Nope

Just a quick geek note- I went to the local Apple store over the weekend and saw the "Apple TV" in action. Pass. This is one of those "close but no cigar" kinds of deals that may be done properly in future revisions, but here's my core beef- no high defininition. Those of you who know me in "real life" know I've been beating this drum for a while, but damnit, Apple said 2006 was to be the "year of HD". Bullshit. The video on an HD screen looks like shit when the source is standard def. I saw The Incredibles at the Apple Store and it was painful how badly the image quality looked on the 30ish inch LCD screen.

I have had an HD telly for almost three years now, and apart from it not having an HDMI interface (DVI for me), it's still of contemporary spec's. We enjoyed the VOOM HD cable service while it lasted, and Dish and DirecTV still have not gotten back to that level of quality and variety. The point is this- Apple is the nearest thing to a corporate champion of HD, and they blew this opportunity.

Here's what I'm waiting for:

#1) The iTunes Store needs to sell movies in HD (yes, I know the bandwidth costs will be big), and you should be able to burn HD DVD's from the downloads (even if in a proprietary format) for archival purposes.

#2) The Apple TV needs to stream HD. And from iTunes as well as QuickTime.

#3) Add a BlueRay or HDDVD drive to the thing with an HDMI pass-through- hell, why shouldn't I be able to consolidate some things? Apple likes to build computers with a minimum of cables and crap, so why are they encouraging a cabling nightmare with this thing?

#4) Make it run cooler. I want to put this in an enclosed space. Radical, huh? Look at the following thermal image from DigitalTrends.com



So, the bottom line is this- we're not "there yet". Hold out for an "Apple TV HD" or rev. B or whatever the hell they want to call it.

Caveat Emptor.

Antenna Crap

Unrelated- General Catz- Your site is now private? Should I unlink?

So I bought an interesting little toy for the compy- a digital TV tuner, the Elgato Hybrid USB. It's a little doobie with a USB plug on one end and a coax fiting at the other. Plug and play, as it were. It works reasonably well and there are no shortage of digital channels in Seattle, although most of them are boring.

So, in Seattle, there is some stupid bullshit with the Fox network. I have Dish Network and they rebroadcast all the local HD channels except Fox, which is in Tacoma. No idea how this came about, but the result of this is that I can't get Fox in HD over the television, and I watch House, 24, and football (and Schmoop is big on the Idol thing). So I'd hoped that I could record stuff to the compy and then burn DVD's to watch on the TV. The only rub? The distance/weakness of signal. I have now one through three alleged HD antennas, and some are pricey. Turns out the $9 one was the best, but it wouldn't tune in Fox from Tacoma. Damn it.

So I have dinked around with this fancy amplified one recently and it was a bust, and as I was considering what to do next, I thought I'd take an old coax cable and strip off one end down to the copper core and see how that would fare.

I farted about and cleared about 2.5' of copper on the end and bent it to a 10" loop and damned if that didn't tune and lock the Fox from Tacoma better than any of the other antennas. And that arbitrary diameter is apparently crucial, and highly directional. If I change the loop size, lights out. If I face the loop away from the transmitter, it's gets blocky and then goes out. That's nice with the digital transmissions in as much as there is no static- it either is perfect or out. So now I'm looking at returning the pricey antenna for another cheap one, and join the signals together.