It must be the season for HDTV; in addition to a big InstaPundit post, both my parents have asked me about HDTV stuff over the past couple of months. I’ve been thinking of getting an HDTV set myself, but I have a rather annoying constraint: my existing entertainment center won’t hold anything much wider than my existing 25-inch Philips 4:3 TV, which I bought when I went off to grad school in Oxford in 1998, and I really don’t feel like replacing the entertainment center until I move elsewhere.

This really limits my HDTV options, as most HDTVs are 16:9 (and I probably wouldn’t bother with a 4:3 screen anyway), and most of them have side-mounted speakers, so most 26-inch LCDs won’t fit, including the el cheapo off-brand ones with lame picture quality that Costco and Sam’s have. My current prime candidate is the Samsung LN-R2668W or one of its same-sized brethren (LN-R268W and LN-R269D), which has the speakers on the bottom and thus will fit my entertainment center; it also looks very pretty in the store (not that I’m going to pay retail at Best Buy when I can save $300 and tax at Amazon). And it has enough connections for the TiVos (yay, 480p, at least for the Humax), the Xbox (yay, 480p), and an HD cable box from the good folks at Time-Warner (so I can see Al Michaels’ lip sweat in glorious 720p)—which will do me until the CableCard HD TiVo comes out sometime next year.

With the big holiday road trip coming up, however, it’ll probably be January before I pull the trigger on the purchase, since if I get it now I won’t have much time to enjoy it. (On the other hand, I could toss it in the car and bring it with me…)

Michael Blowhard compares the experience of using his iPod Shuffle with taking Viagra. I guess you need the proper frame of reference to figure that one out…

þ: Amber Taylor.

One of my students in my American government class dug up this odd article from the Washington Post about a machine that allegedly turns sewage and garbage into clean water and electricity that was on display in Washington this week; the more interesting part may be the sideshow involving ex-mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry and a local pastor:

On Wednesday, the church’s pastor, [Rev. Willie F.] Wilson, confronted Barry about placing the machine in a parking lot used by the church.

The confrontation between Barry and Wilson devolved into a yelling match so heated that police intervened.

Wilson called Barry a liar and told him to watch his mouth, according to footage of the fracas captured by WRC-TV (Channel 4). In return, Barry called Wilson “power hungry” and threatened to have the church’s nonprofit status “investigated.”

If the inventors have some spare time, I’d think a similar device that ran on Barry’s hot air might be very promising.

If you spend a lot of time on planes, do yourself a favor and invest in a set of Koss Spark Plug earphones for your portable music player iPod nano; they work a heck of a lot better than any of the active noise-cancelling headphones I’ve seen and won’t set you back anywhere near as much as the upmarket Shure and Etymotic brands, the marginal benefits of which will be drowned out by the jet engine roaring a few dozen feet from your head anyway.

I just wish I hadn’t paid $19 at Best Buy on Sunday for my pair.

Google’s latest service, which puts Google Maps on your cellular phone, seems like a winner; I tested it out a little on my trip after reading about it in Monday’s USA Today. I did have to lie to the WAP website and claim that my steam-driven Sprint Samsung A620 was really a Samsung A680, but it seems to be working fine. The only thing missing from the big brother service is the “Hybrid” view with streets overlaid over the satellite images. Now, if only it worked with the GPS capability that the phone allegedly has…

After picking up two USB-Ethernet adapters for the TiVos (both of which sit in the living room, since that’s the only place there’s a cable hookup in this joint), I am now enjoying the world of WPA-PSK wireless security with AES encryption.

Figuring out how to do this with my funky bridged network (using WDS) was a bit of a chore. What seems to work: put the routers (one Linksys WRT 54G, one Linksys WRT 54GS, both running DD-WRT firmware) in WDS mode, WPA-PSK Shared Key Only with AES encryption, and set them for Wireless-G only. It doesn’t seem to work in WPA2 mode, nor in Mixed B/G mode.

Good news for all those planning to replace a wall with a television screen: prices for large-screen TVs are expected to continue to free-fall. Entirely coincidentally, the layout of my new living room here in Durham is making my eight-year-old 25-inch tube TV seem very tiny.

Will the next-generation video disc format war be over before it starts? Ars Technica notes that two more Hollywood studios have jumped on the Blu-ray Disc bandwagon, while the lower-capacity HD DVD format seems to be floundering.

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft Windows Vista, the operating system formerly known as Longhorn, will make its debut in time for the 2006 holiday shopping season. Mind you, nobody—not even Microsoft—seems really sure what will actually be in the OS, so this may all turn out to be a massively-hyped non-event, something not entirely unfamiliar to observers of the computer industry.

Hei Lun Chan, on the brouhaha surrounding the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:

I know those against government regulation will rightfully say that it should be up to parents, not the government, to determine what kids play. But if you want parents to be involved, you have to give them an accurate ratings system, since you can’t expect them to research every game’s content. And if the industry isn’t even competent enough to do that, then they really don’t have much to complain about.

The larger sociological questions—why we would rate a game that rewards extreme anti-social behavior as merely “Mature” and worthy of being sold at Wal-Mart, while adding a bit of simulated sex to it makes it “Adults Only”—are a bit beside the point; the ratings system exists, Rockstar Games was supposed to comply with the system, and the company didn’t.

Update: More common sense from Michele at ASV.

Microsoft claims that its upcoming Longhorn operating system will outperform Windows XP in a number of areas, including startup and application launch times. While XP’s boot times are not terrible, the area that really needs work is desktop login times; admittedly, most of the crap that slows down login is third-party junk (spyware and virus checkers, “quick launch” tools), but getting that stuff to start faster would be much more helpful than getting me to the login prompt more quickly.

þ: Ars Technica, who are also somewhat skeptical.

Yet another proposal to eliminate the telephone excise tax that dates back to the Spanish-American War has apparently been introduced in the Senate, although given the ballooning deficit and the typical political wrangling, I wouldn’t hold my breath on seeing the repeal happen anytime soon.

þ: Ars Technica.

According to CNet, Duke has released the results of its evaluation of its iPod giveaway to last year’s freshman class. It was a qualified success:

Humanities students, particularly those studying music and foreign languages, made the most use of the devices, though the whole first year of engineering students had to use the device in a project for their computational methods class, the report said.

Among the classes that took part in the experiment were those for Spanish, in which students were evaluated on iPod recordings of themselves speaking the language. Electrical and computing engineering students, meanwhile, used the devices to record pulse rates.

“The iPod increased the frequency and depth of student interaction with audio course content through portable and flexible access offered by the iPod,” the report said.

You can read the full report here in all its nitty-gritty detail. I have to say I’m not sure what I’d do with one as a professor—beyond loading it up with music to listen to on the East-West Bus on the way to and from work, that is—at least until someone ports Stata (or R) to the iPod.

þ: Infinite Loop.

The long-rumored move of Apple OS X to Intel processors was confirmed today by Apple at its annual developer’s conference. More at Wizbang and Slashdot, the latter of which claims that there is a “preview” that you can order for Intel processors today, something I wouldn’t mind taking for a spin, although it is as yet unclear whether you’re going to be stuck with buying Apple’s hardware to run OS X. Frankly, I’m much more interested in spending $350 or so to upgrade my desktop box’s motherboard & CPU combo to an Athlon 64 than dropping two large on a similar configuration just so I can run OS X.

I keep fluctuating between having 18 and 20 friends in Friendster, which is very confusing. Database replication is apparently a much more inexact science than you’d think…

Well, that explains all the German spam messages that have been flooding my Gmail account; I swear I had more spam than real messages in my Inbox today when I checked. (þ: Steven Taylor)

Interesting discovery here. I was prompted to look it up by an econ text that was making a point about world development, though most people might be interested to see it. The actual data is downloadable here for the statistics geeks among us.

I think I’ve given up on Empires of Light for now… maybe I will become sufficiently bored in the coming weeks to resume reading, but given that I have a few other books to read around the apartment, I probably won’t.

It may prove my geekiness that the first book I picked up was The Design and Evolution of C++, which I rediscovered while searching my shelves for books to sell on Amazon.com.

In preparation for moving, I’ve decided to get rid of most of my collection of computer books, including a large chunk of O’Reilly’s catalog. If I could figure out how to make a link to the list at Amazon.com, I would… in the meantime, here’s my lameass storefront where you can at least search my listings…

Update: Here's the full list of what's for sale.

Gmail has started upping its storage size to two gigs. It seems to be happening gradually, but if you look at your main screen and choose new features, you should see it.

Here's what the help screen says:

G is for growth Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people's lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more. We're not in the plains anymore Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.

Jeff Licquia finds that thieves are discovering something anyone who saw Demolition Man twelve years ago already knew: biometrics don’t do a good job checking whether or not the owner is still attached to the thing being scanned. For that matter, the Tom Selleck sci-fi flick Runaway showed biometric scamming in action 21 years ago. Do the people who come up with these things just not watch sci-fi films?

Four hints:

• You might want to run a spyware and virus scan on the guest PC on the fourth floor of the Fogelman Executive Center. It sorely needs it.
• Don’t try to secure your wireless network with MAC address security, particularly if you allow guest login access to a PC on the network.
• If you do secure your wireless network with MAC address security, don’t allow known wired MAC addresses to connect wirelessly.
• Don’t annoy your alumni by not granting gratis wireless access to guests at your own hotel. Particularly when the Holiday Inn across the street, also operated by the university, does have gratis access for its guests, and you already have wireless infrastructure in the building. (This annoyance, by the way, will be remembered when I have some money to give to various alumni associations.)

Toodles!

Ten-digit dialling came to much of Mississippi overnight. No reports yet of panic, although those most prone to panic are probably out in sheds in Neshoba County—and may be unable to call anyone to express their panic.

Exactly why the PUC went with the overlay instead of just splitting 601 again is one of those unresolved mysteries that probably should be resolved.

Via the AP: Rolls-Royce announces plans for Mississippi engine-testing plant:

BAY ST. LOUIS — Airplane engine maker Rolls-Royce said today it had selected a site in Mississippi to replace its outdoor engine-testing facility in central England.

Rolls-Royce PLC announced in 2001 that it planned to close the facility in Hucknall, 120 miles north of London, once it found a new location. The firm said today it had chosen NASA‘s John C. Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis — its first partnership deal with the space agency.

“This move highlights our growing commitment to the U.S.,” James M. Guyette, president and CEO, Rolls-Royce North America, said in a statement. “As a global company with nearly 100 years of operations in this country, we are pleased to be able to conduct this important work on these shores.”

Among the engines to be tested at the Stennis site are the Rolls-Royce engines for both the Airbus A380 “Superjumbo” and Boeing 787 (formerly 7E7) Dreamliner.