Okay, as many know, I recently splashed out a large sum for a widescreen panel in my lounge. It’s great having a widescreen picture with a 40″ diagonal. So, do you want to know what really s**ts me about it? There appears to be an entire countrry (*cough* North America *cough*) who are yet to acknowledge the exisstence of a 16:9 aspect ratio on broadcast television.

The problem? They somehow think that everyone with a 4:3 TV wants to watch things in widescreen. The end result is a letterbox.

So this:

An unadulterated widescreen image

Becomes this:

Well, that’s all well and good, if you still happen to be running a 4:3 television, AND you’d rather see the (often irrrelevant) picture to the sides rather than use your whole screen. At this point, a 4:3 screen is utilising exactly three quarters of its available area to display a picture.

…but what if I own a widescreen TV? How do you put a 4:3 letterbox on it? That’s right - you pillar-box it!:

At this point, only nine sixteenths of the screen is actually being utilised. That’s 44% of the panel unnecessarily displaying black. My 40″ screen is now 30″. That’s just freakin’ great!

Oh, and I’m not done yet. I happen to know some people with a 4:3 TV, and they hook up a Set Top Box and set it to letterbox. What you end up with is a picture that is letter-boxed, pillar-boxed and then letter-boxed again. Can anyone say “postage stamp”?:

At this point, the image is only taking up 27/64 (42%) of the screen. It’s at this point that I just get up and change whatever ill-conceived settings happen to be applied to the set top box. It’s just painful when someone decides to use this technique to convert their 51cm CRT to a 29cm screen. Hell, I’ve got a laptop with a bigger screen than that!

TV has been broadcast in widescreen since January 2000. Why the hell haven’t broadcasters adapted to it? And why the hell do people think they’re being trendy by letter-boxing? Get over it. You’ve got a 4:3 screen, deal with the 4:3 picture!

It eludes me that stations still broadcast images which have been both letter-boxed and pillar-boxed.

A couple of days ago, my wife spotted one of these t-shirts in K-Mart. She told me all about it, and to be honest, I had a bit of trouble believing it. Ubuntu T-Shirts? K-Mart? I know it’s increasing in popularity, but it can’t seriously be that mainstream, can it?

I went in today, and sure enough, there they were. Let me make it clear, that these are not distributed by Canonical, and have nothing to do with the Ubuntu Operating System, other than the fact that both products stand for the same principles.

As an Ubuntu fan boy, I also stand for those principle and, and what better place to promote it than across one’s torso. Upon reading the product tag, it was in fact designed by Samuel L. Jackson for the Trade Plus Aid charity, and no less than AU$1.42 from each sale will help their cause. More info at http://www.tradeplusaid.com/.

Pics:

There’s something that’s been annoying me lately. For some reason deaf people keep landing roles as audio engineers for TV stations. It’s quite annoying because things like this seem to make it into an audio stream all too often:

Now, having an audio engineer that cannot hear past 12KHz is about as useful as race car driver who cannot see past 12 metres. The only thing is, it’s actually really, really easy to check for these high-pitched squeals. Even if you can’t hear it, it always shows up on a frequency spectrum.

Why does this get to me so much? It’s because I have the hearing of a dog. I can hear super-sonic rodent repellents (although the packaging ensures me that dogs cannot hear it), I can even hear the charger from a mobile phone, and cannot sleep in the same room as it.

I had to give my old TV away because it was outputting a 16KHz note that was so loud that my $1300 JBL floorstanders could not drown it out at full volume. I could even hear it from the park behind my house. It’s the sole problem that caused me to spend over $2000 on wall mounting a new LCD in my living room. When watching TV, I would probably be more tolerant if I was only squealed at once every couple of hours, but every freakin’ minute gets very annoying very quickly!

A message to all the audio engineers out there: If your final recording causes dogs and teenagers to leave the room covering their ears, you should probably learn what a notch filter is.

Yes, everyone knows that there’s plenty of ways to pull money from people’s pockets by making a bad deal sound good. Today I wish to point out the ongoing scam which is being pushed by almost every mobile phone carrier in the country. I’m talking about Cap Plans.

What’s great about this scam, is that the better you make the deal sound, the worse it actually is. Companies do this by saying that you pay $x minimum per month on a plan, and you actually get $y worth of calls. They lead you to believe that the more y is greater than x, the better the deal. But have you actually stopped to crunch the numbers?
For an example, I’ll compare Telstra’s $79 3G cap plan to my fictional cap plan. Now, before I get into this - I have nothing against Telstra. I’ve just singled them out because they’re the biggest (much in the same way anyone targeting fast food always uses McDonald’s for an example). However, everyone is doing the the same thing, and I’m sure others are doing on a much worse scale.

Here’s a simple plan comparison:

Now, I’ll flog you my plan, and claim that you get 10 times more for your $79 than on Telstra. Your average idiot would compare the two plans based purely on this factor, and deem that my plan is better value. Why would anyone pay $79 for $450 worth of calls on Telstra when on my plan you can get $4,500 worth of calls?

For argument’s sake, I’ve set the cap start of both plans to $79 because the nature of a cap plan is to set the cap start at the monthly minimum spend. If you think about this mathematically, the ‘cap start’ means absolutely nothing. I could set it at $30, I could set it at $300. You’ll still be paying $79 per month.

To make the plans ‘equal’, I’ve multiplied of the call/message costs by the same factor as the cap end. And if you think about it, both plans give you exactly the same amount of calls to your dollar. That is - until you reach the cap end. Sure, you’d think that you’d never rack up $4,500 worth of calls in a month, and you’d never have to worry about it - but on both plans you’d reach the cap end at the exact same time, and on my plan you’d be paying 10 times more.

Cap Plans also address another problem with plans that have a fixed monthly spend. If people don’t spend the allocated amount, they feel that they have thrown their money away. With a cap plan, the consumer is somewhat fooled into thinking they have gotten their money’s worth as soon as the cap kicks in, and any usage after that is a bonus. Here’s the thing: there’s no such thing as ‘free’. Every time you see the word ‘free’, think ‘included’. Unless it’s all free, none of it is free.

In summary, the perception of these plans vary depending on the consumer’s mathematical ability:

This leads me to my conclusion: Just like the Pokies, Cap Plans are carefully targeted at those who lack math skills.

Hey guys,

Once again, I scrounged up a bit of time to work on the site. The news page is gone, and I’ve installed WordPress.

I’ll probably just end up using this page to write my rants about stuff, so I’ve named it accordingly.

- Russ.