captainsblog | Live from Ludditeland! (Reply)

It probably surprises nobody that technology and I haven't been getting along lately. What's surprising is the number of issues, all seemingly unrelated to each other, that I've been running into.

The DVR is ded like a ded thing. That comes as no surprise. What was somewhat surprising was how hard it seems to be to replace the device. I had a dead hour on Sunday morning and so headed Up the Transit to price out replacements. Best Buy was closed- and I mean CLOSED, that sucker gets locked down with bodega-style steel rolydoors- but Sears was open. Nuthin. A couple of real cheap players, and everything else (by which I mean "not much else") was Blu-Ray. I know they're pushing hard to get that as the next technology- every Sony DVD we rent now has a high-pressure trailer upfront pimping them- but the Blu-Ray machines don't record and don't necessarily play DVDs. The pickings online for standalone DVR recorders don't seem much better; what I've seen so far are mostly things tied to TiVo and other subscription services.

Ideally, we just need the functional equivalent of the DVD-RW drive on this very computer, only connected directly to the television- one that can record off the air onto physical disks and playback those (and other) DVDs, and preferably one that can display Netflix and iTunes streams of movies and shows and avi/mp4/whatever other formats that come from.... koff.... wherever they come from.

This would appear to be too much to ask. Already we've been told that our Android-platform tablets cannot connect to external CD-DVD drives to display movies inserted in them. I assume iDevices are similarly locked down from such peripherals.

Shit never changes. There was a reference in a memoir we've both recently read- by James Thurber, about the life and magazine of Harold Ross, founding editor of the New Yorker- to something called a Hush-a-Phone. It was one of the many things we wound up googling in the course of the read, and I not only learned Wot Won Wos, but that there was similar Non-digital Rights Management crap going on even back then:

Hush-A-Phone Corporation marketed a small, cup-like device which mounted on the speaking party's phone, reducing the risk of conversations being overheard and increasing sound fidelity for the listening party. AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make charges and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'" During this era, the phones were leased from the phone company, not owned by the consumer.

...The court's decision [citation omitted, from the year Eleanor was born], which exonerated Hush-A-Phone and prohibited further interference by AT&T toward Hush-A-Phone users, stated that AT&T's prohibition of the device was not "just, fair, and reasonable," as required under the Communications Act of 1934, as the device "does not physically impair any of the facilities of the telephone companies," nor did it "affect more than the conversation of the user."

This victory for Hush-A-Phone was widely considered a watershed moment in the development of a secondary market for terminal equipment. It and the related Carterfone decision were seen as precursors to the entry of MCI Communications and the development of more pervasive telecom competition.

It took almost 30 years after that "watershed" for phone-based technology to be deregulated and broken up- and just about the same amount of time since then for the telecom industry to remonopolize itself, like that liquid metal guy in the Terminator movies who just reforms himself from the pile of slush on the floor. Now we're back to companies telling us what we can watch and what we can watch it on.

And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia for almost as long.

----

Speaking of iPhones: mine's all full up again. It does this with no notice and less convenience. Yesterday, I was about to snap a closeup picture of (we think) a purple finch that was about four inches away from the lens on the wrought iron railing outside one of our windows. Nope. Gotta go to Settings- which I seem singularly incapable of setting, resetting or unsetting. I cleared an entire 5-something MB app off the phone (the Firefox one, which never worked anyway because of, what else?, conflicts with other apps) and it seemingly cleared no space whatsoever. The latest iTunes phone control is even less helpful than the previous one in seeing how much of what is on there, and of course there's no "file manager" type function that lets you just treat the phone like the remote hard drive that it is and delete whatever files you want. Unless, that is, you jailbreak it- and that is seeming more and more like the least of all possible evils.

----

I won't even start on how pissed off I am at Adobe I'll just say that, in taking its name from a construction material made partly out of dung, they knew exactly what they were doing:P