The VoIP thing

So, I think after some consideration I can start posting details of the VoIP thing I mentioned a few journal entries ago...

The company's name is "voipo". Supposedly they're linked to a hosting company called Hostgator. I have no comment on the latter, the Wikipedia article is fairly neutral and Hostgator is one of those companies that publishes a bunch of its own "reviews" sites that mysteriously end up being the first group of Google search results. Never did like that practice.

Still, going to places like BroadbandReports I can't find anyone with anything bad to say about Viopo, lots of people with good stuff to say, and looking at Voipo's forums it looks like the people running the organization take a keen interest in customer support. They seem to be an honest bunch.

Here's my initial experience:

1. Didn't take long to be set up, but I note they start your period of service from when you order it, not from when you get your device and start being able to use the service.
2. The device they sent is a Grandstream HT-502. I tried it the way they propose, which involves putting it between your router and teh Interwebs. It didn't work, it sat there for 20 minutes with the various lights pretty much permanently on save for the occasional flicker, wouldn't make calls, and to add insult to injury it looked like it has its own built in NAT router which screwed up my network configuration. I then did it the other way, put the device behind my router, and everything came up.
3. As long as my Internet connection is up, the device appears to work fine. When my Internet went down a few days ago, thanks to Comcast changing my IP address and my router not realizing it, the service rerouted itself properly, and came back up without me having to do anything when Internet access was restored.
4. I have no idea what happens if you try to use other SIP services at the same time.
5. There is a BYOD feature, where as long as you have the Voipo-supplied device online, you can redirect everything to a device of your own. The reasoning is that the Voipo device "proves" you have a working connection, and all diagnostics can be done on that. The Grandstream doesn't appear to have a SIP gateway built in or anything like that, which is a shame.
6. Quality is OK. Not great. Not bad. Volume is very loud, which is fine by me. Latency is long enough to be noticeable. Sound quality was, I guess, similar to a 1990s pre-EFR GSM phone - which I always thought was fairly reasonable but obviously many disagreed otherwise we wouldn't have EFR or AMR.

In terms of features, as someone who's only ever subscribed to "basic phone" (OK, I usually got the call forwarding feature), I was a little surprised by the number of things that suddenly started working. My TV, for example, now shows the CLI associated with the number dialing in when the phone rings. My Siemens DECT system now displays the right time, and even stuff about missed calls, which it never used to.

One thing I haven't tried yet, and probably need to upgrade my DECT base station to support, is the two line feature. If you get an incoming call while you're on a call, it's automatically diverted to the second port on the Voipo device, and you can make calls from that while being on a call too.

There's a web interface which makes it easy to, for example, set up call forwarding when you're away. Also lets you send faxes.

Right now, I haven't used the service for long enough to recommend it, but so far, so good.

On networking, IPv6, and stuff

Remember a few years ago when I wrote my Multiply.com thing on my new network, which involved Xen servers to implement IPv6 and a host of other features?

Well, I decided I'm redoing everything... because I can. I bought a fairly low cost wireless router, a D-Link DIR-815, which does most of the things, including implementing IPv6 over IPv4 (6to4), all by itself. All I had to do was configure it.

What am I not using it for yet? Well...

• DNS - while it contains the usual DNS proxy, it doesn't do internal DNS or anything like that.
• DHCP - the thing contains a DHCP server, but the number of static IP nodes is actually more limited than the amount of hardware I have, which is hard to believe, I know. Actually, it might do it, but I need to do more analysis.

The DNS thing is something I'm thinking about, with a view to maybe building a business around a potential long term solution. If I can do that, really, I can start to move away from the way I've been doing things. I'm thinking of moving my domain to Google Apps, which would take care of email, although there are a bunch of other options too, but for now I'll keep a server around because there are a lot of other things I want to experiment with.

There were a bunch of loose ends when I set up my network last time. Specifically I never implemented IPsec, and I wanted to get Kerberos going but, frankly, Ubuntu and the Linux world have never really figured out what they're doing there. What I'm thinking of doing is using ApacheDS, which is an integrated LDAP/Kerberos server.

Anyway, I'll post my experiences as I set things up...

Switching to VoIP

Now that we're using cable Internet I decided now would be a good time to switch phone carrier to a VoIP service. Which one? Well, not going to say, except:

• It's not Vonage. Woo-hoo. Woo-woo-hoo. Yeah, I can't go with someone who advertises like that.
• It's not MagicJack. I have no great desire to have a computer running Windows permanently hooked up to the 'net somewhere in my house.
• It's not, from what I can figure out, one of the zillion cookie-cutter VoIP companies that all appear to be fronts for the same organization.
• I'd never heard of them until I started researching.
  
• They made a big deal about having their customer support centers being in the US, which is a good thing (jobs, jobs, jobs), assuming they're not working under Indian Call Center conditions anyway.
• They are backed by a company that I can't find anything overly negative about, and they have been around for a few years.
  

As it was, I ended up using the reviews on Broadband Reports to find and pick the company in question.

I will let you know my experience in a few weeks. Thus far, I'm waiting for the ATA (the thingie that hooks up to your router) and they're in the middle of porting my number too. While they allow BYOD, I can't do that until I hook up the official ATA, apparently. I may experiment with Asterisk at some point in the future, but for now, one step at a time.

Ubuntu: Is Natty the last great Ubuntu? Or the first?

Having used it for a few days I'm in two minds about Ubuntu 11.04.

This is reportedly the last version that will support the "classic" GNOME 2 environment. Having used GNOME 2 since I switched back to GNU/Linux from Mac OS X half a decade ago, I'm sorry to see a good friend go. And GNOME 2 really is a good friend, probably the best user interface anyone has put together for Unix (well, aside from Mac OS X, but I'm not sure if I really feel that counts.)

GNOME2 is intuitive, quick (on my hardware), slick looking, friendly, and the builders of it took the time to understand concepts like Fitts law and muscle memory.

Natty gives you the choice between GNOME 2 (called "Ubuntu Classic") and an environment originally intended for netbooks, but substantially improved, called Unity. And Unity is...

...well, it's not ready yet, really, is it? Now, don't get me wrong, it's got a huge number of excellent ideas. Some of these are clearly borrowed from others - the dock, for example, is clearly inspired by the equivalent feature of Mac OS X. The top-of-the-screen menu appears to owe much to the Amiga environment, funnily enough - displaying menu only when it's needed, but title information otherwise. And we still have many classic GNOME elements, such as the Nautilus desktop/file management environment, and virtual desktops.

On the other hand, good ideas or not, sometimes the whole can be spoiled by a few glaring issues, and that was my problem with Unity. In fact, the major issue is the way to launch applications that are not in the dock. I think the assumption made by Unity's developers is that if a user uses an application a lot, they'll put it in the dock, but in reality the dock just isn't large enough, and you still have to start somewhere. Launching an app means going through a system that's laid out like the search feature of a really bad retail website. Finding the apps you want to run requires an enormous amount of clicking around.

Still, the system has enormous potential. If it's true that the next release of Ubuntu doesn't have GNOME 2, then it'll be interesting to see what the result is. A fixed Unity would make the next Ubuntu awesome. The danger is that it won't be.

Well, actually, I think it's a good idea

A bizarre allegation has surfaced. Obama plans to install a device in every car in the country, that'll measure the number of miles you drive. Then you'll have to pay per mile. What an evil genius!

It's bollocks, of course, Obama has no intention of doing anything of the sort. It's too unpopular, of course.

But, here's a question. Is it reasonable to charge road users by something related to the number of miles they drive? Is there a cost to each mile driven, and if so, is the way we raise the revenue needed to pay that cost fair?

Right now, roads are massively subsidized. Absurdly subsidized. Part of the reason why people live in the middle of nowhere, by default, in most parts of the country is because taxpayers pay a fortune to have roads built to the middle of nowhere, so that homes can be built in those locations and people can live there.

In the US, there's a small amount of revenue collected at the pump that in theory is related to the number of miles driven, but it doesn't cover the full costs of road building, which generally comes out of a basket of local, state, and federal taxes, and while anything that reduces oil usage is a positive thing, the costs of road usage aren't lower simply because you drive a Prius. What are the costs? More than you might think. Railroads are worth mentioning here: they're privately owned in the US, and so we can look at the costs involved and ask what equivalents there are with ordinary roads.

Railroad operators, at least today, need to buy land to build their tracks upon. They have to pay property taxes to compensate communities for the land they continue to use. They also have to build and maintain the right of way. And each decision about where to build a line to has to be taken using a full cost benefit analysis, they can't build lines to the middle of nowhere on a whim that the road might be useful one day.

For governments building roads, very few equivalent costs exist. Governments don't pay property taxes, they collect them, leading to the absurdity that railroads in the US actually subsidize normal roads. Generally, governmental entities will measure the cost of a road simply in terms of the cost of building it, and the cost of maintaining it. And if nobody uses that road, well, the road will be undamaged, and so it'll be assumed that the "cost" of keeping the road around is negligible.

Now, suppose you want a sane transportation policy. Wouldn't a "users-pay" philosophy make the most amount of sense, with the "cost" associated with each transportation system being measured in a consistent way? You'd limit the road budget, forcing road builders to actually weigh the costs of building out roads when doing so. You'd prevent one form of transportation system dominating others for any reason other than superiority.

Now, before I go any further, I want to emphasize I'm not talking about Obamodometers. Leaving aside privacy concerns, I don't think such a system would necessarily produce the fairest outcome. What I'd like to see, instead, is a system based upon a combination of private and community road ownership. Essentially, roads would either be owned by their users (usually in the form of communities owning their local roads), or owned by private entities who'd use whatever revenue generation method they wish.

I'm not talking about raising taxes, rather redistributing how we collect them. Making road users responsible for roads reduces the need to make local, state, and Federal governments involved in them, which means other taxes can be cut. In the medium term, you'd see, over-all, a lower tax burden, because the stupidity of building bad roads, and penalizing companies that take traffic off of roads, would be drastically curtailed.

These kinds of reforms can't be done in isolation. They have to be accompanied with planning reform so that the absurdity of requiring businesses be housed in buildings built miles away from the employees and customers they serve can be finally ended. You can't simply require road users pay the costs, you also have to ensure they can escape high road costs by reducing their cost burden.

That's what I think anyway.

If Anonymous did hack Sony...

...maybe they could fix Blu-ray and make it not suck.

The Death of Osama bin Laden, an apology

In common with a number of newspapers, we may have mislead our readers on Monday over the death of Osama Bin Laden. Headlines like "Whoopie!" and "USA! USA! WOORRGGH!!! AWWLRIGHT!!!" may have lead readers to believe that we were 100% sure of our facts before we published them. We apologize and would like to issue the following corrections:

1. Mr Bin Laden did not have machine guns in both hands when he was shot.
2. Nor was Mr Bin Laden sitting on the toilet at the time.
3. Mr Bin Laden did not yell "You'll never take me alive, see? Yeah, yeah!"
4. Mr Bin Laden did not attempt to protect himself by making himself a bulletproof vest out of babies.
5. Mr Obama did not say "Yippy-ky-yay motherf-r" just before ordering Mr Bin Laden's death.
6. Mark Twain was not in the war room during the firefight. Nor was Martin Luther King.
7. Chloe from "24" was not in the war room during the firefight, and never "downloaded" the "schematics" to Mr Bauer's PDA, whatever that means.
8. Jack Bauer was not involved in the firefight. Contrary to our report, Mr Bauer was not shot during the firefight, and did not have to escape Al Qaeda goons by stabbing them in the eyes with a pencil. Mr Bauer is, in fact, a fictional character.
9. As is Jason Bourne.
10. John McCain was not involved in the firefight either. In fact, the report of his presence was caused by a typo when a breathless editor mistyped "McClain"
11. John McClain was not involved in the firefight. Like Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, and Chloe, Mr McClain is, in fact, a fictional character.
12. Mr Bin Laden's body does not, as reported, have a titanium-alloy frame covered with human tissue.
13. Mr Bin Laden's home was not surrounded by a moat filled with sharks. Given sharks are a saltwater species, our factcheckers should have picked up on the impossibility of such a security measure.
14. Mr Bin Laden was not shot by a baby. The baby did not then yell "And don't let me catch you in Quohog" before defenestrating himself.
15. Mr Bin Laden did not attempt to flee the house in a 1971 Dodge Charger.
16. The SEAL team that found Mr Bin Laden did not also find a map of the United States covered in pushpins with dates attached to each one. Nor did they destroy a computer that was displaying a countdown.
17. Exactly how Bin Laden was found has been only partially reported. Our story that a shoe-shine boy outside of Langley provided the information in exchange for a dollar bill appears to have been inaccurate.
18. It is also entirely untrue that Nicolas Cage found Mr Bin Laden after he attempted to steal the Declaration of Independence.
19. It is not true that Donald Trump, upon hearing the news, pounded the desk and yelled "Damn it, foiled again! Implement Plan B!"
20. There was no ceremony afterwards, and the Queen of England's ability to bestow knighthoods is limited to British subjects - she would not have been able to give Mr Obama such an honor, especially not within a few hours of the events that lead to such an award. It is also unlikely the Queen would call Mr Obama "One awesome dude".

We hope this clears up any confusion our initial reports may have caused.

How it happened

"It's been seven years!" the President said, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. "Seven years! And what do we have to show for it? That man, that evil, evil, man is still out there somewhere, and nothing we've done has brought him any closer to justice."

Sam Bucket, the President's top, secret, national security expert nodded his head. "I understand your concern Mr President, but we've tried everything and..."

"I'm aware of that, and some of those ideas were pretty good, but we need to go in a different direction! Do you have anything else?"

Sam sighed. "Only... well, the only one I've heard is, frankly, ridiculous but..."

"I'll hear ridiculous. It's got to work better than the so-called "serious" plans we've tried so far."

Sam went to the door, and popped his head into the corner.

"Mr Lester, can you come in please?"

An older man, wearing a shirt and tie with shorts and long socks, stepped in.

"This is Mr Herbert Lester, Mr President."

"Mr Lester, I've been told you have a plan to help us capture Osama Bin Laden", said the President.

"Why yes", said Herbert. "I most certainly do. I most certainly do. It's really very simple."

The President nodded. Sam sat, his elbows on the table, and let his head rest in his hands. "Oh brother", he thought, "Here it comes."

"I have developed a theory based upon the concept of a universal conscience. Using the interconnected nature of human beings on a higher plane, we can discover many facts by relating opposites. Such as, if I want to discover, say, a new form of energy, all I need to do is apply my concept to a lazy person sleeping in a recliner."

"And what is your concept?" said the President.

"Well", said Herbert, "I find groping yields the most amount of information."

Sam coughed. "OK, well, uh, thanks for your time Mr Lester, if you could just follow me" said Sam, but the President waved him down.

"Do go on Herbert", said the President, "May I call you Herbert?"

"Absolutely, Mr President Sir." said Herbert. "Now, you need to discover the whereabouts of a specific individual? Correct?"

The President nodded.

"Well, to find where a person is at rest, is at a fixed location they call home, we merely need to apply my method to a large group of people who are in motion. Say, passengers at airports."

The President glanced excitedly at Sam, "This stuff is Gold, Sam! Gold! Why didn't you tell me before?!"

"Mr President, can we have a... private word?" said Sam, but the President rebuffed him. "Not now Sam, Herbert - please continue, what do you suggest?"

"It's quite simple", said Herbert. "Just train a group of agents to grope random people at airports. You must be fair and without favor, grope everyone from the most guilty adults to the most innocent children. Mmmm. Children."

"Mr Lester!" said Sam, but the President waved him down.

"But how do we do this? Surely people will protest if they're grabbed by complete strangers and groped at random."

"Quite so", said Herbert, "I usually find being in a position of authority. A teacher perhaps..."

"Or a TSA Agent" exclaimed the President.

"Yes", sighed Herbert, "I guess that would work."

"Sam, put this plan into motion immediately." said the President, shaking with excitement.

"But sir!"

"Do it! Take Mr Lester, and have him train our elite TSA Agents in groping techniques. I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel Sam, I really am, we'll have Bin Laden in our sights in next to no time, I just know it!"

And that's how they found Osama Bin Laden.

Osama been Livin

So he's gone. Finally.

I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand, a man who funded one of the worst terrorist attacks in history - an attack on ordinary people with no involvement in the wars he wanted to fight - is no longer with us, he's not someone we need to worry about any more.

On the other, I really didn't enjoy the celebratory air. And while I understand it was impossible given the circumstances, I'd have really preferred to see him arrested, given a fair trial, and left to rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life, underlying the civilized values we stand for, that he wanted to destroy.

If there's an afterlife, I hope Osama gets to spend a little quality time with his victims.

Google and Apple

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Withdrawing a recommendation

In the past, whenever the subject of Internet service has come up, I've generally recommended Earthlink. They weren't perfect, but they weren't overly restrictive - they blocked one port - outgoing SMTP (but incoming was fine - you could run your own domain), and things like IPv6 (via 6to4) generally worked fine.

I don't know what's happened, but they've gone to crap. I wanted to move my service to my new address. They took down all the details, told me it'd be done in a week and a half, and I never heard from them again. Two weeks later, I called, they cheerfully notified me that I'd been disconnected, acted as if I'd never called and wasted 30 minutes on the phone with a CS rep who'd assured me it would all be done, and, well, went through the process again.

Except they couldn't because their computer was down, so the Earthlink guy told me they'd call me back.

Guess what, they didn't.

I'm sorry, but is Earthlink a going concern any more? Are they interested in keeping customers, or are they just phasing themselves out?

BTW my call yesterday was the third time. I tried calling them just before the move too, but was told to call back after I'd moved.

And much as I hate to rag on Indian call centers, there's definitely something substandard going on, in my experience, dealing with them. I suspect it has to do with the fact that it doesn't really feel important that someone's going to stop paying $50 a month to your employer when you get a dollar or two an hour, and are rewarded, not for keeping a customer happy, but for closing your calls as quickly as possible. The latter is also true of US call centers, but there seems to be a customer service ethic that Earthlink's US call centers had that simply wasn't there when I tried calling Lenovo some months ago, or Earthlink the last few weeks.

Mind you, I have no idea what was going on with Comcast today. First attempt to get service: CS rep closed the chat session. Second: CS rep refused to go further unless I turned up at a center with the deed to my house (no, seriously. I'm not making this up. Want to know why? It's even more ridiculous: the previous owner of my house owes Comcast $1.77. You read that right. Not $177,000. Not $177. $1.77.) Third guy took the order but still wants me to visit a center with the deed to the house.

I'm not a happy Squiggleslash right now. Not happy at all.

Good and bad bubbles

So, continuing the economics theme...

Went through a little thought experiment today. Let's imagine two alternate universes. Both have companies called Squigglerail, whose purposes is to build and run a high speed railway line from Miami to New York City.

(Why a railway? Because it's my fantasy, OK? Insert whatever you want here, but make sure it's similar.)

In Universe One, Squigglerail raises billions from investors, and plans to start by running a free passenger service while it determines the best way to monetize the system. The system is built, and the first services run for a few years, with Squigglerail gradually introducing systems based upon advertising, and premium services.

Needless to say, Squigglerail is amazing popular, but hemorrhages cash, and finally goes bankrupt three years later. With the principle proven, Slashco buys Squigglerail's assets for a song, and starts, you know, charging customers, and closing down unprofitable services. Ten years later, there's a functioning railway system that didn't exist before, it's delivering billions in value every year, and everyone's glad it exists, although there are some very upset investors.

Now, let's go to Universe Two. Squigglerail raises billions from investors, and carefully choses a business model that involves selling transit services to passengers, who buy these things called "tickets" and then are allowed to ride the train. The system is slow to start, but becomes profitable after three years, and a decade later, there's a functioning railway system that didn't exist before, it's delivering billions in value every year, and everyone's glad it exists, especially the Squigglerail investors.

Universe Two is obviously better than Universe One. But is Universe One worse than Universe Zero, where there was no Squigglerail?

Obviously, in one and two, there's something that's worth far more than was paid to make it. The only difference is that in one scenario, a bad monetization model leads one particular group of people to lose money (the investors), while delivering massive value to an even larger group of people (the riders.) In the other, the riders benefit less than they did in U1 (which is OK, because they still benefit - if they didn't, they wouldn't see the tickets as worth spending money on), and the investors don't lose anything.

I posit this rather contrived scenario because I was thinking of the two bubbles I've seen in the last decade and a half. Both caused large numbers of people to lose ridiculous amounts of money. The thing is though, that despite the problems investors had, I think - overall - the country was better off during and after the .com bubble than it would have been had the .com bubble not happened.

This isn't true of the housing bubble. That just swallowed money.

The difference? In the .com boom, as with Squigglerail, something was actually made, of enormous value, that caused growth, it's just bad monetization meant that investors had no way to share in the growth they funded.

The housing boom generally involved something that already existed, with only a superficial rise in value, and it existed largely because of supply and demand, not economic growth. So the housing bubble was actually damaging to the economy, and those who promoted it, seeing the .com collapse as no big deal, didn't bother to ask why the .com collapse didn't have a massively depressive effect on the economy, and whether inflating the price of homes had anything in common.

BTW, don't buy gold.

Adventures in HD part X: 50" Plasma

So, last weekend, bought a 50" plasma. Five years ago, I'd have finished that sentence with "Boo-yah", and invited half the neighborhood over. But, well, it's not quite what you think it is. How much did it cost? About $500.

Yep, that's right. $500. And, functionally, I think it's a little better than my stepdad's 47" 1080p LCD. Bought a year ago, for about twice the price.

It's a Samsung Series 4+ 450. PN50C450. Has a USB port, but you can only view JPEGs with it.

Why so cheap? Well, in fairness, it was a display model. But, on the other hand, I saw Wal-mart has a $500 Plasma set with roughly the same specs right now, so it wasn't out of whack. Part of it is deflation - yes, I'm aware headline inflation is quite high right now, but actually, outside of a handful of admittedly important commodities, prices are plummeting, as people aren't willing to spend money on stuff any more. The grill I got for $250 three years ago costs around $150 new today. Apple isn't selling the new iPad at the same price as the old. And don't mention housing. Unless oil and/or food is a significant part of the cost of an item, you bet it's cheaper today than it was a year ago.

$500 buys you a low end 50" plasma, specifically a 720p non-networked version. It doesn't buy you an LCD at that price and size, and generally the 50" LCDs start around $200 more, and are 1080p. Why do they cost so much more? Because they're better, that's why.

Now, that statement probably takes some explanation, so let's do it. I'm going to cover a few points about both technologies, explode a few myths, and annoy a few people while I'm at it.

• Myth: Plasma's better than LCD, because unlike the latter, it can display "true black". Reality: Unless you're in a pitch black room, the amount of ambient light is going to be several magnitudes higher than the "black" of any modern LCD panel. Realistically you will not see a difference.
• Truth: Plasma is a fragile technology. You realize this when the guy from Best Buy warns you not to lay the TV down in your van (plasma screens are fronted by a big sheet of thin glass. A little undue pressure in one spot, and no more screen.) Despite the claim that modern sets don't "burn in", the manual for my new set was peppered with warnings. And, believe me, unless you like stretchovision, or you only ever watch 16:9 content and simply refuse to watch anything else, you will run into situations where burn-in is a risk.
• Truth: Best Buy (or Wal-Mart, or Target, or...) is not the best place to compare plasma and LCD. Because of the aforementioned burn-in issue, plasma sets usually ship with settings that look great in a livingroom, but washed out and dark under fluorescent lights. LCD, on the other hand, can be as bright as the manufacturer wants, and usually are shipped and set up in stores with settings that make the colors really "pop". Plasma really does look great in real world settings, but looks just awful in TV showrooms.
  
• A definite plus: there's no wrong angle at which to watch a plasma TV. LCD TVs generally have a little bit of range after which it starts looking ugly, though nothing like as bad as RPTVs (whose owners, in my experience, seem to be in denial about the whole thing, under the impression LCDs haven't changed since they bought calculators in the mid-eighties.)
• Comment: Power consumption and/or heat output is not an issue in practice... today. It's not that plasma screens are as efficient, it's just there's so much electronic crap in the average set that you're as likely to get a power-hungry LCD set as a, uh, power hungry plasma. Plasma owners seem to have taken recent surveys to mean that there's no problem with plasma - well, there is, and if TV makers ever start having a race to produce the most efficient sets, then plasma's going to lose. But, right now, especially with large screen 720p plasma sets being normal on the low end...

Why do I think LCD is better? Because you can get a high contrast 1080p set for much, much, less than a plasma with the same specs with pretty much no downside beyond a slightly restricted (slightly) viewing angle range, and because they're resilient and don't suffer from burn-in issues - you don't need to watch 4:3 content either cropped or in stretchovision.

As far as the Samsung goes, we're still in the process of moving into the new house, so we haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time with it. Sound is good. Was glad to read it has a stereo passthrough for HDMI audio to a receiver, which'll help when housesitters are over (right now we have to give a long complicated set of instructions on what to switch to what.) We watched a few shows on a rabbit ears antenna, which got a good ION signal, so was able to watch a few 1980s movies in HD, and, well, it looked good, very good, I can't complain about that at all. Also nice is the fact apparently there's a thriving third party firmware for the TV - I can't imagine using it, I don't want to risk bricking the thing, but, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with the firmware.

Love the TV. If I had unlimited funds, I'd have gone for a good network-connected LCD, but, frankly, this is more than good enough.

My new blog

So, this is where I'm going to be posting in future. I'm in the process of setting things up, I hope to copy all my old Slashdot/Multiply/LJ stuff here in the near future.