Monday, August 29, 2005

AppleInsider | Safari updates improve website compatibility

Yippy!

My favorite website Goggle Suggest now works in Safari!!!

Link

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Russian Lawyer Tries to Stop The Simpsons in Russia

WWW.GAY.RU have reported that a Russian lawyer Igor Smykov continues his attempts to make illegal the showing of The Simpsons on the territory of the Russian Federation. He filed an appeal with the Moscow City Court (highest municipal court) to overturn the ruling of the Hamovnichesky District Court. The appeal refers to the ruling of the Hamovnichesky court in which it found against the plaintiff Smykov in his complaint against RenTv, that is airing The Simpsons on the territory of Russia. Smykov claims that The Simpsons is promoting drug abuse, violence and homosexuality. Smykov wants The Simpsons to be marked as Adult Audience Only and demands 300.000 rubles (~10000USD) of compensation for the emotional distress.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

New DirecTV TiVo! software in depth (well, kind of)

As I have promised earlier, here are some thoughts on a latest DirecTV TiVo! software upgrade.

It does seem to make my Hughes box to run a little bit smoother and faster when performing functions like navigating the menus and settings. The speed improvement is especially noticeable when in the Season Pass Manager. Subjectively it seem to process the requests to change the position of the multiple shows on the priority list at least twice as faster then before.
The ability to show the list of the episodes of the same show in the folders is mildly convenient. It have almost compensated to some extent the pain of not being able to sort Now playing list by the expiration date, as it was possible before through the Slow-0-Record-Thumbs Up hack.

The DirecTv style guide is redrawing much faster as well, while the TiVo style program guide is faster still.
There were some minor tweaks with the icons that indicate the format of the sound and the video of a particular show.
Now, about the video quality. I am not sure if this would be obvious to the owners of the Standard definition TV sets, but if you own a HDTV set and use an S-video output to get the picture to the screen you might notice an improvement in the image clarity and detail. It might be just a trick of my imagination, but shows like Queer as Folk, or anything else that was shot in HD seem to look better then before even when received by non-HD TiVo.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

One positive thing about USSR.

There was one positive thing about the USSR. We did not have religious nuts running the country. Yeah, yeah, I know what you going to say - first learn how to speak the god damn English and then critique. But come on! Where is the bloody separation of the church and the state here?

Link