I find that I barely watch actual movies any more, because they all suck. But Sleep Dealer was fantastic, and you should watch it at once. It reminded me of Varley's Blue Champagne mixed with Haldeman's Forever Peace.

Also Moon was really good.

I can't actually remember any other movies I saw this year that I enjoyed. (Oh, Up. That was cute.)

Then there's the televisions.

I wish there was Mythbusters feed that omitted the interminably long and redundant "coming up next!" and "before the break!" bits. Do they think that people only watch the show accidentally while channel-surfing? I think it's a 20 minute show that they pad to an hour. (Ok, 42 minutes plus commercials.)

So, my Tivo started freaking out, and in a weird way. Playback of already-recorded stuff was fine, but new recordings and live TV were stuttery (going black for 1 second every 6), and sometimes it would seem to momentarily forget that the crypto card was plugged in. Since this sounded a little more like a hardware problem than a bad drive, I took a chance and bought a new (used) DirecTivo of the same hardware vintage off eBay (it was only $60 including shipping, so what the hell). But, when I moved my old drive into the new box, it didn't boot. Just sits there at the "Tivo is powering up" screen forever.

Which leaves me with some options.

1. Use the drive from the new tivo. This will probably work, but the downsides are: A) I lose all the old recordings I have not yet watched, B) it's a smaller drive, C) it doesn't have any of the hacks installed like the web server or the ability to talk to ethernet instead of a phone line.

2. Get a new drive and re-hack the new tivo from scratch. Downsides: A) lose my old recordings, B) Doing this is hellaciously complicated. It took two of us days to figure it out last time. I'm really not looking forward to doing that again. Is there some dead-simple way to do this that involves only using a Mac, and does not involve lugging home and tearing apart some random PC, and does not involve digging through a dozen years-old, wrong, un-cross-referenced pages on that despicable "Deal Database" site?

3. Cancel my DirecTV subscription and just torrent everything from now on. Downside: it's not very automatic. I liked being able to just give Tivo a list of program names and have the new, unwatched episodes just show up with no manual intervention or record-keeping on my part.

What are your recommendations here, oh Lazyweb?

Update: For the record, to move a drive from one Tivo to another of the same hardware vintage, you have to: A) pay DirecTV $20 for a new access card (you can't move them) and then B) run the 51killer.tcl script to tell the Tivo app that it's ok that the crypto key has changed (without this, it will give an error #51 every time it wants to record a program, even though crypto is turned off.)

My theory about time travel is as follows:

If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.

For example. Stories that are about time travel:
Terminator, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Bill & Ted, 12 Monkeys, Journeyman.
Their use of time travel is, at least, honest.

Stories that are not about time travel:
Star Trek, Stargate, Lost, Heroes.
Their use of time travel is a crutch or a gag, and all of their time travel episodes are stupid.

Can someone please explain to me why they apparently photoshopped out Gabrielle Anwar's belly button in about half of the scenes it would have been visible in in the latest episode of Burn Notice?

It was way more obvious in video than it is in these stills. It's not just lighting. It's "what the fuck that woman has no navel."

(Previously, previously.)

(  --More--(10%)  )

Update: Now with higher resolution images.

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you

"When a high school teacher attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system."

Previously.

Dammit! I have a years-old season pass for Heroes ("KTNV, All, First Run") and it didn't record. When I click on the season pass, it shows "no upcoming episodes", but when I search for Heroes, I see:

KNTV, 9/27, 8pm (repeat)
KNTV, 9/29, 9pm (first run)

Why isn't the season pass listing these at all?

This happened for Sarah Connor Chronicles too: it didn't record the first episode, and I had to re-add the season pass to get it to show up. The two season passes (old and new) looked exactly the same, at least according to the data that Tivo displays about them.

I am annoyed.

Update: Looks like almost all of my season passes are fucked, somehow. E.g., my season passes for Dexter and Californication were both showing no upcoming episodes until I re-added them (they both start later this week).

The "old" and "new" passes appear to have a different "series ID" number in the TivoWeb URL. I have no idea what that means.

Does it count as fanfic if the original author writes it?

By the way, if you haven't yet seen the SNL Palin/Clinton video, you really should. (Apparently NBC has been playing whack-a-mole to keep it off of the Youtubes, but it's still on Google Video.)

A few hundred dollars later, my ongoing attempt to have my second monitor cloned onto my video projector is still made of fail. What am I doing wrong here?

My plan was this:

2008 iMac mini-DVI-D output
→ Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
→ DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
1→ DVI LCD monitor (1600×1200).
2→ 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
→ HDMI-to-component converter
→ HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
→ Projector (component input).

My plan fails in two ways:

1. If I just do this:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
   1→ DVI monitor.
   2→ (second output of splittter unconnected)

   then the monitor just sits there and flickers, trying to display a message about input being out of range. So clearly that splitter confuses the hell out of either the Mac or the monitor. I don't know which.

2. And if I just do the second part:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
   → HDMI-to-component converter
   → HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
   → Projector.

   I again get no signal on the projector. Sometimes I saw the projector displaying snow-crash; sometimes it appeared to be trying to lock on to various resolutions that were changing every 5 seconds; briefly, I saw something that appeared to contain the right colors in the static; and now it's decided to just always be black. Anyway, no worky. I tried all permutations of the various switches on the device, and all permutations of the 3 RCA cables.

Suggestions?

Today in "Will Ferrell's Eminently Punchable Face" news:

Universal has cut a deal to mount a live-action film based on Sid and Marty Krofft's '70s children's show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Variety reported.

The deal comes after Universal and Mosaic completed production on the $100 million Will Ferrell film Land of the Lost, another property that originated as a Saturday morning Krofft creation. Land of the Lost is set for release in June.

The script for Sigmund will be penned by Dana Gould, a writer-producer on The Simpsons.

Sony is developing a live-action version of the Kroffts' H.R. Pufnstuff and is in talks with director Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2).

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Dear Lazyweb, I have a 2008 iMac, and I have an external monitor attached to it via the Mini-DVI port (for a total of two screens). Let's say I would like to attach a second external monitor (for a total of three screens). Is there some Firewire or USB dingus that will let me do that?

Really, I'd be happy just splitting the Mini-DVI output, but I think it's been established that that isn't possible.