bentwave

This is pretty awful, but it does give a sense of what The Maze District in Canyonlands is like.

This looks like a cool exhibit!

Finally got around to try my hand at some video editing. Enjoy!

Much to the dismay of the recording industry, music recorded in the MP3 format has become much more popular than compact discs.  Several changes in the last decade have helped the demise:  Memory prices dropped, hard drive capacities seemingly doubled every 9 months, and Shawn Fanning thought the internet could really help everyone build up their music collection.   The ease of use of digital files and huge storage capacity of  iPods were the nail in the coffin for the CD.

The Musical Fidelity V-DAC

I too have my share of MP3 music:  8,744 songs and counting.  I’ve also got an iPod or two, but do most of my music listening at home, on a Squeezebox 3 (SB3) served up by a Netgear NV+ running its version of the Squeezebox server.   It sounds great.  But I began reading about how people made it sound even better.

The first stop was to Welborne Labs, a audiophile boutique shop that manufactures kits and specializes in some arcane gear.  Welborne was selling power supply upgrades for the SB3, and I bought and assembled the kit.  Not sure I can tell the difference, but the box is cute.

Shortly after the power supply upgrade I wandered into the Slimdevices forums and saw pictures that users had submitted of their systems.  Several folks had just amazingly expensive setups.  About the same time I began reading about DACs for iPods, and began thinking wondering if those digital out thingymabobs on the back of the SB3 were meant for a digital-to-analogue converter.   Turns out my local Denver Listen-Up store sells Musical Fidelity V-DACs.  I couldn’t get there fast enough.

I’ve been pretty impressed with Musical Fidelity gear.  I’ve got two of their amplifiers, a CD player, and now the V-DAC.  Each one of these items has brought the sound quality up several notches.  But their V-DAC is, in my opinion, the best value.

The Musical Fidelity V-DAC is essentially a no-frills black box.  It’ll take USB from your computer, or digital optical, or digital coax.  RCA outs.  It’s a mere 6″ long, and it’s fed by a 12 volt adapter, although there is also the V-PSU, their own power supply upgrade.

If you’re into MP3s, you need one of these things (although if you’re going to use it with your iPod, you’ll also want some sort of transport, not to mention amplification.  And yes, speakers).  It sounds stunning:  128 kbps webcasts sound close to CD quality, as do your own constant bit rate 128 kbps MP3s.  VBR MP3s above 128kbps are amazing.

I spent lots of time last weekend ripping all of my CDs to FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, because the SB3 will play FLAC files, too.  And most of my CDs are now tucked in a dark corner to collect dust.

I live in Denver, and like the rest of the nation, we recently made The Great TV Conversion from analogue to digital broadcast.  At about the same time, I’d fulfilled my two year commitment to DirecTV.   Now, I think there’s nothing cooler than having a dish that sucks down satellite transmissions from space – I’m pretty geeky, after all.  But there were some things I didn’t like.  The following holds true for cable as well:

• The basic subscription packages are in standard definition (SD).  You’ll pay more for high-definition (HD).  If HD has become the norm, why am I being charged for it?
• It’s boring.  Their obligatory SD package doesn’t contain anything you really want to watch.  It’s nothing but reruns of syndicated shows from the 1960′s.  No offense, Andy Griffith.
• Want to use a digital video recorder (DVR)?  That’s $5/month extra.  Oh, you wanted it in HD?  You’ll need to upgrade.
• Basic package you don’t want + the package you really want + HD + DVR + PPV + local channels =  Too damned much money each month (An exercise:  Calculate your annual cost.  Now throw it out the window).

Over-the-Air HDTV and DVR

It’s been a year now since I dumped the dish, opting for over-the-air (OTA) TV reception instead.  But how should I get the signal to my TV?  When I did have satellite, I didn’t want to pay for local channels, so I bought a small indoor Terk HDTV antenna, and plugged it into the antenna-in connector on the back of my HD-DVR box.  Pretty slick that DirecTV provided that – the local channels even fed seamlessly into the program guide.

I suspect many folks don’t know about free OTA HDTV.  When I showed the TV antenna to my neighbor and explained to him that I was getting HD over the air for free, he said, “Well, I don’t want to do anything illegal.”

My OTA HDTV Antenna

Getting local channels would clearly work with my little Terk antenna once I’d dropped DirecTV, but what was I going to do for a DVR?  Sure, there’s TiVo, but I was trying to get out of the monthly fees, not start them.  Anyone see a theme going on here?

It’s possible to roll-your-own DVR.  I used SageTV, but there are certainly any number of other companies who will provide you the means to do this (search “PC DVR“).  You’ll need a PC (ideally some Windows variant, or Linux).  I’m sure a Mac would work.  A TV tuner card.  A home network.  And a pretty good HD antenna.  I’m using:

• A dual-core Windows XP (Home version) box with a solid-state boot drive for the operating system, and a 1 TB SATA drive for video file storage.
• A Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 capture card.
• A DB4 multidirectional antenna from Antennas Direct.
• A SageTV HD Theater box.
• A gigabit home network.

Getting this all together isn’t trivial, and unless you’re just brilliant, will take some fine tuning.  Basically, the antenna feeds the capture card that you’ll put in the PC, the Sage TV software encapsulates the TV transmission for your network, sends it to the Sage TV HD Theater box, which in turn pushes it over HDMI to your HDTV.

I’ll argue that sucking down a transmission from a tower 12 miles away is cooler than sucking them from space because it’s FREE.  The picture you’ll get OTA is actually better than you’ll get from your cable or satellite companies, because they compress the high-definition signal to conserve bandwidth for – that’s right – even more of their crappy channels.  Yup – you’re not really even getting true HD from these clowns.  People have even filed lawsuits.

SageTV has a number of cool features.  The program guide evidently comes in OTA.  Did I mention that it’s FREE?  It’s also a media server, if you’re into looking at pictures or playing music.  And there’s other content.

So I’ve got an OTA DVR to watch free HDTV.  I thought I would miss certain shows, but I really don’t.  Hint:  They’re probably on the internet anyway, which brings us to the, um, internet.

The Interwebby Tubes

The only real hesitation about dropping the dish was that I’d miss The Daily Show and The Cobert Report.  They’re great, but they’re not worth the $50/month I was paying DirecTV.  So how would I get my Comedy Central fix without coughing up big bucks?

I have high-speed internet, so that gives me Hulu.  I can watch Comedy Central, then, in any web browser.  But I really want to see it on my HDTV.  As I write this, Sage TV isn’t providing Hulu (I don’t think).  But, you could plug a PC into your TV, through the DVI connector, effectively using the HDTV as a 1920×1080 computer screen.  If you don’t have a DVI on your TV, there are DVI-to-HDMI adapters.  In my case, I plugged in my Apple Mac Mini directly. It’s equipped with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse that sits on my coffee table, or tucks away.

Having a Mac Mini-powered HDTV is way fun:  There’s Boxee.  There’s Front row, a media-center application that comes with OS X that permits you to access other content on your network (say, in a NAS).  There’s Hulu.  There’s any number of programs out there, which brings us to our next section:

Why Comcast is Like a Crazy Person

Comcast is in a pretty good position.  They’re able to provide TV, phone, and internet over one pipe, but I think they’re hoodwinking people.  Once you have decent internet, you don’t need much else.  Their “digital voice” phone service, for example, is just repackaged voice-over-IP, which you can get through Skype for about $0.83/month.  You could even get a desktop Skype phone.

Here’s how to drive Comcast crazy:  Tell them you want internet only.  When they ask how you’ll get your TV, tell them OTA and through the internet connection that they will provide.  When they ask about how you’ll get your phone, tell them you’ll use your cellphone and Skype.  If they say that they can’t do that, tell them you support net neutrality and ask them about their recent FCC probe.  The poor bastard on the other end of your line won’t know how to respond!  Comcast has so many redundant services that I’m not sure how they keep their story straight.  And they just bought NBC Universal, perhaps because they are beginning to understand that it’s not about the medium (that is, the cable) anymore.  It’s about content.

There’s a medium war going on out there.  Not a media war - medium war.  Whether you get your services over satellite, cable, copper wire, cellular, through radio transmissions, over WiFi, or over tin-cans, there’s competition.  And right now, the internet is a cheaper medium for content delivery than either satellite or cable.

But it can’t beat free OTA TV.  And that reminds me… I’ve got a show to watch.

Aztec Butte Ruin

According to Moab Photo Tours, a ruin in Canyonlands National Park has collapsed.  It was a small granary in the Aztec Butte area of the Island in the Sky district.  The structure itself wasn’t very big – but as you can see, its location was stunning. I put it among the most photogenic ruins I’ve visited.

The photographer can see the challenges of getting this shot.  If I remember correctly, we had to wait for the clouds that day to block the sun and kill the shadow line that came into the interior.  Even when that’s accomplished, you wanted to get the picturesque valley in the background, so your shot had to be bracketed – making a tripod essential gear.  Having a wide-angle lens helped take in the context; this shot was probably 17mm.  You can see that I failed most of these; there’s obvious masking and vignetting.

The description of the collapse on Moab Photo Tours suggests that this happened, “…either from the ravages of time or from unthinking visitors trying to climb inside”.  I suspect the former: In this photo (taken in May 2006), the right wall of the ruin looks suspiciously precarious.

No one should believe that the Southwest’s ruins will last indefinitely.  They’re doomed; their slow decay is inevitable.  Known ruins won’t last as long; people can’t help but get up close and peek inside, potentially compromising the object of their admiration.  Kids are less aware of the structure’s fragility, and will invariably want to enter.  The unknown ruins won’t fare as badly, but nature will take it’s toll here, too.  Animals of various sizes will try them as shelter.  And the weather is, of course, constant and unrelenting.  Winter is particularly harsh, bringing a series of freeze & thaw cycles.

I was surprised  to discover that my own photography was, unintentionally, documenting the slow collapse of ruins.  Well-publicized photos by other photographers, when compared with my more recent shots, show how some low walls have decayed even further.  The time between shots?  About five years.

Which brings up the idea of restoration.  The instance of decay described in the previous paragraph was under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management.  The resources of the National Park Service aren’t much better, but perhaps they should repair this particular Aztec Butte Ruin:  It’s a publicized park resource, and the benefits of reconstructing it far out-way any argument for letting nature take it’s course, because it’s not natural to begin with.  But it is historical:  Put up a placard documenting what has happened  (it’s said to have collapsed sometime in April 2008), and describe how it was re-created using … photographs!  Besides, we photographers would hate to lose this wonderful location.  I myself want to go back and try to correct all of the mistakes I made last time.

Read the bentwave essay about visiting Aztec Butte here.
Visit Moab Photo Tours at (you guessed it) http://moabphototours.com

Cool Stuff from Lex Machina. Nice post production!

She's a portrait of a poison