WalkerPad

Yahoo released there free meedio player yesterday. In the eternal search for a better convergence mouse trap I gave it a whirl. Sadly it didn’t stack up very well to MCE or MythTV, though I think the music player was better then Myth. Not like that is hard to manage though.

No randomization options for photos (Uh, hello anyone awake there).

No transition effects

Very limited tuner support. Most tuners like dvico work fine through the generic window drivers with 3rd party apps, but for some reason the yahoo offering only has proprietary support for a couple tuners.

No sort albums

Under settings, there is no settings, just a links to various documents like the EUL, weird.

Worked fine with my stream zap remote but the menu structure lacks short cuts, I had to walk all the way back out of the file structure each time to go somewhere new… I might have missed somthing here but it seemed pretty kludgy to me.

It did work though, played music, pictures and divx files fine without effort. Still nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s free.

-Griffon

I picked up a 360 finaly, played some DOA4, Gun and a bit of Halo2. Good stuff, DOA4 in particular impressed me, though I still prefer the Soul caliber franchise (I like the weapons). Gun seemed fun to but I just barely got started with it (just past the boat crash). Going to check out some the demo’s are arcade live stuff tonight. I hear some good things about the fight night demo.

Probable try out the MCE stuff later. Vista is sadly broken with the Fusion HDTV USB device so I have to do a roll back or wait on some working beta drivers. But without Divx support it’s all sort of pointless anyway (*shakes fist at MS*). Still should be some intresting geek moments 8-).

I fired SBC yesterday, I simple was not getting nearly enough throughput and they seemed to keep raising the  prices every month by a few bucks.

So now we have Comcast again. They are claiming 6mb dl and 768k ul, will see but right now I’m sustaining 800-900kb on 256meg file from file planet. This is a lot better then I was getting from SBC (lucky to see 240kb).

None of it is enough though. I can’t believe I live in sunnyvale CA and nobody can drag fiber to my door step for next gen speeds. It’s simple a sad commentary on the American tech industry and the government (FCC in particular) that we allow this duopoly to continually hold true by directional high speed connectivity to all of our homes.

I also fired DIrect TV. I have been down on their politics and business philosophy for years but the service was ok. They wanted to charge me $300 for second HD Tivo. Comcast offered me 2 of (their admittedly less capable) Motorola boxes and a package that is about the same as the direct tv one with HD for a couple bucks less a month. I figured what the heck it’s worth trying out. Maybe when DTV gets their new MPEG4 HD DVR boxes deployed (they have none until some time next year) I will talk to them again, but the upfront costs they try and stick you with are pretty nutty.

Really though I hate all this. I want to be able to bring all this stuff into one big ass computer in the garage and have it send the HD and what not to all my other silent boxes through out the house. As well as serve all my other content like divx and mp3 etc.
None of the fatass incumbents are offering anything like this. Maybe we will get some of this with Vista MCE and cable cards late next year but that does nothing for me in the interim.

I’m actually going to try and get my MCE (might setup myth again, don’t know) box working with a HD OTA card. If I can get that working right and get good single from all the main networks, I might just fire comcast too. The Motorola boxes fail to impress, and I was pretty tired of Tivo’s awful UI and calculation performance (as well direct TV blocking all tivo enhancements to their customers).
All these things are symptoms of powerful monopoly’s colluding with IP owners to give us as little as possible while keeping as much control as possible for themselves over our content on our property. Sad.

Anyway, some good some bad and not yearly enough for all the trouble but Charise won’t let me cut all the cords so I have to eek what amusement out of the process that I can.

Oh yeah I canceled Akimbo before the trial expired. Nice ideas, but no content and the piece meal pay system is a joke IMO.

Looks like I struck out.

I have got to say that I think I agree with the tinfoil hat crowd about MS deliberately engineering the appearance of a shortage. I had retail drones telling me they are not expecting to get more in until January (after only having a handful for resale). If what MS is saying is true, and that this is because a world wide release then that was a mistake and they never should have tried it. I hit a dozen places none of which had any or had gotten cleaned out this morning by fan boys willing to wait out all night. Pretty nuts for a console that is getting so so reviews and has a pretty weak line up if you are not a hardcore race or sports fan franchise fan.
Really though I think they are trying to create the cabbage patch kid phenomenon of yesteryear. They wan the news to sound the shortage alarms and show pictures of everyone waiting in line everywhere. Some times grabbing market share is about grabbing mind share. Personally I think it’s going to back fire, people will just get pissed off and blow it off entirely and wait until the PS3 comes to do a real side by side and then buy the better system. Also angry disenfranchised people taking frustration out on retail folks is going to spawn some might bad karma for anyone who had a hand in architecting this slowly rolling ball

Will the stores get more tomorrow, more Friday? If so the retail folks don’t seem to know. Not impossible that they are clueless but that seems like yet more signs of a potential disaster. People where turned away in droves at one Circuit city this morning… how does this help MS? Does it somehow really increase demand and thus drive that non-existent critical mass?

The Retailers can’t drive up the price but E-bay and Craig’s list are going nuts. I counted about 70 entries for 360’s on Craig’s list ranging from about $500 for a core system to a 3k. Most seemed to be around 1k to 1.5k. Are you people nuts? Anyone who plays that game deserves to get fleeced IMO. How does this help MS, are those people really likely to feel kindly toward MS and give them a lot of business once the buyers remorse kicks in?

Anyway. Bummer but perhaps for the best for now, by january the next gen MCE extenders will be trickling onto the market and that was mainly the functionality I was looking for from the 360 since none the current games really float my boat.

Just got my first look at a best buy demo setup today. Had Charise and Kaily in tow so I didn’t get to play. I think they had Call of Duty 2 on it. I have to say the graphics looked very nice. The full screen AA is nothing to sniff at. I’m feeling the itch to get one if for nothing else to show of my HD TV some more.

Well the bulb showed up on Tuesday, put it in, nothing… Shit. Took it out reseated it. Click, everything is hunky dory again and dam I must say the picture looks spectacular when it it’s working right. If anything I would say it’s even brighter then before, but maybe my eyes just got used to a partially functioning bulb or something.

Still no call from the service person.
Still no check.

It’s only been a couple days though, I’ll wait until the end of the week to give them a call back.

Edit: Got a call from teh service person on Friday, they will come out next whensday and replace the Ballace. They think that it might be causing the problem. So that will be Two ballaces and two three bulbs I have now had in this thing.

Well they called again this morning. Apparently the order fell part way out of system and they lost the credit card information to secure it. They ran it again and said the bulb should still ship today and arrive tomorrow. Will see, maybe the 3rd time is the charm. Seems their system could use some work.

Well, I’m still pretty mad but slightly mollified.

I found a special 800 number for the consumer affairs department. Apparently they do answer the phone on the weekends. Took about an hour on hold but I expected that.
I was ready to entertain myself with a slow and painful roasting of the person on the phone. I figured I would get a rock or some minimal have to talk to a supervisor type noises for Monday.
It’s hard (at least for me) to be a big mean jerk when the person on the phone with you is totally professional and starts by immediately apologizing and telling you how they will fix the problem. At the end of the day I am all about solutions.
I spoke with Doreesha, it took her a long time to pull up the original case notes (system problems) but she was totally direct about acknowledging the problems as being unacceptable and out of scope.

I faxed her my recite for the replacement bulb and faxed a copy with the case number over to a special 800 fax number for bulb exchange. Where it’s the old we ship you out, then you ship us the old one while we hold a credit card number hostages routine. Fine, everybody has done with mobile phones now.

What Panasonic promised to do:

Process my refund for the first bulb replacement. They said it should not take more then a couple days and they will send a check.

Overnight me a new bulb, this of course won’t go out until Monday, but I certainly understand that. I was impressed I got anyone today actually.

Have a service person contact me to arrange inspecting the set at my home to see if their is some sort of other mechanical failure or defect that is causing these ridiculously short lived bulbs. If any problems are found then get them fixed. All on their dime.

This is all good, and I didn’t feel like I had to push or prod for anything. Also good and different then the last couple times I had to deal with Panasonic.

We will see if they actually deliver all these things, and in a timely manner, and without more bumps.

I’m still feeling very down on projection technology and Panasonic quality control…I don’t think I would recommend rear projection to anyone now given my experience despite the cost to picture size being very favorable. I’m a bit more upbeat out the Panasonic support model though. Previous experiences where not so good, it was like pulling teeth and then only to get a little response.

One of the things that stuck me was that Doreesha was in sync and aware of the warranty changes, although she said the bulb had one year not 18 months (hmmm interesting). Still that is a lot better then 90 days, which is pretty much a joke IMO.
The warranty changes and a few other small cues I picked up makes me think their is going to be a class action suit over bulb life on projection sets at some point, whether against Panasonic or somebody else I have no clue… I can totally see why though.
My position is simple. If the bulb is rated for 10k hours then it should be covered under warranty for that life time or the equivalent amount of average or even high average usage time in years (which is something like 7 years). As a customer having gone through this rigmarole twice now I don’t think I would ever consider accepting something less then that now.
If it’s as Panasonic claims and they see very few issues outside of the one year mark for most owners then they should have no problem stepping up to the plate and supporting the full life expectancy, any thing else is just hot air.

There was one little glitch, after I got off the phone with them they called back about 10 minutes later to say they had a systems crash and Doreesha needed to get my information again to resubmit the order. Hmmm well OK, hopefully it went through the second time I guess I will find out on Tuesday if I have a bulb.

I give Doreesha high marks though, I was all set to be mean and just couldn’t be, given the feedback I was getting from her. That takes some talent when handling a very upset customer who wants a solution and a pint of blood.

I didn’t even get to start yelling. Ah well I’ll save it for the next customer service fiasco.

That is IT. I am going to war on Panasonic.
I bought my Pany LC13 on 04-30-2004. Within 6 months the ballast went out. Naturally my in-laws where visiting at the time, just make my life even more miserable. This rendered the TV out of commission for a month, and it would have been a ‘lot’ longer if I had not called and made a big fuss with Panasonic. The service department was claiming 3 months to get the replacement part. Magnolia would not step up to the plate and give us a loaner even though this turned out to be relatively well know issue and common failure (yet Panasonic kept shipping?).
OK no more business for Magnolia, apparently they would have done something if I had shelled out an extra five hundred bucks for an extended warranty, what a joke, it was like a $3k TV full retail. This was all a total pain in the ass but I wrote it off as water under the bridge.
05-23-2005. The bulb blows. Just poof, gone. No reason. It had less then 2,400 hours on it. This clearly is a serious failing on the design of all rear projection sets be they DLP, LCOS or whatever. A single major point of failure like this is totally unacceptable in design when it is subject to totally random regular failure. The Bulb is supposed be rated to 10,000 hours, not great but a manageable life. Sure some things might cause that to be a bit lower but anything less then 80% is nuts.
Notice the date, this was almost exactly 13 months after purchase and just outside of the Panasonic warranty window. They warrant the replacement bulbs for 90 days. 90 days on a critical system element that apparently is heavily prone to spontaneous and seemingly regular failure with only a small fraction of it’s rated life spent. A part that is expensive and can be time consuming to get. This is absolutely unconscionable. This also demonstrates that Panasonic knows the bulbs won’t come close to living their rated life.
Magnolia service (*sigh*, the only one’s who had the part or I never would have given them more money), charged me $325.16 for a new bulb, on my just over one year old set.
I was pretty mad but stuff does some times happen. I did some research and apparently this has been sever enough of an issue that some Pany Consumer Affairs anger (Michael Marino Jr.) had made an open statement about what they will do for poor folks like me who apparently are just unlucky (because this is not some huge profit maximizing scheme designed to defraud customers out of money… hmmm 90 day warranty, $325.16 part, hmmm). He stated they will warrant the sets for 18 months and that all new bulbs will have a 18 month warranty. Mine said 90 days on the package and that is what Magnolia stated too. He also said in his open letter that Panasonic would reimburse anyone who had premature failure.
Anyway, so I called and tried to get reimbursed for the bulb. Panasonic was amendable enough on the phone and asked me to fax over my recites and what not. I did so. Nothing, not a word, not a hey we can’t read the fax. Not a we looked this over and just going to say no. Nothing, zip, zero zilch. I have a case number though, so I guess on Monday I will start there. Like I have time to chase people *sigh*
Why make this fuss, because tonight 11-05-2005, less then 6 months after I threw good money after bad, because I was just ‘unlucky’, with their bulb, the dam POS blew out, again.
Now I’m going to have to endure god only knows how many days of Kaily crying because she can’t watch Sesame street.

Anger does not begin to describe my state of mind.

Do not buy Panasonic rear projection TV’s. They are rigged to fail regularly and cost you hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
Don’t give companies money that act like this, vote with your dollar or they will not learn. That is what I will be doing from now on. Panasonic is dead to me regardless of how they handle this situation, which given past experience I suspect will be poorly. Another $325.16 out of my pocket? This set is not even two years old and I’m going to be into it for over $650 in repairs? I’m coming for you Panasonic and I’m bringing hell and possible (is that implicitly?) lawyers with me.
These bulbs should be warrantied for their full rated life, nothing less should be considered remotely acceptable on such an expensive TV set. The fact that they claimed to have changed their warranty shows this type of failure is clearly either a design flaw or revenue stream mechanism. This should be addressed through offering customers a full refunds or replacement/upgrades to new sets.

I’ll update on Monday I guess when I have had a chance to grind the bones of the customer service person, naturally they are not open for business on weekends.

I just discovered BlogsBridge. Techcrunch had a short write up. This is perhaps one of the best free RSS clients I have played with.

What’s cool?
It’s Java so nice cross platform compatibility.
If you setup a free account your clients will stay synced. Best feature IMO.
There is a bunch of social web 2.0 type stuff but that doesn’t really grab my attention much.

So it’s like using a web client but instead it’s a fast smooth local client. This means you can read your stuff offline too. Not to shabby.

They have some weird things to sort out with fonts though. It is anything but intuitive on how to set override or default fonts and font sizes. Also not sure why anti alias on fonts shows up some times but not others in the prefs on different but similar systems… Fonts also do not look as good as they should (contrasted to IE or Fire Fox). No tabs either. All that aside it’s pretty neat.
Not sure how it’s put together, off hand I would say they need to use the mozila engine or get a newer version of it. That would probable help a ton.

I have been using a combo of RSSBandit that has some weird resource hogging going on, but is a slick client aside from that. As well as newsgator, which is cool but I can’t get syncing for offline viewing without giving them monthly money, not going to happen. I would shell out for a client but never monthly fee’s, I’m so done with the never ending service push.
The number of feeds I reed makes this setup a pain, so maybe blogbridge will help with that. No MCE plug-in client though (something newsgator has), and since they are java I doubt there will be.

Anyone know another solution for universal synced feeds plus ability to read things offline?

Steve from Akimbo was nice enough to stop by again and made a few comments.

In retrospect I have such a weird mix of personal/family news and general tech comments that maybe I should split the blog or something….

Anyway, Steve Mentions that they don’t think the MCE Akimbo interface is ugly. Well ok, ugly is of course relative.
So more specifically my issues are, it’s blurry. The fonts are blurry the edges on pictures and boxes are soft and not well defined. The colors are more washed out (more then MCE). Everything has a weird low contrast, making for zero pop. The fonts being soft is particularly is bad. This makes it pretty hard to read from the couch when contrasted to the standard MCE interface. So, maybe ugly is the wrong term, how about less usable then it should be :)?

This is on a 50″ Pany rear projection LCD LC13. This set runs at a native 720P and that is what I have windows outputting. MCE looks very good. HD Tivo shows look incredible. Games look good both at 720p and 800×600.

I was explaining to Charise how the Akimbo system works. Charise and her friends (other moms) have talked at length how they would be willing to pay to get a good quality commercial free kids network (not smoltsy GI Joe, transfer toy selling shows, but Sesame street and what not). I suspect this could be a big thing if done right, you should her the moms go off about this type of thing.

I’m going to have Charise poke at the system. When I described the monthly fee she was emendable. Then added how “a LOT” of the other shows have additional fee’s her reaction was a swift “That is not right”. I love using her as a sanity check, some times I can go a bit around the bend, then wonder if it it’s just me thinking funny things.
So there you go, from a non techi mom a first reaction to the price schema.
Then she asked something I hadn’t really though about. “Could I pay 12 or so dollars and have no fee’s?”. No, but maybe that is something akimbo should think about, I imagine it would be more like $15 though. I bet they could grow a lot more market share if folks didn’t feel nickel and dimed.

Being nickel and dimed irritates people. Paying for access to pay… is not a customer friendly model. The Akimbo folks like to point at the volume of other free stuff they offer but it’s hard to find and well… mostly seems to be crap (certainly with some acceptations). Volume is irrelevant, relevant free content is what matters. Really though if you are paying an access fee to get it, then it’s NOT free in the first place so I sort of object to the way that term is being used, but oh well.

On the HD side, it’s great they are going to be offering something. My question is will it be inside the window of their preview? I doubt I will pay to get a look at what I imagine will be a bunch more pay to play content.
Being wrong about that last part would be a good thing.

HD things I would like to see?
Kids shows, even if just unconverted
Anima
Adult swim (if it ever managed to show up on MCE)
Mmm everything else? I hate standard def :p. Really what I’m looking for here though is an excuse to watch the Akimbo content rather then my sat feed. Give me stuff that is relevant in HD. Stuff that my cable/sat company is still sending in SD and you have a big win.

The subscription feature as available needs some work, I’ll just leave it that. It also seems to mainly be available for pay content (I don’t think I noticed it on any free channels but I didn’t kill myself looking). Tivo like power words maybe? Don’t know but it doesn’t impress.

I use rollup2 so I don’t think my experience has been impacted by not being up to date, something Steve also mentioned was generally needed… Can you even get Akimbo without it?

I realize a lot of this read negative. So, some good things
It is nice and efficient to go hit the web site to setup shows. In fact it’s way better to do this then trying to use the akimbo MCE interface IMO.
Down loads seem pretty snappy, bandwidth is not overly choked (then why the time outs on page access through MCE? Need cluster?)

Fix it:
How about this give pay content a different color box or font so it can be seen at the top level instead of forcing people to drill down and then be annoyed about something that sounded interesting but no way would you shell out for it? A small graphically icon at the top level for mixed channels in the same color font as pay stuff would add identification for mixed bags? It all seems like a no braining. Honestly I can’t help but feel the obscuring of payed vs. not um… already subscription payed (Free) content is being made deliberately blurry, that bugs me.

1. Add a filter to hide all pay content in all modes and all channels that only have pay content. Lets see what is really being offered.
2. Fix the navigation bugs. Right now there is not a way from the UI to even submit bugs.
3. Make the UI hi res and fit better into the MCE experience. It’s fuzzy and ugly and slow. Why can’t I just get my akimbo content with a filter to recorded shows in MCE?
4. Season pass? Maybe I’m missing how to do this… My little girl seemed to like High 5 (made my teeth hurt, but not as much as Elmo). So how do I say go get some more of that and Q it up? Do I really have to dig around a and say DL each of these? Maybe I’m just a newb and missing it though.
5. Remove the show expiration dates. If you are going to ask folks to give you rent every month, you really can’t be taking away the things they download, that is just silly. I get that this is probable an IP issue, but jeez, maybe you can make the owners see that this make their content LESS valuable and your service along with it.

I won’t start the HD comments. Akimbo has said they want and plan do it. Good. I’ll judge it if and when they do…assuming my preview period has not expired :). I’ll be curious to see what compression they use. I’m guessing mpeg 4 type files but that would not win much MS love so maybe not. The current resolution on stuff looks pretty bad on my 50″ Pany. Worse then the standard def coming across my HDTivo… but not so bad as to not be watchable. HD would add a lot of value, it might even be enough to get me to occasionally (very occasionally) open my wallet for some of the never ending sea of pay content. Though then I’m going to very quickly have a problem with paying a monthly if that is what is expected to get anything decent. Akimbo simple can’t have it both ways, Apple and the other music and what providers all sea that and ofer one or the other.

Well my off the cuff impression of Akimbo for MCE is not so good. This is not the killer MCE app I was looking for.

I think I approached with an open mind, I didn’t have any particular expectations after looking at the web site, but thought hey some anima and other stuff might be good and worth signing up for.

The premise. Akimbo wants to charge ten bucks a month to deliver their content over your bandwidth (it boggles my mind that anyone would get a dedicated cable like box for this service, but I digress, and that type of box has never been my preference).

My DSL line is a little anemic but hey I figured I could probable mange.

That is only the tip of the iceberg in fees though. Besides the monthly fee, almost every single show I looked at has a fee on top of it, seemly always around two bucks or so. Some as high as five. All the Anima had a price tag, all the marital arts stuff or movies….

Ooo I can watch the travel channel fro free :p, I don’t even watch that crap on Sat in HD I’m sure as hell not going to pay monthly for it a second time. Buy hey maybe that is just me.

Everything has an expiration date on it, free content (what there is of it that is not utter rubbish) is 7 days, paid seems to be 30. Now what the hell, this is going to a DVR, why would I pay for something that is just going to expire, it’s MY disk space and my bandwidth it was delivered over, this should pretty much makes it my property at least in regards to how long I want to keep it. I really don’t understand this approach it is very 1980 but guess that is where the content owners are still stuck.

I might put up with a few restrictions to get access to a incredible huge Netflix size library, sadly not going to happen any time soon, but certainly not for this paltry offering that you have to pay for repeatedly.

I couldn’t find cartoon network on the channel list, maybe it’s not for MCE or something lame like that, really one of the only things that sounded interesting. I’ll have to see if they have updated their lineup listing for MCE, the prerelease stuff was a pretty vague.

All and all there where a grand total of two channels that I’m interested in but won’t use (fee’s all the way down) and a couple others that might be interesting but are a mix of free and fee and frankly the whole things is annoying enough to put me off for good, but I’m going to see if a couple of the kids shows are any good for Kaily

Oh yeah, the UI embedded in MCE seems to be very flaky, I was getting frequent time out’s (load from their new release on MCE maybe the culprit) and other navigational errors pretty constantly. Things like the channel buttons suddenly moving you left instead of up, all would return to normal after hitting enter on something then going back, but it kept happening.
The UI looks like they might have dome some half baked port of their box UI and failed to really shake out the bugs.

I’ll probable post something more towards the end of the 30 day trial but off hand I doubt I will even point out how to use it to Charise, I can tell it would only confuse and irritate her, not a good state to have an already wounded wife in.

Akimbo, so promising, so not even close.

Edit:
The Akimbo rep guy was kind enough to stop by and made a few comments. Setting aside the marketing speak, I do love a company that listens and while I’m not impressed as of yet with this offering, that goes a long way with me. Those that listen (and actually hear) generally will be succeed, in the long run.

He correctly points out that this is a free Preview trial and it’s limited in its content and scope.

Fair enough, but lets all remember about first impressions. Seems to me they might want to rethink what they are offering. I don’t enjoy getting milked for fees (*shakes a fist at wells fargo, and just about everyone else*) and that is what I walked way feeling like it was all about.

I was hopping for something big at Apples press show.
*yawn* 2$ for low res crappy tv vids? Pay more, get less, the apple way. It is to laugh.
Sorry, is there DVI out or something on that iMac thing, no. Looks like 20″ is your ONLY playback avenue. I guess the new mini’s might come with front row too though, maybe somthing will happen there. No tuner support? Sure the remote has less buttons, the product dose less, a lot less, duh.

I’m disappointed, I thought Apple would introduce a Strong competitor into the HDTV arena, but this is just a gimmick, and not a very compelling one, to drive pod sales. This is not going to create even the slightest bubble of competition and innovation in the PVR market place. It’s definitely not going to cause MS or Tivo or DirectTV or anyone else currently in the convergence market to one degree or another to loose sleep. Bummer we need some more competion and more big players to wake up the providers.