Custom messaging ringtones

Originally, iOS only allowed you to assign ringtones to people in your address book. Now you can assign custom ringtones to events such as text tones, email sending and receiving, tweets, and voice mail.

Double-tap the home button while locked for camera and iPod access

The one thing that annoyed me the most about the iPhone was the time it took to get to the Camera app. You had to unlock your phone, click the Camera app icon, and wait for the aperture to open. Now, all you have to do is double-tap the home button and you have instant access to the Camera app. You also have limited access to your music.

Notifications

One major annoyance about iOS in the past was the way the phone handled notifications. If you got more than one, there was no way to look at the history of the notification that were sent to you. Now, you’re shown all your notifications on your home screen that came in since the last time you checked. What’s better is you can now swipe down from the top of your screen and see a longer notification history. You also get a scrolling stock ticker at the bottom of the notifications list.

If you get a notification while using your phone, instead of a giant dialog box intruding on your work, the top 100 pixels or so will “rotate” down like the answers in Family Feud, and display your notification that way. You can then choose to tap the notification to read it, or simply ignore it.

iMessage

Instead of sending messages over SMS, Apple has created a new system called iMessage which allows you to send text, pics, and movies to anyone else that has iOS 5 with iMessage. Now you no longer have to send messages over the clunky SMS system, you can do it all over 3G and Wifi. You can even send messages to multiple people. If the person you’re sending the message to has iMessage as well, their name has a blue bubble. If not, they have a green bubble.

Reminders

Originally, all you could do in iOS to remind yourself about anything was to use the Notes app. Now, iOS 5 has a Reminders app that not only keeps your list of reminders, but also pushes everything to iCloud, so it wirelessly syncs across all your devices. You can set priorities, and tell Reminders how often to remind you about your…reminder.

Photo Stream

When you take a picture on your iPhone, or add one to your iPhoto library on your Mac, it’s automatically sent to all your devices.

Camera updates

One of the first things you’ll notice when you launch the Camera app is the grid lines it puts up by default. This is an excellent way to make sure your pictures are as straight as possible. Nobody wants their pictures to look crooked, as if they were taken in a villain’s lair from the old Batman TV show. HDR is also an option now so that you can take the high dynamic range pictures along with regular pictures.

Some people didn’t like that you had to touch the camera icon in the Camera app to take the picture because it was in an awkward position, so you can now use the volume up button on the iPhone 4 to snap the picture.

Software updates over the air

While beta testing iOS over the last few months,

I was able to update iOS over the air. I found that iOS will pull the update for you and let you know when it’s ready so that you don’t have to wait for it to download. You can, of course, do it manually. I was at a concert one evening when I got the notification that there was a new update available. I told my iPhone to proceed and was updated in less than 15 minutes. The downside is that if something does go wrong, you want to be close to your computer to restore from a recent backup. I would suggest not doing an over the air update unless you’re backed up and near a computer in case something goes wrong.

Sync and backup over Wifi

This is one feature that’s long overdue. I didn’t like that I had to attach my phone to my Mac every time I wanted to do a backup. Now, you can tell your iPhone to do its backup over Wifi. It has to be done over the local network where your computer resides, or at least have some kind of VPN access to it over the Wifi network you’re connected to.

While some people might not think that iOS 5 is a major upgrade, I saw a lot of little things that I absolutely love about it. iTunes Match won’t be ready for another few weeks, so watch here for our review of that service.

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Post tags: Apple, Camera+, iMessage, ios5, iPad, iPhone, iPod, photo stream, reminders

Getting rid of time zones?

Cinavia’s copy protection on Blu-Rays

The DC reboot controversies

Geekiversary: Highlander and Star Trek

The future of the space program

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Post tags: cinavia, dc reboot, Geekiversary, ghostbusters, highlander, space program, Star Trek, superman, time zones, we're ready to believe you

The first thing I did was eject it using the Finder. After the Finder ejected it, I tried to remove it only to find that the hard drive was so hot that I couldn’t even hold it. This had never happened before, and I used that hard drive a lot. I still don’t understand what caused the hard drive to get so hot but after doing some research I found that some hard drives heat up in these external enclosures while some do not. This hard drive was an old Maxtor which I’ve had for several years and never had a problem with it.

After it cooled off, I put it back in the external enclosure to see if it was truly damaged. It was. Disk Utility couldn’t repair it and Mac OS X only gave me the option to format or eject the drive. Every time it tried reading the directory I’d get the same “k-chunk” sound from it. At this point I had to remember what was on the drive, and if it was worth worrying about. My iPhoto backups were of no consequence since they still lived on my main drive and I could just back it up again, but I lost all my Final Cut Pro projects, my Unreal Tournament projects, some Xcode projects I was working on, some PHP projects, and backups of CDs that I threw away.

I had decided that the hard drive was worth recovering and looked into an app that would get the data back for me. After doing some reading, I found that Tech Tool Pro was supposed to work, but it did not. When it tried to read the damaged hard drive, it just said “Sorry, can’t read this disk”, and didn’t even attempt anything else. I tried surface scans, directory rebuilds, and nothing worked. A waste of $100. Determined to get my data back, I dropped another $100 on DiskWarrior. This time, the app looked at the hard drive, said “there’s something wrong with it”, and continued on, somehow grabbing a backup directory and giving me all my files back!

The way DiskWarrior works is that if it can’t put the recovered directory in the space of the hard drive where’s it’s supposed to go, it creates a temporary read-only disk image which allows you to grab the files off the image. Every single file was there, and I copied them to a brand new 2TB hard drive. What worried me was that the bad hard drive was already starting to overheat and I didn’t want to lose my files while backing them up, so I put a hair dryer on cool and just stood there looking silly while cooling down the hard drive. It worked, keeping the hard drive from overheating.

So in the end, DiskWarrior is a far superior app for recovering files off a damaged hard drive. I’m not saying that DiskWarrior will allow you to fix every issue that you encounter, but directory errors are catastrophic since without that, the hard drive doesn’t know where files start and the sector chains to recover them. If you ever have a Mac hard drive die, I would highly suggest checking out DiskWarrior to get your data back. Unfortunately, they do not offer a trial version. I was hoping I’d find a free version that said “here are your files, upgrade to recover them” because dropping $100 blind is not the best way to see if an app works.

Even though it’s been about ten years since I had such a bad hard drive failure, it’s always smart to make multiple backups of important files. The problem I have is that some media projects are so large that they only fit on other hard drives instead of using something like Dropbox. Still, remember to back up your data onto more than one place if you want to avoid the stress of having to get it all back.

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Post tags: diskwarrior, mac, maxtor, tech tool pro, techtoolpro

For a time, while I was living far away from my family and friends, Facebook played an important role in my life – beyond the pokes and emoticons and likes and tags, there was a tangible sense of social interaction with the people I loved. It’s a fantastic way to message your friends and see updates on their lives – and in many cases Facebook has replaced email as a primary source of messaging, event planning and information exchange.  Like anything else, there’s plenty of good that little blue box with the white ‘F’ can do.

Lately though, I’ve been giving some serious thought as to whether or not Facebook (or any other social media platform) is a good thing in the end.  For the past couple of years I’ve become a lot wiser to the privacy implications of using these tools.  Not only are you throwing a wide assortment of your personal data out to a public that  you cannot trust, and to corporations that are mining your information in order to sell to you,  it’s a fact that Facebook (and many other platforms including Google+, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) has eyebrow raising connections to several government intelligence agencies like the CIA, DARPA, the Defense Department and the NSA.  What you post, your personal details, entertainment preferences, spending habits, social interactions and general day to day comings and goings are likely being cataloged by a signals intelligence system like Echelon, or one of it’s newer, more expansive siblings. I don’t know about you, but I am increasingly concerned about the implications of this activity.

Beyond the privacy concerns though, are the human factors.  Is Facebook something that benefits social interaction – or does it provide a false network of interactions, and perhaps actually block real human contact?

Like Me.

I’ve seen plenty of damage caused by Facebook that would not usually show up in offline interactions.  For example – you post pictures of you at a party with a girl.  Three years later, that girl is still your friend on Facebook, but you are now engaged to be married.  Your fiancee stumbles across the picture, and your digital friendship and notices that last Wednesday you responded to one of your party girl’s posts with a “LOL” and a ”   “.   Suddenly you find yourself with a jealous fiancee and potential trust damage to your relationship, even if the interaction is in truth an innocuous affair.

We have begun to treat Facebook as our real social network.  The interactions on this digital chat-room have real world impact.  We get drawn in by our “friends” daily updates, angered or emboldened by their political or religious perspectives.  We pour over their pictures, and the pictures taken by others in which they were tagged.  We see things we never were a part of, and become digital voyeurs.  We update people we barely know with dramas that we wouldn’t tell a stranger, but because they are Facebook friends, they somehow hold an elevated position and our defenses drop.

We allow what people say, what interests they post, and what pictures they show to form our opinions about them without first having the ability to interact with those individuals in person.  We generalize people – and are ourselves generalized  by others.  For example, I have been generalized often – and detrimentally – as a “Republican Tea-Bagger” because of things I post, or opinions stated – when in fact, I am nothing of the sort.  My real perspectives on politics, like most everyone else, is decidedly gray – a little liberal here, a little conservative there.  But it’s easier to generalize – and then – to judge.  And when we judge our digital friends we pull away from them, and potentially miss out on the real and meaningful interactions, where communication is more than a status update, an icon or a “poke”.

We follow people we used to date, and even those we used to hate – just to see what they’re doing – sometimes it causes us joy when they hit bad times, but can also lead us into thoughts of anger, regret, depression and more.  We use Facebook to gossip and to judge – to lie and puff ourselves up – to be the person we wish we were, instead of who we really are. I’m just as guilty of this behavior at one time or another as most everyone else using these networks. In a sense we’ve all become one part digital stalker and one part reality show star – two things that in our worlds outside of the computer we are not (or at least most of us are not, and should not be).

But in moving social contact from physical presence to digital presence, Facebook pulls the ultimate sleight-of-hand. How much individual personality is expressed in a chorus of “LOLs”? How much does “want 2 come over now k ” convey? By contrast, how much nuance and gentle shades of meaning are communicated through the human eyes? What subtle hints of suffering, joy, longing or need can you hear in the human voice? Can the beautiful and complex communication in a human glance be transposed into text? How much do we lose by shifting our contact with our fellow human beings to a text-based world of pithy posts and pixels?  — Josh Olson

I’ve been thinking that in reality, Facebook is a sham.  It isn’t the real world at all, and I think  it may actually be doing some level of harm to the way we relate to one another as human beings.  I’ve been thinking of leaving it all behind, and it’s harder than I thought it might be.

After years building up this social circle, I would miss the connections I have with old high school buddies, kids I grew up with in school, and old workmates.  But I won’t lie – I continue to ask what ongoing value all these connections have – and why I am sharing my life’s activities, events, ups and downs with them.  If we met in public today – would it be that easy – or would it just be awkward?  On the flipside – is it more likely that my two-dimensional online relations are acting as a buffer, a safe social outlay where I don’t risk the pitfalls and (more often) advantages of person to person contact?

I have already trimmed my “friends list” twice – weeding out those on the periphery that, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t really know, or want to associate with – leaving behind a list that feels slightly more accurate.  The vast majority of those I defriended were not my friends – not in reality.  Truthfully, I have maybe 3 good friends in this world – and a small handful of good acquaintances that are great to hang out with from time to time.   I do not have 891 friends – and neither do you.

For all the good it does to superficially connect with the majority of people on Facebook, is it worth being the subject of social, corporate and government scrutiny any more than we already have to be in the real world?  In our heart of hearts do we really want to be creepy stalkers and attention whores?  Do we really want to be the main character in our own ‘Truman Show‘?  Am I really losing friends if I chose not to log-in one day?  Is Facebook a good thing for me?

These are my questions – and I’m not sure I have an answer.  What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: Facebook, privacy, Social Media

Is any kind of piracy ok?

Star Wars on Blu-Ray – big pile of poodoo?

Did you get your HP Touchpad?

Gamestop opening copies of Deus Ex and removing the competition.

Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO

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Post tags: alien, Apple, blade runner, Blu-Ray, deus ex, gamestop, hp touchpad, piracy, rodley scott, star wars, steve jobs

It’s hard to believe that Star Trek is 45 years old. Looking back at everything that’s influenced me over the years in a creative sense, it was Star Trek more than anything that drove me as far back as I can remember.

My earliest recollection of Star Trek is watching it with my dad in the late 60’s when it was still on NBC. I don’t remember what episode it was, I just have this vague vision of the NBC logo and Star Trek. It wasn’t until the early 70’s that I rediscovered Star Trek with my dad again when it was on WPIX-11 in NYC every day at 6pm. Having a show in syndication play every day at the same time was unusual. Usually shows would run Monday through Friday for a few months and then change slots or disappear altogether, but Star Trek ran seven days a week at 6pm for several years, until Space: 1999 played on Sunday nights at 6:30pm in 1975.

Anyone who grew up before cable TV can probably recall those gray, rainy days when there was nothing but junk on TV. The winter months between football and baseball seasons were the worst. The only glimmer of hope was knowing that Star Trek was going to be on at 6pm so it made days like that just a little bit more tolerable. We had an old battery-powered Sony black-and-white TV with a headphone jack which I would watch Star Trek on while away from the house or in the car. In a way, it was the precursor to internet streaming and watching away from home. I watched so much Star Trek that at one point I would know the episode from the first few seconds, sometimes as early as the first frame or note of music. I can still do that for some episodes, but not as many as I used to.

What Star Trek did, more than anything I read or watched growing up, was spark my imagination. Today, I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was that attracted me to Star Trek, but I would have to say that it was a combination of good writing, art design, a great cast, and music. When some sci-fi shows were failing miserably, Star Trek endured because it didn’t make the same mistakes that other shows did. Star Trek built on the idea that man has at least gotten over some of his issues and reached out to space to explore. Other science fiction shows lacked a sense of humanity and that’s where I think other shows failed. Sci-fi at that time was meant to be what I called “disposable entertainment”, but Gene Roddenberry knew what he was doing by pitching it as a “wagon train to the stars”. He pushed the show to have great stories wrapped around this 23rd century universe and that’s what made the show last. Ok, well, maybe not “Spock’s Brain”, but not every episode is gold.

Early Impressions

I was always artistic, or at least trying to be. Star Trek was probably the one thing I doodled the most when I was growing up. I have notebooks filled with doodles of the Enterprise and the Galileo. They’re not very good, but it’s probably what started me on the road to drawing, teaching me about curved lines and perspective. Comics influenced me as well, but I was always better at drawing objects than drawing people. At some point I discovered models. Putting models together was a lot of fun for me because they were designed to be better scaled than toys. Toys would be deformed to fit action figures, but models had to be exact. It gave me a way to build something, and paint it. They also taught me how to determine how to do things in the correct order (paint, then glue on the clear pieces, then decals). I would have to say that working on models is what helped me get into engineering in the first place. Years later I tackled the challenge of lighting models, and they’ve always come out great.

Another aspect of Star Trek that got me into engineering was the Star Trek Technical Manual and the Star Trek Blueprints. Even though I knew that everything in Star Trek was fictional, the Tech Manual tried to map as much reality as it could into the book, making me imagine how to fill in the fictional parts and figure out what needed to be done to make them real. The one part I found most intriguing was the Communicator.

There was a schematic for it in the book, with one piece that hadn’t been invented yet. However, the rest of the device looked like it could work. Battery, transistor, diodes, an antenna, it was all there. Today, we have an iPhone. Although the iPhone itself can’t talk directly to a ship hundreds of miles above the Earth, the design for the iPhone definitely came from Star Trek Communicators. Other contributions that Star Trek made to today’s technology are projection systems, nano technology, 3D printers, iPads, CERN, email, recordable data storage, and many others. What the Blueprints did for me was open up the ship for me and “see” parts of the ship that weren’t shown on TV. At one point, I had all the blueprints covering my bedroom wall.

In the early 70′s, Bantam Publishing started releasing novelizations of some Star Trek episodes in book form. The first three book covers were simple shots of the cast, but starting with the fourth book, the covers were graced with beautiful artwork. Rather than have emotionless covers, artist Lou Feck created these awe-inspiring covers which really captured the feel of what Star Trek was all about. My favorites were the covers for Star Trek 4, 6, and 8 since they conveyed a sense of exploration. It was these covers that gave me a different perspective on the show and space exploration and helped give the Star Trek a better sense of wonder.

Star Trek books 4, 6, and 8. My three favorites

The Enterprise Incident

A pivotal moment for me was in 1976 while at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I didn’t know it at the time, but the filming model of the Enterprise was on display there. My dad knew, and told me that the museum had a surprise. Sure enough, hanging in the “Life in the Universe?” display was the Enterprise, the very same one that was used in filming the series. It was amazing that surrounded by all this history such as Apollo capsules and The Spirit of St. Louis, I was transfixed on this one spot. Today, it’s in the gift shop so that people can get a closer look at it, but I prefer to see it hanging.

The Force Factor

Things changed radically in May of 1977. We all knew that a new science fiction movie was on the horizon, but science fiction movies of that era were generally garbage. This one changed movies forever. Star Wars was like a sci-fi lover’s perfect movie. It combined big screen adventures, exciting special effects, a splash of humor, and the age-old story of saving the princess. You would think that now there’d be room for two important things in my life, but instead, my nine-year-old brain spent the next 18 months hating Star Trek. It was the big-screen excitement of Star Wars that kicked Star Trek out of my life for a little while. I couldn’t even watch Star Trek on TV anymore. The Lucas marketing machine kept me buying comics and figures and records and posters and calendars for quite some time. It was around 1978 when I realized just how stupid I was for hating something that meant so much to me at one point, and finally took Star Trek back into my life. Today, I look at both franchises as being important for different reasons.

The Big Screen

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was an odd beast. People were expecting a Star Wars-style movie in the Star Trek universe. We didn’t get that. I think that it was people’s expectations and the movie getting rushed to completion that gave it the bad rap it has today. I do remember waiting for all the action to take place which never did. The most we got was the Enterprise firing a torpedo at an asteroid. Yawn. I have to say that the segment of Kirk flying around the new Enterprise was breathtaking. Seeing the refit Enterprise on the big screen like that is one of the best scenes in a sci-fi movie. It’s a shame the rest of the movie didn’t fare as well, but it was made with the heart of the epic films of the 60’s and 70’s, it’s just that nobody told Robert Wise that those days were over. I saw the movie a second time in Jersey City a few weeks later with my grandfather, and the flyby around the Enterprise reminded me of seeing the World Trade Center across the river at night. Beautiful.

A side note about Star Trek: TMP is that at the time it was on cable, I had started using an 8mm camera for doing stop-motion animation. I used it to film some scenes from Star Trek: TMP, most notably the end of the film when the Enterprise hits warp speed. Since we didn’t have a VCR yet, my fix used to be syncing up the film with an audio tape I made of the movie. It never worked well because the speed of the film and the speed of the tape recorder were never right, but it’s probably the single point at which I started becoming aware of audio production.

It wasn’t until Star Trek II that we finally got the Star Trek movie we wanted. It’s about as perfect of a sci-fi movie as you can get. Even after all these years, short of a few minor nitpicks, it’s one of my favorite movies. In fact, I’d go so far to say it’s one of the best science fiction movies, not just a good Star Trek movie. What Star Trek II did for the franchise is show people that you can take a then-sixteen-year-old television show and give it a makeover that’s respectful. Spock’s death in the film was odd because at the time nobody knew what the future of the franchise would be. Will there be another movie? Will the show come back to the small screen? How can Star Trek survive without Spock? Is this how the franchise ends? It wasn’t so much denial as it was a sense of wondering whether or not this was really how they intended the film to end, especially with the whole “Remember…” thing. What was that about? So, there was hope for the future of Spock and Star Trek, and sure enough he was brought back to life in Star Trek III.

The Next Generation

Paramount announced in 1986 that a new Star Trek series was in production called “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (a name that still irks me), and it would premiere in September of 1987. A lot of people had mixed feelings about it, but one instance in particular I’ll never forget. While waiting on line to get into a Star Trek convention, a guy was handing out flyers trying to get people to cancel TNG before it got on the air. His argument was that there could never be a show as good as the original, and that anything else is an abomination. A bunch of us pretty much disagreed with him, but I said to him that there are no new episodes of the original series being made. While TOS was a great show, it’s time to move on and breathe new life into the franchise. The guy was adamant about his position, and told everyone that the show won’t last longer than TOS did. Well, he was wrong. I tried to find the flyer he handed out since I thought I had it, but unfortunately I must have thrown it out long ago. His arguments were silly, and TNG went on to survive for seven seasons, four more than TOS had.

By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation started I was already attending Trenton State College, and had a great group of friends that were all into Star Trek and D&D. We piled into our room the night it premiered on WPHL in Philly to watch it since we had our TV hooked up to the stereo. We had mixed feelings about the show. Picard wasn’t as swashbuckling as Kirk, Data was an odd replacement for Spock, and a ship’s counselor? It was definitely more of a touchy-feely Star Trek for the late 80’s and we were worried that it wasn’t ever going to live up to the original since it seemed that right off the bat they were trying to appeal to the Prozac nation. Half way through season two, they finally got their stride and finally lived up to the Star Trek name.

Conventions

I went to my first convention in 1975 at the Statler Hilton in New York City. I really don’t remember much about it, except for a cloudy memory of the dealer room, and seeing the stars of the show “beam” on stage. I do remember buying a book called “The Making of Star Trek” which I still have today, along with the program from the show which is missing the cover. It would be the first in a long line of conventions that I would attend in New York City until around 2002 when I just gave them up completely.

Starting in high school around 1984 when I went to conventions on my own, I think I went to every convention in New York City until maybe 1999 or so. There were three reasons for going to conventions: the dealer room, seeing cast members on stage, and seeing which conspiracy theory nutjob would be waiting on line with you. Oh, we had some winners. One guy was a “former army sergeant” who had seen the UFO in Area 51 for himself. He described it in great detail. When asked what happened to his tour in the army, he was told that he was about to break the story and the army wiped his memory, but he was able to recover his memory thanks to aliens. Another winner was a supposed former Time Lord, complete with Tom Baker scarf, that was sent here from the future to warn people about the coming apocalypse in the year 2000, and to score some rare Star Trek figures. Of course, every convention wouldn’t be complete without someone who thought that Star Trek was beamed to us from the future. Oddly enough, many people like that lived in their parents’ basements.

Two of my favorite memories of conventions was winning the trivia contest one year, with the very same question I asked to stump the panel the con before (the question was: where was Kirk vacationing in the novelization of Star Trek: TMP?). I don’t know if the person who asked that question knew that I asked it the last time, but it was nice making $100 that day. The other time something important happened at a con was when I built an Enterprise refit model, did an amazing job with the painting and lighting, and sold it at the Creation auction for $150. The person who bought it was very happy with the job I did on the model and said that they’d display it proudly in their home. I hope they still have it, it would be amazing if they did, it was around 1987.

After a while, I just didn’t enjoy going to cons anymore. When you’re in a stuffy hotel area for several hours in New York City, and you have to wait until the end of the day to see someone, and watch countless lame clip videos of Captain Kirk to the tune of Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young”, you just have to give up your con membership card. Also, the thrill of finding rare items was killed by the rise of eBay. My last convention was in Secaucus, NJ around 2002. I don’t remember who was there, but I remember being very underwhelmed with the whole thing. I hadn’t looked back at conventions since then. I had seen every major star of every Star Trek show up to Deep Space Nine, and met a few of them. I can say that the times I were at conventions were entertaining, but it wasn’t for me anymore. I thought about going to a convention again just to see how they’ve changed, if at all. So many people have passed on, and Leonard Nimoy retired from conventions, so I’m not sure what the attraction would be. The Duras Sisters aren’t much of a draw for me.

William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and Mark Lenard

The Marathon

In the early 1990’s, a group of us ran films at the Union County Arts Center in Rahway, NJ. Our biggest success was the very last showing of the original Star Wars Trilogy in March, 1994 before George Lucas removed the originals off the face of the planet in lieu of the Special Editions in 1997. We had 700 people show up for that show, it was amazing. In November of that same year, we decided to run all six Star Trek films back to back. Unfortunately, the turnout wasn’t as good as the Star Wars run was, we got less than 100 people. It was still great running the films for people, but I wish more had shown up. At the time I was collecting certain episodes on 16mm and I had a print of “Space Seed” that we played that before the marathon started. It was great seeing the films on the big screen again, but it just showed that Star Trek doesn’t have the vibe that Star Wars does when it comes to theatrical presentations. Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have run all six films. It should have been Star Trek II, III, IV, and VI. I personally love Star Trek: TMP and I can’t tell you what it’s like watching that movie on the big screen in a restored theater, but it’s two and a half hours long. Star Trek V should have been removed because, well, it’s Star Trek V. And what DOES God need with a starship?

Legacy

Over the years there were other Star Trek shows. Anyone who’s listened to the podcast knows how I became disenchanted with Deep Space Nine after “Move Along Home”. I loved Voyager, but as good of a show as it was, it didn’t strike that chord with me that TOS and TNG did. Enterprise, well, I couldn’t stomach that show. I understand what they were trying to do with it, but I don’t think they thought things through very well. I still find myself watching episodes of TOS, TNG, and Voyager a lot as time goes on.

It’s strange to look at Star Trek over 45 years and realize how much influence it had on my life. It helped in picking my friends, it awakened skills I had, it made me look at TV differently, and it made me look at the world differently. I saw the business side of it, and I saw its creative side. To this day I still find myself quoting from episodes almost subconsciously. When I decided to “break out” of just doing a World of Warcraft podcast, Star Trek was one of the topics I wanted to talk about, and “This Week in Trek” has been doing very well, mainly because Darrell is just as enthusiastic as I am about doing the show.

Star Trek is in our DNA. Roddenberry’s vision was so dead on to the human condition that it’s going to last for many decades more. While Trek is currently in a holding pattern on TV, I hope that it comes back as strong as TNG did in 1987. The world needs new Star Trek.

Star Trek 6 laserdisc signed by George Takei

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Post tags: deep space nine, ds9, Enterprise, featured, Star Trek, star trek 45, star trek the next generation, TNG, TOS, voyager

The Good

The Millennium Falcon blasting out of Mos Eisley

In mid-January of 1997, my friends and I got tickets to a private screening of the Star Wars Special Edition at the Ziegfeld in New York City. Not one change to the Special Edition got as many applauds as this one. Originally, you just saw a very wide shot of the Falcon taking off, but in the Special Edition, Lucasfilm filmed a high shot of Stormtroopers shooting at the Falcon as it took off, and composited it with a CGI Falcon blasting off. An excellent change.

Searching for the droids

Another scene filmed specifically for the Special Edition was the search for the droids on Tatooine. Originally done with a cardboard cutout, Lucasfilm brought members of the United States Army into the desert, put them in Stormtrooper outfits, and filmed them looking for the droids. Add in some CGI Dewbacks and you’ve got a great change to Star Wars.

Biggs

Fox was worried that Luke’s appearance so late in the film (near the end of reel one) would turn people off since he is the main character. To counter Fox’s worries, Lucas filmed scenes involving Luke and his best friend Biggs in Anchorhead. In the final cut of the film, Biggs is only mentioned in passing while Luke is cleaning the droids and we never get a sense that Biggs was important to Luke when he’s killed during the attack on the Death Star. With the addition of this scene in the Special Edition, it’s still not obvious that these two are very close, their meeting seems to be more of “hey, you’re here too?”. Still, it gives a better sense of loss when Biggs dies.

The launch of the rebel ships

The original film had a far shot of the ships quickly flying away from the Rebel base. The shot was so far away that you couldn’t tell what was flying away. In the Special Edition, ILM put in CGI ships, showing them take off like ships probably should.

Approaching the Death Star

In the original version of Star Wars, ILM started with a static camera shot from the rear of approaching X-Wings and Y-Wings, followed by another essentially static shot of those same ships. In the Special Edition, that was changed with a dynamic shot of rebel ships passing by the camera.

The sound mixes

Originally, Star Wars was released in mono, 35mm Dolby, and 70mm 6-Track Dolby. For the Special Editions, the mixes were cleaned up and in some places greatly enhanced. The opening of Star Wars, which wowed audiences in 1977 with its flyover of the Rebel Blockade Runner and Star Destroyer, now sounds infinitely much better. All three movies now benefit from DTS 6.1 mixes.

Changes to Cloud City

The original set of Cloud City was rather modern, but closed. ILM opened up Cloud City for the Special Edition and made the city less claustrophobic.

Blinking Ewoks

Similar to what was done to the Gorn in the new CGI additions to the Star Trek episode “Arena”, Ewoks now blink in the Blu-Ray version of “Return of the Jedi”. Not a major change, but I like it.

The end of “Return of the Jedi”

To show how far reaching the death of the Emperor really was, Lucas added some scenes into the end of Return of the Jedi showing celebrations of freedom on Tatooine, Bespin, Coruscant, and Naboo. The end music was also changed from the silly “nyub nyub” song.

CGI Yoda in Episode I

Let’s face it – the puppet in Episode I looked bad. VERY bad. How it was so bad when the job done in Empire was so GOOD is beyond me. Either way, ILM changed Yoda in Episode I to be a CGI Yoda. Here’s an animated gif of the differences (from millenniumfalcon.com)

Honorable mention

From Star Wars: Ben’s hut, far shot of Mos Eisley, changes to the Sandcrawler shots (specifically, the sky).

The Bad

Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad. In 1997 we were hoping that so much would be fixed such as matte lines and such, but instead we got other changes. For the Blu-Ray,

Lucasfilm reps said they worked four years on the Blu-Ray edition. It’s hard to see where that hard work went. We’re still getting 2004 scans of the films, edge enhancement, and some DNR. I haven’t watched the movies myself, but these are the reports we’re getting. I’ll know more in 10 days. Still, these are the changes we do know about.

Artoo hiding in rocks he can’t fit in

After Luke is attacked by the Sandpeople, Artoo hides in nearby rocks. Lucas decided to put Artoo inside a group of rocks he can’t even fit into. This change makes no sense because even though Lucas hid Artoo well, Artoo’s still beeping at Luke, so even though Lucas hid Artoo, Artoo’s still noisy which makes the whole point of the change silly. Take a look at the rocks. How in the world can Artoo fit not only between the rocks, but squat down to get in there?

Krayt Dragon

When Ben finds an unconscious Luke, surrounded by Sandpeople, he lets out a scream that’s supposed to be a Krayt Dragon. In the new Blu-Ray it sounds more like someone getting their lips surgically removed from George Lucas’ ass.

Greedo

After getting the charter to Alderaan, Han is cornered by Greedo, hell bent on getting the money that Han owes Jabba the Hutt. Greedo shoves a blaster in Han’s chest and keeps it pointed at him the entire time, threatening to kill Han. In the original cut, Han secretly takes out his blaster from under the table and shoots Greedo dead. In the most hated change to Star Wars, Greedo now shoots, and misses Han, even though he’s two feet away from him. Over the years the scene has changed, mostly getting shorter and shorter, but still not as believable. I don’t care what Lucas says, this change is just ridiculous.

Jabba

Jabba not only looks bad, but his existence in Star Wars is redundant and pointless. For starters, most of his dialog is the same as what Greedo just said to Han in the cantina. There’s no real resolution here, and lines from Empire more or less tell the viewer that Han has to pay Jabba back anyway. What’s worse is that when the scene was originally filmed in 1976, Jabba wasn’t supposed to be a slug. His description in the novel and comics make him to be more humanoid, so when Harrison Ford walks behind the actor playing Jabba, ILM digitally altered Ford to step on Jabba’s tail. The result is not convincing. Finally, Boba Fett looking right at the camera at the end of the scene takes the viewer out of the movie.

Censorship

This I don’t understand at all. In Star Wars, when our gang takes control of the control room above the Millennium Falcon on the Death Star, and when they attack the detention center, the shots that hit the Imperial guards have been shortened by a few frames.

Bad CGI

There are some shots during the attack on the Death Star which are just atrocious. Bad lighting, bad movement, unbelievable flying, even for a fantasy movie. I wonder why these changes were made when the originals worked just fine. Removing matte lines would have been a better change.

Vader landing on his Star Destroyer at the end of Empire

This is one of those shots where I believe Lucas said “the audience is stupid, we need to show every step Vader took to make sure we know how fast he got on the Executor”. In the original cut, Vader asked for his shuttle while Luke was hanging on for dear life. Now, in 30 years I never once questioned how or why Vader got on board his ship so fast, but Lucas seems to think that was a problem. Hence, we have a reused shot from Return of the Jedi. Silly.

Noooooooooo!

The day Return of the Jedi was released, some friends and I went to see it, even taking off from school to do so. At the end of the film when Palpatine is trying to kill Luke with lightning, you can see Vader’s contemplation of what’s happening simply by his body movement. As with the above change, Lucas felt we needed to hear him say “Noooooooo!” before he picked up Palpatine, echoing what he said at the end of Revenge of the Sith. So unnecessary and shows that less can sometimes be a lot more.

Dialog changes

There are some dialog changes that make no sense at all. The least offensive is Han saying “until I can get the shelter up” instead of “…shelter built” when saving Luke on Hoth. It doesn’t change anything except what I remember from the original cut.

One change that was quite funny is when Artoo is shot from the swamp on Dagobah. Luke now says “you’re lucky to get out of there”. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. The original line was “you’re lucky you don’t taste very good”. That line was funnier. Why was it changed?

One of the worst changes was when Lando’s getting pulled in by the Sarlaac. Han, who still can’t see right from his hibernation sickness, is trying to shoot the tentacle that’s got Lando. Han now says “it’s alright, I can see a lot better”. Meh. The original line was simply “trust me”. Far funnier, and matches Han’s character.

Jar Jar wasn’t removed

‘Nuff said

Honorable mention

Matte lines still plague the entire original trilogy.

So that’s our list of ten best and worst changes to Star Wars. What are yours? Leave a comment here or post on our forums.

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When HP killed the Touchpad a few weeks ago and dropped the prices of the 16/32GB models to $99/$149 respectively, the demand for them was extraordinary. What was once considered a doorstop was once of the most sought-after tablets in recent months. What was the reason for the demand? With the iPad in the $500 range, a $99 tablet looked like a steal. Despite the bad hardware that webOS ran on, the Touchpad is a very capable tablet, and webOS is very solid.

The problem was that HP couldn’t keep up with demand, and most stores sold out of them rather fast, including HP’s own web store. Now that HP sees the demand for the units, they’re producing one more run of them. HP stated on their blog, “More Touchpads on the Way“. What we don’t know is how much the tablets will cost, athough their FAQ leans towards the lower pricing. Knowing that the tablets were sold at a loss after the announcement of their death, it’s strange that HP is making another run at the discounted prices simply to satisfy demand for something they killed.

If HP sells these units again at full price, would people buy them at those prices? Not when you have competition from Apple and Android. While webOS gets good reviews, the hardware made the OS run sluggishly. Web sites takes several seconds to load on a Touchpad, the same sites such as apple.com and microsoft.com load almost instantaneously on iPads, there aren’t nearly as many apps for the Touchpad as there are for the other tablets, and some developers have moved over to other platforms. Where the Touchpad shines is in simple apps like slideshows and playing music.

If you run anything more complicated than that on a Touchpad, the limitations of the hardware start to show.

This is confusing for the customers as well. If HP makes a statement saying “we’re killing the Touchpad because we can’t sell any”, and announces no more development of webOS, and then brings the Touchpads back, how much confidence will customers and developers have with these units? It seems like HP is trying to capitalize on the success of the cheaper prices and high demands, but if they think they’re going to sell them for full price, they may have the same inventory problems they did before.

Are you still interested in a Touchpad? Did you get one? What are you using it for? Let us know in our forums.

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Post tags: HP, hp touchpad, touchpad, webos

Recently, I found myself in a particularly bad quandry – the last major story arc I had followed in Marvel was the “Onslaught” and “Operation: Zero Tolerance” stories from waaaaay back in 1996-1997 (I did get majorly turned on to the Ultimates books – especially Ultimate Spiderman and Millar’s The Ultimates in the intervening years).  I had picked up the trade paperback for “Marvel Civil War“, and “House of M” – and while I enjoyed them both – I was more than a little lost.  To boot, I learned that writer Brian Michael Bendis was in the middle of some serious world revising, with some massive implications for all Marvel characters – an ongoing arc of nearly 6 years and multiple events – a truly epic event!  I had to know what was up – so I started digging.

To my despair I quickly learned that trying to jump into an ongoing story like that is confusing – like trying to jump into Battlestar Galactica during season 4 and make any sense of what had gone before – only I think the Marvel storyline was even more complicated.  The internet offered little help.  No one source laid it all out.  What should I read?  In what order?  Where does it start?  What do I need to know? Is it any good?

Well, faithful readers and visitors from cyberspace – let me give you the gift of knowledge.  Hard fought knowledge of geek canon and mythical men in tights that took literally weeks to acquire and understand.

The epic 2004-2010 story arc - made easy!

I give you:  How to catch up on the Marvel Universe – the essential titles – in order.  These are the books (every one of them a trade paperback or hardbound omnibus edition) that cover the major story arc, helmed by Bendis starting in 2004 with “Avengers: Disassembled”, and concluding with “Siege”.  I know, those names mean nothing to you – any more than they did to me.  So let me clue you in without any major spoilers, then I’ll give you the list so you can purchase the books yourself.

Where does it start?

The single story, “Avengers: Disassembled” is the most logical starting point.  If you know nothing about the current Marvel U, it’s the best place to start because the big guys like Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man are all present – and any sideline characters aren’t relevant enough to confuse you.  This is an event that sees a major character go tragically wrong and change the Avengers forever.  What you need to know going in:  The Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) can apparently control reality.  That’s all you need to know.

Where does it go?

After the Avengers are forever changed, dark things begin to occur.  The Scarlet Witch completely falls apart in “House of M“, leaving the Marvel mutant world sidelined for years.  The chaos of both “House of M” and “Avengers: Disassembled”

leads to the US government mandating that all super-powered heroes be registered  – an event that creates sharp divisions among the heroes themselves, and leads to a “Civil War” across the Marvel U.  Some major players in the universe will not make it out of this event as the same individual that entered it, and some will not make it out alive at all.  In the wake of the civil war, dark, authoritarian powers rise up to claim leadership over the world, with the real heroes forced underground to survive, and eventually rebel.  Has this all been orchestrated?  The answers to that make up the turning point storyline called “Secret Invasion“, and to say anything about it would be a crime – but trust me, things are not as they seem, and if you pay very close attention as you read the early storylines, you’ll pick up plenty of clues.  Just when you thing things couldn’t get any crazier, the story enters the third act with the monumental return of two Marvel characters, missing from years of the story arc, and a “Siege” to retake the heavens themselves from the evil that has held sway over the world since “Avengers: Disassembled“. In the end it leads to a rebirth of the golden age – a return to classic good guys vs. bad guys that has been muddied over decades of continuity.

Is it any good?

Yeah, it is.  There are some stand out stories here.  The entire Captain America run by Ed Brubaker is fantastic.  The stand alone story “Wolverine: Enemy of the State” is gripping and action packed – you’ll realize why Wolverine is one of the most powerful and feared characters in the Marvel U.  The “Civil War” series is pivotal, but also dramatic and well written, with a shocking twist at the end if you don’t know it’s coming.  “Planet Hulk” is simply one of the best sci-fi stories I’ve read in years.  In the end, the 2004-2010 “Bendis Arc” is one of the greatest in all of Marvel history, in my opinion. If you love these characters, and this universe – you will go nuts over the following story. So much of it is already finding its way into the Marvel movies, and the Avengers cartoon – so you’ll likely be familiar with certain portions of the story without even having read it.  Check it out!

Now – here’s the list – in order – to make it seriously easy to catch up.  I’ve colored the most crucial and pivotal of the titles red if you want to just get the cliff notes version of the story – just read them in order.  Every one of these titles is available on Amazon (or better yet, take the list to your local comic shop and support them!) – just copy and paste the title in their search and away you’ll go.  Enjoy!

Marvel Epic List – “Marvel: Disassembled” Story Arc – 2004-2010

1. Avengers Disassembled
2. Avengers Disassembled: Thor
3. Captain America – Omnibus Volume 1 (Hardcover 1-25)
4. Wolverine: Enemy of the State
5. Secret War
6. New Avengers – Volume 1  (Hardcover 1-10)
7. House of M
8. Decimation: X-Men
9. Wolverine: Origin
10. New Avengers – Volume 2 (Hardcover 11-20)
11. Iron Man: Extremis
12. The Road to Civil War
13. Civil War
14. Civil War: Spiderman
15. Civil War: Iron Man
16. New Avengers – Volume 3 (Hardcover 21-31)
17. Incredible Hulk:  Planet Hulk
18. The Death of Captain America – Omnibus (Hardcover 25-42)
19. Mighty Avengers – Volume 1 (Hardcover 1-11)
20. Avengers: The Initiative – Vol 1
21. 32. Avengers: The Initiative – Vol 2
22. X-Men Endangered Species
23. World War Hulk
24. X-Men: Messiah Complex
25. X-Men: Legacy – Divided He Stands
26. Thor (Omnibus 1-12)
27. New Avengers – Volume 4 (Hardcover 32-37)
28. Mighty Avengers: Secret Invasion (Hardcover 12-20)
29. New Avengers – Volume 5 (Hardcover 38-47)
30. Avengers: The Initiative vol 3: Secret Invasion (Paperback 14-19)
31. Secret Invasion
32. X-Force/Cable: Messsiah War
33. New Avengers: Vol 10 Power (Paperback 48-50)
34. Avengers: The Initiative vol 4: Disassembled
35. Dark Avengers  (Omnibus Hardcover – entire run – preorder only)
36. Invincible Iron Man: vol 2   – World’s Most Wanted (Paperback  8-13)
37. Invincible Iron Man: vol 3   – World’s Most Wanted (Paperback  14-19)
38. Thor: Latverian Prometheus  (Paperback 604-606)
39. Captain America Lives (Hardcover Omnibus 43-50 / Reborn 1-5)
40. Invincible Iron Man, vol 4: Stark Disassembled (Paperback 20-24)
41. Siege (Hardcover)
42. New Avengers: Siege (Paperback)
43. Mighty Avengers: Siege (Paperback)
44. Dark Avengers: Siege (Hardcover)
45. Avengers: The Initiative: Siege (Paperback)
46. X-Men: Second Coming
47. Avengers – Vol 1 (Hardcover 1-6)

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Post tags: Bendis, Captain America, comics, Iron Man, list, Marvel, Spiderman, Thor, Wolverine