If you have an HDTV and have been considering purchasing a high-definition video player, the one to choose now is Blu-Ray. Toshiba, the long-time proponent of the HD-DVD format, is calling it quits w/ the format . Toshiba will be halting production of HD-DVD hardware after numerous recent losses of major studios and retailers (Wal-Mart) to the Blu-Ray format (via Slashdot).

You will see HD-DVD players and discs on discount as its backers try to liquidate their wares and cut their losses, but you should not buy them if you want your content to have long-term usability and any hope of growing the size of your video collection as HD-DVD videos will have increasingly limited availability.

Tags: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Toshiba, Wal-Mart

Did I mention I bought a laptop? A nice HP Pavilion dv6500 w/ an AMD 64 Athlon X2 processor. I’ve got it running Ubuntu and Windows XP, but mostly I’m using Ubuntu. I had to hack around and compile/configure the correct driver for my wifi and sound card, but I’ve got the hardware all sorted out now. I’m working on getting the system setup to be a good development machine for me.

So far I’ve installed Perl, Python, and Ruby on Rails. Over the weekend I’ll get PHP installed and also set up an Apache webserver and MySQL for testing purposes. Oh, the fun I’ll have!

I’m staying busy lately aside from work. The English-language practice on Mondays is dying off because nobody comes, but I’m still going to Bible study/potluck on Wednesday nights. Friday nights I’ve had assorted activities; a couple weekends ago I hung out w/ a couple of guys from SaturdayHouse. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to a gathering of “Seattle Tweeters” — Seattle users of Twitter — because a girl I met last Saturday (at SaturdayHouse/Six Hour Startup) invited me to come since I’ve been using Twitter a lot and messaging her and some other SH people on there.

Plus, coming up in March… a party for Battlestar Galactica. Oh yeah!

I’ve found community. I love it.

Tags: laptop, programming

According to my current iteration of my blog, this is my one-thousandth post.

I never thought I’d see the New England Patriots lose Super Bowl XLII to the New York Giants. I gotta say, that was the best Super Bowl I’ve ever seen. Down-to-the-wire drama and a huge upset — perhaps the biggest in Super Bowl History. Plus, I’ll get to tells kids in twenty years that I saw the greatest team in NFL history lose the only game that matters.

I saw the game with a couple of friends from church (Aaron & Jessica) — two of the few people my own age. They have a lot of friends there age which was nice. Also, I will not complain when I’m invited to social gatherings that include even one available female my age. It’s probably the first time that’s happened since I moved here.

HDTVs rock. I want one, but then I think about starving children in Africa. But I don’t think starving children anywhere are able to consume HDTVs so I feel a little less bad about wanting one.

So FLAC files sound awesome. I decided to rip Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) to see if the sound quality is really that much better. It does sound a bit better. At some point I want to repartition my hard drives and perhaps slap a fat 1TB (Terabyte, baby, Terabyte = one thousand gigabytes) drive in my computer so I can go crazy on backing up all my albums and DVDs in the best quality possible.

The only problem with FLAC is that it’s complicated if not impossible to get iTunes to play FLAC. So what I’ve done is I’m using Winamp is the player/library for my FLAC files and storing them all on one of my other drive partitions to keep it all sorted and simple. Of course, I also created MP3 copies of the files for use w/ the iPod. With the demise of DRM though, I’m more open to considering other portable media players, but I can’t say I’ve seen anything more impressive than the iPod.

I’m considering purchasing a laptop I can load up w/ Linux. Partially to be nerdy and indie and open source, but I’ve become a lot more familiar w/ the command line over the years and it’d also be a much better machine for doing web development. Anyway, this also feeds into the desire to find alternatives to iTunes/iPod because Apple isn’t exactly friendly w/ Linux.

Of course, I’d take a Macbook if I could get one, but cost remains prohibitive. It’d cost me twice as much to get the Apple as it would for a comparatively powerful Dell w/ dual-core Athlon chips, 2GB RAM, DVD-burner, 120gb hard drive, wifi.

I’m impressed w/ how busy I’ve stayed this weekend. I spent 15 hours out on Friday, 9 hours out on Saturday, and 9 hours out today.

Social Life FTW!!!

Tags: Aaron & Jessica, FLAC, football, iPod, iTunes, laptop, Super Bowl, Winamp

I’ve moved MyTwitter for Wordpress to a new project page.

MyTwitter is a Wordpress plugin I created that allows users to display their Twitter status updates (tweets) on their Wordpress blog and update their status through the Options page. It includes customization options including number of tweets to display and formatting options. It can be called as a function or used as a widget.

You can see MyTwitter in action at the main page of my site.

At the time of writing this post, MyTwitter has been downloaded 1,150 times via Wordpress Plugins (download current version now).

It’s also interesting to note the number of different languages I’ve seen for pages referring to or using my plugin. To date, among sites linking to mine talking about the plugin, I’ve seen English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese, German, Japanese, and Russian. It’s a global community!

Tags: code, mytwitter, Twitter

The power button for my computer monitor (19″ Dell flat panel) broke today. I called Isaac to ask him to Google for fixes. No luck — nobody knows how to fix computer monitor power buttons. At least, not anyone on the internets.

I called Tyler to ask him if he knew how to fix it. He informed me that monitors aren’t typically designed with deconstruction and fixing in mind.

I called Dell in a feeble attempt to receive “customer service.” In general I like Dell, but their customer service sucked. At first, it’s IVR couldn’t figure out what I was saying, then I got angry and yelled at it and it told me to wait. I waited ten minutes before giving up (plus from previous experience I figured they would ask me to pay them money to give me advice that probably wouldn’t fix the problem anyway — that and my warranty is probably expired).

In frustration with the entire situation, I took out a pocket knife, stabbed the power button repeatedly, and proceeded to cut it out off. I then found where I needed to push to turn on the power, stabbed it, and now my monitor is turned on again.

Tags: computers, Dell, screen