Category: Uncategorized

So, back from a relaxing long weekend in Noosa, and news of Hazel. Of course!

On Saturday, she held her first objects, with encouragement. I won’t listen to any claims that we just shoved a toy into her hand, she actually grabbed it. Then she shook it about. OK? She’s interacting more, smiling more, recognising us and smiling about that too. Brain cells connecting, forming new patterns and so on. She’s talking more, and though the only word she can (almost) say is “hello”, that’s good enough for us.

Tonight, Sunday, she looked at my watch… with intent. Then she reached out for it, and for my arm. She wrestled with the hairs on my arm for a while… with intent. You can’t fake intent like that.

I’d just like to take a moment to say that becoming a father is the best thing I’ve ever done. When Hazel smiles, the world melts. She’s amazing.

Now returning you to your regular reading.

If you’d like to play out-of-region DVDs on your MacBook Pro, you’ve been out of luck. The manufacturer of the drive, Panasonic, made it impossible to read data from out-of-region discs, blocking the usual workarounds like VLC. Anyway, it’s finally been fixed. You’ll need region-free firmware from here, plus DVD Info X to make sure it worked, and Region X to manually switch regions.

Finally, I can watch DVDs legally purchased in other countries, mostly the UK. Still, if you have a choice, avoid region 1 DVDs. NTSC picture quality is lower resolution than PAL (20%) and the pulldown inherent in the system can cause issues too.

HD? Well, the manufacturers are having a Big Stupid Format War to the benefit of nobody in particular. Most of the industry seems to be backing Blu-ray, and though it’s technologically better (higher capacity) than HD-DVD, the latter made better decisions on the content side (no region coding, better audio and frame rate support). Blu-ray is more expensive to produce and doesn’t handle 1080p25 footage like HD-DVD can.

Plus, I can author an HD-DVD on a DVD-R today, straight from my HV20, and it plays on my Mac. I’m stuck. I want the features of HD-DVD with larger Blu-ray size discs. I’d also like to enjoy the fair use provisions that we all enjoy with DVD, but you don’t want to get me started on the DRM inherent in both systems.

If you want to see how the business world convinces its resellers to sell things, you should really see how Microsoft sold MS DOS 5.0 upgrades, in Yo MS Raps.