Checking the Time

It's been almost a month since my last post! Frak!

Sticking with the temporal theme of that opening sentence, I'm going to spend the rest of this post discussing my watch, which came into my possession just recently. I'm talking about the watch not because it's some ridiculously expensive timepiece that deserves a blog post dedicated to the fact that it adorns my wrist - it's a Casio with dual analogue and digital displays, and I think it's pretty cool - but because it's the first watch I've worn in nigh on half a decade.

The reason for this is fairly mundane - when my last watch (also a Casio, one that I had for over 11 years) broke, I decided that my mobile phone was sufficient for telling the time. During the last five years, whenever I needed to know what the time was I fished my mobile out from my pocket. Sounds inconvenient, but minor inconvenience is something you get used to pretty fast, plus I often found myself using oft unused alternative time sources like wall clocks, my computer's time display, and even other people's watches! After doing this for a while, I convinced myself that I'd never need another watch again.

This is not the first time I have been completely and utterly wrong (in truth, I've lost count!). My new watch was given to me as a gift, and I was initially quite sceptical about having it - after all, it was unnecessary! But after only a few hours of wearing the damned thing I realized how wrong I had been all those years. How the frak did I get by without a watch all that time? It's so easy; when you need to tell the time, you simply raise your arm a bit and glance downwards. Even a monkey can do it!

By now you may have gathered that I'm a fool at best, and perhaps even a retard. But folks, retarded or not I encourage you to relegate your cellphone to the status of call making device and let watches do your timekeeping for you! Even if wearing one means you end up silently cursing yourself every time your arm bumps into or grazes against something; routinely inspecting my watch for scratches seems to be my new weird idiosyncrasy!

A bizarre random post to end the blogging drought, one that promised to be about a watch but which ended up being about the act of wearing one (Christopher Walken was, sadly, unavailable). Hopefully the next post will be less nonsensical, and won't be such a long time coming!

Tech Stuff

There's a brain control headset for gaming. It reads electrical impulses in the brain and can map facial expressions, emotions, and movements of a person directly into a gameworld. Needless to say - awesome! If the success of the Nintendo Wii has taught the gaming industry anything, it's that more intuitive and simple interfaces are the type of things that can lead to more entertaining, accessible, and innovative gameplay (which translates into greater profits, of course). And this type of interface should be just as usable for interaction with any computer system, not just games. This is the stuff of sci-fi come to life people! I for one welcome our new brain scan controller overlords!

There's also another interesting BBC article about the evolution of mobile phones as gaming platforms. Damn, these things are becoming more and more powerful; forget Tetris, we're talking genuine home console level gaming on mobiles. I guess it shouldn't be surprising, seeing how Sony's PSP did something similar by fitting last generation level console gaming into a handheld, but in the more limited and energy conserving form factor of mobiles? I'm impressed - I mean, these things have dedicated 3D graphics chipsets on board! Also cool are the potential interfaces, which include iPhone style touch interfaces and Wii style motion sensitive control systems.

Another (somewhat related) article is this one about how mobile smartphones will soon overtake laptops and become the mobile computer of choice. I have to confess, a few years ago I was one of those smug jackasses who'd sneer with contempt at gadget phones, arguing that there was no use for so much multimedia functionality. Phones should be for calls and texting, I argued. Well I'm eating humble pie, because to be honest the potential is huge and it's amazing what you can now do with these relatively affordable smartphones. They're getting some fairly powerful low energy consumption processors in there (even multicore!) that can match low end laptops in terms of basic functionality and applications both for work and for multimedia, including proper gaming (as above) and high def (720p) video. And this is on top of its use as a digital camera, a GPS device, and of course a phone! Yeah the size and interface are probably big stumbling blocks, but then some of these screens are decent sized and very high res, and there's even potential for a mobile projector. And there's always a roll up keyboard for typing. Even if you're not interested in mobile computing technology, the potential for more compact and energy conserving devices is something to be welcomed, as it will eventually filter through to the rest of the industry.

And finally, how could I not comment on the impending death of HDDVD? Yep, the format war is all but over and Sony and the Blu-Ray camp can rest easy. It's a good thing too, because the lack of a standard would have sucked and killed the possibility of there being a next gen successor to DVD. Actually, there still might not be - DVD is still pretty terrific and the leap from DVD to Blu-Ray is only in terms of picture quality. The leap from VHS to DVD was huge and allowed people to make the most of their existing televisions. Hi-def formats offer no significant new improvements apart from the picture (and sound), which require more expensive equipment to take advantage of in any case. And in the meantime, with ever improving video compression and global bandwidth increases, there's also the possibility that people will simply migrate from DVD to buying (or renting) movies online directly instead of moving en mass to a new disc format. Personally, I think Blu-Ray will take off but will never be as huge as DVD, and I think online video is still a long way off from becoming ubiquitous, simply because the network infrastructure isn't quite there yet and won't be for a while, and because there is no standard for online video distribution on the horizon.

And finally, a little humour to wrap up this post, courtesy of XKCD.

Liquid Crystal Displays

I'll never buy another CRT based display. Ever. Unless I become destitute and can't afford anything better. My crummy old 17" CRT monitor decided to betray me yet again (it has its moods) by tinting the picture in yellow, permanently. Needless to say this was an unacceptable state of affairs; staring at a monitor teary eyed is generally not recommended, although it does happen often enough when I read those overly polite, cold, heartless, rejection e-mails. Sniff. But I digress! Instead of getting the old thing (it's not even that old) repaired, I decided an upgrade was in order, and got myself a nice shiny 19" widescreen LCD monitor. Did I mention it was shiny?

Long story short, I love it. It's no secret that I consume a lot of movies and tv shows (no really, I do!), and watching them on an LCD display is a revelation. I had no idea how dark and blurry and indistinct stuff looked on my old monitor! Now it's bright, vivid, and vibrant, and the picture is bigger thanks to the larger size and widescreen aspect ratio. The aspect ratio also allows for more screen real estate in general, which is great for reading webpages and stuff like spreadsheets, though a lot of websites are designed with a fixed width (like this blog!) that leaves half the screen wasted blank space. Text looks razor sharp, and pretty much everything just looks more vivid and pleasing to the eye.

Pros:

• Flat panel takes up little space


• Lightweight


• Lower power consumption


• Superior picture in general


• Aspect ratio better for movies/TV shows and desktop


• Easier on the eyes (subjective, and I'm not sure if there's any solid medical evidence to corroborate this assertion)


• Looks much sexier than a CRT (not that I'm superficial enough to care... Awww, who am I kidding?)

Cons:

• Expensive (costs 50%-100% more than a CRT)


• You could end up with dead pixels (I almost had a heart attack when I saw what I thought was a dead pixel, only to realize that it was dust on the screen)


• Picture quality limitations - Fixed optimal resolution; contrast range not as good as CRT - blacks are not as deep; limited viewing angle


• Could have an uneven backlight (like mine, which has a contrast gradient from the top to the bottom of the screen) - virtually unnoticeable though, unless you fixate on it (which is generally true for dead pixels as well, depending on where they occur)


• Lifetime not as long as a CRT, though I believe the backlight can be replaced once it fails.

That sounds like a lot of cons, but truthfully the pros outweigh the cons. Even with the uneven backlight, and even if there were dead pixels, the improved picture quality (despite the other drawbacks), screen real estate, reclaimed desk space, and power savings make it a worthwhile upgrade. Prices will continue to fall, and these will be par for the course in the average PC set up within the next 10 years, if not sooner. For people like me whose lives revolve around sitting in front of a computer screen (I can hear obesity, diabetes, and heart failure knocking on my door already), it's a no brainer.