Now, I’ve been quite the fan of the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, so when HBO first started their True Blood series, I was all on board for that!

True Blood season one came and went, and though it had some notable deviations from the novels, it was mostly good.  Though the whole “V” drug-abuse thing, I think, got out of hand.  I really wasn’t looking for some lame morality play, and it just doesn’t really fit it.  I’m sure some self-inflated ego thought it would be “edgy” to play more on that concept, but in a world of supernatural beings locked in constant struggles of life and death, drug addiction, even supernaturally based, is just kind of … lame.  Tired.  Boring.  But all-in-all, to the TV series I was hooked.

Season two, well, stretched that.  The deviations from the novels just went beyond trying to keep things interesting for those who read the books.  They got downright … stupid.  The way storylines were rewritten were not impressive.  In some cases they just got plain ridiculous.  Not to mention destroyed the storyline to such an extend that all you could say about their connection to the books were that the names hadn’t been changed to protect the innocent.  The storyline just plain up and left the books entirely and never looked back.

Frankly, about the only good thing that I could say for True Blood season 2 was that at least the “V” morality play had gotten lost in the insanity.  Thank god.

So last night was the True Blood season 3 opener.  And how did it rate?

I think the writers are taking “V”.  Or something.  And I think if Charlaine Harris isn’t at least privately upset over the direction HBO is taking with her intellectual property, she should be.  (And I say privately, because goodness only knows what contracts she has or hasn’t signed, what she’s allowed to publicly say about HBO’s take, etc.)  The storyline is so incredibly lost at this point that I don’t even see how they can reasonably bring in some of the characters and situations from future novels.  But, if the wolves are any indication, season 3 is going to be doing just that.

Meanwhile the first episode of True Blood season 3 was like Short Attention Span Theater on “V”.  It was just all over the place.  Not that I couldn’t follow it.  Just more that I was really getting tired of it.  Sometimes writers like to do things such as follow one plot for more than two seconds, you know, to like build it up, make it interesting.  But apparently none of those writers work at HBO anymore.  At least not on True Blood.

And if I didn’t know any better, they’d told nearly every actor/actress to go and buff up between the seasons.  Everyone was harder.  Or skinnier.  Except for Sookie’s behind, which if I didn’t know better I’d say had gotten implants, because she was the only one who looked bigger this season.  And HBO sure took great pride in showing off as much skin as they could.  I’d also wager they tried to use the F-word more too.  And in both cases, not necessarily for any sensible reason.  Just because they could, I guess.  Or felt they had to?  As if people are watching this show because they just need the hot bodies and foul mouths, and not because they’re fans of the Sookie Stackhouse novels or anything.

But the worst offense of all, the return of “V”.  Now as some kind of main plot, instead of just side morality boredom.  Yawn!  That right there might make me stop watching all together.

The only good thing that I can say about True Blood‘s third season was the choice to use real wolves.  Let’s face it, even the best computer generated graphics still stick out like a sore thumb.  At least to me.  And honestly, I don’t understand the obsession with using it in places where real things can be used instead.  Like wolves.  It looks unbelievably better.  Words cannot express how much better reality is than CG.  And frankly, I think it just may be the only thing they did right in this third season opener.  One can only hope the rest of the season isn’t as random and boring as the opener was, or as badly written as season two was.

As for my wife, quite possibly an even bigger fan of Charlaine Harris, and by proxy HBO’s True Blood than I am (or was), her parting words after last night’s season 3 opener were, “I feel like one of Jason’s women.”  For an hour she’d been sucking it in (heck, more than that with the lame 15 minute, mostly commercials, season preview), and for all that, things were just left dangling and unimpressive.  She had to walk away disappointed.  Kind of makes me wonder how the rest of the True Blood fans are feeling right now.  If they’re anything like us, HBO may have just “blown” what could have been one of the best shows on TV.

So the Discovery Channel has been airing “Life”, its sequel to “Planet Earth”.  Everyone seems to be raving about how wonderful and amazing it is.

And it almost is.

Sort of.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s some truly stunning cinematography.  Everyone involved in that part should be proud of the work they’ve done.  It’s wonderful!

The thing is … we’ve seen the likes of it before, in “Planet Earth”.  And technology is always improving.  These days any idiot can go out and buy an HD camcorder and even editing software to digitally master their home videos on their home computer.  Or even laptop.  They can do it on the go.  So with technology this powerful being so affordable, is it really so stunning then to get such great footage?  It’s hard not to be a little jaded.  We’ve seen it all before.  It’s great, but it’s not new, nor is it unexpected.

But still, it really is stunning.  Just not as much as it was the first time that we saw it, in “Planet Earth”.

What really detracts from it though, nearly spoiling the whole thing, is Oprah Winfrey’s voice.

Now before you hang me from the nearest gallows, let me say that I’m all for Oprah as a person.  She’s the bees knees!

Oprah however just does not have the voice for narration.  Even if you get past that, which takes effort, she also lacks the skill to give properly inspiring inflection to the words that go with such outstanding cinematography.

Again, greatly inspiring woman, nothing against her personally, but narration is apparently not one of her many talents.

I can only hope that BBC puts out their own version with their own voice acting.

Even though the economy may be struggling not to grind to a halt, the standards organization bodies that create those geeky acronyms that go over your head when shopping for a DVD player are at it again.  Up on the block today are two upgrades to loves of long past: HDMI and SATA.

HDMI, short for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, is the cable primarily used to connect to TVs these days.  Unlike TV cables of yore, the HDMI cable is digital instead of analog.  And not only is it for your high-def TV picture at 1080p ( 1920 × 1080) and surround-sound (up to 8 channels), but with the new reversion 1.4 just announced, it’ll do even more.

With HDMI 1.4 you get resolutions well past 1080p.  It will support up to 3840 x 2160 at 30Hz, and even 4096 x 2160 at 24Hz.  In that TVs do not offer past 1080p it is believed that this increase in resolution is not specifically for larger pictures, but for pictures in stereoscopic 3D.  Oooh.  Aaaah.

On top of this support for 3D TV HDMI 1.4 also comes with support for your network connection straight through the HDMI cable for all of those internet-enabled devices so that now you only need to use the one cable.  And added on to that is also support for bi-directional audio, presumably for supporting devices with built-in microphones.  And HDMI 1.4 also comes with support for sYCC601, AdobeYCC601, and Adobe RGB color spaces typically used by digital cameras.  Sounds an awful lot like people are expecting TVs to come with built-in webcams soon, eh?  Maybe when combined with VoIP your TV will become your video-phone in the blink of an eye.  Or is this to sneak into the in-car electronics systems market?  Only time will tell.

Also new to HDMI 1.4 is a change in the cable itself.  There’s a new Micro HDMI Connector that’s even smaller than the already small HDMI Mini Connector, because nothing is more entertaining than trying to juggle teeny little connectors on your digital cameras, cell phones, PDAs, Game Boys and the like.

Yay for HDMI 1.4.

Next up on the block is that beloved replacement for IDE/PATA: SATA.  Serial ATA, ATA itself short for Advanced Technology Attachment, making the whole long-hand name actually Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, if anyone cares, is basically what connects your hard drives to your computer with nice neat efficient little cables.  The older IDE interface, retroactively named PATA or Parallel ATA after the release of SATA, used all of those really wide ribbon cables, because each wire was a communication path that served a purpose and there were a lot of paths.  It worked great … for moving data.  It however didn’t work so well for moving air throughout your computer to keep it cool as those cables were quite wide.  In came SATA to save the day, with tiny cables that moved data at faster rates over far fewer lines, making for much thinner cables.

SATA started out simply just as a replacement for those clunky old PATA hard drive cables.  Then it began to support CD and DVD drives.  (Thank goodness, as those used the same clunky PATA cables that hard drives did.)  And then SATA started to really get fun with revision 2 including some Native Command Queuing (a feature similar to that in server-class SCSI hard drives that re-orders read and write requests to optimize their performance) and some improved power managemen to save electricity, not to mention the usual bandwidth increase.

Now SATA is announcing Revision 3.0.  Once again it comes with even more bandwidth, now 6 Gb/s.  Yay.  It also has some NCQ upgrades, including a new command that trips an isochronous mode, which basically means a forced data rate, typically used in video capture or streaming to ensure that no matter what, no data gets left behind.  And, of course, SATA Revision 3 also comes with, you guessed it, even better power management.

Also new to SATA Rev 3 are new cables that are even smaller, no doubt for the netbook and such devices that are considerably smaller and tighter spaces to work in than normal laptops.

It’s all not exactly stunning news or all that impressive, but it’s the kind of thing that is always needed as the world keeps moving forward.

So there you have it.  HDMI and SATA both get upgrades, adding the features and changing the connectors as needed to keep up in the modern world.  Enjoy.

So I finally bit on the lure and tried out that new streaming video TV/movie service, Hulu. The basics?  You can watch lots of TV and movies, for free, from your computer.

The concept isn’t exactly new.  However, Hulu does have a decent selection of random stuff.  If for some reason TV just isn’t doing it for you, maybe you can find something on Hulu.  Or if, like in my case, Comcast’s OnDemand for some strange reason doesn’t carry some pretty common channels that you’d think they would (like in my area, CW, Fox, ABC, etc.) and you missed a show (because networks compete just a little too much) then you possibly can catch up.

Hulu is free*, as in no fees, but forced commercial breaks.  I can live with that.

As quality goes, it’s not so good.  The default quality setting is, of course, crap.  Let’s face it.  You’re using a computer to access Hulu.  You’re going to see every pixel in horrible detail as your monitor’s resolution is a lot higher.  Hulu’s “Std-Res” is basically worse than watching standard definition TV on your computer.  It’s only 360p, which is just 360 vertical pixels.  (The NTSC standard used by analog televisions in North America has 525 vertical pixels.)  Worse than that however is the usual bad streaming that you get where movement is jerky at best.  The framerate that you’re getting is not equal to TV.

You can however change the setting to “Hi-Res”, which is actually a pretty big fib.  It’s not anything near TV’s HD, which is 720 or 1080 vertical pixels.  Hulu’s “Hi-Res” is only 480p, a mere 480 vertical pixels.  So Hulu’s “Hi-Res” is not high resolution at all.  It doesn’t even reach the quality level of digital TV’s standard-definition.  But it’s at least slightly better than their “standard” resolution of 360p.  In theory.  In practice however, Hulu’s other problem comes into play heavily: bad buffering.

Yeah, Hulu had enough trouble keeping your buffer filled on their low quality setting.  On occasion you get pauses or jerky play.  Kick it up to their higher quality setting and you’re just begging for trouble.  The servers aren’t serving fast enough and the software isn’t buffering enough when it has the chance to in order to fix the server lags.  It gets really nasty when you kick it up to “Hi-Res”*.  (Keeping in mind that it really isn’t a high resolution by anyone’s standards except Hulu’s.)

Still, it’s free.  What do you expect for free?

(And before anyone goes trying to say I just have a crappy internet connection, I’m on Comcast’s high speed cable internet.  I have all of the bandwidth in the world for this.  It’s not my end that’s being sluggish.  It’s most definitely Hulu’s servers.)

So on your computer, it’s an effort some times, but Hulu can be swallowed … if for some reason you really need to watch a missed show or something.

So the next obvious thing to try, of course, was get Hulu out of my computer room and into my living room where I have a large widescreen TV to watch shows on and a comfy couch to sit on.  I know that in theory the Playstation 3 has an internet browser.  And I’ve got to say, unless you’re a gluton for punishment, don’t even try it!  Really.  The PS3 and Hulu just do not mix.

So it goes like this:  You struggle to input the URL into the PS3′s address bar, fighting that stupid fake keyboard with your controller.  You get to Hulu.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Apparently the PS3′s web browser basically won’t do anything at all while any little bit of a page is loading.  And Hulu loads a lot.

Worse, you’re trying to type in a search query, again fighting the stupid fake keyboard with your controller.  During your fight, Hulu switches their advertisement to something else.  The PS3′s browser actually clears what you’ve managed to type so far, forcing you to try all over again.  And so it becomes a game.  Can you type your search keywords in faster than Hulu changes something on the page?  It’s not easy with a controller running a fake keyboard.

But okay, so say you try to outsmart the bad design by browsing manually through channels and genres and such.  So sorry, but didn’t I already mention that the PS3′s web browser freezes up whenever there’s the slightest change in the web page?  Scrolling, apparently, makes new items visible, which requires more loading.  Somehow.  Which means just trying to see everything in the list brings everything to a lock-up for freaking ever while the PS3 jerks itself.  During that time, nothing works.  You can move the pointer around, but clicking doesn’t work, scrolling doesn’t work, etc.  You get the idea.

So after fighting this all for twenty minutes, you finally find something to watch.  The browser, by the way, has been stuck on the “Standard size” setting which is basically only using a standard definition TV’s amount of space.  Why?  I don’t know.  Apparently Sony couldn’t be bothered to determine which type of TV output you have and use space accordingly.  You know, like any other computer in the world would do, just use maximum use of the resolution it’s set to.  So you do this manually by switching the web browser’s mode to “Maximum size” by hitting the triangle button to bring up the settings, then go to View -> Maximum size so that you can take advantage of the fact that you have a widescreen TV.  You start your show.  You set Hulu to display the show “full screen” which should make the video take up the entire screen.  And I’ll be damned if the PS3 doesn’t take that “full screen” request as an opportunity to revert the browser back to a space-wasting TV’s fullscreen resolution size with black bars encapsulating your video.  Nerf!  And sure enough, once the “full screen” video is over and the web browser goes back to normal mode, it’s reverted right back to the “Standard size” view setting, making it quite clear that it didn’t stay on the “Maximum size” setting that you specifically set it to.

Basically there’s just no getting around it.  The Sony Playstation 3 has a crap-awful web browser.  It’s bad.  Really really bad.  And what’s worse, a lot of it’s badness is really brought out by trying to innocently use Hulu on your PS3.

Sony, you have a lot of work to do…

(And before you mention that it’s a problem that has been fixed, I just updated the PS3′s firmware this morning to the latest.  And I double-checked that I still have over 50GB of free space and have a good solid signal to my wireless router.)

But still, by themselves, Hulu isn’t all that bad.  It just needs higher resolutions and either better servers or better buffering.  And the PS3 is great for playing games, watching Blu-Ray and DVD movies, playing CDs, and such.

Just don’t try mixing them together.  Not until Sony works out a lot of kinks in the Playstation 3′s incredibly bad internet browser.  Just use Hulu on your computer.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative.

Hopefully by now you’ve heard it and know all about it: the switch from analog television signals to digital signals.  February 17th was to be the day that the analog signal stands still.  But maybe it won’t be.

Because, as was obvious would happen, things aren’t going smoothly.

There’s talk of a new bill that would extend the date of the required switch over all the way out to June 12th.  And according to Nielsen, there are still in excess of 6.5 million American households not yet ready to go digital.

The real question is, why digital?  “Experts” will tell you that it’s because digital signals come in clearer and have better sound.  Which, theoretically, is at best only a half-lie.  The truth is that technically speaking, you get slightly more visual information in the analog signal as you do the lowest quality of digital, which is the only quality required to be broadcast.  Only when talking about the audio signal is the digital broadcast actually better.  In theory.

In practice however, this is really only true of the ideal cases, where the signal strength is strong and there are no interfering signals.  We all know that there are plenty of places in the world where this isn’t true.  In the “boon docks” signals get weak.  And in areas of heavy population, interfering signals occur all the time.  With an analog signal, when there are problems, you get “snow”.  The signal may not be perfect, but often it still manages to deliver quite a lot of information.  Where as, when a digital signal has problems, you get failures.  The screen may freeze.  The screen may go black.  The screen may just get a lot of bad transmission artifacts that make it all gobledy-gook.  The sound may just stop.  Or may have “pops” or “gaps”.  When things are less than ideal, analog is a lot more ideal than digital is.

So if the quality isn’t better, and things are much worse when Bad Things Happen, then why is the country being forced to broadcast in digital?

Money.

It’s really that simple.  Though no one will tell you that simple honest truth.

You see, an analog signal takes an awful lot of the radio spectrum to broadcast.  Where as a digital signal takes just a tiny blip of the spectrum by comparison.  So if you force a switch, all of the digital broadcasts can be made in a fraction of the radio wave spectrum reserved for TV.  What will happen to all of that unused spectrum?  Why, it’ll be sold of course.  Maybe it’ll be the next range for cell phones.  Maybe it’ll be used for satellite communication.  Maybe it’ll be a new wireless network standard.  Or most likely, it’ll be split up and sold for all sorts of things, each piece of it going to the highest bidder.

Now, is this necessarily bad?  Not really.  By now a lot of people really are using cable, sattelite, or some other digital means of getting their television already.  And as has been sold from on high since the first announcement of the switchover, if your TV doesn’t already have a digital tuner, a simple box will do the work for you.  (Though you’ll probably want a new antenna too while you’re at it.)  It’s only a one-time cost for a household to switch, and the government does offer coupons to reduce the cost.

But it’d be awfully nice if the government just told the truth.  The digital switch may bring you worse TV than better TV.  It’s not being done for the sake of quality.  It’s being done for money.  And they’re making both you the end consumer and the TV broadcast stations both pay so that they can sell off the unused airways.  If the government really wanted it to be about better TV then it wouldn’t be just a digital switchover, it would be a high definition switchover.  It isn’t.