Newstocks

More Olympics bitching

I'd like to add my voice to those locals who have been bitching about the quality of the Olympic coverage available in Bermuda.

My particular grouse is our inability to get any high definition coverage. All NBC coverage is being offered in HD in the US. So why not here?

I got a random tele-marketing call from someone at Cablevision a couple of weeks ago asking if I was interested in subscribing to their HD tier. They didn't ask if I had an HD TV, and when I told them "no" they didn't ask why, the fools. (Ditto for the call I got from them asking if I was interested in their broadband service, but that's another post.)

I should be one of the people who are snapping up their HD service. I do have an HD TV and would be willing to fork out the cash for decent HD content. The reason I told them "no", however, is that their content still sucks. Fox is the only one of their meagre selection of HD channels that we might actually want to watch. Had they offered the Olympics in HD, however, we would have signed up in a flash.

Now according to Tryangle, ZBM have exclusive rights to broadcasting the Olympics in Bermuda through their membership in the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC). Presumably this explains why much of the coverage has been Caribbean. However my wife assures me that there's been plenty of NBC coverage on channel 9 too (possibly to fill in gaps in the CMC coverage?).

So even if the CMC isn't available in HD, we could have been offered the NBC stuff that way. Did ZBM or Cablevision even try to make this happen? I don't know, but a golden opportunity for Cablevision to boost uptake of their service, and to drive HD adoption in Bermuda, has been lost.

Doctor Who finale

If you're watching Doctor Who, but haven't yet seen the season finale that aired in the UK this Saturday, stop reading now. Major spoilers ahead.

Seriously. Last chance.

OK, well, despite being set up nicely by the previous episode, Turn Left (one of the highlights of the season), the double-parter that closed the season was a huge disappointment with a heavy emphasis on style rather than substance.

The narrative was largely incoherent and mired in technobabble (tell me again how the Doctor suddenly cobbled together than gun that was going to kill all the daleks? or why we suddenly had two Doctors running around?). There were too many characters to follow (at times it felt like a "Greatest Hits" of the characters from previous Doctor Whos), resulting in minimal screen time for each. In particular, the Doctor himself seemed almost irrelevant in the first episode. And while I was overjoyed that the Doctor didn't regenerate into someone new (I think David Tennant is one of the best Doctors there has been, beating my previous favourites, Tom Baker and Peter Davidson), I couldn't help feeling a bit cheated by the mechanic they used to explain why he didn't.

It wasn't all bad, I suppose. Davros was excellent (kudos to the BBC's makeup department), and Dalek Caan was delightfully unhinged. And best of all, they finally got rid of Donna Noble, surely the most annoying companion the Doctor has ever had. But overall it felt bombastic, chaotic and rushed.

Yawn

Battlestar Galactica is becoming self-absorbed and dull.

Still catching up on the last few week's episodes, last night we watched this season's fifth episode, "The Road Less Travelled". Despite this being the show's final season, it was another episode in which not much happened.

I'm tired of Kara Thrace and her crazy, wall-painting antics. I'm tired of Gaius Baltar and his incomprehensible religious gibberish (given his role on New Caprica I struggle to understand why anyone sees him as messianic). Can we move on already?

I used to look forward to every new episode of this show, even during the somewhat uneven third season. Now, not so much. Needless to say, Mandy is having even more trouble staying interested than I am.

Please God don't let this be another X-Files that starts with a bang but ends with a whimper.

Overload

I have too many things on my to-do lists right now. It's partly due to my parents' recent visit, but mainly due to me (as usual) trying to do too much.

Games to be played include, on the PC, Puzzle Quest (which I'm still obsessive-compulsively working my way through) and Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. At my prompting, my dad has also downloaded the excellent (and free) Trackmania Nations Forever, so I want to spend some time racing him too, if the latency isn't too bad. On the PS3 I still have GTA IV, Ratchet and Clank, and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, plus a shed-load of demos that I haven't looked at or want to play more of, including GRiD and DiRT. I'm really enjoying the PS3's driving games and want to find some more time to play them so I can justify shelling out for a Logitech G25 wheel.

Podcasts to be listened to include the last week of the Radio 4 Today program, the last five months of In Our Time, the last couple of News Quizes, and a bunch PC Gamer podcasts (which are just as entertaining as the magazine itself). The only time I get to listen is when I'm in the car or on the bus or, in the case of the lengthier, more cerebral In Our Times, when I'm ironing. I think I'm going to have to do a lot more ironing if I ever want to catch up.

Books to be read include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (still only about a quarter of the way through, still quite enjoying it), after which I have Iain (M.) Banks' latest sci-fi novel Matter lined up. Reading only gets done when I'm on the bus to or from work and not listening to any podcasts, so the two of them will probably last me the rest of the year.

TV shows to be caught up on include the all of the current season of Doctor Who, the last two weeks of Battlestar Galactica, the final four episodes of Pushing Daisies (which my parents put me onto), and most of the first seasons of Dexter and The Riches (downloaded the first episodes from iTunes several weeks ago and haven't had chance to watch any more since). That's in between watching new episodes of Lost and old episodes of the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Ah well, at least Survivor has finished now.

And let's not mention the couple of videos that I still need to make time to edit into something watchable.

I suppose I should find some time to spend with my wife and son too.

Too. Damn. Much. To. Do.

Morons

NBC are saying that Apple must do more to address piracy before it will start selling its content on iTunes again. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy," said NBC chief digital officer George Kliavkoff. In particular, they don't want their content to be playable on iPods.

Idiots. I am currently torrenting episodes of NBC's Battlestar Galactica precisely because I cannot buy them on iTunes, or anywhere else. I can't access them on Hulu (for free), because my IP address is outside the US, but then Hulu wouldn't let me watch them on my TV anyway.

I'd wager that most pirated copies of NBC shows come from TV rips, not copies on iPods purchased from the iTunes store. The quality of rips is higher (if you're ripping an HD channel) and it costs nothing. Boycotting Apple is therefore unlikely to be doing anything to reduce NBC's losses from piracy. If anything, it's probably making them worse.

How can they be so stupid?

Group my items into as many shipments as possible

When I order stuff from Amazon.com and send it to my ZipX account, I always say "Group my items into as few shipments as possible". That's because ZipX charge a flat rate of $22.25 for every package (plus duty and additional shipping), so getting multiple shipments gets expensive quickly.

So I when I ordered seasons 1 and 3 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" from Amazon this week, I was careful to check they were both shipping from the same supplier. They were, and my email confirmation also stated, "order will arrive in 1 shipment".

So naturally I was overjoyed when Amazon then told me they were going to send them as two packages anyway. High fives all round.

I rushed to the website to try to cancel part of the order, but it just laughed in my face and told me they were already being prepared for shipment and it was too late to do anything now.

The really bullshit thing about the whole deal is that the shipping confirmation email for the first package said they were shipping this part of my order separately "to give you quicker service". The second shipping confirmation arrived 90 minutes later. Both packages arrived at ZipX at the same time.

I've emailed Amazon to complain, and suggest that perhaps they should warn customers before splitting orders into multiple shipments when "as few shipments as possible" has been specified. I'm not holding my breath, though.

To PS3 or not to PS3?

Against my better judgement, I've again found myself thinking about buying a PS3.

Pros:

• It's the only BD-Live Blu-ray player currently available.
• It can play back DivX- and XviD-encoded video. Like torrented Battlestar Galactica, for example.
• Apparently it can play games too. Including some you can't get on the PC (Guitar Hero I'm looking at you). Plus, the prospect of playing games on a big screen is quite enticing.

Cons:

• Price. I'm guessing between $600 and $800 in Bermuda.
• Selection of Blu-ray movies is a bit rubbish right now.
• Hi-def torrents seem to be mostly encoded in X264, which the PS3 can't play (at least, not without a lot of frigging around). And I don't know if the standard def, XviD-encoded ones will look any better than Cablevision.
• Selection of games isn't as good as, say, the Xbox 360. Although as I wouldn't be buying it for the games (and certainly not first-person shooters, which need mouse-look), that's no big deal.
• It's a console. Sellout.

Any console owners out there have any thoughts?

Battlestar Galactica

The first episode of the final season of Battlestar Galactica aired on Friday evening. Alas, as a 4:3 picture letterboxed to widescreen, it looked absolutely awful on my TV.

If I could, I'd buy every episode of the new season on iTunes and watch them on our Apple TV instead. We're already doing that for Lost, rather than watch a 4:3 picture with all sound coming out of one channel (thanks Cablevision). But NBC, in their wisdom, decided to cancel their arrangement with Apple last year, so now you can't get Battlestar Galactica on iTunes anyway. I'd subscribe to Cablevision's HD channels just to get this one show - but SciFi isn't a channel they offer in HD (they do offer Fox, but the rest is just crap, like HGTV and the Food Network). With no legitimate means to get it, I'd BitTorrent without a second thought, except that I have no way to play Xvid-encoded content on my TV.

The only other option I have is to wait until the season comes out on DVD, probably around the end of this year. I'm not sure I have the patience for that, however, and I'd be too worried about coming across spoilers in the interim.

The stupidity of the networks, to provide no way to get what I want, even though I'm willing to pay for it, boggles my mind.

A new TV

Ever since I graduated from university, I've dreamed about owning a big widescreen TV.

For my first few working years I was renting a tiny room in a house, and I had to put up with the owner's choice of TV. It wasn't until I finally moved into my own place in London that I was able to get a widescreen set, but it was only a 32" CRT, and it weighed a ton.

When Mandy and I moved to Bermuda, to my great regret I had to revert to a 4:3 set, as none of the local stores sold widescreen models(the US being somewhat behind Europe in this respect). It wasn't until yesterday that I finally bought myself the widescreen TV of my dreams: a 46" HD Sony KDL-46XBR4.

That model is reckoned to be one of the best LCD HDTV's on the market right now, and so far I've been very pleased with it. Although I don't have any HD content to try on it yet (a Blu-ray player is going to be my next purchase, when M&M can get some back in stock), DVDs and content from the iTunes store look great on it. Even regular cable isn't too bad.

The only gripe I have so far is the set's auto-dimming "feature" - when the screen is mostly black, it dims the backlight (presumably to produce deeper blacks), brightening it when more content appears on screen. In the situations where this is an issue (credits at the end of movies, for example, or the screensaver on the Apple TV), the switch in brightness is noticeable and extremely annoying. Unfortunately, there's no way to directly turn it off - instead, I've had to do so indirectly by turning Game/Text Mode on. This works, but you lose certain other features of the TV, such as noise reduction. I'm still deciding whether the loss of these is worth it or not.

I might also consider signing up for Cablevision's HD service now, despite the relatively limited channel selection, were it not for the fact that I dread dealing with their piss-poor customer service.

One thing I will be doing more of, however, is downloading TV shows from iTunes. Lost, for example, is currently showing on Cablevision on a channel where all the sound comes out of one speaker (and has been for weeks), and the picture quality is a poor 4:3 image. In contrast, not only does the downloaded version have better picture and sound, it's also available in widescreen format. Well worth $1.99 per episode.

Apple TV

Picked up a 40GB Apple TV when I was in Atlanta.

It's a sweet little device, that lets you stream your iTunes audio and video content from your PC to your TV. We often buy episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store (usually when our DVR fails to record them for whatever reason, or we miss the start of a new series), so now we'll be able to watch them on the big screen in the comfort of the living room. It also makes it easy to play all our music on the living room stereo, and even internet radio too. There are a bunch of other nice features too, like the ability to browse photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube directly on the TV, and easy access to movie trailers.

Setting it up hasn't been plain sailing, however. When iTunes tried to sync the first episode of Heroes to the Apple TV, it crashed iTunes and blue-screened the PC. Not good. I had to work around this by disabling automatic synchronisation, and manually excluding Heroes from the list of TV shows to sync. I can live with this, but it's irritating.

The other problem was with Radiohead's In Rainbows. For some reason it synced the album metadata over OK, but when I tried to play any of the tracks on the Apple TV, I got an error message, even though they all played fine in iTunes. While trying to fix the problem, the Apple TV back-synced the album to iTunes, rendering the album unplayable there too. So I deleted it from iTunes and plugged my iPod in, expecting it to copy the album back into iTunes from the iPod. Instead it just deleted the content from the iPod. That was when I discovered I didn't have a backup of the album anywhere. In the end I had to download a new copy of the album from BitTorrent, import that into iTunes, then resync the Apple TV and my iPod.

The other issue is that video content doesn't play back properly on our 4:3 TV (it gets stretched vertically to fill the screen). I knew this would probably be a problem when I bought the Apple TV, however. The solution? A trip to M&M tomorrow morning to buy a large, flat-panel widescreen HDTV. I've been looking for an excuse to buy such a beast for a while, and I'm happy that the Apple TV has furnished me with one!

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Just watched the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I wasn't going to bother with this series, pegging it as a lame attempt to squeeze some extra cash out of the Terminator franchise. However, some positive reviews persuaded me to give it a go.

Overall, it was fine. But I couldn't help feeling that we'd seen it all before. The "come with me if you want to live line" made me laugh, but it felt like the show was trying a little too hard to be self-referential.

I'll give the series a bit longer, but I really hope that the writers take it in some fresh directions. The Terminator movies were enjoyable (I even enjoyed T3), but that doesn't mean turning them into a TV series is a good idea. George Lucas, are you listening?

Have I Got News For You

One of the things that I miss most about the UK is the TV show Have I Got News For You.

So why oh why oh why don't the BBC make every episode available for download online? I'd probably be willing to pay $5 per episode, I enjoy the show that much.

In fact, why don't the BBC make all of their shows available online for a small fee? How hard could it be?

Lost

Just watched the first episode of the new season of Lost.

Season three ended with several very strong episodes, and I'm hoping that season four will keep up the quality. If the first episode was anything to go by, it will. I was a bit concerned when I first heard that Lost will have two more seasons after this, as I didn't think the story was deep enough to keep going for that long. But now I'm beginning to think that maybe they can pull it off without it seeming like they're dragging it out.

My only concern is the effect that the Writers' Guild of America strike is going to have on the show. There were supposed to be sixteen episodes this season, but because of the strike, only eight will air. I'm not clear whether they will now comprise the whole season, or whether the remaining episodes will be filmed and aired later. The writers' strike destroyed the second series of Heroes (although to be honest, I don't think it would have been very good even if it had had its full complement of episodes), and I'm hoping the same fate won't befall Lost.

Doctor Who

Over the last couple of months, Mandy and I have been working our way through the first three seasons of the “new” Doctor Who (those that started airing in 2005).

It’s a show I remember watching (and being terrified by) as a kid, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the revamped series. Doctor Who was always a bit campy, and even though I’d heard that the special effects in the new series were considerably better than those of old, I wondered if it could possibly stand up to the gritty realism of modern sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Although still served with generous quantities of cheese and some aliens that still look like guys dressed in rubber suits (yes, Slitheen, I’m looking at you), there’s much to like too. Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have both made first-class Doctors, their wit and energy making up for the series’ failings. And many of the episodes have exhibited the creepiness that was the hallmark of the original series (the episode “Blink”, which we watched this evening, being one of the best). Even though Doctor Who is meant as a family show, Mandy has already said that she wouldn't let Aidan watch until he's at least 15!

Season 4 is due to start in the Spring. If you haven’t caught any of the previous seasons, I heartily recommend you start catching up now.