Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 190

Go Tiger: Songs from 2010

I guess this is becoming a tradition: last January, well after bloggers everywhere had posted their year-end best-of lists, I moseyed along with my own belated playlist of my favorite songs from 2009. Here it is again, several weeks into January, and I'm only now getting a playlist of my favorite songs from 2010 out there.

Without further ado, here it is: "Go Tiger: Songs from 2010."

A Word About the Music

There are twelve songs here, all available for listening in your browser or for download. This track listing is a cross between the best and the most interesting of what I heard last year. I like all of these songs and spent a lot of time listening to the albums they shipped on, but looking back, I have to say that none of the albums I acquired last year truly captured my imagination, really left me ecstatic.

However, I'm not going to make the mistake of interpreting that mild disappointment as an indictment of the state of pop music, or anything so wide-ranging. Even though this playlist is filled largely with newer artists, it's no accident that for the most part these tunes sound a lot like the bands I was listening to in my twenties. Old age. It happens.

Still, that shouldn't take anything away from the fact that I think this is a pretty good playlist. I've listened to it a few dozen times now as I readied it for publishing, and I still find it really enjoyable. I think you will too if you give it a shot.

Listen in Your Browser



Download the MP3s


The lovely cover art (included with the download).



The enjoyable track listing.




No.
Artist
Song Name



01
Spirit Kid
"The World Doesn't Stop"



02
Brahms
"Brought It Out"



03
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
"Sweet Feeling"



04
Seagall, Ty
"Imaginary Person"



05
LA Vampires and Zola Jesus
"Searching"



06
Altar Eagle
"Monsters"



07
Autre Ne Veut
"OMG"



08
Pascal Pinon
"Árstídir"



09
Allo Darlin'
"The Polaroid Song"



10
Radio Dept., The
"This Time Around"



11
Record Club
"Need You Tonight"




12
Dinosaur Feathers
"History Lessons"

A Logo for HTML5

The W3C unveiled an attractive new logo for HTML5 today. It's nicely done work from a boutique studio I'm not familiar with called Ocupop. Don't miss the interview with Michael Nieling, the creative director from Ocupop, as well. Overall, my only complaint is that the "HTML" part of the logo is apparently optional, as several versions of it feature just the "5" within its shield; to me that assumes a little too much that people really understand what this brand is or will be. That said, the logo page is terrific, providing all sorts of info and downloads, which is what every new logo should offer, in my opinion.

"Seconds" Dishware

Like a lot of men, I never pay attention to dishware, but these caught my eye: from New York City-based design manufacturer Areaware, a line of bowls and plates that looks something like a collage of different dishware styles. Very different and quite smart, in my opinion.

Applying Analytics to Print Magazines

It might seem like I've been bashing print publishers a lot in recent blog posts, but I don't think they're doing everything wrong. If nothing else, they're learning smart lessons from their experiences in digital media, as demonstrated in this article that discusses publisher Hearst's initiative to apply Web-like analytics to their print products:

"…Hearst held a competition to see who could build a better analytics model to predict newsstand sales for magazines. It's a Netflix Prize-like approach to figuring out how well a magazine will sell at a given location, based off historical sales data. There were more than 700 participants in the competition, and last month Hearst and the Direct Marketing Association awarded a team US$25,000 for their formula, which generated magazine sales estimates that were nearest to actual newsstand figures. "

Smart and savvy. Read more here.

Listening to What Movie Lovers Have to Say

In my post from earlier this week about the drawbacks of Blu-Ray, one of the points I tried to make was that all of the extras that Blu-Ray discs provide really amount to very little of interest to me and, I would guess, to most consumers — especially if they cause the total user experience of Blu-Ray discs to be slow and problematic (they do). Contrary to what the entertainment industry believes, most of us can easily live without all the deleted scenes, interviews, outtakes, trailers, and commercials disguised as documentaries — to say nothing of the uniformly dismissable interactive features and supplemental content that Blu-Ray makes accessible over the Internet.

What matters is the movie itself, the core content. If you don't believe me, you can believe Netflix. Through their success they've inadvertently proven that the concept of "DVD extras" is hardly a necessary component of providing good entertainment. Their discs-by-mail service treats a two-disc movie release (one for the movie itself, one for the extras) as two different rentals, and so it's probably safe to say that very few people go to the trouble of renting that second disc. And of course, their streaming service offers up no extras at all and has proven to be a big hit nevertheless.

In an age where entertainment journalism is so popular and when everyone is interested in the backstory of practically every movie, regardless of how good the movie itself is, it's interesting to me that extras can be regarded as so inessential. But they really are, and user experience designers across all media would do well to keep that in mind. Cherries don't sell sundaes.

Other Extras

All that said, I really do enjoy extras myself, even if I don't miss them much when I don't get access to them. Director's commentaries, in particular, can be very revealing. When I can find the time to re-watch a movie with the commentary track (it doesn't happen very often), it's almost always a rewarding experience that deepens my appreciation for the original work.

So it occurs to me that, outside of its inherently beautiful high-definition picture, the one mildly useful thing that the Blu-Ray format could do for me would be to give me access to alternative commentaries. This is an idea that originated with the critic Roger Ebert several years ago: why limit the voices you can hear from to just those of the cast and crew? Why not open it up to anyone out there who has something to say?

Digital technology makes it cheap and feasible for anyone to record their own commentary track for any given movie, and there's a robust community of film critics, writers and enthusiasts who have been doing just that. There are about 3,000 examples of their work catalogued over at Zarban's House of Commentaries. There's also a much less serious strain of the same idea available at RiffTrax, a project from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew, where the goal is to produce comedic commentary tracks.

Blu-Ray to the Rescue

I'd be very keen to have access to this stuff, especially for the movies that I cherish the most and for which there are no commentary tracks available (or no good ones). But to listen to one of these tracks right now, it's generally a manual process, with no easy way of uniting what are basically two different content sources. Two different media players are necessary, in fact — one for the movie and one for the track — both playing at the same time. Though getting what you're hearing in sync with what you're watching is not difficult, but it's harder than it should be.

And this is what Blu-Ray would be so good at. Access to alternative commentaries would finally provide a legitimately interesting purpose for the otherwise useless BD Live aspect of the format, which can pull in supplemental content from the Internet. It would be elementary for a Blu-Ray player to automatically sync an alternative commentary track (really just an MP3 download) with the video that it's displaying. What's more, the player could also negotiate between the commentary's audio and the movie's audio, bringing the volume of the latter up when the former is silent, which is something that's virtually impossible to do via manual means.

New Dimensions in Home Video

To me, this would make for a network feature that truly justifies all of the hassle that Blu-Ray players go through to connect to the Internet, even if this new content would still be unlikely to upend my theory that extras just don't matter to consumers. People who don't have the time or interest in a director's commentary are unlikely to have the time or interest for commentary from some random film buff — or in the case of RiffTrax, some random wiseacre.

Or would they? Imagine a simple, user-friendly marketplace for commentaries where a Blu-Ray owner can find the commentators who match their sensibilities, and download tracks and start playing them with just a few clicks of a remote control. Imagine being able to engage in conversations with those commentators too, or send clips of their audio to your friends. Or even imagine a Blu-Ray player that makes it dead simple to record a commentary track yourself and to upload it to this hypothetical marketplace, letting you become that movie pundit you always knew you could be. These kinds of features could make for a fascinating new dimension for home video. In the fight against piracy, in the fight against declining sales of movies on discs in general, taking a more conversational approach like this could be one of the tools that might rejuvenate the business.

But this kind of thing seems very unlikely to happen with Blu-Ray. Certainly not soon, and probably not ever. And the reason is simple: Blu-Ray, as an invention of movie studios and technology companies, is a one-to-many medium, not a many-to-many medium. It's a digital update on an old model where content producers ship a product and consumers buy the product, stop. Though it's technologically possible to do what I'm talking about, because of the interests involved, the Blu-Ray format is constitutionally incapable of accommodating outside voices, unpredictable conversations and alternative commentaries. It's a 20th Century paradigm dressed up with beautiful 1080p resolution. And that's why it'll be dead within a few years.

Verizon Monologue

Over the past dozen years or so, I've used mobile phones on the AT&T, Sprint and Verizon networks. Of them all, AT&T's service has been the worst, but it's much better now than when I first tried it in 1998. By no means am I completely satisfied with AT&T, but I spend little time lamenting its shortcomings.

On the other hand, my experience with Verizon's customer support — in the years just before the iPhone debuted — was by far the worst of any of the three carriers. The worst. I found them unhelpful, often rude and sometimes even hostile. They also seemed to operate under a set of corporate rules that seemed decidedly unfriendly to customers. I disliked every minute of my time with Verizon, and I was glad to be rid of them.

So I just hope people who have been anxiously awaiting the now-real Verizon iPhone are greeted with a revamped customer service experience, that Verizon has turned a leaf and found a new focus on making life easier for their customers. In any event, I'm going to stay with AT&T.

iPad Magazines Go to '11

It's still too early for me to say "I told you so" about iPad magazines, but nevertheless I think it's worth pointing out that the current evidence shows that this format is not doing well. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, which is sort of like the Nielsen of the print magazine industry, reported that sales of magazine apps across the board, from Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair and others, slumped precipitously towards the end of last year. More on the specifics in this article from paidContent. The bloom is off the rose, I think, and the reality that people just don't like to consume magazine content in the monolithic, issue-centric form that these apps take has caught up with the irrational enthusiasm that we saw in 2010.

All This Help Is Hurting

A lot of people who make, read and love magazines have called me a naysayer about this issue, but I say that if you really care about the value that magazines can bring to the world (and I admit, I'm skeptical about whether they really do offer much value anymore), then it would be wise to give up the ghost on this unrealistic notion that a fancy presentation layer and rudimentary DVD extras-style bells and whistles slapped on top of content that can already be read for free on the public Web will generate any significant revenue. It's bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design.

Time to focus instead on coming up with new and genuinely different solutions to this admittedly vexing and unforgiving problem facing great print publications everywhere. So I say stop it, Condé Nast. Stop it, Hearst. Stop it Adobe. Stop it everyone who's pursuing this all but discredited strategy. All of the money, time and effort that has gone into these misbegotten experiments amounts to a kind of neglect and misdirected focus that borders on a dereliction of duty. You're killing the thing that you love.

Meanwhile, News Corp. is apparently readying the launch of The Daily, its much-anticipated iPad newspaper, sometime later this month, possibly in a joint announcement with Steve Jobs. I'm bearish on this particular venture too, but not knowing much about the product, I'll withhold judgment. What's more, there's the added unknown of The Daily possibly being distributed via an Apple-powered newsstand, a new venue for helping consumers find and browse publications. This is badly needed and may inject a bit of life into the whole iPad magazine concept and heck, it may prove me dead wrong in all of what I've written here and what I wrote in my previously stated position on the subject. If anything can change the prospects for iPad magazines, an Apple newsstand can. Then again, a year ago we were saying that if anything can save magazines, an Apple tablet can.

The Evolution of the Batmobile

A genuinely entertaining information graphic from, of all sources, CarInsurance.org: this exhaustive inventory of the many, many designs of the Batmobile over the years unearths a fun history most of us probably never suspected existed.

There are dozens of iterations here, and maybe what's most interesting about the vast majority of them is not so much how each design reflects the ideas of its particular time (they do), but rather how little imagination is really at work throughout this long string of reinvention opportunities. The Batmobile is a blue-sky design brief if there ever was one, and yet time and again, these designs are little more than a mildly interesting variant on the notion of a hot rod or muscle car — basically the kind of ride a middle-aged guy buys when he gets divorced.

The exception, and the notable standout, is the "tumbler" design produced for Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins." This Batmobile is not only a novel departure from what came before, but it was actually inventive enough to inspire a real world tank design from a military contractor. Honest.

See the full, very, very tall graphic over at my friend David's Mlkshk page.

Blu-Ray Blues

It's been about a decade now since DVDs first became the default delivery medium for movies and I've been trying to remember exactly how buggy or inconsistent the earliest DVD players were. I remember vaguely that some discs wouldn't work with some players (especially DVD-ROM drives built into computers), but as best as I can recollect, I never had a problem playing a single disc. Or if I did, it was just one out of countless discs I've owned, rented or borrowed. For me, DVDs have always just worked.

Not so with Blu-Ray, the would-be successor to the DVD format. I was lucky enough to get a Blu-Ray player for Christmas a year ago and when it works, it works great. I can pop in a Blu-Ray disc and watch a movie in beautiful, luxurious high-definition, revealing all sorts of details in my favorite movies that I'd never been able to see before. But it has not been a painless experience. The player has been frustratingly, consistently buggy, making the act of watching a disc needlessly difficult.

This Just In

None of the four or five DVD players I've owned ever required firmware updates, but this Blu-Ray player seems to survive on a monthly diet of them. Each firmware update is labeled with a long and confusing version number (e.g., BEv1.03_090528_BDP3600_XAA) and provides virtually no clue as to what improvements it holds or problems it corrects. In fact, some of the updates have seemed to make the hardware perform worse, and the user forums are littered with complaints from people whose players have stopped working altogether after firmware patches. After applying one such update, my player stopped working with my receiver altogether, forcing me to connect it with a different set of cables.

Speed is also a general problem with Blu-Ray. Network-connected features slow down the disc loading experience so much that I've resorted to disabling some of these ostensibly value-added features. Even without the network issues, a disc takes longer to load and menus take longer to navigate than on a stock DVD player. This is doubly frustrating because one of the early promises of the format was that users could pop in a disc and the movie would begin playing immediately, doing away with the interminable trailers that have opened DVDs for the past decade. Not only has that promise been essentially broken, but trailers are an even worse problem on Blu-Ray. Often the way a Blu-Ray disc is formatted, it's harder to fast-forward through a bundle of trailers than it used to be on a DVD.

Steps Backwards

In fact, aside from the fact that Blu-Ray's high definition picture is so ridiculously gorgeous, the whole format is demonstrably worse than what came before it. I suffered through a year of my own Blu-Ray player's problems without protesting too loudly (and without blogging about it) because I felt like the technology was still relatively young, but this past Christmas I set up a brand new Blu-Ray player for my girlfriend's parents and encountered many of the same problems — and even some new ones. Even though it was a newer model from a different manufacturer, things seemed little improved.

To even casual technology observers, it's always been obvious that Blu-Ray is a format designed more for content producers than for consumers, but it's hard to understand how hostile the Blu-Ray ecosystem is to consumers until you actually own one and try to use it regularly. Turning on my Blu-Ray player is just not as fun as streaming movies via Netflix, or renting them from iTunes. And I say this as one of a dwindling number of consumers who would prefer, on the whole, to own my media on discs rather than as digital files.

What's amazing about this situation is that the leap from DVD to Blu-Ray shouldn't have been this complex. The newer format bundles in all sorts of features like bookmarking, inline menu availability and BD Live, which accesses supplemental content over the Internet, that frankly I couldn't care less about. What I wanted, and what I would be willing to guess most consumers want out of Blu-Ray, is simply better looking home video. That shouldn't have been hard to do at all, but the business agenda of the entertainment and technology industries stepped in and subverted that simple equation until it became a complex mess. If you haven't yet made the switch to Blu-Ray, I would urge you to consider carefully before you do.

Solid State Drive Upgrade for 2008/2009 MacBook Air

Owners like me of the previous generation MacBook Air know that while they're great computers, they're plagued by slowness (unless you were smart — and wealthy — enough to opt for an SSD at purchase time). Other World Computing is offering new SSDs that will substantially increase the performance of these machines, as evidenced in the shootout comparison video. I'm tempted to do this myself, as the prices are not too outrageous. Pricing for the highest end model, 480 GB, has yet to be released though the 240 GB already runs US$580, so you can imagine the larger version will cost you nearly as much as a new, current-generation MacBook Air.