatically gets a +1 from me. But the rest of this movie was just pointless. It failed at least half of the rules Mark Twain laid out in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, primarily the one that mandates that the reader / viewer care whether the characters live or die.
  
• TRON: Legacy - An expensive disappointment. And by "expensive", I mean I dropped $56 to take the family to see this in "Real3D DX" and it really wasn't very good. Frankly, it was like watching the original TRON re-rendered at 8x the resolution with .25x the plot. The Daft Punk soundtrack (and their brief cameos) were the real standouts. Visually, it looked like a Syd Mead wet-dream -- but somehow it still managed to be trite and forgettable.
  
• Predators - As with Night of the Demons above, this was pretty much pointless from the beginning and totally lacking in sympathetic characters. There's a "surprising plot twist" near the end that I'm sure anyone with an IQ over 100 figured out 15 minutes in. There's one cool part where this Yakuza guy takes on a Predator with a samurai sword, but beyond that, there's pretty much nothing of interest here. Disappointing. I sure hope Machette is better than this.
  
• Get Him to the Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall - I really enjoyed these movies (perhaps because I had low expectations). Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a pretty basic "boy loses girl" plot but I found myself actually liking the characters, and I enjoyed the quirky humor (for instance, Sarah is the star of the television show "Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime"). Also, I cannot lie, it was also nice to see Kristen Bell wearing a lot less than she ever wore on Veronica Mars. Get Him to the Greek is something of a spin-off, based loosely on My Favorite Year with Russell Brand's unflappable, burnt-out rock star "Aldous Snow" playing the part of Peter O'Toole's "Alan Swann" -- but with a lot more sex and drugs. Again, a lot of quirky humor (and a fun little cameo from Metallica's Lars Ulrich) and likeable characters. But beware: you don't wanna watch either of these movies with the kids.
  
• The Ring - Again, I'm one of the last people in the world to see this. And I know a lot of people think this was just an awesome horror film. But it left me with a big "meh".
  
• Scott Pilgrim vs The World - One of -- maybe the best -- movie I've seen this holiday season. And, oddly enough, my teenage kids enjoyed it too, and I had fun watching it with them. My only criticism is that they could have trimmed 15 minutes. But don't let that put you off of seeing this gem. I've seen a lot of movies that are based on comics--errr "graphic novels"-- but this is the only movie I've ever seen that managed to successfully pull off "graphic novel look-and-feel" in a manner that was fresh and original throughout the entire film. A fast-paced movie that's fun and sweet at the same time.
  
• The Box - I'd read the short story and also seen the Twilight Zone version. The movie succeeded in taking a simple concept and making it, well, sorta stupid. It's the kind of movie where you get hooked watching it, trying to figure out WTF is happening -- and then at the end, it's like "oh". Visually, I'll give the movie points for capturing a genuine 1976 look-and-feel, and some scenes were a very effective homage to the whole 1950's Cold War / Bodysnatchers kind of alien paranoia (I assume this was on purpose).
  

So I guess I'm kinda hard to please. I could go on -- I've been working my way through a number of lists of "most disturbing films ever made" (which probably deserves a post of its own -- I'm finding myself surprisingly un-disturbable)(although Martyrs certainly left an impression) and also watching some mindless-but-fun action movies (2 Fast 2 Furious, District B13, the Transporter movies and some horror classics like Final Destination and Hellraiser).

That said, I watched a few trailers last night for upcoming 2011 features that look somewhat interesting:

• Limitless
  
• SuckerPunch
  
• Battle Los Angeles
  
• The Tree of Life
  
• Vanishing on 7th Street
  

Guns! Guns! Guns!

So you want to know what kind of gun Wayne Newton used in The Adventures of Ford Fairlain? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the astoundingly comprehensive Internet Movie Firearms Database.

Inception

I was probably the only person in America who hadn't seen Inception, but Amazon delivered the modestly-priced "triple pack" (includes blu-ray, regular DVD, and "downloadable digital" versions) yesterday and so I figured It Was Time.

All-in-all, it's a pretty kick-ass movie. One that begs to be played *loud*, too: the soundtrack is quite a lot of what makes it all work, and Hans Zimmer, the composer, borrowed freely from Holst's Saturn and Don Davis's Matrix soundtrack for lots of those big, in-yer-face "brass explosions" and the result is pretty awesome.

Surprisingly, when I looked around for critiques and reviews of the movie, I was rather surprised that most people -- even people who professed to like the movie a lot -- seemed to find Inception a rather shallow piece of work. Which left me scratching my head; when the Matrix movies came out, there were all kinds of deep, philosophical discussions about the nature of reality, I remember someone put together an annotated transcript of the dialogue between Neo and The Architect in Matrix Reloaded, references were made to Plato's The Cave, etc. Some really deep shit.

I've been a big Philip K Dick fan for decades, so having characters moving willy-nilly between realities, sometimes losing track of what's really "real", is something I'm pretty comfortable with. And while the Matrix films had some awesome action / fighting sequences, Inception beats Matrix hands-down for plot and consistent world-building. So I was kinda surprised to see people talking about how Inception was really a metaphor for movie-making (say what!?). Personally I think there's rather a lot more there that Matrix-meets-Sunset-Blvd.

There appears to be some disagreement on what really happened at the end: some people seem to think it was all wrapped up neatly, with Dom Cobb returning to reality and they all lived happily ever-after. I've only seen the movie once, but I'm of the opinion (and I find it just generally more attractive to think) that it's more complex than that. Dom claimed that he knew inception was possible because he'd done it to his wife Mal when they were trapped in Limbo, persuading her that they weren't living in reality. Well -- what if Mal implanted a memory in Dom to convince him that they were living in reality? In other words: maybe Mal was right?

I know the totem is supposed to indicate whether or not one is currently in reality -- but the totem concept was Mal's idea, and Dom even uses Mal's totem after her death. I don't think it's impossible to wonder if totems -- or, at least, Dom's totem -- aren't as reliable an indicator as they're made out to be.

Ah well. Everyone's got an opinion, and mine isn't set in stone. But I guess I'm just not a fan of movies that wrap up too neatly at the end. I prefer a little ambiguity or subtlety in my narratives, where I have to apply some thought to "what it all means" versus being hit over the head with "the answers".

Neat iPad / Stanza / epub feature

If you install the free Stanza e-reader app, and then someone emails you a book in epub format as an attachment, touch and hold the icon until the attachment is fully loaded -- you'll then see a prompt asking if you want to open the book in Stanza. Indicate in the affirmative and happy reading! (depending on the apps you have installed, you may be prompted with several choices of apps to "open" the book -- I had GoodReader as one of my choices, and it seemed like it tried to open the book as a PDF. FAIL. So make sure you choose Stanza to open an epub book). Oh, and yes, you can delete the email after you open the book in Stanza -- Stanza saves it in its Downloads area. I've only tried this with non-DRMed epub; it may work with MOBI or other formats but I don't know. Anyhow, this is a nice trick for loading a book onto someone's iPad without going through iTunes.

My Home Video Odyssey

originally published 15 November 2010

 
So I've had this dream for quite awhile of having a totally digital home theatre system with no moving parts. I'm happy to say that I made a significant step towards that goal this weekend -- I set up an audio / video "tank" -- think of it as a "digital jukebox" -- that holds all of my family's music, pictures, and videos, including about 350 (legally) ripped DVDs. All accessible via remote control on our television / home theatre system (and, also, on our iPhones, iPads, and computers).

If you're curious, here are the results of the research I did this weekend, and what I finally settled on:

First off, I had a few loosely-defined requirements:

• It needs an on / off switch or extremely low power sleep mode when not in use. You'd think this is a no-brainer but the early Apple TV units were powered on 24 / 7 / 365 and supposedly got quite hot and weren't power-efficient.
• Also -- instant-on or a very short power-on / boot time.
• 1080p support.
• No dedicated computer required. I don't want to boot a computer just to watch a movie, nor do I want to leave a computer running all the time.
• Wide format support, including mp4 / m4v (which is how most of my video assets are formatted).
• DLNA support (so it'll play content directly off of a NAS).
• "Nice" UI, preferably based on something open source like Boxee or XBMC. Ie, I want something that wasn't just hacked together.
• HDMI output -- I think this is the only thing that was available on everything I looked at.
• Support for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and any other 'net-based content delivery.
• NAS functionality, so we don't have to pass USB drives around to share content.

All that in mind, I hit Google hard and pretty quickly came up with the Major Players in this area. The following list of devices, pros and cons is not at all comprehensive, it's primarily the features or problems that stuck out enough that I remember them from Saturday:

• Apple TV -
  Pros: the latest 4th gen version is low-power, and the device seems fairly reliable. This last is a not-insignificant feature considering all of the reliability complaints I saw about the other devices. Neat iPhone / iPad controller apps. Neat picture / slideshow features.
  Cons: it really doesn't do what I want it to do -- it seems to be mostly oriented towards allowing one to rent movies and television shows from the iTunes store. The latest version won't take an add-on external storage device, and while there's an external storage hack for older versions, it's apparently like a roach hotel for videos: they go in, but they can't come out (ie, no NAS functionality). Finally, and surprisingly: it's only 720p.
  (I also considered buying a Mac Mini and running something like Boxee software on it -- but the Mini is kinda pricey ($700US) and for that kinda money, it should read blu-ray discs. But it doesn't)
• Google TV -
  Pros: 1080p and it's got Netflix and a variety of other media sources. Also, it lets you browse the web while you watch television, neat iPhone / iPad controller.
  Cons: so many it almost makes me cry: it's expensive ($299 and up), saw many many complaints about reliability and failures, some odd android fluke allows you to connect an external drive of up to 869GB (?), formatted as FAT32 (?!), many complaints about how the browser was painful to use, and the "remote control" is a full-sized keyboard (although you can buy an extra tiny keyboard controller for $130 or go with Sony's implementation which starts at $400), television networks seem to be lining up to block Google TV (FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and SyFy block it). Basically, at this point Google TV is pretty much a new "improved" implementation of WebTV from 1996.
• Roku -
  Pros: cheap ($99), supports Netflix and a variety of other sources (Hulu "coming soon"), lots of built-in codecs, neat iPhone / iPad controller app.
  Cons: reliability issues, they recently stopped supporting PlayOn (an interesting content source that I may subscribe to in the future), I couldn't tell if the thing would function as a NAS or not. No DLNA support, so I'll need to buy a couple of terabytes of storage ($200) just for videos and I may or may not be able to use it as a NAS device.
• WD TV -
  Pros: cheap ($99), NAS capability (sorta), Netflix support.
  Cons: can't connect to Windows 7 as NAS device (my wife's computer runs Win7), reliability issues, there's an iPhone / iPad app controller but it's not very good, I'll still need to buy a couple of terabytes of storage ($200).
• Boxee -
  Pros: nice GUI (maybe - there were mixed opinions on this), Netflix and Hulu "coming soon" (but they still claim lots and lots of sources of media content), nice iPhone / iPad controller app.
  Cons: kind've expensive ($199 plus the cost of 2TB of extra storage), long-ish power-on time, reliability issues (and I haven't had good experiences with D-Link products in the past). No NAS support (I think).
• Popcorn Hour C-200 -
  Pros: lots of keen features.
  Cons: expensive ($299 plus cost of extra 2TB of disk), notso hotso iPhone / iPad remote. Many, many, many complaints about reliability and support. Not sure about NAS capability.

So those are "big names" in this field. There are a number of lesser-known players out there and I suppose it's possible that I overlooked a device that would have been absolutely perfect. But I tend to think that if something truly awesome was out there, I would have encountered numerous mentions of it while I was researching these others.

To summarize: nothing I looked at did everything I wanted. Apple TV and Google TV just weren't what I wanted at all -- Google TV was especially disappointing. The Popcorn Hour box has great specs but there were many comments from buyers who had significant problems, I kinda got the feeling that they promised more than they really delivered. Similarly, the Roku, WD TV, and Boxee weren't quite "there". My overall impression is that there's currently quite a lot of churn in this market and it's going to take time for everything to settle down to where this technology is commoditized and reliable like, say, a CDROM drive.

And so ... I basically consigned myself to waiting 6 months or so and then surveying the field again. Although I decided that now would not be a bad time to "prepare the way" by buying a NAS device. And during the course of researching NAS I learned more about DLNA, and how well it works with the XBox 360 -- which is the device my family already uses to access Netflix.

Woot!

And so I hustled down to my local Fry's and bought a Western Digital MyBook Live NAS device, which includes a very nice little DLNA media server called TwonkyServer.

It works like a dream.

And I have objective evidence for this: my wife and kids actually love it and use it (which is sadly not true of every high-tech gadget I've set up at home). There's currently no iPhone / iPad controller for the XBox -- but my wife's Harmony universal remote works great with XBox, and the XBox controllers themselves aren't bad.

I've got all of our videos, mp3s and pictures up on the NAS, and they're all accessible via the XBox 360's (arguably somewhat eccentric) UI. It's one of those things you have to experience to really get "teh awesome" of it.

It actually works better than I had hoped, because DLNA / Twonky allows us to stream videos onto our iPads -- there are several for-pay apps and one free one called MLPlayer Lite. And the XBox controllers themselves aren't bad -- they're RF, not IR, so I don't have to aim it.

So ... I'm almost there. I still have some moving parts, most notably the NAS disk drives. I'm not sure how long it'll be before SSDs are down to about $100 / terabyte, but it's probably just a matter of time. I'll probably never really get it down to no moving parts: switches and speakers will be with us always, I think, and also it's going to take quite awhile before the media industry switches from rotating disks to tiny cheap SSDs and / or totally network-based distribution of content. But this was a pretty significant step forwards.

NEXT: (I do not know when this will happen) will be the integration of some kind of recording ability into the setup, so that I can record and timeshift television shows onto the NAS and bypass the (rather unfriendly) DISH Network PVR. But that's a big topic and I'm not going to go into even my preliminary thoughts here.

Pad People

originally published 4 April 2010

So ... Mr. UPS showed up with the iPad at 11am on Saturday. I'd pre-ordered the 32GB Wifi version for my wife's birthday.

By 1pm I'm on the phone to the local Apple store: "So, if I came down there and wanted to buy an iPad, would you have one to sell me?" The person on the other end was somewhat amused: "there's a line, but probably so."

Long story short, I got a couple of the 16GB units for my kids and a 32GB unit for me. This took a certain amount of dedication on my part, as they had a "2 units per person" policy, and so I had to stand in line twice.

By now you're thinking "he's gone insane"[1] and / or "this guy obviously has too much disposable income"[2]. But you'd be justified in asking why I would do such a thing. And don't be mistaken: I'm not an Apple Fanboi by any means. Not since that PoS Apple ][e+ I bought when I was 19.

I think the watershed moment for me was when my wife used the iBooks store to download the (free) Complete Works of Shakespeare. She flipped to "Hamlet" (act III, scene 1) and held her finger over the word "bodkin" and a popup window gave her the dictionary definition[3]. It's not 100% -- it failed on "hurleyburleys" (although it offered Google and Wikipedia lookups). Shakespeare really doesn't get easier than this.[4] The iPad has the potential to be an educational device like something out of a science fiction novel (see below). My daughter picked up Gray's Anatomy, in color, for $0.99.

Also, I knew there'd never be any peace in the household until everyone had their own unit.

Oh, it's not perfect:

It doesn't charge while it's plugged into my notebook computer's USB port. And (like the iPhone) you really need a case of some sort to make it easier to hold on to. I think it was the C|Net review that noted that it's about the size and weight of a book -- but when the book costs $700 and is made of glass, you treat it a lot differently than a traditional book. And I miss being able to mount the device as an external filesystem like I can with my iPhone and iPod. And of course everyone is waiting for v2.0 that will have a camera so we can all (theoretically) videoconference with it. Oh, and if there is a Razzie Award for bad software UI design, iTunes wins hands-down.

But it's still pretty darned good. Comparing the iPad to the Amazon Kindle or the B&N Nook reminds me of the early days of the web, when there were many hard-line HTML experts who held that "HTML is a formatting language for displaying text and images on an arbitrary viewer", who would dismiss anyone who wanted to actually attempt to control the look / layout of the page. The Kindle is great for displaying books, sure. But the iPad let's you redefine the cncept of "book" to be something different and better. For instance, take a look at The Elements for iPad (an app which has been getting a lot of PR).

"This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library," creator Theo Gray told BoingBoing. "Everything in it is alive in some way." Or, if you're a Neal Stephenson fan, it's like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.

No, most iPad books aren't this elaborate. Yet. But I can see an entire new "magic books" industry forming, dedicated to writing and programming "books plus" for this platform.

I suppose time will tell, but so far, battery life has not been an issue.

I'm also excited by the musical possibilities of this device. Create Digital Music has a really wonderful overview of some of the available and upcoming music apps. And I've got my fingers crossed that the JazzMutant people will adopt iPad as a platform.

I could go on and on -- all of the free news and media apps. NetFlix streaming. Cisco has a (free, as yet untested by me) WebEx app for the iPad, too. You've heard it all before.

Late breaking news: Apple iPad Already Jailbroken

But having played with one for the past 24 hours, I feel I can safely say: this thing rocks.

---

[1] My family thinks I'm reasonably sane. YMMV.
[2] None of your business.
[3] A needle, more or less.
[4] It strikes me that Scientologists (who I'm told are big on knowing the exact definition of every word they read) are gonna love the iPad. I bet it won't be long before Dianetics and Battlefield Earth appear in the iBook store.