Movies and Music
Yesterday, media conglomerate CBS Radio pulled the plug on local radio station WBCN, in the process moving MIX 98.5 to the 104.1 frequency and turning 98.5 into a sports radio channel. After 41 years broadcasting a rock format, it's sad to see WBCN go - some have compared it to dismantling the Citgo sign or bulldozing Fenway Park, both popular landmarks here in Boston.
WBCN is living on in a limited form - on a subchannel of 98.5 that's only accessible to "HD Radio" listeners (as a side note, I don't even know anybody that owns an "HD Radio"). There's as...
I don't know what to make of how the "Coming Soon to Home Video" segment on the Good Bye Lenin! tape consisted entirely of other subtitled foreign-language films. Technically the movie is a tragedy/comedy, though it seems like Sony Pictures opted to file it as a foreign film instead. I personally think of a foreign film as something culturally foreign rather than linguistically foreign, but I guess it's not up to me to make that decision.
Then again, I suppose it's one of the shortcomings of the English-speaking world that I'm nonetheless a member of: it's been pampered with full audio...
The FCC is shutting down full-power NTSC television broadcasts today, freeing up about 414MHz (69 channels * 6MHz/channel) of the airwaves for other uses. So, as I did a year ago when the FCC killed off the AMPS cellular band, I figured I'd stay up until midnight to see what would happen.
Strangely enough, the same thing that happened last time repeated itself: those channels are still broadcasting after midnight. Waste of my time, indeed.
People have recently been telling me that I seem to share a great deal in common with the personality of Rorschach – and I’m beginning to agree with them. I got to see The Watchmen today. Despite hearing generally mixed reviews tending to fall towards the lower side of the five-star critic spectrum, I actually would say that the film overall was pretty good. I’ve heard that the main problem that people had with the film adaptation was that it failed to deviate far enough from the graphic novel to be creative rather than just a narrated comic book...
I've been trying to import some old Led Zeppelin LPs for a few days now, and so far I haven't managed to get a decent reproduction of any of them. Problems are such:
The built-in amplifier on my receiver causes tracks to clip too much while being imported, so I have the Monitor switch thrown to bypass it. As a result this causes the sound quality to become too tinny, and turning down the treble setting doesn't help.
Stereo sound is heard over the speakers hooked up to the receiver, but the result waveform...
I'm beginning to realize that HD is like The Matrix. You don't really know high the resolution is until you see it for yourself.
Recently I found myself in the market for a new capture card, as my previous one had developed a rather bizarre habit of resetting every ten minutes. While tapping the input button on the front of it wasn't that big of a deal, restarting VLC after the sudden gap in the feed crashed it turned out to be an ordeal of hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, ending the process, restarting it, and opening the card as a feed could take...
I've noticed that a number of bands' websites are massively Flash-enabled, to the point where the entire site consists of an HTML wrapper with a large-scale, dynamically-loading Flash application. While the argument of whether or not this is an acceptable way to code a website is arguable, I'll save that argument for some other time. Something's made me wonder about such sites for quite awhile: almost all of these band sites allow a user to listen to a full-length track at no charge, using an MP3 player coded in Flash.
That's great and all, but obviously I don't want to have...
Back in December I mentioned that I was buying used CDs off Amazon Marketplace. 26 of my CDs showed up within the first full week of January, while the remaining five have apparently been lost in the mail. The great part is that the sellers in question apparently shipped the discs, as each one gave me a full refund upon hearing that I hadn't received them. So what's the problem?
I put those orders on a reloadable cash card, and canceled it after I was finished purchasing items so that I wouldn't have to incur the end-of-the-month cardholder fee. That means...
Here are a few questions that I've recently found myself asking: in today's overprotected, overmanaged, overcompressed, over-portable world of music, where are the last holdouts of cheaply-available CDs? Where can I legally download music from a substantially large library in a format that can be played universally without rights management? Is there a such thing as a MP3 player that doesn't add DRM to all of the music I place on it?
Users of Windows-powered handhelds have long been able to upload unprotected media to their devices and play them back using Pocket Windows Media Player. I own a Tungsten E,...