Dan's Demented Ramblings

Thanks to the magic of Salary Sacrifice and a friend on holidays in the US, I decided to buy myself a Birthday Present…

The Jesus Phone aka iPhone……

The phone arrived with firmware 1.0.2, I followed an excellent set of instructions at

http://www.winandmac.com/mobile/iphone/ultimate-guide-to-unlock-iphone-111-for-free/

to upgrade it to 1.1.1, jailbreak, activate and unlock it. I’m using it happily on Vodafone and all functions are working just fine. The only problems I have are that my custom ringtone keeps disappearing and the 24 hour time setting randomly turns off.

The phone is dangerous, once you play with it you will NEED one, it’s no wonder they sold 1.12 Million units last quarter. Not bad for a first entry into an insanely competitive market….

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I was reading an interesting post on two new Blu-ray releases.

It seems that there are issues with BD+ on existing units. And of course since Ethernet ports are optional for Blu-ray players it is non-trivial to perform a firmware update.

I can see some punters getting pretty pissed off trying to update their players, this can only serve to help the HD DVD camp.

All of this comes about because Sony were well behind HD DVD on finalising their spec and didn’t want to let the HD DVD guys enjoy the lead. So, they rushed the standard to market without finalising it and now it looks like it is going to bite them in the ass….

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As I posted earlier, we bought a new TV to replace our ageing 43" rear projection unit. It was delivered Saturday and I’ve set it up including a total rebuild of all the gear in the A/V cabinet, I can finally close the rear door again!!!!

Here’s how she looks in place

It’s funny, the "old" tv appears totally unwatchable now, the image is blury and washed out, the new machine is bright, crisp and clean.

Viv is well impressed and ranks it as one of our best purchases, she even watched Australian Idol in real time the other night so she could watch it in High Def…

Despite what my most A/V obsessed friend thought, the new TV hasn’t convinced me to stop watching "Channel BT" content ( in all its low res, compressed glory ) in favor of HD…

Maybe one day I’ll get an HD PVR and we’ll see what happens then, but for now I like to keep up to date with my shows 😉

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There are times when I really wish I was living on one of the "First Class" continents….

In an article I read on Smarthouse News this morning we find out that Sony have left Australia off the list of countries getting the PVR plugin for the PS3 at launch time. This doesn’t affect me as I don’t own a PS3 but a couple of friends of mine were really looking forward to trying it out (you know who you are)…

Things we are still waiting for here in Oz

iPhone
PS3 "PlayTV" plugin
Microsoft "Media Room" (good luck with that as it needs fibre to the home)
TiVo (although we should have this next year only 9 years after the US)
iTunes TV & Movies

I’m sure there are plenty of others, the silly thing is that Australia is a really good testbed for gadgets, we tend to adopt new technologies faster than most countries (including the US) and the population is large enough to be a good sample but small enough to be manageable…

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Definition 😉

I finally relented and bought a new TV to replace my aging but still loved 43" rear projection beast.

The new hotness is the Panasonic Viera TH-50PX700A bask in its HD (ish) glory and weep….

• 50" (127cm)

• 1366 x 768 resolution 10th generation plasma panel

• 3 x HDMI inputs, 2 x S-Video, 2 x Component

I was pleasantly surprised by the picture quality as my previous experiences with plasma TVs has been quite disappointing .
  
We expect delivery in the next week….

We are planning in the not too distant future to mount the sucker on the wall, that will be one big-ass job as the set weighs 50kg

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So, not only was the PS3 a way to give Blu-ray a leg up over rival HD DVD, it appears that it is also set to take a bite out of the PVR market.

Smarthouse News are running a story about an upcoming add-on that will turn your PS3 into a TiVo-like video recorder….

Let’s hope Sony don’t do their usual trick of taking a good idea and making it painful and locking it down to stop users having any fun with it…

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Arstechnica have a piece on the upcoming Wireless A/V connection standards…

In a nutshell we have in one corner

Philips, TZero Technologies and Radiospire Networks with “Wireless HDMI” running over UWB (which is the brainchild of the WiMedia Alliance consisting of over 200 international corporations and is promoted by HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Texas Intruments, Samsung and Sony).

This system will deliver 300+Mbps (theoretical max for the underlying UWB is 480Mbps) and will support up to 1080i using lossy JPEG 2000 compression.

and in the other corner

Samsung, Sony, NEC Corp, SiBeam, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic with WirelessHD, they formed the WirelessHD Consortium in 2005. Instead of UWB they use 7GHz of continuous bandwidth around the 60GHz band.

WiHD will transmit at 5Gbps and so will be able work without compression.

NOTE: It looks like Sony and Samsung have an each-way bet going 😉

Unfortunately WiHD won’t be available until sometime in 2008 while Wireless HDMI is exected to ship in September 2007….

Let the games begin…

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Not content with my first Mac, the 20" iMac (G5), I decided to take advantage of "Salary Sacrifice" and buy a nice shiny new MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo)…

Specs

2.33GHz Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
160GB HDD
ATI Radeon X1600 256MB

I also picked up a Wireless Mighty Mouse and an Apple Keyboard…

To house the whole shebang I picked up a Targus XL Notebook Backpack and Booq Vyper XL2 protective case from rushfaster….

The service from Rushfaster and The Apple Store was awesome, each item arrived at my house within 24 hours of placing the order.

As with all Apple purchases I have taken a series of unboxing photos 🙂

So far I’ve been using it as my work and home machine for 3 days and I’m totally wrapped…..

It "seems" much quicker than my G5 iMac and the portability is unbeatable..

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