David Pogue at the New York Times, quoting from his surprise encounter with a rare non-clueless Best Buy employee:

Q: Is there a lot of consumer confusion about HDTV?

A: Oh, man, you have no idea. People come in here absolutely clueless. Or furious, because they bought an HDTV set, got it home, and discovered that the picture doesn’t look anything like it did here in the store. Because they don’t realize they need a high-def *signal* to feed that set. For example, they need to replace their cable boxes with digital ones, or put a high-def antenna on the roof.

I admit that we fell into something like this trap when going HD a few months ago. We knew we would need to feed it HD signal for best results, but weren’t prepared for how much worse traditional signal would look. But apparently not everyone notices. Or who notice but don’t care:

[D.P. adds: According to a study by the Leichtman Research Group, 50 percent of HDTV owners aren’t actually watching any high-def shows on them... but 25 percent of them *think* they are.]

Yikes.

Traditional news media is struggling to retain readership, and it’s all hands on deck to train working journalists in digital media technologies so they can reach the next generation of news consumers where they live (online). That means doing a lot more than shoveling newspapers onto the web, and the Berkeley J-School - in conjunction with the Knight Digital Media Center - has been at the forefront of multimedia training for journalists.

We’re expanding our popular multimedia training program to include training tracks on a broader ranger of internet technologies - map mash-ups, wikis, RSS, widgets, blogs, podcasting, FaceBook, etc. We’ve got two great new workshops in the queue for March and April - one for editors and one for reporters.

The workshops are free to qualified journalists (with stipulations). Click through for application details.

(more…)

Every responsible state budget means someone gets to swallow some bitter pills when their pet project gets slashed. You can’t reign in government waste and keep everyone happy. I get that.

But Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to shutter 48 of California’s magnificent state parks is not just a blow to people who like to spend their weekends in them — it doesn’t make fiscal sense. Total savings from closing 48 parks? $9 million annually — less than 0.1 percent of the state budget. What can a state buy for $9 mil these days? Meanwhile, the cost to the spiritual and physical health of the state would be incalculable.

The state’s obligation to maintain a few slivers of natural land for public use seems crystal clear. The question, I suppose, is how much land, and at what expense? Fortunately state parks are cheap to run, and we’re talking about tiny specs of real estate in the big picture.

Check the map of proposed closures on the governor’s own site (also as PDF).

Then, let the governor know that Californians won’t make this particular sacrifice, especially not at this miniscule benefit/cost ratio.

Had the most awesome caching experience with Miles today on Yerba Buena island, halfway across the bay between Oakland and SF. Still cracks me up when we happen on an ammo can cache. They’re generally the best ones, and loved the theme of this one (a depot for trading “mix-tape” CDs), but the sight of a five-yr-old cracking open a box labled “200 CARTRIDGES … M-13″ still makes me laugh.

Playing a round of Scrabble (no, not that kind) with the wife tonight, needed some good thinkin’ music to get in the groove. What better choice than a far-from-pristine LP copy of Donny Osmond’s 1973 opus, A Time For Us? But lo, what should greet my hungry eyes when sliding the record out of its sleeve but this tantalizing grid of original Osmond product offers, each one better than the last.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if you actually tried to order something you found in a 30-year-old comic book or, in this case, record sleeve (assuming you had the balls to actually cut up the sleeve to get to the order form, leaving your prize records defenseless against the cardboard outer sleeve). Would your money go into a black hole? Or would some sweet old lady sitting bored at a desk in front of a warehouse full of long-unsold merch cheerfully put your order together and send it on its way? It’d definitely be the purple tank top for me. The order form is on the reverse, and emphasizes the Osmond’s Mormon roots: “Utah residents add 4.375% sales tax.”

Science time, boys and girls.

Now, all we need is a worldwide power source strong enough to cool road surfaces to negative bajillion degrees and we’ve got free transportation!

OK, how to approach this… A few weeks ago Miles brought home an R2D2 toy and a “Learning to Read” Star Wars book. Started talking Star Wars characters and planets (you know, “light savers” and “Dark Tater”… the whole bit). Started making his own light sabers out of cardboard tubes, talking about the next characters he wanted to get. Turns out there’s a sizable cadre of kindergartners who are way into the Star Wars thing, and had even been watching the movies. The school is suddenly swimming with Star wars. Boy-hood had started for real.

Soon after, we went to a Star Wars-themed birthday party. Foam-core cut-out Tie Fighters to bomb with water balloons from the back deck, Stormtroopers tacked to the fence and a rack of Nerf guns to shoot them with, figurines all over the house, the whole nine yards. Great fun, but now Miles wanted to watch the real SW movies.

I never in a million years would have that the actual SW movies were age-appropriate for a five-year-old — we’re still on Backyardigans and Curious George fer cripes sake. Seemed like a quantum leap to go from kid shows to one of the great epics of the 20th century overnight. As of last week, his idea of grown-up TV was carefully selected and filtered episodes of Mythbusters and Man vs. Wild (my own personal TV obsessions), which he watched with me.

Started to doubt myself after learning that a lot of kindersquirts were already watching Star Wars. I was concerned about two things: Amount of violence and plot complexity. Could they even begin to grok it? And what effect would that much violence have on them? Talking to a lot of other dads about this recently, and starting to feel alone. Was I artificially holding him back? Was he more ready than I was giving him credit for? And if movie violence is in the context of an epic struggle between good and evil, and you know good is going to win, and that most of the killing is abstracted to ‘droids, is it really so bad? Especially if you watch with them and explain everything?

And doesn’t every parent who grew up with eps IV-VI dream of eventually watching the whole series in order, with their kids? I did. Just didn’t think we’d be doing this until age 10 or so.

Finally relented and borrowed episodes I-III from another dad. Granted, we were hitting the pause button every few minutes to explain things, but I was blown away, both by his ability to understand the story arc and by the fact that he wasn’t scared. Not one bit. I kept asking, and he kept reassuring me. I started to feel like I really had been holding him back, perhaps babying him unnecessarily in terms of what he could handle. His questions and impressions were so innocent, yet so wise. The death of Qui Gon Jinn seemed to affect him profoundly, but only, as it turned out, because he thought Qui Gon was Anakin’s daddy. Then Obi Wan’s vengeance on Darth Maul gave rise to a discussion about concepts of justice and revenge. The scene of Yoda teaching the ways of The Force to five-year-olds from across the galaxy had him ecstatic. He was getting it all, lapping it up. We were having an awesome time.

Got halfway through episode II tonight, then off to bed. 20 minutes later he starts crying out in terror from his bedroom. Went in to see what was up, and he was barely able to blubber out “DARTH MAUL IS STARING AT ME IN THE HALLWAY!!!”

Lord, what have I done? I’ve traumatized my child, subjected him to things no kindergartner should see. Feeling terrible about this. Held him for a long time, till he drifted off in peace.

Turns out that what he saw was the silhouette of a cute, puffy red dinosaur attached to his backpack, hanging from the door, amplified in the dim light to the standing incarnation of evil itself. Interesting that entire space stations full of souls being blown to fragments seem to have no effect, while the face of the dark side linger in his mind.

What to do next? He’s obsessed with a story, and we’re having a great time, but maybe I should have trusted my instincts and waited a few years. Should we turn off the Star Wars valve tomorrow? Maybe it’s a passing thing. But then what happens when he has to witness Luke doing battle with his own father? The politics of it all are complicated enough - how would I explain that one? We’ll leave this one up to him. If he’s willing to risk another bad dream in exchange for the waking fun, then so be it (but Amy sez: “One more nightmare, and we’re done.”)

Moving out of toddler-hood into genuine childhood, and all of its complexities. Everything becomes less clear-cut. You have to make up some of the rules as you go. But you also have to be solid, and consistent. You have to articulate things to yourself that have been dormant, bubbling in the back of your mind. “If I’m ever a parent, I’ll…” Time’s up. No more abstractions. Decision time.

Songza: Dang near any song you can think of, at your fingertips. Amazing, in many ways (not so in others - almost everything is low-fi, and you can’t download anything). But amazing that it exists. Get obscure as you want - it’s probably there. Where is all this audio coming from? Watching the status bar, seems like a lot of is being hoovered out of YouTube videos, but there must be many other sources as well. What a time we live in.

Great fun to be had at Mr. Picassohead - seemingly simple Flash-based tools to create Picasso-like paintings easily. Great fun with kids (younger ones need help, but still dig it). I love when simple tools with narrow parameters - married to human creativity - give rise to a zillion fascinating combinations.

Create something of your own first; then page through the gallery for a while to be reminded of all the things you forgot to try.

18 months ago, I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS to store MP3s and our home backups. It’s been all peaches, and we’ve been using SuperDuper for backup against it with no issues.

When Leopard came out, thought we’d switch to Time Machine for backup… only to discover that Time Machine doesn’t support backups to network shares — unless those shares are on Mac (HFS+) volumes. The ReadyNAS does do AFP, but the ReadyNAS itself is Linux-based, and its internal filesystem is ext-something.

This sucks. Without simple, any-OS network backups, you’re forced to attach a physical disk to each machine you want to back up — unless you’ve got OS X Server running somewhere in the house (and thus have some networked HFS+ volumes to back up to).

Found a hack on the Infrant forums to force Time Machine to see a ReadyNAS share as a supported volume:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences \
TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

It works! Time Machine has been backing up to a partition on the ReadyNAS for a few weeks now. But I haven’t had occassion to try and restore from it yet, and don’t completely trust it. Apple’s introduction of Time Capsule seems like the perfect answer, and is dirt cheap for what you get (remember it doubles as an AirPort base station and print server).

But I resent that it’s required. Daring Fireball has essentially the same gripe. I already have an excellent networked storage unit. I shouldn’t have to buy Apple hardware to accomplish this. Apple needs to step forward and support TM backups to any network volume. Time Machine shouldn’t be a gateway drug sucking you into the Apple Store.

Of course, no law prevents me from continuing to use SuperDuper. But TM feels so good…

Web-based forums/boards have had comment formatting buttons (quote, italic, bold, link, etc.) for years. I have no theories as to why this feature is not present on any major blogging platforms I know of. Even weirder, it’s really hard to find a plugin to implement what would seemingly be a much-requested feature. But went searching for one tonight and eventually found LMBBox.

Not listed in the major plugin repo’s. Doesn’t claim support for anything over WP 2.0, but I’ve got it working in WP 2.3. Required some mods to comments.php in my theme (probably one reason why it’s not a common plugin), but seems to be working nicely (Safari of course insists on showing its usual elegant but un-styled form buttons; not yet tested in IE).

Whoa: 11 great Mac apps ($368.75 worth) for $49 - can’t beat that with a stick. Heck, I’ve already spent more than $100 on a few of these over the past couple of years.

It gets better: 25% of the proceeds go to charity. Some of the software licenses won’t be released until certain quotas have been met - all that remains to be unlocked at this point is Pixelmator (I already own that one, but let’s work together and complete the set). Run, don’t walk.

Technically a few weeks late for a new year’s resolution, but better late than… whatever. Just stumbled across an incredible essay by Ryan Norbauer of 43 Folders: Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

Norbauer chips away at the notion that productivity and achievement are pathways to happiness, and in so doing opens up a Pandora’s box of existential questions for the workplace. For those of us driven like rats to sip from the sugar-water spouts sticking through our cage walls looking for one more rush, one more minor achievement to fool our impatient selves into thinking we’ve found a scrap of meaning in our lives, Norbauer says it’s time to step back and take a close look at ultimate motivations:

The essential point that we must confront here is that the achievements which seem so important and for the pursuit of which we perpetually torture ourselves are on the one hand futile and the other utterly insignificant. What is the ultimate summit we expect to reach? And if we can’t answer this question, why do we exert ourselves as if we’re heading towards one?

His observations are in part triggered by the release of The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which rests upon these core principles:

• Life’s too short.
• Control is an illustion.
• Expectations lead to misery.
• Great expectations lead to great misery.
• Achievement creates expectations.
• The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
• Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a powerful piece, and one I needed badly to see. I’ve been feeling all of this for a while now, but blaming it on the wrong things: ennui, exhaustion, a fragmentated work environment, my own stupidity. But maybe the problem is that I’m looking for love satisfaction in all the wrong places.

My (fittingly late) New Year’s resolution is to chill more, back off the treadmill, and to remember to breathe.

via Weblogsky

Miles and I spent an hour with iStopMotion and boxes of toys today, experimenting with animation techniques. The topic’s been on his mind recently since he’s starting to really figure out where real actors end and animated characters begin - the quality of rendering in so many modern kid’s shows makes the line more blurry than it used to be.

This was our second practice clip, unpolished and without sound, but he really got the hang of it after a while. Took about half an hour to create these 10 seconds, but he says he’s willing to put in the time to create more fluid flicks in the future. And I realize now that we should have been working at the default 20fps rather than 15.

Click to play

A friend of his stopped by while we were working on it and he told him “We’re making a movie about animation and I’m the conductor!”

Heard of an alternate stop-motion technique the other day - rather than feeding DV camera output to a Mac and grabbing still frames directly into a sequence, mount a digital still camera instead. Since the images will all have sequential filenames by default, you can drag then into Final Cut Pro, setting the initial duration for each image, and get the same effect. Except that you’ll have had the advanced features of the digital still camera, and the advanced features and controls of FCP rather than being limited to what iStopMotion offers. Hmmm…

Far out — BBC: A giant Pacific octopus living in a Cornish aquarium has formed an unlikely bond with a child’s plastic toy. Louis regularly plays with the Mr Potato Head figure which was given to him as part of an enrichment project at Newquay’s Blue Reef Aquarium.

Via Boing-Boing, early example of geocoding? No mention there of how coordinates were calculated back then. I’m picturing a sextant in one hand and a bubble level in the other. Love the use of the wooden arrow, just to make sure we’re talking absolute precision.

I’m not the gadget hound I used to be - practicality’s got the better of me. But I’ve been drooling over Garmin’s coming Colorado handheld GPS receiver. Is this the iPhone of the GPSr world? After nine months of geocaching with my intro-level unit, I’ve become painfully aware of its limitations: Small screen, tendency to lose signal easily in tall trees, difficult-to-use buttons, inability to store anything but coordinates from .gpx files (which is why I wrote gpx2ipod).

The Colorado addresses all of that and more… at a price. Excellent review at GPS Magazine (6-page review, check the photos on inner pages). “Indiana Jones Meets MacGyver.” Not sure I want to be either of those guys, but dang, I’m drooling. Went to look for a demo unit at REI yesterday, but it’s not in stores yet. Ended up walking out with new mud boots instead. Saving pennies.

After just having spent the last couple of hours watching the Republican half of the ABC debates, I can sort of relate to this poor four-year-old:

(not really). Actually, it was a pretty interesting experience watching the GOPs duke it out. You go through stretches thinking “See, they’re not all idiots! Some of these guys are pretty bril.” Then someone’s real agenda eeps out through the smokescreen and you’re forced to recant.

The idea behind the Discovery show Invention Nation is good: Send three hipster dudes around the country in a bio-diesel bus, looking for interesting technological environmental solutions. Unfortunately, the show is poorly produced and executed, but the ideas in it are interesting enough that it’s kept me watching.

Cool to see a piece recently on Integrated Manure Utilization Systems (IMUS). There’s a butt-load (sorry) of usable methane gas locked in the manure that gets discarded by the ton at dairies and stock yards around the world. An IMUS system involves strategically placed floor grates in cattle yards, into which manure can be pushed. From there, it’s chopped, mixed with water, and placed in large holding tanks. Bacteria go to work on the sludge and methane rises to the top, where it’s burned (cleanly) to create electricity.

How effective is the process? The dairy farm visited by the Invention Nation guys had 250 cattle, and was able to generate enough electricity not only to power itself, but 150 average-sized households as well. And the equipment investment pays off in 5-7 years.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association says the range of benefits from IMUS include:

• Reduced manure handling costs
• Protection of water resources
• Odour reduction
• Recycling of waste water
• Reduced energy costs
• Value-added revenue from the sale of energy and bio-based fertilizer
• Strengthening agriculture’s reputation of environmentally sustainable resource management

Imagine if every dairy and cattle yard installed their own IMUS - the enviro benefits would be immense.

Came home from work tonight and Miles had something to show me. “I made a laptop!” I thought he was joking. Then I saw it. By gum, he did make a laptop. With number keys going right on up to 20. And no spacebar. But a laptop, nonetheless. And then it dawned on me… but I had to ask, to be sure. “Miles, does your laptop just have a picture of a leopard on screen, or is it running Leopard?” “It’s running Leopard!” Dang. Complete with a mouse. And a mousepad. A mousepad named Ziggy.

The other new addition to our house tonight — a hand-made picket sign with giant letters: “THE END OF THE WORLD!” This because the other day he whined that it was the end of the world when I told him he had to stop work on the beach hut he was building in a friend’s back yard. I told him he ought to make a sign saying that, so he could march it around downtown. So he did.

See also: The Laptop Club (8-year-olds draw their dream computers).

Nature and the mind, never cease to amaze. Nice collection of things people have seen in the clouds. You couldn’t Photoshop this if you tried.

Great way to wrap up a holiday: Agreed to take on a new Birdhouse client - a mid-size company who’s had a horrible email experience with their previous “top tier” provider. They had a dozen or so addresses; could we take them on? No problem. The old host had been storing a couple weeks worth of their mail, but there was no way to get it through to the mail exchanger for delivery. The old host agreed to relay it all to Birdhouse for processing.

That’s when things turned ugly.

Turns out the previous host didn’t have the basic common sense to discard mail to unknown addresses on the domain (it hasn’t been feasible to accept mail for unknown names, like balloon345@domain.com) for years. But they were not only accepting it all; they relayed it ALL to Birdhouse.

300,000 messages worth, 95% of which was theoretically discardable.

Unfortunately, discarding crap mail isn’t trivial when parsing a queue that large. Needless to say, things came to a grinding halt. Complicating matters was the fact that Birdhouse actually utilizes two mail queues: One for MailScanner, which pre-processes spam, and another for Exim, which is the actual mail transfer agent. The MailScanner queue was so large we couldn’t even get things out into the Exim queue. Exim documentation assumes a single queue, and MailScanner doesn’t offer the same range of queue management options that Exim does.

Which meant I got to script a solution, examining each messages on the pre-que to determine whether it was destined for a valid or invalid address, and dropping it if invalid.

The script is running now, but will take a while. All spectacularly unpleasant. Once again, wanting to skewer a spammer or two and painfully aware of how much of my time is consumed by fighting bad guys.

Progress updates on the Birdhouse System Status page.

When I was a boy, one of the things I loved about driving through the Bay Area was looking for the amazing sculptures people created and planted in the mud flats and low tidal areas around area highways and bridges. There are far fewer of those around these days than there once were, but there are still a few, if you know where to look. Yesterday Miles and I found a few good ones while geocaching around the Emeryville Marina, including this excellent biplane just beyond arm’s reach from the end of a pier at the base of the marina peninsula.

The GPSr pointed to a spot somewhere just beyond the plane’s cockpit, which explained why the cache was rated a 4.5 on the terrain scale - one of the more difficult ones I’ve attempted (yay adrenaline!).

Absolutely gorgeous caching day, and booty everywhere. At the end of the day, sun going down and the sky turned absolutely electric. One of the most gorgeous sunsets of my life, and the vista was 180 degrees of perfect.

Me: Miles, this is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. No, wait, *you’re* one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.

Miles: Yeah, but I’m not a sword swallower. [Then, looking at the sky:] Hey, this must be where God lives!