Miscellaneous Heathen

So, Amex has a great program wherein you accumulate a point for every dollar you spend. These points are then redeemable for, principally, travel benefits like free rooms, free car rentals, free airfare, or free upgrades to first class; Mrs Heathen and I used these points to fly in First to San Francisco for our honeymoon, for example.

As it happens, it's also possible to redeem these points for goods via any of a number of catalogs that show up in our mailbox from time to time. Usually, these merch deals are curiously bad ones; $400 items for, say, 50,000 points or more (airfare can be had for 25K points, for example).

Comes now, then, the First Collection, a fancy catalog of very high-end items available in exchange for truly unreasonable point totals; it includes high-end Bourdeaux for 30K to 50K per bottle, for example. The particular item that prompted this post, however is a 12-month lease on a Lamborghini Gallardo for 9.5 million points.

It's funny on the face of it, clearly, but then you realize it's aspirational marketing. No one will redeem his points for this. Just having it in the catalog makes the catalog fancier, and helps emphasize the luxe aspects of the Amex program as well as, to a point, Lambo. But it's still funny.

A $250 guitar controller to improve our Rock Band game, despite the fact that it involves "a solid body, real wood neck, metal frets and tuning peg, and a rosewood fingerboard."

I bought a 47" Vizio with the 120Hz refresh rate. It looks SMASHING. Now, who wants to haul off the old one?

Apple sold more phones in their recently-closed fiscal 4th quarter than RIM, the maker of Blackberry, did. It was close -- 6.9 million vs. 6.1 -- but it's still a pretty amazing development.

.... last night our 8-year-old rear-projection TV developed a very ugly convergence problem that renders it essentially unwatchable, and the quotes I'm getting for repair are well in excess of what I'm willing to throw at an 8-year-old TV.

Consequently, it looks like I'm TV shopping.

My initial research suggests that LCD is probably a better fit for our room (due to the large amount of natural light; the rear-proj set was unwatchable for about 2h in the middle of the day, not normally a problem except in football season). We also like the lower energy consumption; a friend just got a (very large, very high-end) plasma, and you can feel the heat coming off of it from a foot away.

Given that we've tried to be careful and ended up with some Tivo-related burn-in anyway, I also like that LCD is said to be much less prone to the problem than plasma. For a while, it looked like DLP was a good idea, but those sets seem to have nearly vanished from the marketplace, so I'm gonna ignore them unless someone can tell me a good reason not to.

We're going to try to be frugal here and not spend a fortune, so the ideal television will be:

• Probably 42" or 47" (replacing 55")
• Will eventually go on the wall
• 720p is fine; 1080p is nice, but I don't know how much I really care.
• Under $1700 or so; I don't need to surf the ragged edge of quality here. Also, if we spend less and need to bump up in 5 years, it hurts less.
• Obviously HDMI is key, but I'm guessing it's hard to avoid that at this point.
• Right now, we're on standard def DirecTV, because we prefer the Tivo software to any of the generic DVRs. It's possible we'll upgrade to HD DirecTV next year, when DTV releases a Tivo-brand DVR again, but not before. (Basically, we find reliable and friendly DVR software to be a bigger value than higher resolution sitcoms.)
• We don't currently have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD deck, and have no plans for one YET. An upsampling player might be on offer, but we're not feeling the need for more expensive movies given how good regular DVD can look with a proper upconversion.

We hear good things, and see good prices, about LG. The big boys (Sony, Pioneer) are very spendy, and I'm particularly unwilling to spend on Sony given their corporate behavior. What other brands should we look hard at, or avoid?

Any input is appreciated. Thanks in advance. Comments or direct email are fine.

An Aussie firm I've never heard of made a really, really cool car in 1970.

Swatch is following their first 007-commemorative collection with a new Bond-themed set based on villains. I'm keen on the Le Chiffre and the Baron Samedi (from Live and Let Die) , but it's hard to choose.

German Supertuner RUF Building an Electric Porsche. It'll be Cayman-based, but still.

Jamie and Adam paint the Mona Lisa in 80 nanoseconds with a massively parallel paintball cannon.

An iPhone implementation of the best football game EVER is coming.

Please explain to us why we do not yet have a robot clock.

Siege points out the coolest iPhone app yet.

Jetpacks now exist.

(Sadly, they start at 100 large.)

Please get us one of these Thingamagoop goofy lo-fi synth kits, kthxplsdrvthru.

Shut up. I can too solder.

John Lee Hooker + M1911A = win.

(Via MeFi.)

Some dude in Florida has built a working, autonomous sentry gun. The site includes prior prototypes as well as a video demo of the latest iteration. This one shoots paintballs, but the design is clearly intended to be flexible; he notes that the system will work with any gun with a pistol grip.

Paintballs, though, would be plenty to discourage nocturnal patio incursions. Mmmmm.

Palm, on the heels of their 4th straight quarter of losses, has decided to challenge the iPhone in a bold new way: they're releasing a new version of their Centro handheld that's a completely new color.

On Friday. The same day as the iPhone 3G launch.

Brilliant move, guys. Really.

(Via Gruber.)

AT least 'lectronic stuff, anyhow.

Heathen Central's 3rd stereo receiver -- after 1988's entry-level Pioneer (RIP) and 1992's $1,000 Onkyo battleship (still in limited service in Heathen HQ's office) -- has gone the way of all circuits. This is somewhat irritating, since it wasn't cheap and has been in for repairs once already despite its relative youth (b. in late 2000 or early 2001; we forget, but it was soon after our acquisition of the Steel Treehouse Lodge (tm pending)). The 2000-era box -- an Arcam AVR100 -- was nice enough, and did the New Fanciness of both Dolby Digital and DTS, so we were very happy with it. Except for a few things.

• Problem the First was that, unlike some of the fancier models of its era, renaming inputs wasn't possible. No receiver anywhere, I'm convinced, actually has the correct equipment plugged into every port, and for lots of good reasons, but having customizable text on the screen means at least some positive feedback is possible for the operator (i.e., when you've got the TV plugged into VCR for input-scarcity reasons, it's nice if the screen says "TV" anyway).

• Problem the Second was an unfortunately made bet w/r/t digital audio bus inputs. Back in the day, everything was on a pair of RCA cables, one left channel and one right, but with multichannel came the need for, well, more than that (Dolby Digital has 6 distinct channels). Digital cabling solved the problem, but there were two main contenders for plug type: Coaxial and optical. The Arcam has two coax but only one optical input, but the market has since settled on optical. Oops. Double oops since Heathen HQ has optical inputs coming from the Tivo, the XBox, and the streaming music from the Airport Express (heretofore routed through an outboard D/A; we only did cable swap between the Tivo and XBox).

• Problem the Third was video switching, meaning the "stereo" controls both what you hear and what you see on the TV. Receivers as old as the Onkyo would try to do this, but they could only handle composite video -- i.e., single-RCA plug video feeds that, quite frankly, look like ass even with plain-jane cable TV. In a world of 1080i, that's just not enough. Even in 2000, the solution wasn't good enough -- the Aardvark will switch S-Video (good enough for standard-resolution DirecTV), but nothing better, so using the DVD player or the XBox meant switching inputs on both the receiver and the TV, which got direct feeds from the higher-resolution sources.

Combine all three of these issues, and you get a situation wherein I once typed up a three-page guide for a long-term houseguest just so she could watch TV when Mrs. Heathen and I were out.

Well, now that the Arcam's dead, we have a new sheriff in town in a little Yamaha amp, and it gleefully solves all these problems.

• First, inputs are re-nameable onscreen, so when you scroll the Input knob, you see a word that means something for the local setup. Even better, the Yamaha line comes with four big round buttons square in the front of the box called "Scenes;" these amount to input-and-surround-setting macros you can configure for easy access. At the Steel Treehouse Lounge, #1 is the new Tivo; #2 is the old Tivo (shut up); #3 is the DVD player on stereo-only with all DSP and processing bypassed; and #4 is for DVD movies; each of these also gets its own, human-created name, so it's clear when you hit one of the buttons what the gig is. No muss, no fuss, and certainly no 3-page instruction manuals for visiting playwrights.

• Second, the digital bus problem is solved in spades, again with a bit of a one-two punch. It's got enough of the right plugs for us, which is great, but you can also reassign the higher-resolution plugs on the back (i.e., the inputs for digital audio (coax & optical), HDMI, and component video) to the input slots arbitrarily to better suit your configuration. It's part of the same interface you use for changing input names.

• Finally, the video switching problem is dead, dead, dead. Only two remotes live on the coffeetable now: Tivo and receiver. There's no need to switch TV inputs now, since everything goes through the receiver -- and will continue to do so well into the future. (The receiver is actually smarter than the TV now, since the 2001-era TV doesn't know from HDMI.)

As a bonus? The Yamaha had a lower number on its price tag than either the Onkyo or the Arcam, which means it's actually MUCH MUCH cheaper if you adjust for inflation -- about half the price of the Onkyo in 2007 dollars, and 2/3 that of the Arcam.

Dear Intarwub: Please buy us this sink. kthxbi.

This comparison of the owning experiences of an AK-47, an AR-15, and a Mosin Nagant is well worth your time -- I mean, if you have more than a passing familiarity with what any of those things are. (Don't miss this, Frank.)

Go read this longish Atlantic article on what could very well turn out to be the first real game-changer in the automotive world -- produced, improbably enough, by General Motors. The GM people my age know is a company made of Fail; few folks in the Heathen orbit and generation have ever even considered a GM product outside of the odd Corvette or Camarao (hi, Edgar) -- especially if you eliminate the early, independent years of Saturn as an aberration -- GM eventually absorbed the division and destroyed its independence and with it, its value.

Well, that may change. The Volt is a new kind of hybrid that GM is in very-nearly-bet-the-farm mode over. It's electric-first -- there's an on-board gas engine, but its job is to run a generator, not drive the wheels. The wheels turn with electricity, never gas. Set to go 40 miles on a charge (i.e., more than the average commute), the Volt will mean that most owners buy gas only once in a blue moon. And GM wants it in showrooms for 2010.

They might just make it. And if they deliver on these promises and manage to escape their seemingly inevitable Fail gene, Heathen might just buy one.

This cube toy is made entirely of rare-earth magnets, and therefore requires no mechanism other than magnetism.

Dear Intarwub: Please make for us one of these.

Did you know that Leatherman makes a multitool that lacks a knife, explicitly so it can be carried aboard planes? (Actual Leatherman.com page here.)

Wordpress author Matt Mullenweg is apparently an enormous idiot, as he just lost nearly of TWENTY THOUSAND BUCKS worth of camera equipment when it was stolen from his checked baggage. His list:

• Nikon D3 (Amazon: about $5K)
• Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D IF (Amazon: about $1K)
• Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED (Amazon: about $2100)
• Leica M8 (Amazon: about $5400)
• Leica 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux (B&H: about $6K)
• Cards, cases, etc.

Quickie total: $19,500. In his luggage. My first thought was "Wow, writing free software must pay really well, Matt." My second was "holy crap, that's the dumbest move I've heard of in weeks." Checking valuables was a stupid idea pre-9/11; it's grounds for a mini-Darwin award now. Maybe next time, Matt will check some bearer bonds or untraceable gold bullion; I'm sure those will be just as safe.

It occurs to me that perhaps the trusting attitude revealed here is one reason WordPress has such a terrible security reputation; clearly, Mullenweg places abundant trust in untrustworthy institutions. Perhaps his code behaves likewise. It is my sincere hope that his post -- helpfully titled "Don't Check Your Valuables" -- is the first in a series dedicated to informing his readers when he encounters these sorts of life-lessons. I eagerly await follow-ups like "Don't Buy A Car That's On Fire" and "That Man In Nigeria Won't Really Send You Any Money."

Please buy us this car. KTHXBI.

The HP calculator emulator is almost ready.

No, really. Check it out.

This NYT covers a somewhat surprising development in the smartphone market: it's now a fight between relative newcomer Apple and corporate darling Research In Motion (i.e., the makers of Blackberry). Stalwart Palm and Microsoft's Windows Mobile are at best also-rans, and tiny Symbian never really had a chance.

The key bit, which could fortell hard times for RIM, is this:

(RIM co-CEO) Mr. Balsillie thinks that R.I.M. is in the best tactical position for the coming fight. He points to its close relationships with 350 carriers around the world -- like Verizon and AT&T -- that sell, often at steep discounts, BlackBerry phones and the accompanying monthly e-mail service.

Apple and Google, on the other hand, are vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market. Unlike other phone makers in the United States, Apple sells iPhones from its own stores and has negotiated relatively stingy contracts with the carriers, in exchange for limited periods of exclusivity. Google, for its part, unsuccessfully bid for wireless spectrum this year in an effort to force carriers to be more open to allowing various handsets and Internet services on their networks.

R.I.M. makes its alliances clear. "We are sort of polite and amiable and we gently interrelate with the carriers and try to find compatibility," Mr. Balsillie said. "It may be a better strategy to fight the carrier. We may be wrong. The carrier may get disintermediated, in which case we fade with them."

In other words, R.I.M. is content to please carriers, not actual customers. Apple has turned that whole ecosystem on its ear by creating a phone that has literally made AT&T's year, financially, because people wanted it People actually LIKE it. On the other hand, people with Blackberries are typically folks who have never touched another smartphone, and who use what their IT drone tells them to use. Of the non-corporate BB users I know, most have switched to the iPhone for sheer ease of use and lack of hassle.

It's important to note that the Blackberry system is dependent on R.I.M.'s servers to work, even for private, ISP-based emails (unless you just use the browser to access a webmail account); the iPhone forces no such Rube Goldberg mechanism on its users (though neither do the offerings from Palm, WinMo, and Symbian). Up to now, R.I.M. was also the only real game in town for centrally-controllable mobile email; a lost Blackberry can be wiped remotely, over the air, by an administrator. This summer, that feature -- along with holy-grail native Exchange support -- comes to the iPhone, which means Apple is seriously bringing it to what has been R.I.M.'s essentially uncontested territory.

Dear Intarwub: please get us one of these.