December 2006 Archives
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December 15, 2006
HD-DVD on the XBox 360
So, we've now had a chance to watch two movies with the HD-DVD player on the XBox 360: Aeon Flux and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The image quality is, of course, fantastic. HD-DVD outputs at 1080p but our TV is only 720p . Still, it looks great. The sound, I'm sure, is great, too, but we're only using stereo speakers at the moment.
Someone recently asked me if it actually made a difference. I asked them if going from a computer screen resolution of 640x480 to 1600x1200 made any difference in web browsing. It really does make a big difference in clarity and sharpness. Do you sit there every second of watching the movie and actually notice all of the new detail? Well, no, not exactly. However, that's more because when watching a movie or TV show, the average person tends to zone out on details, including the size of the TV or how big the black bars are on the top or sides. It's a form of motion blindness where only what changes tends to be noticed over time (a bigger problem in driving than watching TV, though).
Just before the release of the HD-DVD drive, the 360 got an upgrade to support 1080p in addition to 720p and 1080i for HD output. Now, we have component cables and a standard DB-25 VGA cable for our XBox 360. Our TV supports both for input, as well. When using the component cables, we can choose 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. Since our TV only supports up to 720p or 1080i, we'd choose one of those. On the VGA side, if you use those cables you can choose a bunch of different resolutions depending on what the monitor can support. These vary from 640x480 all the way up to 1920x1080. I've used it at 1280x1024, 1280x720, and now I typically use it at one of the new resolutions, 1360x768.
Our TV is actually 1366x768. That's how it can do 720p and 1080i. That said, it's a rather odd resolution since 720p is supposed to be 1280x720, which many TVs have as a resolution. I would also have thought that 1080i would have been 1920x540, interlaced. But every TV that I see with 1080i resolution is 1366x768. This means you never get a pixel perfect screen, which is more important on an LCD screen than on a analog CRT monitor. And then you have the XBox that outputs 1360x768 which does, in fact, leave a few black pixels on either side, although it's much better than the previous resolution of 1280x720.
The screen is much sharper running the TV using the VGA input and a resolution of 1360x768 than it is running it at 720p on the component cables. That said, the contrast does look better with the component cables, but the colors aren't as good and there is usually some ghosting. This setup would be perfect if the VGA cable had optical output. However, it doesn't. It only has stereo out that we send to our stereo speakers. I haven't looked around to see if any other VGA cables have optical out, but that's the primary problem we have now. In our current situation, it's not too big of a deal since we can't run much volume, anyway.
Now, with playing DVDs or HD-DVDs, it's the XBox that does any scaling needed to the resolution you set with the LCD monitor. It would also seem that the XBox 360 scaling is much better than that of our TV. From what I've heard, the XBox 360 will only scale the DVD output to 480p (from 480i). However, this can't be the case with the VGA out, otherwise it would be in a small window on the screen. This is also another reason we think movies look better through the VGA cable as we think the XBox 360 is scaling the image much better than the monitor. For HD-DVDs, this is actually a down-scaling, too. (Although, I want to see if I can get the output on to our 30" Dell monitor, where a 1920x1080 image would be up-scaled by the monitor to 2560x1600 to fit on the screen.)
So, anyway, the HD-DVD movies look great even at 1360x768 on our Samsung LCD TV. They sound great on stereo speakers and will sound better hooked up to a 5.1 system or better. However, that's not the only thing that HD-DVD has over the DVD format. They've also upgraded the menu and scripting system. In general, the menus tend to be similar to the DVD ones right now. Most people would be hard pressed to identify things a regular DVD couldn't do. That's probably good for familiarity with the system.
However, there was one thing that we noticed on Tokyo Drift that actually got in the way a couple of times. It turns out that an HD-DVD can basically support a screen saver. In this case, it was a screen saver of the publishers logo. This was interesting when it came over the menu while the menu was just sitting there. It was also interesting when it came up while the movie was paused. It was not interesting when it came up twice at the exact moment I hit the play button when the movie was paused. In fact, the timing once was odd but a second time it no longer seemed like a coincidence. It ate the key press though, so I had to hit play a second time to actually get the movie going again. I don't know if that's an XBox 360 bug, a bug in the scripting on this particular movie, or just bad timing on my part. We didn't notice anything like this on Aeon Flux, either.
Aside from the better viewing experience, another advantage for us to have the HD-DVD drive on our XBox 360 is that it saves wear on the the game drive in the system itself. If we wear out the HD-DVD drive (like we did with the drive in the original XBox) from playing too many movies, we can just replace it with another. Wearing out the internal drive means sending the system in for repair.
Additionally, the drive will apparently work fine on a regular computer as an external HD-DVD drive. We have no reason for that use currently, but it's nice to know that it might work.
Overall, it was a surprisingly small amount of money to play for the added benefits, especially when compared to the cost of getting a full HD-DVD or Bluray player. Since we use Netflix, there has been no additional cost in buying movies.
December 14, 2006
Thurn and Taxis Board Game Mini-Review
Thurn and Taxis, published by Rio Grande, is an interesting and fun board game for 2-4 players that involves players building postal routes in the 17th century. You do this by playing cards that represent cities on the game board. They must be adjacent, of course. When a route is built and scored, houses a played in cities based on particular rules. This serves to get towards various bonus goals that give one points. As you build larger routes, you get better mail carriages that are also worth incrementally more points each. The game ends when a player gets the largest carriage or runs out of houses. This keeps the game length to about an hour.
The rules of the game are fairly simple, but there are a number of small "note" type rules that are rather important to the game (like if you can't play a card on to the route you're currently building you have to discard your entire route or if you don't have any cards you have to draw two). The game play, for our first game, was very quick. If we get a chance to play more, I imagine Laurie and I could pound out a couple of games in an hour.
One interesting aspect to this game is that it doesn't really have the direct conflict aspect like some games. About the only thing you ever run in to conflict with is if you happen to take a card that's showing that your opponent wanted. Other than that, it's just a race to get points first. Most of the points come in the form of bonus point piles where the first one to get that particular bonus gets more points than the next and so on. Since the first person to run out of houses or get the biggest carriage causes the game to end at the end of the round it's also a race to build long routes (to use up your houses) and build them quickly (to get to the big carriage first).
Some may say that this makes it a "solo multi-player" game, but it doesn't totally come out that way. You do need to watch what the other players are doing so you can try to gauge how much time you have on your strategy or if you should go after one type of bonus rather than another because some else will beat you to one. However, it's also good because you don't have to pay as careful attention if you don't want to. In fact, our first game had many distractions with a couple of people around that weren't playing that game at all.
Laurie and I will definitely be playing more of it, though. We enjoyed it and expect it fit the shorter and more casual game role. Setup does take a little bit of time because the bonus piles have to be sorted out and place, as well as some cards. I can't tell yet if it will get boring, though, since it doesn't have the depth or variety of play like some games (such as Runebound or on the lighter side, Caylus).
December 13, 2006
Should I Upgrade from my LG VX9800 (The V) to the LG VX9900 (The enV)?
So, the VX9900 (aka the enV), has been out for a couple of weeks now (at least). From following forums and such, it's the obvious next step up from the aging LG VX9800. However, I'm not yet convinced that it really is a large enough jump. As you may have guessed, I haven't made the jump yet and I'm not sure if I will or not.
First, let's look at the physical form factor. It's basically the same as the VX9800 while being ever so slightly thinner. It still opens to reveal a keyboard. Instead of being uniformly thick, though, it bulges for the camera so it doesn't lay flat. I only ever open my 9800 to the half-way point (much like you'd have a laptop open). On the 9900, however, this blocks the sides keys because the hinge is on the bottom of the VX9900 rather than on the top, like the VX9800. This means it's most useful state is fully open. The front buttons on the VX9800 appear to be superior in size and feel to the front buttons on the VX9900. On the inside, the Function button that I frequently used has been replaced with an email button, apparently good to just launch the wireless sync email client which I don't use and likely would never pay for.
Comparing the size and weight, we find that "The V" is 4.57" high and 1.97" wide where "The enV" is 4.64" high and 2.08" wide. Yes, in these dimensions the VX9900 is actually a bigger phone. However, the VX9900 is only 0.78" thick while the VX9800 is 1.00" thick. That said, I don't think this includes the camera lens sticking out. In volume, assuming both of these founds are squared off boxes, "The V" is 9 cubic inches where "The enV" is 7.5 cubic inches (again, likely not counting the camera lens). That is, if you slim the 9800 down by 16% you'll be at about the size of the 9900. Noticeable? Yes, but what you'll actually feel is the extra width on the 9900. The 9900 weighs in at 4.6 ounces while the 9800 is 5.19 ounces, an even smaller difference than the volume, but noticeable.
Winner for physical form factor? The 9800 actually wins this round because it sits flat, doesn't have a mostly wasted button (for me) and is easier to blind-dial. (The screen resolution is actually a tad higher on the 9800 than the 9900, too, but whose counting 16 pixels?)
Software wise, the phones are very similar. The versions of various things are up a rev and the 9900 doesn't exclusively have the new style Verizon menus all of the phones have had lately. However, these are not things most people will notice.
People will notice, however, that the 9900 seems to have a superset of Bluetooth profiles supported, including Audio/Visual Remote Control (AVRC) and Human Input Device (HID). I had a chance to try out a Bluetooth keyboard, but with no luck. I haven't seen anyone anywhere talk about trying to use AVRC. I'd like to find out if it can pair with a laptop (my laptop supports the AVRC target profile) and control media apps, such as iTunes, that support the regular media controls (think multimedia keyboard).
The other big profile that was added was A2DP, the stereo audio profile. Since I have a pair of Macally Bluewave Bluetooth headphones, this interests me. However, I don't think a phone is going to be replacing my 80GB iPod anytime soon.
The winner for software? This goes to the VX9900, but only by a small margin since mostly they are identical but the VX9900 has a few nice features that the VX9800 doesn't have. However, couldn't they have added these to the 9800 via a firmware upgrade?
On the hardware side, the biggest improvement and only improvement, from what I can tell, is the camera. The resolution has been bumped up from 1.3 (1280x1024) Megapixel to 2.0 MP (1600x1200). In addition, the swivel for macro mode versus normal mode has been replaced with a lens cover swivel and an auto-focus lens that improves picture quality dramatically.
The other big hardware change was the switch from using mini SD cards (you know, those little ones you just bought for your other new phone, the 9800) to the micro SD card format (formerly known as TransFlash -- you probably sold those when you got rid of your V710 or E815). Although a physically smaller format, the phone is big enough to hold either and switching that out just means replacing cards -- again.
The AC adapter plug has changed again, too. It's smaller on the VX9900 but like the card size change, it didn't help make the phone that much smaller.
The winner here? Clearly, "The enV" gets the win here for a much better camera.
After all of that, the end results is that if I want a couple of new Bluetooth features that I'll probably rarely use and a 2.0MP camera that still can't beat a normal point and shoot 10.0MP then I'd upgrade. Otherwise, I think I'll wait for the next phone with this form factor. Maybe the next one will have something truly compelling. Or maybe I'm just dreaming and I should upgrade now because my VX9800 is dusty, old, and is getting a couple of cracks...
Read "The enV" manual here, from LG.
What do you think? Have you done this upgrade? Will you? Will you wait?
December 12, 2006
Mini-Review of Domaine, a Board Game
Laurie and I just finished playing Domaine for the first time. In brief, it's about making domains around your castles to get money to make them larger to get victory points to win the game (what else?).
It's good for 2 to 4 players, although the 2 player rules could use a little clarification (you use a neutral guy when placing pieces at the beginning, but it's unclear if you should play for the guy or just let the stuff sit there). It takes about an hour or so to play and comes with lots of little plastic pieces (sorry, no wood found here).
The board changes each play for some variety in play. Having played it once, we both found it was fun to play but requires a bit more direct confrontation than we are used to in games. (We like games that don't require it -- more of a race style than direct competition style.) I can see that for four players it will get very crowded very early in the game. Luckily, the victory points are reduced as the numbers of players are added.
Basically, you take turns either playing (and paying for playing) an action card to expand your territory or strengthen your territory or you sell a card to get some money to have more options in your next turn.
Scoring happens immediately. At first, it was unclear why scoring was done while playing since score can go up and down. But you win instantly once you reach a certain score, so the victory points track is important. However, should you lose your place, you can recount the scores easily. That is, the score is represented by what your territory encloses and mirrored on the victory path for easy counting.
In our first game, Laurie had a couple of rather large domaines that she made a truce with my neighboring ones, effectively protecting the from me. I was then stuck with the other part of the board both trying to get points while not letting her get more over there. For about 10 moves before the end, she was within one move of winning while I was struggling at less than half her score. For quite some time it seemed quite futile to me. However, we weren't playing the neutral character. Had we been, it may have been quite different. That said, she also did have her castles much closer to the edge than I had mine.
She didn't want to play again right away. So here I am writing this. Maybe she'll let me play again soon. ;)
I liked the game because the rules are relatively simple, gameplay is quick, and you don't have a whole lote of choice of what to do (you either play or sell a card and then draw). Although it didn't feel totally balanced while playing two player, I'll have to play more before judging that completely.
More information can be found here at catan.com.
December 9, 2006
Once Again, It's Been a Long Time!
I doubt anyone still reads this (you know, because it's likely no one ever did). But if there is anyone that reads this, I'm still here. This isn't dead. Really.
I had hoped to get more writing in about our honeymoon before getting back in to normal posts. Unfortunately, that created a deadlock on both threads. Until now, at least.
I got on to Windows Live Writer (still in beta, but many builds beyond what I had used last) and found that I had about four posts still sitting in draft about our travels -- and written during the travels. So, check out the travel category to see them (if you want).
Things have been pretty hectic since we got back. We returned to the house in the middle of construction (also known as a concrete slab downstairs). I had to catch up on the happenings of over a month of work -- which included all of the stuff about the acquisition that had happened mere days after we left.
In the time since we got back, a ton has happened:
- Mostly finished the downstairs including flooring, lighting, painting, and other stuff (still some details to finish up).
- Expanded flooring to include bathroom, entryway, and kitchen (still to do)
- Got carpets for the floor
- Swapped living room with dining room -- we now have a larger dining room to make better room for our storage furniture and a smaller living room, with less seating. Overally, though, it makes sense for our house. And yes, it's permanent. And yes, there is no TV downstairs.
- Hosted our first Thanksgiving with my dad, his wife, Laurie's brother, and my grandmother.
- Got and decorated our holiday tree with some friends in town
- We got a redwood again. We like them, except the setup part where they eat our hands and forearms. I'm still picking out splinters and my arms were red and hurt for days.
- Got some new things (and just to pre-clarify: a lot of this stuff is thanks to our wedding, my birthday, stuff for our trip, and early Christmas gifts from ourselves and other people... and it covers about four months... and provides a list of things to remind me on stuff I can talk about if I don't have anything to say... har har.)
- I got a Gen 5.5 80GB black iPod on our first trip to Costco when back. My white Gen 5 60GB iPod was full and they not only had the right size and price, but the right color, too. I also got a clear plastic cover for it and a rubber cover that also holds the headphones. Both together keep the inside looking new.
- I got a 2006 Honda Accord Hybrid to make my commute cheaper and more comfortable. And it's a car that can comfortably hold more than two people. (You know, in case that occasion arrives.) It improved milage by 88% over our two other cars and still has plenty of power. ;)
- Laurie got a quad core machine with a 30" monitor to be able to work at 2560x1600 resolution (the current highest single monitor resolution readily available). The Dell 30" monitor is absolutely amazing. The quad core processor is also something of a treat. However, with only a Nvidia 7950GX2 video card, graphics at full resolution are lacking with all but the best written 3D games. (For instance, Neverwinter Nights 2 just doesn't have a good enough engine for everything to be on at that resolution -- I have to run it at a lowly 2048x1280 for it all to work smoothly.)
- We got a 2TB Terastation that we run with RAID5 for 1500GB of storage via gigabit ethernet that's reasonably safe. The quad core machine runs dual 500GB disks in a RAID 0 for fast, but not so safe 1000GB of local working space.
- Being the holiday season, we also got a number of smaller things, including:
- New Spode
- Curtains, carpets, table cloths, etc.
- Microsoft's wheel for the XBox 360
- Some new shortbread pans
- Construction tools, including
- Table saw
- Mitre saw
- Various other painting and flooring instruments that we didn't have
Anyway, before this becomes a silly list of stuff, it also goes without saying that there were a number of other new things even before we went on our vacation. We had to get stuff for our vacation plus we received a bunch of stuff from our wedding.
We were jetlagged for at least two weeks after we got back. It didn't help that if either one of us would wake up early (you know, like 1 or 2am) we'd both get up and not worry about going back to sleep. That helped keep the jetlag around longer.
I hope it doesn't go as long before I blog again, but we're still quite busy so, naturally, I can't guarantee anything. But I do hope to talk about some thoughts I've had lately as well as some of the new stuff that either works well or doesn't work so well. We shall see.
