Inside Chris’s Head

I have been trying to figure out what the video setup of the living room of the future is (or at least of my future) and a new discovery on ABC.com makes me wonder if it is time to ditch my television completely.

But let’s back up a bit first. My current setup did not used to seem quite so dated. I have a big screen tube style TV (the largest tube from back when my company went public) connected to the DirecTV box with (their brain dead version of) TiVo. Flat screen Tvs have now come down in price to the point that I am willing to buy one, but if I get an HD TV then I need to get a new DirecTV and this is where things get complicated.

• I love the TiVo but because I have the DirecTV (brain dead) version of TiVo I can’t copy shows off to put on my laptop or iPod to use when I workout. I could buy the expensive HD version but it still does not have all the TV functionality I want. And frankly DirecTV is fine but I am more loyal to the TiVo than to them.
• I could switch to cable (ComCast) and that would even allow me to change my DSL line to cable. Given how my DSL line with AT&T is less reliable than my old DSL line and also screws up with our phone line (the old line was a separate line) that is a plus. But ComCast’s own TiVo box is still not in my area and it sounds like they also have screwed up a good solution.
• I could switch to cable and get a new TiVo box that would work with cable cards to connect to the cable network. This would be a more acceptable solution but also is the most costly per month.

All of those options are more expensive than doing nothing and not appealing enough that I have made the switch yet.

Getting back to last night, I was catching up on Lost because I had only watched the first episode of the season and my TiVo was getting full. I watched a couple episodes on my TV and I watched a couple of episodes on ABC.com. I have previously used ABC.com and find it more than adequate for the task. I can’t fast forward through the commercials but they only give me two and a half minutes or so for a show instead of 20 minutes on broadcast. That seems to me to be a fare trade. I would not be surprised if this was also more valuable for them as I can recall (unaided brand recognition) that I was watching ads for Toyotas Tacoma (do they know that they named a car after the city in the U.S. with the highest suicide rates?) and for Starwood resorts.

What I did not realize until last night is that Lost has two different versions of Lost on ABC.com. About a week after they release a show they release an enhanced version of the show which is annotated like a show from Popup Video. As the show goes along they explain that the color light Desmond is seeing is like the color of the light from back in season 2 when the hatch blew up. Sure it was distracting, but it was also cool and it was something that ABC could do because this show was being distributed on the Internet. Having a second version of the show that some people will love and some will hate would just split their audience on network TV so they would never do it. It would use up another precious time slot on the schedule (of course they could air it late it night when TiVo could find it but the cost they would have to pay the studio and the fact that they don’t control the affiliates would get in the way). On the Internet that show is additive for them.

So what if my next “Television” is a computer. Are we there yet? I don’t think I can get all of the shows I watch through any one legal method and legal is a requirement for me. Shows I watch on BBC America don’t seem to be on the web yet. I could buy shows on iTunes although the crossover for when the shows are more expensive than a $50 cable bill would be 25 shows and I think I watch more than that.

My todo list:

• Are all my shows on line somewhere
• Is my cable (satellite) bill really only $50? (Always marry an smart woman with an MBA if you can so you don’t have to pay the bills.)

Is MLB Baseball the only thing keeping me attached to broadcast television?

Popularity: 33% [?]

The world has a lot of problems. One of the leading causes of illness is diseases that come from contaminated water supplies. Even if a village has a well, they cannot always afford the fuel to run a pump to pump up the water.

The brilliant people at PlayPumps.org have created a pump that is powered by a merry-go-round. So the energy from children playing pumps the water. The biggest benefits are the young girls who traditionally had to go fetch the water who now not only have more time for play but also for school.

The world has a lot of problems, but it also seems to have some very clever people with some clever solutions to some of them.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for finding this story.

Popularity: 28% [?]

SciFi.com’s Dvice blog had news about a new railgun the navy has. I find myself discourage that we continue to find more ways to kill each other and yet I must admit that the guy in me also has the reaction of “13,000 miles per hour, 10 megajoules, cool”! Sue me, it’s the testosterone.

Just take a look at the image above! It shows the first demonstration of this crazy magnetic railgun, which fired a shell at 5,600 miles per hour using 10 megajoules of energy. And that’s just the beginning. When this thing is done, it’ll be firing shots at over 13,000 miles per hour. Oh, and it’ll be accurate enough to hit a 5 meter target from 200 nautical miles away while shooting at 10 shots per minute. Even though it won’t be ready until 2020 to 2025, I’m going to start getting on the Navy’s good side now.

Popularity: 26% [?]

MacWorld is in San Francisco this week and I had a chance to go up for a Geek Brief meetup this evening. It is on days like today that I appreciate that I have an EVDO card for my laptop. For those of you not familiar with EVDO it gives me an internet connection through the cell system even when traveling, as I am now, on CalTrain between San Francisco and San Jose. So I have been chatting with a good friend from high school for the last 10 minutes while riding past Redwood City and now I am blogging as I pass Menlo Park.

I have even uploaded podcasts via an EVDO connection before. Upload speeds are much slower than download. Once it took me nearly an hour to upload a 35 minute podcast. But when you consider that I was in a car on highway 101 and stayed connected to my companies VPN for that hour even though I was traveling 65 MPH, that’s not half bad.

Certainly there are faster connections available, but having a connection that is more ubiquitous than Wi-Fi is a very nice thing. On the MacWorld show floor there is free wi-fi, but with so many iPhones and MacBooks you are luck to get a decent connection. Now if I only had a MacBook Air and 5 hours of battery life. Fortunately, CalTrain has power outlets.

Popularity: 18% [?]

The new 2Gb Eye-Fi secure digital memory card, like memory cards for your digital camera, can hold your pictures. That is not too surprising. The surprising part of the Eye-Fi is that it won’t just store your digital masterpieces but will share them. When you first get the Eye-Fi you program the card with your favorite photo upload site like smugmug, flickr, shutterfly, facebook, etc. After you take your pictures, when the card detects a wi-fi network it uploads your most recent photos. Just make sure that you only take pictures you are willing to share.

Popularity: 10% [?]