Total Bypass

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Fixed With New Digs

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The better part of the afternoon was spent at a computer store with the Wife selecting components for her new computer.  Yup, it seems like though it did last a few months longer than mine, the trip across the Pacfic has finally done in her PC as well, and it is slowly but surely becoming more unreliable.  Rather than simply wait for a catastrophic failure that eats up all her work and data, she’s just getting a new one now while she can still turn the damn thing on most of the time.

Other than that, I ended up playing Resistance:  Fall of Manin co-op mode with our neighbor.  That game holds up fiendishly well even with two people.  More impressive to me still was the fact that even though it was a split-screen, in high-def, the frame rate was ROCK SOLID with not a single bit of slowdown to be seen anywhere.  Very neat trick, that.

Yay For Free Movies

Today I was pleasantly surprised when I went down to the post office–with slip in hand–to pick up a package that was delivered which I unsurprisingly slept through. I wasn’t expecting anything at the time, but when I got home and opened it up, it turned out be five free Blu-Ray movies from that offer the Blu-Ray Disc Association is having to promote their hopeful pretender to DVD’s throne. Part of the deal was that each of the five movies came from a particular “tier” where various selections (I think it was by studio) were available, so here’s what I ended up with:

My first–and only–theatrical viewing of Species occurred in the mid-90′s when I was living for a year in Thailand. The Thais have a strange way of censoring movies. They don’t make cuts, they merely go for the film reel itself and block out objectionable portions, since they didn’t seem to have much of a ratings system at the time. As a result, viewers in a theater with scenes of nudity can expect to see either a) black bits of “paint” or “marker” blocking out the naughty bits, or b) something akin to vaseline smeared on the screen to blur everything out. When I saw Species, it was the latter.

So now here, once again is the movie, in High Def glory, and I picked it largely because Species has… in the immortal words of the South Park credits, “That chick from Species.” Only this time without vaseline.

This one is kind of a downer for me in light of recent events. I initially picked up Black Rain because it was the only film on the list that was directed by Ridley Scott. Now it turns out that it’s about to become a collector’s item. As of two days ago, Paramount, the studio that owns the film, has “defected” over to being HD-DVD exclusive, and will no longer be producing movies in Blu-Ray. This is unfortunate, because with them on the “Blue Side” the format war was actually shaping up to be pretty one-sided in favor of Blu-Ray and many were predicting that Christmas might be a clear cut end to it. Now, thanks to a rumored $150 million “incentive” from Microsoft, they are dragging out the format war, confusing consumers, and making this disc a soon to be rare, out of print collector’s item. I am not happy about the callous way Microsoft is making consumers suffer so they can “save us” from the format war by introducing downloadable content via Xbox Live and Windows Vista, but what can ya’ do…

I’d seen the first Underworld and while it was an uneven and not amazing film, it had some slick cinematography, some very interesting ideas, and, of course, Kate Beckinsale running around in a latex bodice, dual-wielding a pair of pistols with near infinite supply of bullets. Ever since I’d heard of the sequel, there had been a curious part of me that actually wanted to watch it, but didn’t want to buy it. And every time I went down to the video store to rent movies in Singapore, I kept finding other films that I had a stronger preference for watching, so Underworld: Evolution continued evade my semi-apathetic curiosity. Now, for the price of a postage stamp, I can safely justify a “purchase” so I can watch this relatively guilt-free in the “I spent money on this” department, even though the film student in me is still probably drooping its head in shame at this vacuous, guilty pleasure.

This movie on the other hand, I am EXTREMELY happy with. Being a fan of most of Tim Burton’s work (I’m still trying to pretend Planet of the Apes never happened) and the amazingly tedious work that Henry Selick had done for The Nightmare Before Christmas, this kind of animation is a treasure to me. It’s kind of like a high-budget, much more polished version of the Christmas specials I used to watch by Rankin/Bass as a kid such as The Year Without a Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We’d rented this film, loved it and wanted it, but for some reason they were never selling the Region 1 version of the DVD in Singapore. Now however, we’ve got it in High-Def which is a much better proposition anyhow, so I guess it all worked out in the end. The only thing I am left wondering about now is just how many more films is Tim Burton going to stick Helena Bonham-Carter in.

And finally there’s this.

Because it was either this or Pearl Harbor.

Foldin’, Foldin’, Foldin’, Get Them Proteins Foldin’…

Up until recently, whenever I felt the need to take the PS3 online, I would unplug the LAN cable from my computer and plug it into the PS3, a necessity to do things like surf the net on the TV, check out the Playstation Store for neat new stuff, and download things.

Now, however, the PS3 finally has its own dedicated cable and as a result, I’ve been taking advantage of one of the more unique features of the system. It’s called “Folding@Home” and what it does is… calculate possible configurations for folding proteins.

It’s actually a project by the Stanford University Chemistry Department, and it’s a fiendishly elegant solution to using a supercomputer to get your work done. They call it distributed computing. Rather than simply get a whole boatload of proteins that need calculation and piling it onto one super computer and say “Call me when you’re done,” Folding@Home actually distributes “work units” (which is to say, a particular protein molecule) to PS3 owners that have activated the program. The PS3 then quietly goes through all the calculations required for its assigned work unit and when it’s done, it sends the information back up to Stanford U, and gets another to work on.

The cool bit about this is that the “screen saver” that gives you something to look at when those numbers are being crunched shows you the particular protein you are helping to demystify, as well as globe with points of light. Every point of light on the globe is another PS3 owner that is “donating computation” time to the cause, helping scientists to figure out much, MUCH faster a better understanding of the protein molecules that are involved in things like Alzheimer’s disease and certain forms of cancer.

To me, if this is going to help fight off hideous diseases one day, seems like its worth it to leave the console on for a few hours a day…

Thursday Is Playstation Store Day

That meaning the virtual store available to PS3 users with an internet connection gets updated with shiny new toys. So apart from checking out the new additions, doing a bit of prep work for the second season of the animated series I once wrote in Singapore, and a little bit more grinding away in preparation for the penultimate confrontation in Digital Devil Saga 2.

PS3 Finally Smiles

Today our Playstation 3 finally lived up to at least half of its intended purpose. A quick check of the mail revealed that our first Blu-Ray movie arrived, Hellboy. Sony’s “trojan horse” plan seems to certainly be working on us, since my rationale is, “Well, since we have a high-def TV, and a console that plays Blu-Ray movies, we may as well get Blu-Ray discs now, right?” Damn you, Sony…

It feels right, though. I’m probably anthropomorphizing far too much, but I imagine our shiny new black box must have been feeling–at the very least–jilted, over having been taken out, hooked up, given a proper HDMI cable for high-def images and then… used exclusively to watch standard definition DVDs and play last generation PS2 games. Today, I could almost feel a throb of relief surge though the thing as it powered up and actually detected a Blu-Ray disc which it was more than happy to play. The only downer is that not all the extras from the 3 disc DVD edition made it to this Blu-Ray version, which is puzzling to me in the extreme when you look at the math. The normal DVD has 4.7GB of storage space, 8.5 if you’re talking about a dual layer disc. Blu-Rays have… 25GB on a single and 50GB on a double layer. Go figure.

To its credit, there IS a difference between watching a normal DVD, and watching a “BD” as some people call them. Whether that difference is hugely noticeable, or worth the initial expenditure is something that is arguable, and based largely on the personal preferences (or more specifically, nit-pickiness) of the viewer, but the improvement is there. At a practical level, watching Hellboy in its BD incarnation versus a DVD original is improved in two major areas; sharpness and color. Sharpness comes through mostly in the form of details that are suddenly quite clearly noticeable. Features of skin, fabric on clothing, detailing on carvings, walls, etc… all of these things are noticeably clearer and more obvious to see. I wouldn’t say it’s a gigantic leap in quality, definitely not as large as the immediate improvement I noticed between watching a VHS tape versus a DVD, but when you see the picture, you see the difference. Where the BD clearly wins out over the DVD however, is in “macro-blocking” department. On some transfers from film to a digital source like DVD, the space limitations of a DVD mean that sometimes corners have to be cut to ensure a film fits on the disc (or, in the case of Lord of the Rings, split into multiple discs). One of the side effects of this is that occasionally the hawk-eyed viewer will notice that details can look “blocky” or “pixellated” similar to what you sometimes see when watching videos on Youtube. Here’s an extreme example:

What you see on the left happens as a result of the “compression” technique. Up until now DVDs by their space and so have had to have video images run through a special kind of software known as a “codec” or compressor/decompressor. This means that, in order to save space, the codec will make a “judgement call” on which parts of the image are less of a priority than others, and devote higher image quality/resolution to the pertinent elements of the image. The much larger capacity of the BD means that this isn’t so much of an issue and movies can now be stored at a resolution and image quality approximating the digital masters made at “full resolution” that subsequent copies for distribution are made from.

Then, there’s the color department and here things are even more apparent. One of the things that most people will notice when watching a DVD–if their picky about their image quality, that is–is an effect known as “banding.” Banding is what happens when an image goes through very subtle changes in the gradation of color. As you can see from the example on the left, in the case of clouds, this means that a digital image with lower resolution cannot precisely mimic the smooth shift in color, and very clear lines of color become quickly apparent. DVDs have always been noticeable for this, particularly in dark scenes, where “blobs” of darkness would be noticeable within the darkness itself. Once again, the BD eliminates this completely and the colors blend naturally.

Speaking of which, the colors are also somewhat richer than before. Hellboy’s red is more vibrant, Liz Sherman’s blue pyrokinetic flames are bright and dynamic and everything has nicer saturation of color to it than what I’ve seen previously.

That still brings up the question of whether it’s worth it. Honestly, I don’t know. In our case, we have the damn PS3 there anyway, and moving over into high definition was an inevitability. Most home theater aficionados would be horrified to hear that we haven’t bothered with a surround sound system, as a) that’s pretty expensive and b) I’m just not that huge a perfectionist when it comes to audio. As long as I can hear my dialog, music and explosions, I’m a happy camper, and multi-channel sound is a nice–but ultimately unnecessary–bonus to me. It really all depends on how much this matters to you. If you’re the sort of person that needs the absolute best, is willing to spend hundreds of dollars just on a set of audio/video cables alone, and bursts into tears if a room isn’t properly rigged for ideal acoustic balance, then there simply is no choice; it just doesn’t get any better than High-Def currently.

However, if you’re the sort of person that values the content far more than the actual fidelity of said content, there’s absolutely no reason to start upgrading your equipment. Especially considering that the prices on stand-alone Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players is astronomical right now. In a few years, as with DVD, those prices will drop and become much affordable, especially when one or the other format dies as Sony/Apple (Blu-Ray) and Toshiba/Microsoft (HD-DVD) fight out their little war of succession in a second visitation to the Betamax versus VHS format war of the 70′s and 80′s. Except that this time, Sony, with Blu-Ray seems to be winning.

Of course, the other excuse for getting a Blu-Ray
player now (at least in the form of a PS3) is if your PS2 has died, and you know Rock Band is coming out in November…

A Walk In The Park & Other Things

Today was still a remarkably quiet and boring day by the standards of those whacky citizens we refer to as “kids” but it was still fun. We got an invite from the neighbor who was taking her dogs out for a walk to a nearby forested area in the city called the Don Mills Valley, or something to that effect. Since the Wife had never actually walked in a North American forest, this seemed like a good idea. And it was. I quietly marveled at how long it had been since I myself had done this, and it was nice to be in a quiet, forested area and know there wasn’t some python or tiger waiting to jump out and kill you, as is de rigeur in the tropical jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Old Friend also showed up today, which is always fun. I really gotta’ hang out with her more, because it’s kind of silly that one of my best, oldest and dearest friends is once again in the same city as I am, and I still only see her once every month or so.

And in geek news, the Playstation 3 has had its operating system updated and I have now plastered the Wife’s work as my PS3 “desktop” only it looks a lot more impressive on a big ol’ High Definition screen. I also managed to check out a new trailer for a game by Level 5, the Dragon Quest VIII and Rogue Galaxy crew, who are quickly turning into another favorite developer of mine. White Knight Story looks COOL.

More Fiddling

Another geeky day with the Playstation 3. I tried something out that I was curious about. Over in Singapore, the locals who bought a PS3 quickly came to realize something; the Asian equivalent of the online “Playstation Store” left something to be desired. When you buy a PS3 and hook it up, the console creates a user profile/account filled to the brim with information on you, provided you answered all the questions honestly, and then, assuming you actually told the machine where you really live, locks you into an online Playstation Store appropriate to your region. The Southeast Asian version is, apparently, in not so terrific shape, so what many Singapore PS3 owners had been doing was faking an American address so that they could get access to the North American store. The only catch was that they needed a valid North American postal code, since the North American system actually went to the trouble of checking online to verify the postal code address put in actually existed.

After doing a little bit of homework, I realized that the European, Australian and of course, the Japanese versions of this store all offered a few things that the North American version did not. The European store, for example, offers a demo of a game that the North American version doesn’t. In Australia, PS3 gamers can download music videos and watch them, a service not available here. And of course, in Japan, the Land of Games, they have much earlier access to demos of games, since those games come out there first, before being subjected to months of translation to ready them for an English release. So following in the footsteps of the Singapore gamers, I went into my system and created a bunch of new dummy accounts, one for England, one for Australia and another for Japan. To my amazement, neither the British or Australian versions of the store cared about a valid address, and simply took me at face value when I said I lived there. The Japanese store was a lot trickier, if only because once I designated my residence as Japan, the consoles–surprise!–switched over to Kanji. Fortunately the registration process was exactly the same, and I muddled my way through until I got to the bit asking for a residential address. It turns out the Japanese ALSO want to confirm an actual postal code, and they have a bizarre address system that I needed to take a crash course in, learning about odd things like how prefectures work and how the Japanese use the AGE of a building, rather than its location, to determine its hierarchy in address numbers for a particular street. In the end, I ended up hitting up an English speaking expatriate site that had apartments for rent in order to track down my legit postal code and fortunately that was all I needed to get in.

Not a bad haul, though. In the end, I managed to get my grubby little paws on a Japanese demo called “Folksoul” who’s English name will be “Folklore” when it finally releases, a music video from some Australian singer with weird, almost Kate Bush-y sort of feel to her voice, and a demo for comic book based first person shooter, The Darkness, which amazingly is not offered in the North American store.

I also finally got around to getting that HDMI cable. Looking around in normal retail stores, the cheapest cable I could find sold for about $70. However, on the internet, I found some guy that claimed to sell them for $15. So we hopped on down over to St. Clair West and promptly found ourselves in a very nice, sleepy little neighborhood that lacked the same bustle in the middle of the day that our usual haunt, Bloor Street possesses. It seems like a really nice place to live, and I’m glad we actually got an excuse to go down and see the area.

It turns out the guy in question was NOT lying. Instead of a little electronics shop, we ended up at a house that was inhabited by what the Wife tells me were Vietnamese folks. We entered the guy’s bedroom and found wall-to-wall electronics. I have no idea how he came across them. I have no idea how he could sell them at such unbelievably low prices and still make a profit unless he didn’t pay for them himself. Frankly, I don’t want to know. I got my HDMI cable and we got out of there and went back home. Hooking it up and turning the PS3 on, that big black box once again amazed me by automatically detecting the new connection and optimizing itself for it. I had thought that the jump from standard AV cables to S-Video cables was noticeable when I first tired it on my PS2 years ago. The jump from S-Video to component was similarly noticeable. I knew that there would be a change, because the component cable I was currently using for the PS3 was analog, meaning that a loss of signal due the entire damn thing not being shielded with gold plating–or something else similarly arcane–was inevitable. However, HDMI is pure digital, so the quality of the cable itself means nothing, as long as it works, the purity of the image is preserved. But I wasn’t quite prepared for just how sharp and crisp the PS3′s graphics became when it finally got its “native” cable, the one it was really designed to work with (and yet, is not included with). The vibrancy of the image is really amazing, and I now understand what other folks have been saying; if you’re any kind of technology geek, once you get a taste of High Definition, there’s no going back. Even old PS2 games and regular DVDs look noticeably better thanks to the PS3′s ability to “scale up” standard definition images to pseudo-HD.

I’m extremely curious now to see what an actual Blu-Ray movie will look like. Guess I’d better mail that damn coupon out for the free movies.

Hurray For Desperate Marketing Moves

This is pure fluke timing, but I only just found out today that, as a result of the Format Wars, the Blu-Ray consortium is trying to give The Finger to the HD-DVD guys. Over the summer, anyone that buys a Blu-Ray player before September 30th, who can produce the UPC code from the box as well as a photo copy/scan of the receipt will get five free movies.

Of ‘course, the movies ain’t that great, but hey, at least Corpse Bride is on the list. And for the cost of a postage stamp? Hard to say “no” to this…