Kill your iPod (part II).

When it comes to audiophiles all is but lost.

With the advent of MP3, the idea of lossless audio seemed to have fallen upon deaf ears. Enter: FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, it compresses waveforms by finding similarities (like bzip), not by changing the the waveform itself (mp3 et. al.).

When it comes to playing FLAC on a portable, a HD based one is the only way to go because of the increased size of FLAC files -- roughly 1/2 the size of the original uncompressed stream. FLAC players are listed on the FLAC website, but as far as I see it there are only two choices for gapless MP3 and FLAC playback:

• Rio Karma -- purchase from Karma Limbo, his are pre-hacked with upgrades
• a Rockbox enabled device such as iRiver, or iPod

Why have you forsaken me?

My MythTV box has been chugging along nicely, playing DVDs and recording two shows off of a 2-tuner standard definition hardware MPEG encoder card (doing all at once). Just before Thanksgiving, I purchased a projector that can do 720p and had been enjoying the finer detail of my DVDs at full resolution. However, standard definition material really looks like crap when displayed on a 69" screen. Enter: High Definition. I bought a HDTV tuner card, thinking that I had prepared myself for this moment. According to the MythTV documentation, the minimum recommended processor speed for recording and playing off of one HD Tuner card is about 2.4GHz. So I built my box with an Athlon XP 2800+ (2083MHz clock speed) thinking it would be up to the task. Think again...

I was watching the television today, and I saw the most idiotic commercial ever. The commercial was for a pair of HD Sunglasses. Let's look at that acronymn HD for a second: H=high, D=definition.

Now, why is this stupid? Maybe only someone with knowledge of what the term HD really means would think this is ridiculous. What is HD? High definition is a term associated to television or video broadcasts or files that are of a resolution higher than that of NTSC or PAL standards. Since real life optics have no pixel-by-pixel resolution, this makes no sense.

A pair of HD Sunglasses, as the company calls them. Worthless crap is what I call them.