I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Go read it in full.

Following these paragraphs, two images will show up, one below the other. If you pasted a 5″ by 5″ square cardboard hole on the screen of a 24-inch monitors/TVs, this is the difference you would see between an SD set and an HD set. In detail, here’s what you need to know about these images:

1. The first video is a standard definition video. It has 352 lines and it’s in widescreen format, made to fit the aspect ratio of old televisions (4:3 aspect ratio). It was very probably captured from a high-definition source and resized to standard definition so the video file wouldn’t be so large. The compression algorithm used is XviD, and the file (42 minutes of video) weighs in at 350 MB. As it happens, this is the stereotypical video standard used to distribute series and movies over BitTorrent.
2. The second video is what they call 720p (non-interlaced 720 lines of resolution). It was very likely captured directly from a digital source into a file, then recompressed into h.264 — a more advanced codec than XviD which, if used here, would make the file two to three times larger. This is the stereotypical HD broadcast via BitTorrent, and it weighs at 1.1 GB.
3. The first video image was resized to match the resolution of the second one, because this is the process your TV would use to show you standard definition. They were subsequently cropped to fit the interesting area because they were huge shots and this Web page isn’t as wide.
4. In case you care to know, these are still shots from the Dexter intro.

Here it is in uncompressed PNG form so you can see the quality difference:

Do you see the difference?

Points to notice:

1. Eyebrows. The SD shot shows a shape only. The HD one shows the shape of each hair.
2. Chin and facial hair. It’s a blur in the SD shot. Each hair is clearly visible in the HD one.
3. Forehead. Do the wrinkles disappear in the SD shot?
4. Eyes. They look blurred in the SD shot. They look sharp as razors in the HD one.

You can find the other ninety-nine differences on your own.

Please note that even though the HD broadcast was already recompressed a second time, the quality is still amazing. It’s very likely that standard 720p video “from the tap” (digital cable box + digital HDMI cable) looks even better. Imagine how it would look at 1080p!

HD. I never thought it would look so good. And now that I got myself a 24″ wide-gamut 1920×1200 monitor… dang, I can finally appreciate it.

• The medicine: every single episode carries a medical mystery that (while not always accurate) is plausible and keeps me clawing at the TV. But (most interesting) you do not need to know medicine to understand House.
• Cameron and Thirteen: gorgeous, both of them. I’m liking Thirteen more every day. But I’d tap them both any day.
• Cuddy vs. House: he always takes potshots at her, but most of the time she delivers stunningly strong comebacks.
• The Wilson / House dynamic: how can someone be so patient with a stubborn asshole of a friend, and at the same time be able to make the asshole think? It’s about the ping-pong of ideas, insults and remarks between them.
• Gregory House himself: he is an ugly, misogyinistic motherfucker who is always on drugs and booze, sneers at people, makes offensive jokes and remarks, hurts everyone around him, makes me crack up at least five times per episode (every single of his remarks has that kind of sideline humor embedded in it, plus the delivery both in facial expressions and tone of voice)… and he is always right, and he always wins.

House fucking rules. It’s the best TV series I’ve ever watched in my life.

Voy a explicar muy rápidamente de qué mierda se trata esto de The secret (el secreto). De acuerdo al libro (y a los trailers del “fenómeno simulcasteado mundialmente”):

1. existe un secreto,
2. que ha sido guardado celosamente por los más poderosos y millonarios,
3. que ha sido prohibido por la Iglesia,
4. y cuyos conocedores obtienen todo lo que desean.

Permítanme ahorrarles unos dólares, unas horas y un coraje monumental. ¿Saben en qué consiste el secreto? Consiste en “pedirlo”. Lo que quieras, lo tienes que pedir, como que lo rezas y se lo pides al niño Dios y ¡bam, lo tienes! Porque, reza la hipótesis, el poder de la palabray del amor es milagroso — y la ley de la atracción es universal.

¿Cómo puede una persona adulta puede ser tan imbécil para creer eso? Una cosa es pedirle al ratoncito Pérez dos dolaritos por tu diente a los 4 años… pero otra mucho renunciar al más elemental sentido común y creer en este abyecto y purulento fraude.

Así es: la estupidez ha infectado a tanta gente, que no sólo millones de personas han comprado este fraude de “autoayuda”, sino que estos ingenuos boboalegres juran y perjuran que les funciona. A tal nivel ha llegado la histeria colectiva por esta estupidez, que yo he tenido que gastar las teclas de mi teclado para denunciar algo que hasta el chimpancé más experimentado en aventar heces fecales entendería por asinino.

Las únicas razones para que este libro sea best-seller son, a saber:

• la imbecilidad no es un recurso escaso; me atrevería a decir que es un recurso inagotable por lo renovable, y autopoiético por los estúpidos que copulan y alumbran como conejos;
• la gente está desesperada por algo que les dé esperanza, y existen defraudadores dispuestos a hacer lo que sea para lucrar de ello; especialmente máquinas tragamonedas multimillonarias como este libro;
• este fraude es promocionado con todos los elementos psicológicos indispensables para convencer a las masas estúpidas: teorías de conspiración, truthiness (apariencias de veracidad), apelaciones a sentimientos, alegatos de divinas pomadas y soluciones milagrosas, etcétera;
• el libro plantea una nueva “religión“– de la variedad más conveniente, porque si quieres desearle el mal al prójimo o tener sexo con sidáticos sin enfermarte, básicamente lo único que tienes que hacer es sentirlo con muchas, muchas ganas (”mucho amor”, le dicen ellos) en tu pancita, y ¡presto!.

Este libro (y todo el movimiento y la maquinaria de marketing detrás de él) es un cáncer que ahoga el sentido común, invita a los ingenuos a tomar decisiones y derroteros destructivos, y siembra un gravísimo riesgo moral en la mente de la sociedad: si todo lo que tengo que hacer para obtener algo es desearlo, ¿importan acaso las consecuencias inmediatas de mis actos?

Y recién ahora voy a hacer la crítica que, a mi modo de ver, es la más contundente: es mentira. No hace falta ser un Einstein para entender que una fantasía lunática nunca se hará realidad sin una acción que la medie — y si todo lo que necesitas para obtener lo que quieres es una acción, pues — ¡puta, manos a la obra! ¿Para qué necesitas creer en una mentira?

¿Compraste este libro? Bótalo. No veas la “película”. Y dejemos que la gorda fea de Oprah Winfrey se ahogue en sus palabras; sólo con verla ya sabemos que este cuento de hadas es falso — nadie puede ser tan feo sin haber deseado no serlo… y yo no la veo menos fea últimamente.

Hope he gets out of this self-destructive spiral.

Hugh Laurie is a genius. Credit for the source.

Bruce Schneier exposes just two red herrings TV and newspapers love to quote:

Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu — the boring kind — kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn’t want to hear that.

“I say, ‘You need a flu shot.’ You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, ‘Don’t talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?’”

Current hot-button issues:

• abortion and contraception
• terrorism
• drug use
• firearms
• violent action games and movies
• sex

are decoys used by newsrooms to fill their space and time quotas. The newsrooms are focusing on all them, and completely forgetting about all the issues that matter much more in terms of quality of life and the health of society. We, across the world, have been paying attention to these “decoy conversations”, devising whole bone-headed policies, around them. It’s about time we stopped.

When was the last time a news story focused on how many lives are lost to drug wars (territorial feuds and revenge killings)? Perhaps lives ruined through lack of access to hygienic abortions (most poor people suffer from this) or contraception? Lives saved by the use of firearms in self-defense (tens of thousands in the U.S. yearly)? Kids playing violent games who don’t get involved in school shootings (about 99.9999% at my last assessment)?

So, the next time you see something dramatic reported on the news, don’t just blindly nod and think “yes, someone should do something about _______”. Think, and see if the frequency of the danger warrants doing something, or focusing on something else instead. Think, and see if the policy we as a society apply to that issue actually makes sense.

Don’t take the fact that news channels peddle something as it being frequent. The numbers are out there — just look for them.

Oh, by the way, houses with pools are more dangerous that houses with guns. That doesn’t mean I will not get myself a pool. Neither does it mean I will rid me of any guns.

Excellent picture quality is important if you use MythTV a lot. Unfortunately, if you’re using a standard Brooktree (bt848 or bt878) video capture card, the default settings of your card work against you. You might have noticed light colors washed out, color ringing on sharp vertical lines, brightly lit areas of the video flashing rapidly, and a general picture darkness that doesn’t make MythTV justice when comparing it to a TV set or TVTime.

We’re about to fix that for ya.

Step 1: install the adjust filter on each channel

First, we fix recording. Brooktree-based cards have a bug that causes it not to capture colors correctly. Using a MythTV filter, we can beat the color space delivered by the card into the standard.

Use the MySQL client to execute this command on the MythTV database (usually named mythconverg):

update channel set videofilters='adjust=0:255:1.0:2:253:1.0';

That adjust filter will map the incorrectly captured colors to the standard TV color space. Now recorded videos will contain the right color balance and brightness/darkness mix.

Note that, if you add any new channels, you will need to re-run this command.

Step 2: adjust gamma correction on your monitor and enable deinterlacing

Now it’s time to adjust the gamma correction and interlacing adjustments.

What gamma correction does is lighten or darken the picture up. Think of gamma as a way to make the picture brighter or darker in average, without making the light parts lighter or the dark parts darker. Brightness controls are inferior to gamma, because gamma, unlike brightness, doesn’t make light colors look “burnt”.

Unfortunately, the standard X Window System gamma control usually has no effect on video (Xv) windows (though NVIDIA card users can use the nvidia-settings gamma correction control which will work properly). Fortunately, the same adjust filter has a gamma correction argument, and we’ll leverage it. This time around, the adjust filter won’t change the color map.

Now open MythTV and go to the Playback options screen:

• Enable kernel deinterlacing (unfortunately, there isn’t a better deinterlacing algorithm in MythTV — TVTime still beats the competition in this department).
• If you could not alter the gamma of Xv video windows, do this: just below that option, set this playback filter on the playback: adjust=16:235:0.7:16:240:1.0. Change the 0.7 in there to suit your tastes: the lower the number, the “brighter” the picture will look. I use that number because my monitor is fairly old — in theory the ideal number would get your monitor from the standard PC gamma of 1.5 to the TV gamma of 2.2, but I have no idea what the right number is — I just set it up so my old monitor looks good.

The second step will cause loss of some color information on playback. However, the recorded video preserves the full color range.

Step 3: eliminate dot crawl (color ringing around sharp lines)

A frequent problem with Brooktree-based cards is dot crawl: vertical and diagonal lines on the picture display rapidly alternating patterns of colors in a vertical or staircase fashion. Besides being unnerving, it costs you picture quality, because the video encoder will spend many bits to encode these rapidly changing artifacts instead of spending them on the detailed portions in the real picture.

Install these commands on a file named /usr/local/bin/fixbttv. These commands will enable certain types of processing in your video capture card that will eliminate dot crawl:

#!/bin/bash

v4lctl -c /dev/video0 setattr 'combfilter' on v4lctl -c /dev/video0 setattr 'agc crush' off v4lctl -c /dev/video0 setattr 'whitecrush upper' 255 v4lctl -c /dev/video0 setattr 'whitecrush lower' 0 v4lctl -c /dev/video0 setattr 'full luma range' on

Full luma range ensures that your capture card captures the entire color range.

Oh, forgot to mention it: the AGC crush control we’re turning off here basically stabilizes the picture produced by my card. If you see a light “blinking” of the picture, this will help.

Don’t forget to make it executable with chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fixbttv.

Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/bttvwith these contents:

install bttv modprobe --ignore-install bttv && /usr/local/bin/fixbttv

Finally add the command /usr/local/bin/fixbttv to the file /etc/rc.local.

Step 4: restart your machine

That’s it. I hope the good six hours I spent figuring this out helps you pimp your MythTV in ten minutes. Just to be sure, take a “before” and an “after” videoclip so you can compare the results.

Now, for a question: why on Earth does xvattr -a XV_GAMMA -v 1300 work for only a hundredth of a second, then stops working? I’m using an ATI Mobility Radeon if it’s relevant.

In the meantime, however, I guess I’ll have to settle for Scrubs and House combos.

Acto seguido aparecen las imágenes del rescate. Tan sólo segundos después, el jefe de rescate (aparentemente uniformado como bombero), sale diciendo (más o menos):

…por el exceso de velocidad, dado que la calzada está mojada porque está lloviendo, y las calles se ponen resbalosas cuando está así el clima, el automotor aparentemente perdió el control y se encunetó…

Exceso de velocidad? No era suficiente para explicar el accidente, acaso, el simple hecho de que la calzada estuviese mojada, y que estuviese lloviendo? La lluvia era evidente en las filmaciones del lugar!

Yo conozco personalmente a una familia que se estrelló a 80 kilómetros por hora en la carretera, tan sólo porque estaba mojada, así que es perfectamente posible perder el control de un vehículo sin incurrir en excesos de velocidad. Era obvio que el accidente lo causó la lluvia (técnicamente, la poca pericia del conductor, pero la lluvia proveyó las condiciones).

Pero claro, obviamente no sería noticia si Ecuavisa no abre la historia con la famosa frase “por exceso de velocidad”, especulación totalmente no confirmada (excepto por el jefe de rescate, quien también avanzó la explicación que culpaba a la lluvia).

Señores: el exceso de velocidad no produce accidentes. Si esto fuera cierto, habrían centenas de miles de muertos diariamente en las Autobahnen de Alemania, donde las velocidades alcanzan “lo que dé el carro” (algunos marcan 300 Km/h). Es la impericia de los conductores, mezclada con pobres condiciones de las vías y diferenciales altos de velocidad (es decir, abuelitas manejando a 25 Km/h en el carril izquierdo) lo que provoca los accidentes. Pero, claro, nadie conoce esta elemental verdad (recontra-estudiada) y obviamente si los canales fueran honestos y dijeran la verdad, no generarían ratings.

Yo sé que saldrán quienes digan en estricto rigor, todo accidente es causado por un exceso de velocidad — si el conductor hubiera ido más lento, el accidente no se hubiese producido. Bullshit. En primera, no se sabe si ir más lento hubiera evitado el accidente. En segunda, si el conductor iba muy rápido para las condiciones de la calzada, eso no se llama “exceso de velocidad” — se llama impericia del conductor.

Detesto cuando los canales de televisión nacionales salen con sus moralinas fundamentadas en el sentido común, y es exactamente la razón por la que no los veo.

See on Erebe.

Even on an old PC (graphics card: generic GeForce 2 MX), Beryl can hold its own. This video was shot at 640×480 because the CPU could not capture video fast enough at higher resolutions, but the same experiment runs fluidly at 1024×768 when not capturing video.

Check the window miniatures. Perfect for monitoring a program (say, the Firefox download manager) on a different side of the desktop cube!

The most amazing thing you can do with Beryl is open a TV window (yes, it gets along fairly well with TVTime), maximize it, put your Web browser on top of it, and make the browser semitransparent. You can watch TV and browse the Web simultaneously, no fuss, no muss!

Oh, almost forgot: You can pimp up your Beryl at beryl-look.org! Tell your friends!