ThinkGeek is selling “the ultimate in retro-cool PC mods.”

The PlusDeck 2 is a full-logic cassette deck for your PC. Use it to archive your old cassette tapes of 80s hair bands into digital media files for playback on your PC. Or better yet, archive your favorite audio files or streams onto cassette – perfect for playback in your ’78 Midget that is still not sporting an in-dash CD player.

I have a few hundred cassette tapes from the dark ages of audio, including some field recordings and some FM broadcasts that probably can’t be found elsewhere. PC Magazine’s review of a pre-production unit praises it as “the easiest way we know to copy tapes to your PC” but dings it for “cumbersome” installation and “often-incoherent documentation”: 

Setup involves screwing the deck into an external drive bay and cabling it to a slotless back-panel interface card that must then be patched to a serial port and to your sound board’s 1/8-inch line-in/line-out jacks. If your system lacks a serial interface, you’re out of luck, and if your sound board, like our Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro, has the wrong type of jacks, you’ll have to purchase adapters.

I suppose I could hook up an old cassette player to the Line In jacks and do all this manually, but the prospect of one-button dubbing is pretty tempting. I’m looking over the manual and FAQs now to see if the problems are fixed in production units. Anyone tried this device?

Via eHomeUpgrade, I read this post from Shelly Palmer, chair of the Advanced Media Committee of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (I’ve highlighted two key sentences in bold):

An array of technology firms, including major computer and TV-set manufacturers, is pressing federal regulators to enforce new set-top-box rules against the cable industry.

Cable operators are resisting implementation of a Federal Communications Commission rule that would ban the deployment of new integrated set-tops after July 1, 2006, effectively meaning that all new boxes would need to function with the CableCARD conditional-access device.

“The time has come to end consumers’ exclusive reliance on [set-top boxes] provided by their cable company. In fact, it’s long overdue,” Hewlett-Packard Co. executive vice president Shane Robinson said in a Feb. 17 letter to the FCC.

The CableCARD mandate is designed to establish a retail set-top market, and the technology firms maintained that the creation of such a market requires that cable operators support the CableCARD in all new boxes that they provide their customers.

Cable insists that the mandate would drive up box costs without creating new value for consumers.

In a separate letter, H-P joined 11 other companies, including Sharp Electronics Corp. and Dell Inc., in urging the FCC to reject cable’s proposal that the agency should eliminate the ban or postpone its effective date by 18 months.

“The only way to ensure that consumers enjoy the benefits of a competitive marketplace is to maintain the requirement that devices supplied by cable operators rely on the same CableCARDs for security that must be used by equipment supplied through competitive retail outlets,” the companies told the FCC in a Feb. 18 letter.

Read between the lines. The cable companies desperately want to lock you in to their hardware to maximize their profits and reduce your options. Their tactics now include stonewalling and spreading misinformation. The CableCARD initiative cuts their hardware out of the loop, giving alternative hardware providers (including makers of PC-based systems like Windows XP Media Center Edition) the option of tapping directly into the signal that comes over the cable into your home. The underlying technology is sound and secure. Through the use of strong encryption, the cable company gets assurance that only its subscribers will have access to the programming it delivers. Consumers get the option to record, time-shift, and expand their media options.

But the cable industry is doing everything it can to torpedo the move to CableCARD technology. They say it won’t “add value” to consumers. I say they’re dead wrong, and I have a perfect example to prove it.

Continue reading “Making the case for the CableCARD” →

Omar Shahine’s Creative Zen Micro vs iPod review is excellent, and his conclusion (“Kick Ass – better than iPod”) matches with mine. I only wish that Creative would make this device in a 20GB or larger format.

A random selection from my music collection. (If you don’t know the rules, read this. Inspired by Thomas Hawk, I’ve kicked the number up to 20.)

List is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in parentheses):

1. Cheikh Lo, Guiss Guiss (Ne La Thiass)
2. Cowboy Junkies, Miles from Our Home (Miles from Our Home)
3. Bruce Cockburn, Great Big Love (Nothing But a Burning Light)
4. Grateful Dead, Fire on the Mountain (Closing of Winterland, Disc 1)
5. Bob Marley & The Wailers, No Woman No Cry (Natty Dread)
6. Paul Simon, Further to Fly (Rhythm of the Saints)
7. Bruce Springsteen, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Tracks, Disc 2)
8. Fine Young Cannibals, I’m Not Satisfied (The Raw and the Cooked)
9. Steve Earle, Everyone’s in Love with You (Transcendental Blues)
10. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, The Dark of the Sun (Into the Great Wide Open)
11. Hot Tuna, San Francisco Bay Blues (Live at the Tabernacle, 2003 – bootleg)
12. David Lindley & El Rayo-X, Talk ABout You (Very Greasy)
13. Wilco, Should’ve Been in Love (McCabe’s Guitar Shop 4-14-95, bootleg)
14. Bob Dylan, Cat’s in the Well (Aragon Theater, Chicago, bootleg)
15. Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler, Tears (Neck and Neck)
16. Soul Asylum, I Did My Best (Let Your Dim Light Shine)
17. Clash, This Is Radio Clash (Live at Bonds Casino, 1981 – bootleg)
18. Richard Thompson, Meet on the Ledge (Small Town Romance)
19. The Kinks, Here Comes Flash (Preservation: Act 1)
20. Green Day, Pulling Teeth (Dookie)

A fine selection, but only one woman in the list (Cowboy Junkies vocalist Margo Timmins). Gotta do something about that…

Two oddly related bits of news landed in my RSS reader this week.

First comes the news that at least one high-ranking Senator thinks HBO, Comedy Central,  and other cable networks should live by the same rules as over-the-air broadcasters. Paul McLeary writes in the Columbia Journalism Review:

At a meeting of state broadcasters gathered in Washington by the National Broadcasters Association on Tuesday, [the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)] dropped the bomb that he, along with several other senators, are looking into extending “to cable and satellite TV and satellite radio the same indecency regulations faced by broadcast radio and TV,” according to Mediaweek.

This proposal to expand the FCC jurisdiction to include the hundreds of paid cable television and satellite radio stations comes on the heels of the House of Representatives passing the “Broadcast Decency Act” in February — a bill calling for an increase of the basic FCC fine for “indecent” content from $32,500 to $500,000. The Senate is currently working on its own version of the bill, which calls for a minimum fine of $325,000.

Either way, if Stevens’ plan becomes law, cable channels like HBO and Comedy Central would either have to completely alter their programming or be fined into oblivion. If they chose to succumb and live, their appeal as edgy, mature, alternative programming would be tossed out the window, in effect giving rise to a couple hundred more versions of ABC, CBS and NBC.

The MediaWeek story quotes Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) as approving of the idea.

This is simply absurd. I can somewhat understand the desire to regulate content that is broadcast over the airwaves, which are a scarce commodity and are available to anyone. But HBO? For heaven’s sake, if you don’t want to watch The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, just don’t watch. But don’t stop me from doing so. What’s next? Imposing decency controls on content delivered via the Web?

Meanwhile, Bradley Smith, chair of the Federal Election Commission, is quoted in a News.com interview as suggesting that the Federal government might decide to regulate blogging by defining each blog post in support of a candidate as a political contribution. Sounds absurd? The blogosphere is up in arms over the idea. Fortunately, one of the smartest political commentators around, Mark Schmitt, has deftly analyzed the controversy and concludes that this idea is a non-starter. Thank goodness.

Not only does it sound like the food was great at the San Francisco Geek Dinner, but the guest list and conversation were apparently, well, ultra-geeky. (And I mean that in a good way.) Thomas Hawk reports:

The conversations that immediately come to mind from this evening include everything from how to protect film makers in the digital media world (yes musicians can always tour and make money if they can’t from their recordings, but a filmaker can’t), the broadcast flag, HDTV, the generally poor UI interface and various problems with the current cable DVR offerings, the superior Microsoft Foundation television interface, the new MSN remote guide, the challenge of marketing to a new blog universe, video on demand, and oh did I mention HDTV?

I’ll be in Redmond next week. Think we could do a similar dinner there?

Love the Grateful Dead? Now you can get any of the recordings in their live Dick’s Picks series over the Internet. Single songs (up to 10 minutes long, which cuts out most of the extended jams the band is famous for) are available at the iTunes store. Full tracks are available at the Grateful Dead store in 128K and 256K MP3 and lossless (FLAC) formats. The lower-quality MP3 formats cost less than the higher-quality MP3s, and the lossless files cost a few bucks more. But the prices are still not bad – $23.50 for a 4–CD set, with no shipping or handling.

I thought this explanation from the band’s production company was pretty classy:

We’ve been on the cutting edge of music distribution for more than 30 years, and the evolution to digital sharing is not surprising. Dead Heads have always honored ethical standards in their sharing, and we think this offering represents a great combination — it’s easy to use and it’s legal.

Digital sharing. Ethical standards. Legal. What a refreshing bunch of words to see in the same paragraph. Too bad the rest of the music industry can’t get on board.

I have an older iRiver H120 music player. It does what I want it to do, but the user interface is awful, and I would never recommend it to anyone who isn’t a certified geek. I had put the newer iRiver models, especially the 40GB H340, on my gotta-try-this list. Until I read Omar Shahine’s review and his follow-up from yesterday.

I’m staying away from the iRiver products for a while. I think their current customer base is way too far on the techy side, and I’m not sure they “get it” when it comes to building the basics. Meanwhile I think Creative Gets it and love my Zen Micro.

His detailed commentary provided exactly what I need in a review. The raves I read at iRiver fan sites glossed over the problems, but with just a little research I was able to confirm that everything Omar wrote is true, and that the H340 isn’t going to work for me. In shirt, if I bought it I would be unhappy.

And I will enthusiastically confirm the raves for Creative’s Zen Micro (also available at Newegg). It scores very, very high on the Spousal Acceptance Factor metric.