While pretending to know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen, I had some music on for companionship. One of my favorite songs is “God is a DJ” by Faithless. It’s a great dance-type song, and I never tire of listening to it.

This time however I noticed an interesting sound in the song. Faithless often uses odd bleeps, sweeps and loops in their songs, and this one sounded familiar. I’d probably noticed it before, but this time I paid attention to it. While my hands chopped various vegetables my mind stirred around and tried to remember where I’d heard that particular sound before.

After some mental wandering through my archives I remembered. It was from one of my all-time favorite movies, the masterpiece known as “Apocalypse Now“.

Apocalypse Now has a very interesting soundscape. The music is this odd synthesizer-and-percussion thing, and most of the soundscape is somewhat surreal and unreal – which goes well with the films somewhat bisarre themes. One of the more noticeable aspects of this is that a lot of the helicopter sounds have been replaced with similar-sounding (yet at the same time kind of alien) synthesizer-created sounds.

The very first minutes of the film demonstrates this, with the Huey swooping across the film with a distinctly non-Huey type sound.

It was this very sound I heard in “God is a DJ”. An odd, swooping type sound filling out the background.

I briefly wondered if Faithless had sampled it from the movie, and if so whether it was a legitimate (i.e. they asked for permission from the copyright holders) or whether it was a black-market sample. The latter option seemed much more logical, and while it’s a fairly uniquie soundbite it’s also quite generic to the untrained ear.

But then my mind continued thinking about this. What if they’d recreated the sound using the same type of equipment? What if Faithless discovered they could replicate the sound using completely different equipment?

So who owns the sound if an almost identical sound can be recreated using completely different equipment some twenty years after the “original” sound was created?

Could the copyright holders of Apocalypse decide that they owned the IP of that particular sound, and that any other sound created independently of that sound, sounds that weren’t completely identical but at the same time sounded similar enough, was in fact infringing on their intellectual property? That they owned the rights to every similar sound?

Of course it’s quite bizarre to think about, but it’s also essentially how the copyright-mafia works today so it wouldn’t really surprise me either if some crazed hollywood rights-holder unleashed a shitload of lawyers over this trivial matter.

Which in the long run reminds me that this IP-hostility only serves to stifle creativity. If Faithless had to leave out that sound due to threats of being sued into oblivion, then the rights-holder of that sound would’ve stifled innovation and creativity.

Kind of sad to think about.

(The sound in question can be heard here, in this Youtube-video of the very introduction from Apocalypse Now. It’s the very first sound heard, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh.)

However, lately I’ve been kicking around some ideas regarding what could make it into a truly perfect device.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

YouTube in High-Definition

When I bought this thing it could play Youtube-movies in HD. In later firmware-revisions this was removed, probably since YouTube was moving into the territory of renting films, and various companies didn’t want the WDTV to compete with their products. In short – it wasn’t a technological thing, but rather the stupidity of business and bureaucracy that removed this function.

If it was brought back, it would be great.

Quicktime-support and built-in viewing of trailers from Apple

While I on general principle loathe proprietary and closed formats, I still do enjoy watching trailers on Apples website. They look great, it’s easy to browse and overall it’s a nice experience. Much nicer than trying to find them on Youtube or whatever.

This is another fine example of how bureaucracy and business-decisions get in the way of technological progress. Apple owns Quicktime, and Apple of course doesn’t want anyone else to stick their fingers in the jar. They most assuredly do not want any type of competition with their own AppleTV-device, and thus lock this down really hard. WDC can’t add unofficial support either because Apple would come down on them with an army of lawyers.

Thus no gorgeous high-def Apple trailer on the WDTV Live. Which is a shame, because it would be awesome.

Better built-in file management functions

The WDTV Live has some rudimentary functions for basic file management. These can probably do in a pinch, but overall they’re pretty useless. Personally I always get annoyed at how you have to go into a certain submenu to do the file-management rather than being able to do it “on the fly” while you’re browsing through files.

The interface for this could be cleaned up, and ideally I feel that maybe buttons could be added to the remote for some of this.

This also brings me to…

Cleaned-up interface

The WDTV Live is very easy to navigate, and it’s obvious that the UI has it’s roots in the UI of it’s smaller, non-networked sibling. When networking and file-management was added these functions were simply bolted on, and in some cases this has made the otherwise quite sleek UI a bit unwieldy to navigate. Especially if you’re like me and have multiple network shares.

The user tends to spend quite a while navigating the primary menu, then navigating into the network share, then navigating a system of subfolders for organizing and then finally finding the file you wish to play back. I’m not sure how, but I do believe this could be cleaned up a bit.

Expanded functionality and customization for the Photo-function

When I first bought this device I felt that the functions for Photo-viewing weren’t going to get much use in my house. I was right about this, but recently I discovered that it’s actually a rather neat thing when you want to do a slideshow for friends. It’s much nicer relaxing in the couch than cramping together in front of the computer. You can sit there and click through the pictures and tell anecdotes about them.

However, the function is quite crude. First off it’s annoyingly slow when dealing with either large pictures. Changing from one 3 mpx picture to another 3 mpx picture takes up to ten seconds, and it’s frustrating not knowing if the thing is working or if you didn’t press down enough on the remote control. Maybe a “working” indicator would be nice? Or preferably somehow speeding up the process.

It would also be cool if you could customize things such as transitions a bit more. Maybe implement a system where the user could download a tool from WDC, create transitions and then upload them to his WDTV Live? And maybe share them online via some community? Who knows, lots of potential here.

Proper DVD-Playback

I (almost literally, as a I sold it for a paltry sum of money to a friend) abandoned my DVD-player shortly after buying the WDTV Live. DVDs fill very little function in my life these days, but occasionally I find a movie that isn’t available in any other format, or I go on a wild romp in my DVD-collection and find some golden oldie I want to view again. Most of the time I copy the DVD to an ISO-image and play it over a network share – or (and this works just fine too) I simply pop the disc in my DVD-drive and share it through SAMBA then play the movie straight from it over the network.

But the WDTV has some fairly psychotic playback of DVDs, which is annoying. It completely ignores nice DVD-functions such as menus and chapters, and instead utilizes the somewhat crude functions it already has to fast-forward/reverse.

So, it would be really nice if the WDTV when playing back DVD-material would emulate the DVD-experience, complete with menus, chapters and whatnot.

Ability to customize the UI a bit further

Often when using the WDTV Live I find myself wishing there was some function to change the background image of the main menu. Sure, it’s functional – but it would be nice to be able to put something else there without firing up the hex-editor and mucking about in the firmware-image. This could also be a part of that UI overhaul I mentioned earlier.

Not to mention the fact that I wish there were more customization of various settings. For example, you can jump ten minutes in a movie if you press the “next” button while fast-forwarding. This is nice, but often I wish there was a way to jump shorter distances. Often you overshoot where you want to be in the film, and then you tediously have to rewind back to that moment. It would be nice if the user could change the settings for things such as the jump-function.

And finally, at least for now, until I think of more things that might fit the bill…

Stable firmware

The latest firmware (as of writing this) is not particularly stable IMHO. It feels like a beta-release. The player will lock up in various artful ways – the play/pause buttons when viewing a film will stop working, or the “loading” indicator will show up while watching a movie, or the movies soundtrack will keep playing even after you’ve pressed “Stop” and have dropped into the navigation-menu.

This needs to be a higher priority. Unstable firmware does nothing to make customers happy, and we don’t like being treated as a big bunch of unpaid beta-testers. So, pretty please with sugar on top, spend time making the firmware more stable?

I’m all for environmentally-friendly cars. Sure, I do love a big V8 in some american iron from the late ’60s, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that cars need to evolve and change. Fossil-fuel is looking more and more like a dead-end since oil doesn’t last forever and it also creates heavy pollution. Plus, internal combustion engines are amazingly wasteful.

The only problem is that most environmentally friendly cars are incredibly lame. The Toyota Prius for example, or Chevys Volt concept. Lame. Sure, they’re green and will do nicely for transporting grandma to bingo and back, but they have all the style and flavor of a glass of water.

Thus, I’m saying this: if I was in the market for a brand-new car I would without a doubt buy a Tesla Model S. It’s 100% electric, it looks great and it’s also quite practical. Four-door sedan for the whole family, and plenty of torque for when you feel the need to lay rubber.

It’s a win for the gearhead and a win for the environment.

The only problem is that Tesla is a small manufacturer, and even though the Model S is (in my opinion) extremely competitively priced compared to similar-looking and similar-equipped cars from more established automaker it’s still a problem buying one. Demand for them far outstrips availability, and the closest Tesla-dealer in europe is in the UK.

I hope this will change soon and we’ll see more Teslas on the road.

And I mean, just look at the damn thing! Gets me all worked up just looking at it!

All I can say is, you heard it here first, folks. I was the one who suggested they do this.

None the less, the sale will happen. I stumbled upon this little article which urges Spyker to re-introduce a SAAB-branded Sonett, and I’m totally for that.

However, when I started thinking about this whole retro-thing I realized there’s a better candidate for Spyker to bring back. As the above-mentioned article says there’s lots of companies who’ve had success at bringing back retro-styled models. I for one love the new Fiat 500 which is just so cute and sexy. BMW brought back the new Mini, and lest we forget the questionable decision VW made a decade or so back to bring out a retro-styled bug.

So I got to thinking… Why not bring back a retro-styled SAAB 93? The 93 is a classic SAAB, and it’s a damn cute car, especially the ones from the mid to late 1950s. I think this would be a much better choice of introducing than the Sonett, which despite all it’s good things has some issues. The first one is that the Sonett would be yet another two-seater pseudo sportscar, while a retro-styled 93 has a backseat and could function as a family car while at the same time being a neat and sporty hot hatchback type vehicle. We shouldn’t forget that SAAB had quite good results in various rallies with the 93 and similar vehicles back in the day.

I mean, just look at the SAAB 93 from 1959. Doesn’t it just scream out for a retro-makeover and being built with modern technology? Replace the nasty old two-stroke engine from the original with a nice little hybrid and I think it would give the beloved Prius a run for its money. Make a funky, nice retro-styled SAAB 93 with the original suicide-doors, let people have plenty of options when it comes to color and addons and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if it could enjoy the same success as the Fiat 500.

The upgrade was completely uneventful and a complete success. Lasse (my client) was impressed at how easily it was done, and how little complications arose.

The printer was a different story though, we just couldn’t get it to talk to the computer. I returned the next day bringing a laptop, and -long story short- came to the conclusion that it probably was a bogus cable. Off to the computer store, bought a new cable and presto – printer was detected by Ubuntu and installed in about five seconds.

But that’s not the point of this posting.

Lasse has a penchant for collecting old pseudo-medical equipment from the early part of the 20th century. Think weird medical gadgets from before the first world war and you’re spot on. These are some seriously weird gadgets, and I doubt they had any kind of medical benefits, but they’re fascinating to look at.

He showed me this one thing, I have no idea what it is, but I called it the zapper. It’s an electric transformer in a very pretty velvet-lined case. The transformer plugs into the wall, and into the transformer is a kind of plug. This plug accepts any of the glass doodads that you can see in the case.

These weird glass vials are apparently filled with an inert gas of some kind. When plugged into the socket, they light up, buzz rather violently and exhibit a number of different effects when held close to either the transformer or human skin. According to the manual these prongs and vials were used on the body for various vague medical benefits.

We both found it rather amusing, and it was quite obvious that it probably impressed the hell out of common people back before WW1. However, we both agreed that eventual medical benefits were quite probably completely placebo.

The thing made me quite nervous though. It hummed like a doomsday-device and depending on the plug in the socket it either shot sparks or buzzed and glowed rather ominously when you put it close to your skin. The air filled quickly with the smell of ozone. None the less it was quite fascinating and interesting.

I also filmed two short movies that I’ve youtubed here for your please. This way you’ll get a better idea of what this thing look and sound like.

I have no idea what the purpose of the plug in the top video is, but the one in the lower video was apparently supposed to be used for dentistry! It had a chamber at the top that according to the manual was supposed to be filled with some liquid and then you could stick it in the patients mouth and cure toothache and other ailments.

Now, I don’t know about you but I would NEVER put that thing in my mouth.

Well, a few days back I actually bought a car. It’s my second-favorite classic muscle-car, and I bought it despite lacking a drivers license. It’s a 1970 Dodge Challenger. No, it’s not alpine-white (my preferred color) but instead it’s a mean hemi-orange. It also has a shaker-hood, and it looks totally badass.

Here’s a picture of my new car:

Okay, fine. It’s a hot-wheels car and is approximately 2 cm long. But it’s all mine! Some day I’ll take it on a road-trip around the block. It’ll kick ass!

The only sad thing is that we haven’t been back since, and humanity as one race is far too divided and obsessed with other things to ever get the focus to do more than potter around our own planet. We put priority on our childish squabbles and wage wars over finite resources. It’s quite sad, actually.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re visited by beings from other planets. My inner logic says so, and at the same time do I wonder what they make of this primitive species living on a small green-blue planet not too far from a yellow sun. Do they see hope in us? Hope that maybe one day we will evolve to something better? Or do they see a hopeless bunch of meatsacks too dumb to realize what’s right in front of us?

Either way, I recommend you to check this out.

But yesterday evening as I was walking back to my apartment I had to cross the street not far from it. It’s a red light and I pushed the button to signal my wish to cross. A few cars are pulling up, but the light will turn and stop them.

And lo and behold, the second car was my dream car. A 1968 Dodge Charger. I was rubbernecking like crazy while crossing the street, staring at this muscle-car legend. It was a very dark bottle-green, not the color I’d prefer, and it had the horribly ugly vinyl-roof, but it was an actual Charger.

It had R/T badging and I could hear the large 440 V8 burbling and gurgling happily while the driver waited for the light to turn green again. I crossed the street, a few moments later the light went green and the burbling disappeared, replaced with a godlike thunder as the driver opened the throttle and accelerated.

It was glorious.

Update: In case you’re wondering what the abovementioned godlike thunder sounds like, I give you this Youtube-video:

So, what do we have here?

• Bog-standard run-of-the-mill family station wagon? Check.
• After-market Lexus-style brakelights? Check.
• After-market bodykit? Check.
• Ludicrous exhaust? Check.
• Rims that don’t match your car in any way, shape or fashion? Check.
• Tinted windows? Check.
• Low-profile “racing” tires? Check.
• Tacky decal in the rear-window? Check.

Well, it seems you’re ready to hit the road!