We received the new PS3 today, we haven’t done anything with it yet except upgrading the firmware and checking how OSNews renders on its browser. However, while checking some configuration settings with it, we realized that the “native” resolution of our 6 year old 55″ Sharp TV is just 540p/1080i and not 720p/1080i.

This explains why I can’t see the difference between HD-DVD and DVDs (and JBQ can only see subtle differences). We usually used our TV in 720p mode, simply because this specific TV model has a “bug” when on 1080i (it would render “waves”), but now we figured that our “720p” is not a real “720p” but down-converted to 540p. This gives us another good lesson for being early adopters of HDTVs (the lack of a DVI input was the only other major complaint we had in the past few years)…

In other words, how do I find the PS3? Expensive, because it made us realize that we need a new TV: 1080p, 24p support (with 120 Hz support if possible), at least 2 HDMI ports with HDCP support. We probably won’t be getting one any time soon though at least for another 6 months, unless this one dies (“oopsie, I broke it…”).

And so Palm canceled the Foleo. This was the right decision, because the Foleo was simply too big and had no phone functionality. The Foleo was in reality competing with full sized laptops, and it would lose on every count except the size/weight.

What people need is a Nokia N800-sized Foleo, with full smartphone and touchscreen functionality. Which is obviously what the Palm CEO is talking about when he mentioned the upcoming Foleo II. Still, the cancellation was a pretty big surprise, given the fact that the product was ready to hit the shelves.

A small test with my HV20 this evening using Tiffen’s sun orange filter. After that, we went to a Greek restaurant in the City and we had some… non-authentic gyros. Yeah…

The RED camera is out and the first footage is out and about. Cool stuff, although there seems to be clipping on the highlights. The picture below is of a huge 2k video (2048×1024) playing back on my two high-res screens (1680×1050 and 1200×1600). Now, if you think that the RED camera can actually grab 120fps on a 4k+ resolution, it shows just how ahead of its time it is.

Our friend Daniel (ex-Be/Tascam/Avid, now at Google) went skydiving for the first time the other day. Scary! But he seemed to have a good time, which is what matters as it was obviously a better experience than my brother’s. Check Daniel’s video below!

So the rumor has it that Leonard Nimoy will be the main character of the next Star Trek movie, not just a guest star. This actually makes sense because Nimoy quit acting many years ago and he swore to not act again in his life. I am certain that it’s something more than money the would make him come back to the big screen. And that would be an important, conclusive plot.

You see, Star Trek has pretty much completed all its subplots except the Romulan one. On the previous Star Trek movie, where they were supposed to do just that, they screwed up because Patrick Stewart wanted to make it the lame “Picard-oriented” movie it became. This time they have the opportunity to make it right, and have Spock give a conclusion to a Vulcan/Romulan/Federation plot, while opening a door to more movies in the future.

I just can’t stop listening to that 0:43″ seconds preview that Drist sent over for the purposes of the video report I shot for them. The thing rocks so much, it’s just amazing. It can also be heard in the first 3 “music” sections of the video report. The yet untitled song had a comment in the mp3 file I received: “bad ass preview”. Whoever of the 4-member band wrote that music, is a genius.

This song could very well be the band’s big break. However, I am a bit concerned that without marketing, radio play and TV shows, it won’t be an as a big break as it could have been if they were pushed by a major label. As Vasper said on a comment yesterday on this blog, “life isn’t fair”.

Special thanks to Adam Scheinberg for writing the script that fetched all my old 2002-2006 blog entries from Slashdot and saved them as a big RSS file. Then, using WordPress’ RSS import facility, all blog entries got into place, 1.6 MBs full of data no less! Awesome!

“NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes. […] The company has been talking to iTunes about offering Universal movies, but has not done so to date because of piracy concerns.

Stupid studios. So they are afraid that people will even CARE to crack iTunes’ 640×480 letterbox videos and pirate them instead of downloading a full 848×480 DVD quality version off bit-torrent for free? Studios want more and more and more money, and at the same time they are afraid to make the smallest step towards the 21st Century. Idiots. Kudos to Apple for sticking on its guns and offering a pretty sensible service — considering.

Update: And so NBC wanted to charge $4.99 per episode. Let me respond to that: Hahahaha….

I don’t believe that the way most sports competitions are organized are fair. For example, currently there is the world track & field championship in Osaka going on. Here you have athletes trying to do their best to achieve that 0.1% better performance than their competitor and get the gold medal. How stupid is that?

What I mean is, especially for a woman, it’s not fair to say that “on the 30th of August you gotta perform better than all the rest”. What if you got your period that day? What if you are injured? Why can’t they do a number of competitions throughout the year (like IAAF’s Grand Prix series), and at the end of the season decide who was the best and leave it at that? Why do athletes have to prove themselves THAT particular day?

Same goes for the play-offs btw. Here you got teams working their ass off all year to get a good rank, and at the end of the season they have to do play-offs instead of winning the championship purely on ranking. Except than feeding viewers adrenaline and suspense, there is no other reason why things are the way they are. And so for me, these results are just invalid. It’s just a marketing ploy, not real competition based on long term performance statistics.