Ryan Lawler (GigaOm) has written a fascinating post on HDTV adoption within the U.S. – what demographics are adopting it, how frequently, and so on. No, I’m not a big TV guy either – but this article is fairly fascinating.

If you work in the IT realm, its well worth the subscription cost – especially if you can [...]]]>

Image by iogi via Flickr

One of my long-term favorite services that I’ve subscribed to as a paying member on-again, off-again is Safari Books Online. Safari offers access to a vast library of hundreds of IT related books for online reading.

If you work in the IT realm, its well worth the subscription cost – especially if you can get your employer to foot the bill for you. IT books are such a niche volume and oftentimes so massive in size that they frequently run $50-$100 for a single volume. Safari offers a relatively inexpensive alternative – while also preventing the proliferation of the dreaded stacks of outdated IT books that seem to crop up around us as technology changes at a blistering pace.

The price used to be $10/mo. for their basic subscription – but that was years ago and it is now a much steeper $23/mo. – but still well worth the price.

Oftentimes when we find online subscription services the best and the brightest are not amongst the selection – this is not the case with Safari. You’ll find numerous volumes from a variety of the best technical publishers including O’Reilly Media, Microsoft Press, Sams, Apress, Cisco Press, Packt Publishing, Que, and McGraw-Hill.

Perhaps a little insiders peek at what I’ve been reading (or at least perusing) over the last year or two on Safari will help provide some idea of the range and depth of the collection:

• Martin WP Reid’s Pro Access 2007.
• Ross Mistry and co.’s Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Management and Administration.
• Michele E. Davis and Jon A. Phillips’ Learning PHP and MySQL 2nd Edition.
• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson’s PHP and MySQL Web Development.
• Andrew and Paul Hudson’s Ubuntu Unleashed 2008 Edition.
• Karen S. Fredricks’ SugarCRM for Dummies.
• John Paul Mueller LINQ for Dummies.
• Dino Esposito’s Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5.
• Scott Driza’s Word 2007 Document Automation with VBA and VSTO.
• Kirk Haselden’s Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed.
• Larry Tenny and Zeeshan Hirani’s Entity Framework 4.0 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach.
• Alex Mackey’s Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010.
• Michael Lisin and co.’s Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Unleashed.
• Brian Larson’s Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Reporting Services.
• Laurent Bugnion’s Silverlight 4 Unleashed.
• Michael W. Picher’s Building Enterprise-Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0.

Along with extensive collections of books on development (web, java, .net, php), database (mssql, mysql, oracle), server/workstation administration (windows/linux), and network administration there are titles on digital media, engineering, math and science, personal and professional development, and so on.

Did I mention you get discounts on books (significant ones) if you purchase them while having a subscription? Sweet.

No, I’m not getting paid for this post.

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I grew up in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have a television for a number of years. Cable was not available. Satellite was the only (and expensive option). Local TV channels were sparse. We learned to live with VHS.

When [...]]]>

I grew up in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have a television for a number of years. Cable was not available. Satellite was the only (and expensive option). Local TV channels were sparse. We learned to live with VHS.

When I moved to college I didn’t have a TV. I never bought one. We watched movies on our laptops or in the lounge. When Charity and I married and moved into an apartment our TV didn’t get a single channel – even the local ones. When we purchased our house, our home still didn’t get any channels. More recently they’ve changed everything over to digital and we never bothered to get a converter box – so now we definitely don’t get any channels.

We have a huge old TV some friends gave to us. No, I’m not too worried about mentioning this on the internet – b/c it’d take two or three people to move it and has a street value of $25-$50…but, hey, it works great for us – even if those little flat-screens look really pretty.

I still use the ClearPlay DVD player I was given years ago for allowing myself to be interviewed by a Philadelphia reporter for an article on the DVD player. It is starting to break down a little bit – but its been what, eight years?

So, Charity and I have learned to live without real TV (gasp). That’s not to say that we don’t watch anything – we do – but 95% of it is on the computer. The only time we turn on the TV/DVD player is for her exercise videos (no, I never watch / do them…people in leotards is disturbing to me) and when we have friends over and want to watch something as a group.

How do we watch anything? Hulu and Netflix. I began going largely internet based long before most people knew what internet video was. In those days there were a number of small vendors offering a small selection of movies and tv shows – many of these has since folded or been acquired. I envisioned a day when there’d be one site I could visit to watch tv shows – and not just the old stuff from the sixties no one cared about…then one day, a company began delivering on that promise – Hulu.

Hulu offers a wide range of television shows and movies online and for free. It is a pretty great deal. Yeah, if you watch them on TiVo you can skip the commercials, but Hulu is pretty close – with only 30-60 seconds of commercials on each break. The video is high quality, the buffering ensures the video doesn’t crack up even on reasonably slow lines, and the queue features allow you to track when new episodes are released for your favorite shows.

Hulu now has Hulu Plus for $9.95 – I received an invite to the beta but never joined. They wanted us to pay up-front. What? How about at least 30 days free? Especially since its a beta? Plus we already have Netflix – and I’m not going to spend more than $15 or $20 a month for video entertainment – I have too few dollars in the first place and better things to utilize them on.

But I’m still relatively happy with Hulu. I’ve been disappointed that they are now oftentimes stacking two videos – one right after the other. This is annoying.

They have gotten better at not showing you the same commercial over and over again in a single episode. For example, I can remember having four or five commercial breaks in an episode and seeing the same commercial each time! I wanted to shoot myself! Ach! One of those commercials was for the Adam Sandler movie Click – the first few times my wife and I thought it looked funny – then we became so sick of seeing the commercial over and over again we vowed to never see the movie and never have…it still makes me feel ill thinking about it. Overexposure – bleck.

Still, Hulu has a bit of a problem with this – which is funny – b/c part of the beauty of online video is its promise to offer better value (imho) to advertisers than normal video. Why? Well…

1. When you keep the ads short people don’t have time to leave the room. I sit through the commercial breaks on Hulu when they are thirty seconds – but when they get longer than that I can run to the bathroom, grab a drink from the fridge, or browse a website. Advertisers get my devoted attention when they are the only advertiser.
2. Hulu needs to learn how to spread the ads better. Yeah, yeah, I know we don’t buy it till the 20th time we’ve seen it – but I’m not that sort of guy….or if I am, you need to spread it out over a year…otherwise I just become annoyed.
3. Ideally, ads will eventually become part of the show itself. Did you notice how the hero is using a Dell and the villains are all using Macs? Okay, I made that one up…but I’d cast the villains as Mac users. Point is, you can advertise without even making it obvious…Cisco has done a good job of ensuring product placement in various shows demonstrating their video conferencing technology.

So, anyways, Hulu is pretty great. I made the switch to internet video years and years ago – now the trend seems to be hitting a tipping point, but its very possible you are still doing it the old-fashioned way…which is fine, unless you are paying out the nose for it – which many people are…in that case, try Hulu…I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

P.S. I’m hopeful that internet alternatives to traditional broadcast channels will offer better life to those shows that I love that are continually being canceled b/c they don’t appeal to a wide enough audience. Using Hulu you don’t have to pick between two shows showing at 8:00 p.m. – b/c now they are available anytime…and b/c this competition isn’t as furious you can see shows produced for smaller audiences. This hasn’t happened too much yet, but I expect it to be part of the trend of the future.

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Movies and television shows have allowed us to experience entertainment in ways never before possible. We can travel the world, experience adventure, discover ancient lands – such a multitude of experiences is laid out before our very eyes. Yet at the same time the advent of Image via Wikipedia

Movies and television shows have allowed us to experience entertainment in ways never before possible. We can travel the world, experience adventure, discover ancient lands – such a multitude of experiences is laid out before our very eyes. Yet at the same time the advent of movies and television has brought much that we would rather not interact with on a personal or family basis. Depending on your individual and family beliefs you may have issues with extreme violence, drug or alcohol abuse, strong language, or explicitly sexual content.

This left many in a bind. Oftentimes the only movies that didn’t contain at least some of these elements where boring or childish. Great for when you have children – not so great when you get together as a family to watch a film or want something with more mature topical material for yourself. Even many great movies contained stunning – if brief – moments where they shot out some unexpected content. Ned Kelly starring Heath Ledger comes to mind with its unexplained and brief nudity. Awakenings starring Robin Williams, a moving film about disease and a courageous medical doctor contains a brief outburst of strong profanity.

An entire industry rose up to combat these issues. Edited DVD‘s became very popular but were eventually outlawed by the courts as infringing upon the rights of the artist – manipulating the artist’s original intent. One vendor was found innocent of these accusations and continues to operate successfully to this day – ClearPlay.

How does it work? The ClearPlay DVD player doesn’t require special edited DVD’s, rather it has a small storage space inside the DVD player on which filters reside. These filters contain logic that says “skip time 01:15:33 to 01:15:35.” Thus the DVD player seamlessly skips over objectionable content – or mutes it. These filters aren’t blanket either. One can customize the filters according to one’s personal preferences. Don’t want to see explicit sexuality but drug and alcohol use doesn’t bother you? No problem, you can customize for that. Don’t want to see extremely gory violence but normal wartime or drama violence is acceptable? Can filter for that as well. ClearPlay offers extensive customizability on a per DVD basis.

Well, this DVD player must be exceptionally expensive to offer such advanced and useful technologies, right? No! The device is right around the same price as competitive DVD players that don’t offer the ClearPlay technology (every device should utilize this technology!). Right now ClearPlay has two models available, one priced at around $70 and the other around $80.

This is because ClearPlay doesn’t really care about the cost of the hardware – it makes its money from

the filters. A subscription is $8/mo. with discounts available for annual, bi-annual, etc. purchases. These subscriptions allow you to download and install all the latest filters onto your DVD player. ClearPlay is constantly adding additional films to its list of filters. Or, if you don’t watch many movies you can purchase filters individually – when you feel it is necessary for the film you are watching.

I can’t recommend ClearPlay enough. So go out and buy one today – or at the least, next time you need a DVD player, make it a ClearPlay DVD player. It doesn’t cost any more than your average DVD player and even if you don’t subscribe to their filter subscription – at least you will have the technology available should you decide you need it.

I’ve been using my DVD player for around four years now without a problem! Thats much more than I can say for some other DVD players I’ve utilized. Two thumbs up for ClearPlay!