My Experience With Fox's Digital Copy

I bought Family Guy Presents Blue Harvest. It's a pretty funny movisode (I can't quite call it a movie since it's only 48 minutes, but it's not really an episode either). Either way, it's a pretty good waste of $15 and 48 minutes of your time. The interesting thing about it is that the package includes two discs. One contains the DVD that plays in your standard player. The second disc contains a digital copy of the movie for you to rip onto your computer (and watch on the tiny ass screen of your choice). This is cool if you ask me, although packaging a separate disc seems clunky for some reason - a free digital download would be better.

Anyway, when you put the digital copy disc in your computer (I use a PC running Windows XP) a prompt appears asking you how you want to use the copy, which translates to Windows Media Player or iTunes. I chose Windows Media Player since I don't use iTunes all that much (I have some issues with it....and yeah, I have bigger issues with WMP....). After making my selection, I was greeted with an error without explanation stating that I could not transfer the media. I tried a few more times and got the same result so I decided to try iTunes....worked fine.

This brings me to two gripes, one fairly small and one much bigger.

1. How can a piece of Apple software do this better on my Windows machine? It's going to become more apparent how bad Microsoft has dropped the ball on digital media when things like this keep happening. Microsoft wants me to rip/organize digital media using WMP, but they want me to buy/manage other digital media using Zune Marektplace/Xbox 360 (these accounts are tied). How is all this DRM going to be handled/tied together and managed in one place across one account? And the process has to work without error first.
   
2. Are we really going to have to go through the same long process with video DRM that we did with digital music? It took years for the record companies to give in and distribute files without DRM and I believe the only reason they did so was because they realized they could make more money. If I wanted to steal this movie, I could have. Including the digital copy of the movie with the purchase is not going to stop people from getting it for free. So now people are left with a single DRMed copy of their movie that may or may not work the way they want it to. And the digital copy isn't free - it's just added into the cost of the package just like the included fee that we already pay to cover for people stealing the thing.
   

End gripes.

Blue Harvest is pretty good if you like Family Guy and Star Wars. The best moments are the subtle jokes that poke fun at some absurd moments in the Star Wars film. A better alternative for digital copies can be found here.

You Suck At Photoshop

This is a series of hilarious Photoshop tutorials that will at least make you laugh if you don't learn anything. Actually, the tutorials are not that bad despite having a lack of detailed explanations of commands and menus. The tutorials are pretty good for beginners but better for moderate users because of this, and because the funniest jokes are really just inside Photoshop geek humor ("I saw you do tha....you we....you went for the eraser tool, we're gonna erase the background off."). Is it just me or does the guy's voice sound like Will Farrell's?

Phone Books

My recycling was probably 25% phonebooks this week.  I think we've reached a point where phonebooks should be a paid for item (outside of taxes).  Nothing outrageous, maybe 25 cents, 50 cents, a dollar, anything to make people think about getting them - The same way that some grocery stores are now charging a small fee for bags.  With the internet tubes, GPS, 411 (free 411 at that), do we really need to produce giant, heavy books that have to updated and reprinted every year.  The phonebook might be as antiquated as the broom.

TV Firmware Upgrade. TV?

I just upgraded the firmware on my television.  I have a Samsung plasma HP-T4264 (great television by the way) and it has a known issue that I have been too lazy to fix until tonight where the audio cuts out occasionally when connected via HDMI.  The issue is easily fixed through a firmware upgrade, which I thought would be a pretty long, painful process since I would have to call customer service to obtain said firmware through email.  I just completed the upgrade and it couldn't have been easier.  This whole process took about ten minutes.  

• Get television customer service number off Samsung website and call.
• Give them my information and explain my problem.
• Samsung tells me I need a firmware upgrade (which I already know from reading about my TV's problem a long time ago).
• Samsung emails me said firmware upgrade.
• Put said firmware onto USB thumb drive.
• Power on television and put thumb drive into slot (while praying I don't have a power outage).
• Navigate through menus to perform firmware upgrade-hit "yes" button.
• TV power cycles.
• Done.

Easy enough.  Does TV look better now as well or is this just my mind playing tricks on me?

Some Podcast Favorites

I've been up all night working with only my podcasts to keep me company. Here's a list of some of my favorites divided by category.

Technology

• This Week In Tech
  


• Diggnation (sort of tech I suppose)


• Buzz Out Loud

Sports

• The Dan Patrick Show


• Pardon The Interruption

Other

• This American Life

Give them a listen. Enjoy. This one is just in time. :-)

Macworld 2008 Predictions

I'm going to pile on to the rumors and predictions (like every other blogger) for the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo happening January 14-18.  Here are my predictions guaranteed to go wrong.

• Apple will NOT release a sub-compact notebook or tablet.  I consider a sub-compact notebook to be one smaller than 11", maybe even 10" (has to be small to be considered a sub-compact, especially after playing with Asus' eeePC, which is really cool if you haven't seen one yet).  
• They WILL release updated 13" Macbooks with aluminum shells in silver and black just like the iPod Classics.  These will pretty similar to the current Macbooks, but might have SSDs and probably will have external optical drives.  I think they will have the same white keys on the keyboard just like the current Apple keyboards that come with the iMacs and Mac Pros.  They will probably have LED back lit screens too.  These will replace the current Macbook lineup.
• iPhone will get updates with an SDK and 16GB of storage along with other fixes that should have been there in the first place that Apple will sell as new miracles  (ehem, cut and paste).
• iTunes movie rentals, which at this point isn't even really a prediction.
• I'll say that they won't update the Apple monitors at all.  They've needed updates/refreshes for a couple years now and they are still the exact same.  Why now?
• Some kind of big deal with Google.  I'm not sure what this is going to be, but I'm thinking they do something with Google soon involving data storage/delivery.
• Some other little updates/speed bumps to the current lineup of products.  Maybe some kind of revision to Apple TV to make the thing somewhat relevant. 
  

Chunnel 2.0

In 2099 you could live in New York and work in London....or maybe eat dinner in London and have dessert in New York. Well, maybe....with 13 trillion dollars and 100 years of labor.....five miles under the Atlantic Ocean's surface. This is a really cool series of videos courtesy of the Discovery Channel and stolen by YouTube that show how this could be possible. If you've got some free time (and like that Extreme Engineering show), I highly recommend them. Make sure to watch the other parts that it is broken into. Enjoy.

Engadget Slowness

Ever since Engadget redesigned their site a while ago, it's been really slow on my notebook. I don't visit the site much because I have their feed loaded in my RSS reader, but I occasionally will visit the site to read/post comments. The new site takes a really long time to load (mostly the ads, the text loads at fairly normal speed) and once the page is loaded, my browser has a hard time scrolling down the page smoothly (the scrolling lags and is extremely choppy).

Engadget recently said that they have tweaked the site to make it faster (just in time for CES overload), but I haven't noticed any improvement. I thought the problem was probably due to the aging technology inside my CPU. I regularly use Firefox but will occasionally use Internet Explorer if I have to or if I want to test something, etc. For some reason, IE does much better with the Engadget site on my laptop. The pages load faster, the ads are displayed quicker and the page scrolls smoothly. I've started to notice this with a few other sites since (IE displays them faster). I have no idea why and I don't want to use IE regularly, although it's not as bad as it used to be. Any ideas why Firefox sucks on some sites? They need to fix this before V3 (in addition to the obscene amount of memory that it hogs).