All posts by archangel

Television

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Canceled; Dollhouse Renewed

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It’s official, Fox has terminated Sarah Connor. There were rumors that Terminator: Salvation would reinvigorate interest in the series, but the bastards say it costs too much. So no more Summer Glau, Lena Headey, Stephanie Jacobsen, or Leven Rambin. At least not in one place. Stephanie Jacobsen will be playing a call-girl/med school student on the new Melrose Place. For the rest, the future is unclear. As unclear as that annoying, cliffhanger ending (which was actually great until the show was canceled). At this point, I’d be thrilled by a 2 hour special tying up the loose ends and clearing up the confusion.

On the bright side, Dollhouse has been renewed, albeit at on a lower budget. It’s a decent show, but I can’t help thinking I liked Terminator better. Heck, I liked Firefly way better.

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About, Internet

Banned in China!

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Update: See the comments for more details and links to learn about the Great Firewall of China and how to test your site.

Update 2: We are no longer banned!

I started tracking stats on Google Analytics about a year ago. Since that time, over 36,000 people have visited the site (thanks!). Of that 36,000, only one person was in China. One! I think I can safely say we’ve been banned, locked out of the Great Firewall of China. I wonder if it’s the words “covert organization” or “free speech” that is keeping us out. I must say, I am pretty proud that we’re the first result when Googling “covert organization” – with or without the quotes. Great success!

Full Disclosure: There are about 21 countries on Google’s global map for which we have zero visits (versus 170 countries that have stopped by). But I’m pretty sure none of those 21 have 1.3 billion people.

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Film

Movie Roundup (spoiler-free)

I’m lazy, so here are some 30-second movie reviews:

Star Trek: The IMAX Experience – First, there’s no reason to see this in IMAX, as there are no large format shots like in The Dark Knight. Second, keep in mind that I’m a Star Trek fan (I’ve seen all the movies, and even every episode of Voyager and Enterprise), but not a scholar. The movie starts out great, but as I saw more changes to the original storyline, I started questioning the writers’ choices. There are a few silly decisions for plot purposes, too. But overall, a good film, even if I’m not sure I agree with its immediate jump to #62 on the IMDB all time best list.

Angels and Demons – Starts out a bit slow, and a bit of the same old, same old. A lot like Davinci Code, but I think Davinci was more consistently paced (if significantly more blasphemous). By the third act I was hooked, though, and overall I thought it was decent.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine – I liked this, even though I had the same issue I wrote about last year. And in addition to the wrong sized actors, they take liberties with Wolverine’s official origin story. That said, Hugh Jackman, Liev Shreiber, Danny Huston, and Ryan Reynolds give solid performances. The rest of the supporting cast, however, doesn’t add much. If you like Wolverine, I’ve got good news: there will be four more X-Men films. They include a Wolverine sequel1, a Magneto origin, a Deadpool origin, and X-Men: First Class, which I assume to be the first group of mutants taught at Xavier’s School for the Gifted. In other words, an X-Men origin.

  1. Working title: Wolverine Does Japan [↩]
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Everything Else

Munchkin: The Card Game

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I just had an awesome time playing Munchkin, a card game that humorously pokes fun at Dungeons and Dragons. There are cards for races, classes, gear, buffs, curses, and, of course, monsters. Players race to be the first to get to level 10 by defeating monsters with your cards or selling gear to buy levels. Players can gang up to fight monsters they wouldn’t normally be able to defeat, which can lead to much shrewd negotiation. The flip side is that since the first player(s) to hit 10 win – thus ending the game – there is a lot of incentive to gang up on the strongest players to keep them from winning. Alliances are made and broken from turn to turn. In this respect, I hear it’s great for those who love Survivor.

We had 5 players and the game lasted about 4 hours; this included learning the rules. It starts out deceptively slow (partly due to so many new players), but as the game progresses you get more cards in play, accelerating your leveling. As a counter balance, the playing field is leveled whenever someone gets ahead, as everyone teams up to knock him down a few pegs. I have to say this is one of the most balanced games out there. I got to level 9 twice and was knocked down each time. Another player was wiped out a few times, but at the end was one of a few players tied at 9.

I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a regular player of D&D.1 A lot of the humor is based on generic fantasy settings,2 so if you liked Lord of the Rings – or better yet, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – you’ll have fun. If you don’t like the setting at all, there are pirate, gothic horror, space opera/sci-fi, espionage/007/MI, spaghetti western, martial arts, superhero, and even Cthulu themes! The themes can be combined for you genre-benders out there. Remember those westerns where, for some ridiculous reason, a samurai shows up? You can do that!

One caveat: some of the humor is adult-oriented. It sounds perfect for spirited family competition until you need to explain the jokes about altar boys and knee pads and hey kids! let’s see what the excitement is about those German board games!

The game and expansion packs (I think we used 1-4) at Amazon:

Munchkin
Munchkin
Munchkin 2: Unnatural Axe
Munchkin 3: Clerical Errors
Munchkin 4: The Need for Steed
Munchkin 5: De-Ranged
Munchkin 6: Demented Dungeons
Munchkin 1-6 Value Pack
Munchkin 7: More Good Cards

 

 

 

 

 

  1. If you do play D&D, there is a d20 RPG setting for it, although it seems overpriced. [↩]
  2. D&D is pretty much taken directly from Lord of the Rings. [↩]
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Television

Down Economy Cancels Good TV

This is a really tough year for good TV. Many shows are canceled or are in imminent danger (but mostly canceled):

Life On Mars: Canceled (but wrapped up nicely)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Canceled (with a bitch of a cliffhanger!)
Dollhouse: Canceled
Life: Canceled (almost certainly, with big plot questions left hanging in the air)
Chuck: Circling the drain (we find out in a week or two)

All those shows have one thing in common dragging them down: bigger budgets. TV executives are being upfront about next season: they expect ad revenues to be down – way down. If the big budget shows can’t bring huge audiences, they’re gone. They’re taking chances on several new shows, which I’m sure are all cheaper to produce.

Fortunately, I can end with some good news. Smallville was supposed to be wrapping up the series this season – perhaps because it’s been running for 8 years, perhaps because CW is trying to be Oxygen for young women. If you’ve been wondering why they haven’t been tying up loose ends (indeed, they seem to be creating more of them), it’s because the CW woke up to the fact that they were about to let one of their most popular shows end for no good reason. So I’m happy to say it will be back in the fall.

Also, there’s no reason to kill shows with budgets equal to what I spend on coffee each year, so It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia will also be back for a 5th season. Huzzah!

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BTW, Film

Vote For The Next Criterion Collection Blu-Ray

Amazon has a poll to vote for the next Criterion Collection title to be published in Blu-ray format. The choices are fairly obscure, and I’ve only seen two of them: Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law and the 1965 Japanese film Kwaidan.

Of the two, I found Kwaidan to be more memorable. It contains four ghost stories set in old Japan, filmed with painterly cinematography. I had always assumed they were classic Japanese tales, but I have just read that they were in fact “adapted from the fiction of Greek-born Lafcadio Hearn (a.k.a. Yakumo Koizumi, 1850-1904), who assimilated into Japanese culture so thoroughly that his writings reveal no evidence of Western influence.” There are scenes here that I think may have directly influenced Tarantino’s Kill Bill.1 If you are expecting The Grudge, I think you will be thrilled. Unless you (inexplicably) liked The Grudge.

  1. I’m thinking of the showdown with O-Ren Ishii in the snowy garden. [↩]
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Technology

How To Stream Rhapsody On Your PS3

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Update 4/3/2010:

First, you should go to http://getsatisfaction.com/rhapsody/topics/playstation_3_issue and vote for PS3 support for Rhapsody. That’s Rhapsody’s official support site where they admit the PS3 is not supported. You don’t even need an account, you can sign in via OpenId, Facebook, etc. If everyone who visits this page votes for it, it will be their top priority in no time.

Second, Orb doesn’t seem to work anymore. I am now running on a new machine with Win7 x64. I grabbed the latest (2.50) Orb and after installing it, my PS3 couldn’t see the Orb media server (but WMP could). I backed down to 2.0 and the PS3 saw it, but complained it was unsupported media. I then tried going to the mycast.orb.com website (on my PS3) and signing in, which is the current recommendation for PS3 users, but the player plugin doesn’t work. (On Firefox on my PC there is no plugin, rather it tries to download the .asx file which only WMP can play.) So at this point it’s simply not working and I don’t know if it’s Rhapsody’s horrid DRM or Sony’s lousy PS3 browser or Flash support. I filled out a tech support ticket, maybe I’ll hear from them on Monday. But note that recent commenters have gotten it to work, so YMMV.

OK, this is big. Well, to some people. I’ve wanted to get Rhapsody on my PS3 for a while now, but it doesn’t support the Plays for Sure DRM. I’ve shared my Rhapsody library via the Windows Media Player streaming media server, but although I can see the files, I always get an error that the media is unsupported.

Enter Orb. This is yet another streaming media server. It appears that its main purpose is to share your library across the internet, so when you’re not at home you can still access the files on your desktop by visiting your personal Orb web page.

However, it also offers a UPnP server that allows you to browse shared directories with gaming consoles like the PS3. Unlike other UPnP servers (like the ones that come with Rhapsody and WMP), this allows you to play DRM-protected tracks. (As panarican mentions below, this includes subscription tracks. In fact, I’m a Rhapsody To Go member with a Sansa e280 so I haven’t purchased any tracks from Rhapsody.)

Here are the steps:

  1. Download Orb
  2. Run the installer. When it asks you if you want to set up support for gaming consoles like the PS3, say yes (duh). You must also sign up for an account that you won’t use, but oh well.
  3. Find the Orb icon in the task tray. Right click and select Configuration. Under the Media tab, choose the directories you want to share. Initially, I went to the web page and got rather frustrated when I couldn’t find a way to include/exclude directories.
  4. Fire up your PS3 and browse for your the Orb media server. You should see your folders and files. If you don’t, don’t panic! When I first visited my collection, the folders were there, but the files didn’t show up. I assumed it just didn’t work, or that I needed to change the transcoding format (somewhere along the way I chose Windows .asx; I think that was on the web page). A couple hours later my housemate was browsing through again and the files were showing up! When he selected one, it took a few seconds (buffering?) but it actually played!

I haven’t tried playlists yet, and I’m a little curious if it will go from track to track without a long load time.

So there you have it. Yeah, it’s not as good as a true Rhapsody client like the Sonos system or a Tivo HD XL. With those, you can actually browse Rhapsody as you do with the desktop client or their website. The Orb method isn’t much different from loading up your Sansa and connecting it to your receiver, which I’ve also done. But this way you don’t have to worry about batteries going dead or even transferring tracks beforehand. It’s much nicer for impromptu playing.

If this stuff interests you, you might also want to learn about my troubles with HDCP and the PS3.

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Rants, Technology

HDCP Was Created By Satan

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This is the story of how to waste an afternoon.

My housemate and I were trying to hook up his HTPC to our home theater system, as an internet search suggested that the PS3 couldn’t play MKV files, so it seemed streaming was out. The home theater is built into the wall (not my doing, we’re renting), and working on it is a tremendous pain in the ass. It already had an HD DVR and a PS3 connected to a 6.1 Onkyo receiver, which outputs to a TV. Both the receiver and the TV are 6+ years old and don’t have HDMI; heck, the TV is only 720P. However, the HTPC outputs via HDMI. We figured the only way to do this would be to swap in his newer HDMI-capable receiver for the old one. Then we hook up everything and output to the TV via component. What could go wrong?

I change out the receiver (again, huge PITA), and while I’m doing this, I decide to change the PS3 connection from component to HDMI. See, the PS3 will output HD through component, but won’t upconvert normal DVDs to HD unless you output via HDMI. HDMI requires HDCP, or high-bandwidth digital content protection. Apparently, they’re afraid you’re going to upconvert your legal/legit DVD of Spiderman to HD, then run it through an HD recorder/digitizer that has component inputs1, then… destroy all of Hollywood! Yes, it stops you from doing even fair use copying. And yes, you can pop that DVD into your computer and do the same thing, only way, way easier. So anyway, if you want your old SD DVDs nice and sharp on your HDTV, you gotta use the HDMI connector. No problem!

After all is hooked up, I test out the DVR – component in, component out – and it looks fine. I then try the PS3, and I’m getting no video. Audio yes, but no video. I connect it to a TV that has HDMI, verify it works, set HDMI to the default output, and hook it back up to the receiver. Still no dice. Perhaps the receiver is not HDCP compliant? The PS3 no likey da Onkyo? With a heavy heart, I read the manual for the receiver.

Turns out, the receiver is HDCP compliant. In fact, it’s so fucking compliant that it refuses to output video from an HDMI input to a component output! It’s essentially saying, “Your TV isn’t good enough to date my video signal.” Well my TV may not come from the best side of town, but your video signal is a whore! A filthy, corporate whore!

Sorry, where was I? Doesn’t matter. At this point, there appeared to be only two solutions:

  1. Replace the TV. There is some merit to this idea, but that would cost me $2,000 and it’s not even my TV.
  2. Buy an HDMI to component converter with an HDCP stripper. At first blush, this sounds great, due in no small part to the word stripper. It would make the PS3 think it was connected to an HDCP display, which is just what we need. Unfortunately, these cost $200-300, which is almost what I paid for the damn PS3. It’s also the cost of an actual stripper. Gotta think about that one.

Sadly, I went with Option C: go back to the all component setup and forgo dreams of sharper DVDs and HTPC goodness.2

Then, just for shits and giggles, my roommate downloads and configures TVersity on his desktop and shares a few MKV movies. We point the PS3 at his server and voila! the movies play! Now, they seem to be maxing out the wifi connection, so we may need to lower the quality to optimize for speed. And I’ve been hearing more good things about PS3 Media Server than TVersity, so perhaps we’ll give that a try. But the bottom line is, we never needed to swap anything out for this to work. And if I had just read the fucking Onkyo manual, I never would have bothered. But really, if Satan hadn’t invented HDCP, everything would have worked perfectly.

  1. Which are rare, but the Hauppauge HD-PVR looks interesting. [↩]
  2. Note: since I had just set the PS3 to output via HDMI, I had to keep my finger on the power button for 5 seconds on startup to reset the display settings. Then reset them to match the TV, etc. [↩]
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BTW, Everything Else

Teaching Intelligence

Interesting article in the NYT about increasing intelligence. A quote:

“…the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements…”

By my calculations, based on personal experience, I think we’ve lowered that figure from one half to about 48%. Good job, America!

But seriously, there are some interesting ways to trick kids into raising their IQ. And yes, a couple methods that don’t involve subterfuge.

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