Butterflies!

Over the holiday break Karin, her parents, and I visited Natural Bridges park in Santa Cruz which is a big stop for monarch butterflies as they migrate south to Mexico for the winter. They estimated they had about 300 butterflies there that day, and these are a couple of pictures that don't completely suck. You really need to see them full size to see the butterflies well . . . .

I also took a couple of pictures that don't have butterflies, but were just pretty.

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Überremote - the Third Generation


Way back in mmm 1995 or 1996 I gave up on running my home theater with the coffee table of remotes, and don't even start me on trying to convince Karin it was functional. So I went out and spent some ridiculous amount of money (I can't recall if it was $200 or $300 - I have a suspicion it was the latter.) on a Marantz RC-2000 universal remote. This sucker was a monster and it had macros that you program very painstakingly on the remote itself.

Later when i bought my first Dolby Digital receiver (that was in 1997) it came with a Marantz RC-2000, so I had two for a while. The next receiver (my current receiver) came with a touchscreen universal remote that you could connect to a PC via USB and program from a Windows app. That lasted us until November 2006. But the new house has hardwood floors and every so often the remote gets dropped and . . . well the LCD layer started being wonky. it built up to the bottom half of the screen being blank (luckily the touchscreen still worked but you had to know which button was where.)

So I purchased a Logitech Harmony 880 remote from Amazon. It took some fiddling, but I quite like it. It has a color screen with 8 buttons that change function as needed, as well as hard buttons for transport controls, arrow keys, 10-key keypad, channel and volume. It does have a learning function if you need it, but the key bit is supposed to be that this connects to a PC (or a Mac) and downloads remote codes from the internet.

The big new function for the 880 is that it has internal models of the system state. On the last remote I had a double set of macros - one set that turned on the TV, the receiver and the desired source component, and a second set of macros that assumed the TV and receiver were already on and only turned on the source component and set the input. In contrast the 880 has "Activities" where you push the "Watch HD TiVo" button and it thinks to itself and says "Well I think the TV, the receiver, and the DVD player are on. So turn off the DVD player, switch inputs on the receiver and TV and hit the "List" button on the HD TiVo". This works pretty damn well and it actually quite shortens the macro duration (since it only issues needed commands). The Logitech code database seems quite robust - it knows buttons that my original remotes don't have (such as the direct input codes for my TV set - I used a silly hack to cycle inputs in the past.) Even more importantly, it seems to know all the delay figures for the hardware - which is a painful trial-and-error process. See if you turn on a component it may be a half second or so before it's ready to accept commands. And shifing the TV input may take a noticeable lag before it will accept another command. With the Marantz and the Denon remote you could insert delays but it was a terrible trial-and-error process to figure out what was needed.

There's only one thing I don't like about the 880 and that is the remote programming application is some crazy Flash/web based program and the data is actually stored on Logitech's web site. This means if Logitech ever went out of business or decided to stop supporting the remote I'm just shit-out-of-luck on the programming front. The Denon remote stored it's information in a local file so I can always restore it if I need to. There is one potential upside to this storage which is that I've read stories where the tech support people tweak a remote command on somebody's account and gets them to redownload to fix a problem. That's a neat trick, but I'd feel a lot better if I had some way of locally storing a backup of the programming.

The 880 also has a built-in rechargeable battery and comes with a charging cradle so it's much less battery-consumptive than the Denon remote which ate 4 AA's every couple of months. All in all I give it a thumbs-up.

Well, actually I'm not wild about the silly blue ring of light on the charger, but I can live it I suppose. That's a minor nit.

If you've got more than one or two remotes on your coffee table, I'd highly suggest getting an überremote to replace them. And the Harmony seems to be a nice sweet spot in terms of price/performance and with the necessary user-friendliness to simplify a complex home theater down to "push this button to watch a DVD" level.

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So you want to stream video to your living room?

So I've been meaning to look at Windows Media Player 11 and how it can stream video to the Xbox 360. Apple's announcement of the imminent release of Apple TV pushed me to figure out whether I needed such a device. Answer is that I don't, but WMP blows chunks. Big surprise. Tackling things one at a time.

1) WMP will indeed stream video (or at least it claims to), but it will only stream WMV's. Truthfully I didn't test this - I don't really care, because I don't have any WMV files. C'mon Microsoft that's retarded.

2) If you look at the web page the Xbox 360 send you to, it will tell you install the Zune software. With grave misgivings I did this. Man it looks terrible. Zune is even more restricted than WMP - it won't even play AVI files. I spent more time downloading and installing the Zune software than I did testing it.

3) Connect 360 - a product that I have recommended (and still do) for audio streaming from a Mac only supports WMV video as well. (sigh)

4) But there is a fix - and it's freeware. If you have a Windows XP machine then you can run TVersity! (EDIT 5/14/07 - the link was changed from .org to .com) Basically you install this on your Windows machine and it will transcode a file to WMV in real-time and stream it to your 360. The claim is that any file that Media player can play will transcode. I know XVID and DiVX files work.

TVersity is a bit rough. My 360 basically locks up when the stream finishes - you have to bring up the Guide and reboot into the dash. Video streaming to the 360 means you can't fast-forward or rewind. I don't know if that's a 360 feature, or unique to TVersity. I guess I should try digging up a WMV and feed it to the Media Player. But if you have an XP machine, a 360, and a collection of video files in formats other than WMV you should try it out. Note that it won't support DRM'ed files - so if you do buy stuff from iTunes the Apple TV might be a better solution. For me - it's not clear whether Apple TV will play more open formats yet.

I believe TVersity is transcoding at the file's native resolution, and the 360 appears to be upscaling to 1080i - and it preserves aspect ratios. It's doing a pretty good job. It's certainly not HD, and it's not even really DVD quality. But it's much better than my previous solution for playing video files on the home theater - hooking my PowerBook up via SVideo.

Anyway, if you have video files that you'd like to watch on a 360, definitely give TVersity a try. Well worth the (free) cost.


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Whee, a Wii(tm)

Happy New Year everyone!

Karin and I did manage to blip over to Valley Fair Mall to check out the "Wii Tour" that Tony had mentioned in my previous post complaining about Wii playable kiosks. I'm still unimpressed overall with the demo experience and the final consensus was "Meh."

At Valley Fair they have six kiosks - one running Excite Truck, one running Wii Sports Boxing (and ONLY Boxing), one running Rayman Raving Rabbids (but only one game - a western shootout thing that uses the "nunchuk" attachment), two running Wii Sports (no nunchuks so you can't play Boxing, but you can play Golf, Tennis, or Bowling), and one running Zelda. The Zelda station was monopolized by a couple of pre-teens the whole time I was there, and I didn't feel like arguing with them about it. Karin played some Bowling and the Raving Rabbids game, I played a few frames of Bowling, a match of Tennis, and the same Rabbids game.

The kiosk has tethers on the controllers (naturally enough) but they are far too short. Karin complained about it on both games, and it was visibily screwing up her bowling follow-through. I had a couple of shots on Tennis where it pulled my swing short. That's just poor execution, but I guess it's a relatively minor point. I don't really think that Karin would have enjoyed it MUCH more with a longer tether, but it's difficult to say for certain.

I noticed one thing about Wii Bowling - Karin kept doing something that caused it to stop the game and give her a tutorial screen about how to bowl. (I think she may have been not releasing the trigger in time, but I'm not certain.) Anyway, when it happened the game would stop, pop up an entirely static screen and wait for her to push 'A' to continue. The only clue as to what was needed was a little A button icon in the lower right corner. As a gamer I understood it, but it was a far cry from the whole "everyone loves the Wii" angle that Nintendo is pushing (and the media for the most part regurgitates). The kiosk staff were quick to come over and tell her what to do, which indicates to me it was a fairly regular problem. I watched after that and saw two other people do the exact same thing in just 5-6 minutes of watching. It's a remarkably poor UI decision on Nintendo's part and I think it really hurts in a game that is so focused on an immersive experience.

The end result was that it didn't change my Wii analysis any. Karin enjoyed it, but not enough to play it regularly if we had one. I was underwhelmed by the single-player experience on Wii Sports - it's an interesting novelty, but it wouldn't last a week before I was tired of it. The Raving Rabbids demo was just poor - I didn't find the game demoed that interesting and there was something definitely wrong with the tracking. I don't know if it was bad lighting, or some sort of calibration issue or what but I wasn't pointing the remote where the aiming cursor was. It was playable, but it felt like driving a mouse cursor around, not like I was "really" aiming a reticule. Frankly I'd vastly prefer dual analog sticks (or a mouse and keyboard natch) for FPS controls. Maybe it works better in a home situation, and maybe Raving Rabbids has a bunch of other mini-games that are more entertaining than the one I played. Still, it was a poor showing.

It still comes down to you either feel paying $300 for Zelda is a good deal, or you have enough interest in setting up a party system (in which case the cost drives up pretty quickly as you buy more controllers) to warrant it. Neither describes me. If the WarioWare game gets really good reviews I might reconsider the system (Karin really liked the first WarioWare), but man - after that it's a wasteland. Name the next good Wii title coming out. People will say Mario Galaxy or Metroid - but I'd bet we aren't going to see those until Q4 2007 (say September or later - and I'd be willing to put money on one of those two titles slipping out of 2007 altogether).

At the end of the day, I'm still unconvinced that third parties are going to support it with quality stuff, and frankly Nintendo's first party support for the Cube was so erratic as to call into question whether they still have "the touch" that used to make picking up a Nintendo console a no-brainer.

If Karin had walked out wanting one I would have started looking for one. But she didn't, and it didn't push me any further towards wanting one. If Zelda is the biggest draw than I'll go ahead and just rent the Gamecube version.

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BoardGameGeek!

So I decided to start tracking my (board)game plays on BoardGameGeek. To the right, just below my Gamertag you should see my last five plays. Wootness. The "Collection" function of BGG is not terribly accurate for me yet - I'm adding games as I run across them, so it's pretty spotty right now. It will get better over time. BoardGameGeek can be slightly . . . inpenetrable to the normal mind so I should point out one "feature" of how the database works, especially as it relates to plays. Each game and the game's expansions are listed separately, so an individual "play" of a game (such as Carcassonne) can trigger multiple entries. For instance Karin and I played Carcassonne only once (on Christmas Eve) but we used three expansions (The Games Quarterly "Mini-Expansion", The River II, and Inns & Cathedrals for the curious. Even though we own Traders & Builders and The River (1) we left them out.) so this creates four "plays" in my record.

While I was at it I fixed two long-standing HiddenJester bugs. It used to be that if I didn't have enough (or recent enough) post content the right sidebar would flow into the left - which I found quite ugly. Also, any "normal" text in the right sidebar would be in a dark blue color that was unreadable against the grey. I'd like to change the color scheme and lose the grey, but for now I fixed it so the right column stays right, even if there are no entries, and regular text is now black. (Although it occurs to me it should be the same light grey as main text. Hmm. I'll go fix that when I'm done posting. EDIT: Yeah - It's the "regular" grey now.) Let me know how it looks for you. It should work on Internet Explorer, but honestly, for my own personal blog? Can't be bothered to test. I didn't do anything that should trip up IE - but if I did oh well.

Before I've never had the HTML/CSS chops to fix this, but I've been doing enough web development that I can actually read the underlying structure of the site, so I fixed it.

Lots of stuff afoot, but let me just say if you're interested in boardgames and you haven't played Caylus? WOW! I like it a lot, a lot, a lot. The rules are murder to figure out and fairly poorly organized - if you're local get me to play it with you and I can (now) explain it much better than before Karin and I struggled through it today. But wow, was it A) complex, and B) fun. It currently ranks #3 on the BGG ranks (under Puerto Rico and Tigris & Euphrates - also both really freakin' great games that you can ALWAYS get me to play if you muster up the right number of players.) It might fall a bit over time, but I think it's really hot in the 2-5 player space. Way more complicated than Thurn & Taxis (which is why it missed out the Spiel des Jahres - even though it got the weird new "Special Prize for Complex Play" which was invented pretty much for Caylus) and I can think of groups of 3-4 people where I'd reach for Ticket to Ride, or Thurn & Taxis first, but if I've got a table of folks who will play for real - right now I'd go for Caylus in a heartbeat. Only one play under my belt, but I really like it this far.


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