Mac Mini Adventures, Day 31

Where was Day 1? Well, it was supposed to be 31 days ago, but I'm a major slacker. So it's here. Let me back up.

Last month my dad got a Mac Mini for the purpose of making it a Home Theater computer, also known to others as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). The Mac Mini shall not be called an HTPC from here on out.

The mini is perfect because it can play 1080p video (high definition, 1920x1080 resolution) without being too pricey or taking up too much space or being unsightly in the TV room. Here are some of the pictures I took the night we first opened it up.














So far, the experience has been great. The only issue with the Mini itself is that the power cord is a little loose. So if we move the computer while it's running, it's liable to shut off due to disconnected power. While this is generally not a problem with a normal "desktop" computer, the mini is such a portable machine (6.5"x6.5"x2") that it just begs you to take it with you to the next room. My dad is quickly finding that it blows the doors off of his nearly 10-year-old Power Mac G4, a tower more than 4 times the size. The only thing keeping him from using the Mini as his main computer at this point is that it's connected to our 32" LCD HDTV. It's connected via a couple adapters. The Mac Mini has both a Mini-DVI connector and a Mini-displayport connector, the latter of which is a display standard created by Apple, who hopes that it will become an industry standard in the near future. We are using a Mini-displayport to DVI adapter connected to a DVI to HDMI adapter to display the video on the TV. The audio also goes to the TV, via a standard 3.5mm stereo jack, much like the one in your MP3 player of choice, although on the other end the audio is split into separate left and right channel plugs.

This setup works great. The only problem for me is that the TV tops out at 720p (1280x720 resolution) which is insanely weak for any sort of normal computing. For reference, if you have a 17" computer monitor your resolution is typically 1024x768, and for a 19" monitor you're typically seeing 1280x960 or 1280x1024. 720 rows of pixels on a 32" screen is great for video, but crappy for anything else. Fortunately, the Mini is there so we can watch movies and downloaded TV shows, and that's about it. We've found that even though the TV can't show anything bigger than 720p, the Mini itself handles 1080p video just fine, stutter-free, and I'm actually able to tell the difference between it and 720p video. I can't explain how that works, but it does.

I've tried to play Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy on the Mini, and it runs smooth as butter. I'm used to playing the game on my 5 1/2 year old Power Mac G4, which plays it well but not exceptionally. But for gaming, the mini is just a taste of things to come for my next computer...

UCLA vs BYU

I know that the subtitle of my blog is Bruin Basketball, Terrific Tech, and Random Ramblings, but I'm also a general UCLA sports fan. So although no one's going to read this post before 12:30 (or ever), I thought I'd mention that UCLA football's gametime is 12:30, and it can be heard on radio at AM570 in LA and Orange County. On TV it'll be shown on the Versus network. Thus I won't be able to watch it. Booo! Versus sucks footballs.

They're everywhere! Part 3

(please read parts 1 and 2 below before reading this)

Speaking of product placement, with the rise of video/computer games as a viable entertainment and storytelling medium, there's no surprise that third party companies are wanting to use them to hawk their products. Video games are especially appealing to those companies because they can easily target specific demographics.

However, product placement in games is not a new thing. Back as far as the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, we had an entire game that's one big freaking advertisement. It's called Mc Kids, and it features none other than Ronald McDonald and his "friends" like the Hamburglar, that big furry purple thing, the weird duck-like demi-human girl, and I don't remember who else. It was a platformer in the vein of the Mario Bros. series, and it kind of really, really sucked.

Later on, we were treated to another big $50 cartridge of an advertisement, Cool Spot for the Super Nintendo. Yup, 7-up wanted to cash in on this newfangled video game thing and placed its contrived mascot, that red dot in the 7-up logo, into his own game. He was basically a small red disc with arms and legs who wore really cool shades. Yeah, he was cool. So cool that "cool" was in his name! Anyway, that game was actually not bad. But like Mc Kids, it was just one giant advertisement for a food franchise.

If you know of any others, please let me know.

More subtly, we have signs, labels, billboards, decals, and actual objects placed in games to make the player aware of a certain thing. Sometimes painfully aware, literally. In the highly acclaimed NES game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, there parts of the game where Foot Soldiers hid behind large Pizza Hut signs and pushed them down onto the turtles as they walked by. The game itself even came with a coupon for Pizza Hut pizza. Wow.

Many sports games nowadays have ads from sponsors of the actual organization. For example, all the companies that sponsor NFL football, whose ads you normally see when you watch a pro game, appear in the latest Madden games for XBox 360 and Playstation 2 and 3.

I don't know where it goes from here, but product placement in games is catching up to (and may be surpassing, for all I know) product placement in movies and TV. But you know what? That doesn't really bother me. We'll see what happens in the near future.

My view on this is that product placement doesn't bother me, but unskippable commercials or ads that appear in front of what I'm reading or watching, forcing me to click to remove them, are unacceptable.

By the way, the title of this post is based on what these little guys from Halo scream when you attack them. Halo, to my knowledge, has no in-game product placement, but I could be wrong.

They're everywhere! Part 2

(please read part 1, below, first)

In the last post, I kind of went off onto a tangent of galactic proportions, so let's get back to the original issue. The real point was that ads in TV are becoming longer and more numerous. But it's not just TV where this is happening.

Anyone who spends any amount of time on the Internet knows that web sites simply do not run without some amount of advertisement. Web space costs money, so those who run sites put ads in order to make money, or at the very least, recoup the costs of the web space. With the advent of flash-based advertisement and other fancy-schmancy ads that feature motion and sound and general, annoying in-your-faceness, it's become a big distraction to say the very least. I realize advertisement is necessary, but from the point of view of someone who doesn't use the web to make money, the magnitude and nature of the ads just presents a gargantuan annoyance.

Sure, there are adblock programs, and very good ones at that, which savvy users can activate to avoid seeing those ads, but not everyone has 'em. And my point is the fact that these ads exist and annoy hundreds of millions of people each day.

Recently, ads have even made their way into web-based video. On the popular YouTube, little text boxes sometimes appear at the bottom on your video while it's playing, forcing you to click a little X button to get rid of it. On other sites, such as cbs2.com and espn.go.com, an actual commercial will play before your video, which the video player does not allow you to skip. This can be exceedingly annoying if you happen to be watching many short clips. Each one will be preceded by an unskippable (yes, that's a word) commercial, often the same one over and over. These vid-ads cannot be blocked by adblock programs, to my knowledge.

People think product placement in movies and TV shows is a big deal... a sign of selling out. But I've never seen any endorsements in movies or TV that are as annoying as these web-video ads. I just wish someone would think of another way. If I think of something, I'll let you know.

They're everywhere! Part 1

Have you seen those huge ads these days that take up a whole side of a bus? Putting ads on the side of a bus is not a new thing. It's quite common to have a little section of the side or back of the bus advertising a movie or a radio station or McDonalds' new old McRib sandwich. I suppose it was just a matter of time before they extended the small, below-the-window displays to bus-height and bus-length monstrosities. I have heard that there are also whole ads that cover both sides of a bus as well as the back, but haven't seen one yet.

But that sort of thing doesn't really bother me. Like all advertisement, it's meant to be omnipresent and kind of in-your-face. And as far as ads go, even full-bus ads aren't really that in-your-face.

Then there's TV ads. We have all grown up with them, no matter how old you are. We're used to it, but now in the age of the new(er) Internet, we have downloadable shows and option to skip the ads that normally accompany the shows. I felt like this was a point of no return of sorts. It's very hard to go back to regular TV, with all the commercials. It's the single leading cause of channel surfing, in my opinion. I don't channel surf though; I just turn it off (there's not much good on these days anyway, but that's a topic for another discussion).

Along these same lines, I'd like to point out that commercials have gotten longer and longer over the years as well. This pretty much sucks because it gives us fewer minutes of show per episode, and forces the showrunners to cut out stuff for time that may have been cool or interesting to see. This is readily apparent when you watch a show either downloaded or from a DVD with the commercials ripped out.

I stumbled across this a while back: the original Star Trek, which debuted in 1966 and ran for 3 seasons, had 50-minute long episodes, including the beginning and end credits, but without commercials. In 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine began, and each episode was barely 45 minutes, including a long credit sequence at the beginning and end. I'd estimate about 42-43 minutes if you take those out.

Some other hour-long shows these days: Babylon 5 (1994, 43 minutes), Psych (current, 42 minutes), Battlestar Galactica (current, 42 minutes), Eureka (current, 42 minutes), and CSI (current, 42 minutes).

The difference might be more striking with half-hour shows. I don't know how long those were in the '60s, but a short-lived favorite cartoon of mine, Undergrads, was 21 minutes long without commercials. And of course, the wildly popular show The Office on NBC is 20-21 minutes when they're not doing their special extended episodes. You know what that means? That means in a half hour, you're only getting 66.667% show and 33.333% commercials. What a gyp!

An exception would be HBO shows, like Entourage, which is 27 minutes out of 30, but that's because it's paid for more by the customers' premium subscription payments than by advertisements.

I guess I should just take consolation in the fact that watching without the commercials will save me 7+ minutes of my day, per episode, so I have more time to blog about it here.

What do you think about this? Do you like the commercials, giving you a sense of suspense while you wait to see what happens after the break? Or would you rather have instant gratification, to see it all at once without interruptions? Have you noticed this when watching DVD episodes?

Of course, I didn't watch any shows today, on TV OR on computer, so where did I find the 7 minutes to type this?