I got 2 free TV show episodes in the last month or two from Apple. One was from the TV series "Conviction" - the pilot, I believe - and the other was an episode of Monk. So far, I haven't even had time to watch them but I am looking forward to it. Especially, that Conviction episode. It turns out that Apple also gave away a music video of a song from the show (theme song, maybe) and a "bind the scenes" 3 minute short about the show. Every month that goes by, I am more appreciative of how iTunes is a record-breaker and a trend-setter. Thanks to it and my TiVo Series 2, I can listen to all the songs in my music collection on my TV set in my bedroom. I wish I had the video iPod so I could watch TV shows on that. Since I just bought a new one - the iPod Photo - about a year ago, I will not really be in the market for a new one until about 2008. By that point, they will probably be showing holograms or something. Sigh... I read the news reports that Apple bought a 107,000 square foot digital storage farm in Newark, NJ really recently. I wonder how long it will be before they are selling full length movies and increasing the number of TV show episodes in the catalog by leaps and bounds?

My really nice humidifier I have used for the past couple years has started leaking so I have gone without the past few days. Boy, you really notice the winter's chill without one of those things! Even though Winter is more than half over already, I guess I am going to have to buy a new one this year.

TiVo is reported as saying they will introduce a very spiffy TiVo Series 3 system this year. The current model, TiVo Series 2 has the following limitations: only one channel at a time can be watched/recorded, no HD resolution record/play capability, cannot record digital television broadcasts - only NTSC analog). Since US TV stations will stop broadcasting in analog NTSC analog in 3 years, and they already broadcast in the new ATSC digital television format - with many shows shown in HD (High Definition resolution mode) - TiVo had to do something. Well, it seems they did. TiVo unveils Series 3 HD DVR says the unit will ship in mid-2006. Not only does it support receiving/recording/playing/viewing these new broadcast standards (i.e. HDTV) - it has a lot of new features to make the system more powerful than ever before. Capacities have been raised and new capabilities have been added. In addition, there is a front panel display that will let you see what is going on. No more little red/green round LED: it has a full digital/alphanumeric readout on the front panel. The feature set seems pretty juicy: [list=a]

modem (for those who lack broadband connections to the Internet)

Ethernet (new feature)

2 USB ports (doesn't say if they are USB 2.0 yet or still 1.1)

external serial ATA (SATA) so you can connect external storage (in theory)

2 audio outputs: digital optical for home theater connections and RCA cables for connecting to old-fashioned stereos

2 NTSC digital tuners that can handle HD (up to 1080i)

2 ATSC tuners

2 over-the-air tuners for receiving broadcast

HDMI video output (see Wikipedia definition of HDMI for more)

S-Video output

component video output

composite video output It also mentions the unit will support the CableCARD 2.0 standard. So, if your cable company gives you a CableCARD card, you should be able to plug it into the unit and not need a set top cable box. PVRBlog says in HD TiVo Series 3 @ CES that it will still record in MPEG-2 - but it will now be able to play back in MPEG-4! The blog also points out that although there are 6 tuners in the system, it will only be able to record two shows at once. Probably that will not disappoint many home users. Two seems to be the magic number. A lot of people have been asking when TiVo systems would have this capability. Well, [color=red]TiVo Series 3 systems can record two channels at once[/color] - so, if that is what you have been waiting for, now you know what system to get. The Engadget blog reports that TiVo announces Series 3 HD TiVo, due this year. They add a few juicy tidbits of information. [list=1]

can use one CableCARD 2.0 cards or 2 CableCARD 1.0 cards

TiVo will be offering an extern SATA (serial ATA) drive to store your shows

300 hours of recording space comes built in Just so you know, if your job was to watch TV 40 hours per week, it would take you just a fraction of a week less than two months to watch all those programs!

EyeTV is the name of a family of products that let you watch, record, and even schedule TV shows on your Macintosh. I am not sure you could say it turns your Macintosh into a TiVo but that is the idea. Actually, these days a TiVo does a lot more than just schedule/record/play your TV shows - but that is what it is best known for. El Gato just released EyeTV software version 2.0. If you bought your EyeTV device before December 2005, you have to pay for the upgrade. If not, you can get it for free and save yourself the $49 upgrade fee. Actually, if you have an EyeTV device already, you had better hustle - because the $49 is a special short-term offer price. The regular price is going to be a little higher than that. There are two new features in this version. You can save your TV shows to your Video iPod now, if you have one. And, there is a new desktop application for viewing and changing your TV schedule. Under the old scheme, in EyeTV 1, you would go to the Titan TV web site using your web browser. Feasible, but I have a hunch this new way works smoother and looks a little bit nicer. Not to knock the Titan TV web site; I like it a lot. I just upgraded. So, if anyone has any questions about it, post a comment to this blog entry and I will try to tell you what I know. Right now, that is not much. But by the end of this weekend I should be a wiz at it. By the way, the USA transition to purely digital TV from the current NTSC standard, will be complete in 3 years. What will happen then? Well, as I understand it, your non-digital TV set will stop receiving signals off the airwaves. So in order to keep watching broadcast (non-cable, non-satellite) TV in the fashion you have grown accustomed to for almost the last century, you will need to buy a digital-to-analog adapter for your old TV set - or buy a new TV set. A 3rd option is to look at a digital TV receiver for your home computer. I bought the El Gato EyeTV 500, which is designed to work in the US. It is a digital receiver for the Mac and it has a Firewire connection on it. Firewire is a very fast computer-to-device interface, and it is a good thing too. Digital TV shows can use very high resolutions, and that is a lot of pixels - which translates into a lot of bytes of memory to move from the receiver to the computer a bunch of times per second. A USB 1.1 interface would probably not be able to keep up. I am not sure if a USB 2.0 interface could. With the Firewire interface, though, I have no worries. Anyway, if you already have a fast, new computer with a big screen and good sound - adding digital TV to it for under $400 might be a lot more economical solution than going out and buying a digital TV set for $600 or more. And, it will give you better resolution than slapping an adapter on a regular, old TV set. Instead of the low resolution video you are used to, you can be experiencing the high resolution of HDTV video. If you are in the market for a new computer this year, you should check out the new Apple iMac systems. They have 17" or 20" flat screen LCD monitors - in fact, the whole computer is in that monitor! They do not take up much space, trust me! I have a 20" iMac G5 and it has a desktop footprint smaller than my shin. Very nice for watching TV shows. I just now looked up Intel compatibility of EyeTV 2 in the product's FAQ. They say it runs now in the Rosetta (PowerPC emulator) on the new Intel-based Macs. They have been working since mid-2005 to convert the whole application over to Intel. They say when they get that done, an updated Intel version of the software will be available for free. I am a programmer who has programmed Intel family and other family processors since the early 1980s. I have looked over information about Apple's new Intel/PowerPC compatible Xcode compiler/editor/debugger. In the past, this might have been a difficult, painful conversion process for their programmers. However, thanks to Apple's long time commitment to Intel-compatibility, which they kept under wraps - and their free Xcode computer programming tool - and the wealth of information they have recently made available for free to us developers, a huge burden has been lifted from the shoulders of the EyeTV programmers. El Gato thoughtfully provides an RSS feed to their FAQ. So, those of us with Macs running the Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) operating system, it is easy to view it in the splendid Safari 2 web browser that comes with the OS, and bookmark the page to come back to it at any time to see if there have been any new developments reported in the FAQ. So there you have it. That is why I am happy about the new version 2.0 of the EyeTV software!

Apple is probably the major driver in the computer industry and the music industry right now. In the early 1980s, it was Apple, not Microsoft who ushered in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that we all take for granted now: Windows, Icons, Mice, etc. Microsoft still using text-based character-oriented UIs in all of its products when the Mac came out. When the first version of Windows came out several years later, you could not overlap windows. You could split the screen into various panes but real windows in Microsoft Windows? No way! And the software development tools? They cost around five hundred dollars! It was not until almost a decade later, in 1990, that Microsoft actually had something worth selling. Fast-forward to present. Apple's Macintosh's are based on open source software. While Microsoft claims this is an aberration, as is often the case - this is simply not true. In fact, one of the first big computers I used was the Honeywell Multics system. Multics came with the source code for all the software on the system. Everything. Compilers, OS kernel, print formatters, commands - all of it Apple, which entered the music scene three years ago, now dominates it. They have the most popular online music store and the most popular MP3 music/podcast player. Their new video iPod not only plays audio and shows color pictures - it plays movies, TV shows, and music videos. To fully accommodate this ability, Apple has started selling TV shows and music videos at their online store. Tomorrow, CEO Steve Jobs will introduce the first new Apple products of 2006. Speculation is rife that this will include some new kind of entertainment products or services. Apple is already selling TV shows online at their iTunes music store. So what will tomorrow bring? Hard to guess. One persistent guess that a lot of pundits and aficionados are making is television. Some are guessing a new way to get TV show or movies, while others are guessing TiVo-like features. I have no idea what they have. But I do know they are going to make that information available and some or most of what they have usually winds up being available immediately. I know I will check out the Apple web site tomorrow (Tuesday) sometime and see what is new. If you are into television, you might want to do it too. By the way, every Tuesday is new Free Music day at the iTunes music store. So be sure to launch iTunes tomorrow, go to the iTunes Store, and get your free song!

Happy 2006, everybody!

Wow, I just read that DebStitch has reached Level 51! That is really awesome. I am still plodding along at the single-digit levels. Hitting 51 is quite an impressive achievement. I have been on TV.com for a few months. Still, I didn't realize until a month or so ago that the site's levels went beyond twenty-something. Seeing some people's dedication to this site and its goals is really inspiring. I cannot help feeling when I read this site and learn about all these shows that one day in the distant future, someone will look at this site and be impressed. They will not be able to say our culture did not produce literature and art in abundance for the little screen. I think the dedication of those who took the time to describe it will amaze them too!

I want to thank ISpeakTheTruth for mentoring me. I also want to thank the anonymous editors or reviewers that got out of bed this *Saturday* _morning_ and took the time to review my newest material and let me be awarded my points. I know it is a thankless job much of the time, so this time I am thanking and thinking of you!

I got tons of help last night from ISpeakTheTruth. He gave me lots of really useful tips on what things I can do that really benefit the site, and how to get to the places where I can input the kind of information The Powers That Be want captured. So I just wanted to say thanks. I really appreciate it when someone on here far more experienced and knowledgeable than myself takes the time to point me in the right direction.

This year has been one of incredible innovation and growth for Yahoo. For those who did not use the web much until recently, you may not have realized that Yahoo did much more than search or email. For those who are old hands at the web since the 1990s, you may not realize how much they have done since 2000, when they really started adding on new services and features at a prodigious rate. But very few people probably realize how many web services Yahoo now owns. They haven't been really loud about it - but they have been active at it. Unless you happened to be using the site, or found a link to it from another Yahoo service that itself was not well known, you probably never heard that site got bought up by Yahoo. They own so many sites I do not even know of a page that lists them all. I am not even sure if Yahoo has such a page out on the web yet. But, it is a lot - let me tell you! You can do a lot of things at Yahoo. Any kind of entertainment, shopping, travel, communications, notifications, news, social web, and tagging activities you want to do - Yahoo has a site for it now. There has been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 this year. Yahoo has those things. They own Flickr and del.icio.us, two of the best known social web, Web 2.0, tagging sites out there. If you do lots of photography and bookmarking, chances are you already know about these two sites. There has been a lot of talk about blogging for the last two years. Yahoo has 360, a pretty decent blogging site. It has nice features in it too. For instance, you get to maintain your own blogroll, which is a list of sites you visit regularly. It is a handy place to put a link to this site. Better yet, your profile page on this site. That way, your friends can find your home page here, even if they have lost the bookmark for it or they are at a friend's house and do not have access to any of their bookmarks. Since Apple introduced podcasting support for iTunes in the middle of this year, interest in listening to podcasts has exploded. Yahoo has a podcasts site which catalogs, reviews, rates - and allows searching for, listening to, and subscribing to - podcasts. It works extremely well, is very easy to use, and looks great. It is very worthwhile if you are into listening to podcasts. For instance, you could be listening to one now while you are reading this or typing in your latest reviews. Kind of multitasking intensive, but possible. Or, if you are eating and you can't type at the moment, might be a good time to fire up a podcast to listen to while you go at that. Yahoo's searching capabilities are growing by leaps and bounds. Even before they bought del.icio.us a week or two ago, they already had a social tagging/bookmarking feature for web sites feature that has been out in public beta for half a year or more. These are great things because they will let you find your most frequently used or more seriously needed bookmarks when you are away from home or the office. You can keep them Private, in case they are stuff you do not want to show around or are of no interest to anyone. You can share them with friends in your Community. Or, you can make them Public. It is up to you, with the Yahoo one. The del.icio.us one is strictly public. Yahoo is doing tons of stuff with RSS. They have been doing RSS almost since it was invented. RSS has turned out to be the plumbing that connects live feeds of information on one site, to other sites, and now most web browsers and even some custom desktop software. Many of Yahoo's sites produce live feeds of the latest views of their information. The latest news, the blog entries, the latest happenings and upcoming events in your town, the latest you-name-it. So far, for whatever reason, this gigantic trove of resources on the web that Yahoo lets people use for free has not been hyped yet. Remember back in the 1990s when at the end of every TV commercial for food you heard, "...a Beatrice product". Well, it's like that now, except with the newest hotest things on the web. They don't have anything that competes with TV.com and frankly I haven't seen anything that does as much in-depth treatment as this site does on TV for any topic. So I don't worry that anything on Yahoo would lure anyone away from this site. But I do think they have useful, entertaining, and informative stuff. Next time you are thinking of looking up directions or doing a web search, mosey on over to Yahoo and nose around a little. You will be surprised at all you find with a little exploring while you are there.