HDTV's not quite there yet.

I need a new TV. I've have my current one for 6 years now and it was secondhand when I bought it. Plus it gets this little green patch now and then (which it's been doing for a couple of years). Not hugely annoying, but everything helps in justifying a new one.

My current TV is a normal 25" 4:3 set. I've worked out that if I go widescreen I need a 31" set to get the same height, which seems perfectly doable. The tricky bit comes in that I'd like HD, as hopefully the new TV will last me at least as long as the old one has. HD's only recently been launched in the UK - Sky brought out their HD service just in time for the World Cup (though I understand lots of people who'd pre-ordered didn't receive their upgrades in time). Telewest also have a recent HD service. Of course NTL, who I have, don't yet (despite them having merged with Telewest) and the Freeview DVB-T trials are only in Central London. Anyway, I won't have HD signal for a while, but I want to be ready when for when I do (and I'll be hooking a media PC up to the screen anyway, so will be able to take advantage of it via that method).

Sky appear to have decided on using 2 HD formats; 720i (1280x720, progressive) and 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced). So having support for those would be nice. In addition I'd like 1080p (1920x1080, progressive), for things like the media box and in case content becomes available in that format (HD-DVD/BluRay?). This doesn't seem like a huge request. Lots of TVs in the UK are marketed as HD Ready. What does that mean?

Essentially it specifies that the minimum native resolution of the screen is 720 lines and that there is a digital (DVI or HDMI) input that can support 720p and 1080i input and copy protection (HDCP). There is no minimum width; the set is allowed to scale the image to fit whatever it has. I've seen HD Ready sets that have a 1024x1080i native resolution - not wide enough for a native 720p image let alone 1080i. However most HD Ready sets seem to do 1366x768 as the native res, so fine for 720p but not 1080i/p. sigh

I managed to find a TV from Philips, the 37PF9830/10, which does native 1920x1080p. Amazon even sell it, though for an eye watering £2,248.28. What does this get you? Integrated Freeview decoder? No. MPEG2/4 playing of movies from flash media? No, just image viewing. A nice big monitor for your computer? No, Philips' website only lists 1024x768 as the max computer res and I've seen reports in forums that 1366x768 is possible, but no higher. There's a 42PF9830/10 (42") that adds movie playing and ethernet, which sounds good but adds who knows how much to the price (I couldn't easily find a UK price). Plus it's probably too large for me even if it was affordable.

My naive hope is that with the Sky push lots of people will have got sorted for the World Cup, or will go HD for Christmas. Meaning that come the new year I might have a better available choice of proper HDTVs and the pricing might be sane. I can dream, right?

Nothing impressive about Coke Zero

I tried Coke Zero for the first (and probably last) time this evening. While the first mouthful actually tasted not bad, the familiar and unpleasant taste of artificial sweetener soon hit. Oh well. Much better than Diet Coke, but not something I'd buy again.

Not that I'm that fussed. I don't drink a lot of soft drinks - we buy pure juice for the house and although I occasionally drink Coke (or preferably Pepsi) when I'm out, it's only if I'm not drinking. I prefer ice cold water but it's usually ridiculously expensive and doesn't come in pints (tap water will sometimes do, but often isn't cold enough). Nice try Coke, but count me out.

Dynamic DNS implementations all insecure?

Black Cat got another query today about offering dynamic DNS to customers. We've had people ask us about it in the past, but the DNS changes we made a while back means it's something that is possibly easier for us to offer now. So I had a think about authentication and tying it in to our current DNS interface and bits like that and decided it might not actually be too hard to get a basic service running.

Then I went and had a look at current implementations. In particular I wanted to see about client support. So I grabbed ez-ipudate, which is used on at least the Netgear DG834G and Linksys WAG54G routers. It supports a load of different services. And the only one that protects the password is GnuDIP. Various services offer HTTPS updates, but ez-ipupdate doesn't support it that I could tell.

I stopped looking at that point. If one of the most common clients doesn't care about protecting users then I don't want to depress myself by finding out how many others don't either. It's a real shame though, as it means if we want to implement dynamic DNS that'll work with standard clients we have to add another authentication system that is unique to that service.

UKUUG 2006 over

I returned last night from my first UKUUG conference, which I'd been at since Friday (missing the Thursday tutorials, but arriving in time for beer on Thursday night of course ;). Good to see the usual faces, as well as meet some new ones. Ta to JD for providing me with crash space (and recommending the wonderful Thai).

I don't think my talk, Hardware Hacking on a Budget; the Amstrad E3 was as good as it should have been. The audience were much more hardware savvy than I expected and I went through it too quickly. Still managed to talk up until lunchtime due to the previous talk having started late so I guess that worked out ok. And hopefully some more people will get involved in the E3 work.

It was amusing to see that TFM isn't the only person who decided to replace a broken heating system with something hooked up to a linux box. And Ben's talk on DVD creation was good as I'd been fighting with that myself last week. Meeting SteveC was good as well - I've been pleased by the number of people I'd been touting OSM who have now either gone off and starting marking things up or at least started thinking about how they can make tracks.

All in all a great (if hot) weekend and too much to mention all here. Definitely something I'd go to again.

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