Comcast Summary

Some of you readers wanted to know what became of the Comcast saga. I thought I had made it clear in the last post of the series, but upon reading it I see that I did not. Here's what my setup is now:

$12.95 for Basic Cable (channels 2-13, essentially)
$1.79 for two CableCards

The CableCards give me the HD channels 902-913 for "free." I don't have to pay the $8.00 fee to receive them.

I'm very happy with this arrangement. I did buy an outdoor HD antenna and briefly tried it out. It received the stations well, but I was worried about the trees that obscured the line-of-sight to the transmitters about 40 miles away. I ended up returning the antenna and sticking with cable.

A friend has encouraged me to try the antenna again and ditch cable entirely. I may do that when I get the time. That will save roughly $15/month.

Printer resolution, demystified

Someone wrote to me with a question about printing getting a digital photo printed in a magazine:

Attached is a photo that blows up very well on screen. However, I keep getting told by journal publishers that they need them with more pixels. Can it really be so that sufficient resolution on screen will not turn out to be sufficient resolution when printed (in the same or even smaller size)?

Attached was a 1700x1200 pixel image.

My reply:

You should give print publishers the largest possible image size so they have the flexibility to reduce or enlarge it as needed.

Let's see if I can explain it.

Every output device, such as a monitor or printer, has a native pixel density, called pixels per inch, or PPI, and also incorrectly referred to as dots per inch (DPI). A monitor is typically somewhere around 75-100 PPI. A printer's PPI will be stated by the manufacturer; for example, 600 ppi or 1200 ppi.

Let's take a 600ppi printer as an example. A resolution of 600ppi means the printer prints 600 pixels per inch in each direction. Each square inch of paper is filled with 600x600 little droplets of ink.

If you take a photo that's 1000x800 pixels and print it at the printer's native resolution, how big will it be?

It will be 1000/600 inches by 800/600 inches, or about 1.7x1.3 inches. Each pixel in the image becomes a tiny droplet of ink on the paper. That size is fine for a postage stamp or a business card, but what if you want to print a 4x6 inch picture?

A 4x6 picture would need 4x600=2400 pixels in one dimension and 6x600=3600 pixels in the other: a 3600x2400 pixel image. In other words, in order to print out a 4x6 image so it appears the sharpest and most detailed on the printer, you need to send it an image that's 3600x2400 pixels.

"But!" you protest. "3600x2400 is 8.6 megapixels. That's more than my digital camera has. You mean my $1500 digital SLR can only print small 4x6 photos? How can I print out anything bigger than about a 4x6 image if my camera's sensor doesn't have that many pixels?"

Well, here's where you can fudge things a bit. The calculations are still fundamentally the same, but things get a little blurry, literally.

The human eye simply can't see anything as detailed as 600ppi. There aren't enough rods and cones in the eye to do it. So although the printer is capable of printing 600 pixels per inch, only about 300-400 of them are actually visible.

Couple that with limitations in print technology itself. You know from personal experience that when you touch ink to paper (say, when you a black marker), the ink spreads a little. It's no different in an inkjet printer. The printer may be spitting out 600 little droplets of ink for every inch, but they smear together such that the effective resolution of the printer is around 250-450 ppi, depending on the paper and ink being used.

Let's settle on 300ppi as a nice average of both eye resolution and printer resolution and rework the previous example.

A 4x6 print at 300dpi is 1200x1800 pixels. In other words, you can print out a 1200x1800 pixel image at 300ppi and it will look pretty much the same as the 600ppi image. But you can't get away from the native resolution of the printer. The printer can't actually print anything at 300ppi. So here's what actually happens:

1. You direct the computer to print the 1200x1800 image, scaled to fit 4x6 inches. The computer calculates that to be 300 ppi.


2. The printer driver takes the 1200x1800 image and scales it up to 2400x3600 by doubling each pixel in both directions. The image is now scaled to the printer's native resolution.


3. The printer prints the 2400x3600 image. It occupies 4x6 inches of paper. It comes out looking pretty good.

Let's say now you take that same 1200x1800 image and direct the computer to make an 8x12 inch print out of it. What will happen?

1. The computer calculates the resolution to be 150ppi.


2. The printer driver scales up the image to the printer's native resolution of 600dpi by quadrupling each pixel in each direction. The image is now 4800x7200 pixels.


3. The printer prints the 4800x7200 pixel image onto an 8x12 inch print.

But what does the print look like? Is it sharper, blurrier, or the same as the 4x6 print? A: at only 150ppi, it's blurrier than the 4x6 print because the same 1200x1800 pixels now effectively occupy a larger area. Each pixel had to be printed bigger to fill the area, so it appears less sharp.

Do you see what's happening here? An 800x600 pixel image looks great on your monitor displayed as a roughly 8x6 inch image on the screen, whose native resolution is around 100ppi. The image is as sharp as it's going to be on the monitor, so you think "Wow! I'm going to print this out!" Although it would look great printed as a 2.6x2 inch print (300ppi), it would look lousy printed as a 4x6 print (133ppi) and really crappy as an 8x12 (66ppi).

So back to your magazine publisher. Let's say they want to print your flower picture as a 4x6 in the magazine. Let's also assume they have a really high quality printer with good, glossy paper whose effective resolution is 400ppi. How many pixels should your image be to make the publisher happy?

4x400=1600, 6x400=2400. Your image should be at least 1600x2400 pixels. More pixels would give the publisher some flexibility, since it would allow them to print the photo larger without having to reduce the pixel density. Scale your image to at least 1600x2400 pixels. Don't worry about PPI or DPI; just give the magazine an image at least 1600x2400 pixels.

Here are some common rule-of-thumb output resolutions:

75-100 ppi: screen
200: fax machine
300: ca. 1990 B&W laser printer
300: effective resolution of a consumer inket printer
350-400: limit of human eye
400: Costco 1-hour photo
400-450: high-quality offset color printing press
600: modern B&W laser printer

Hope that helps!

The Bailout: So Many Questions, So Few Answers

I can't help but feel that this $700 billion bailout is Washington's last attempt to issue free money to Bush's Big Banking Buddies at the expense of taxpayers. Although the headlines read that lawmakers have reached an agreement today on the terms of the bailout, so few details have been released that I am left with so many questions.

Which institutions will be allowed to benefit? The news is full of big names like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Washington Mutual. But what about the smaller regional institutions, like Umpqua Bank, Bank of Montecito, and River City Bank, who specialize in providing banking and lending services to Small Town USA? Surely some of them are in financial trouble, being saddled with bad debt stemming from the housing boom. I haven't heard anyone speak up for them. Will they be allowed to go under while larger banks snap them up using bailout funds?

What about institutions with other kinds of debt, such as credit card debt? Will Citibank be allowed to write off billions of dollars in consumer debt and essentially start over with a zeroed balance book? Who decides what kinds of debt are covered under the bailout bill and which are not?

This bailout does nothing to fix the underlying problem.

President Bush went on the record last night to explain to the taxpayers how we got into this mess. The problem, as he stated, stems largely from the poorly-managed mortgages wrapped up into complex securities that buried the risk. This bailout is necessary, he said, to buy up the bad debt and allow banks to resume lending.

That's great, but it's like applying a Band-Aid to a patient with internal bleeding. The financial vehicles for this disaster still exist:

• It's still possible to create complex securities out of bad debt and sell it to unknowing investors.


• It's still possible to sell a house to someone who can't afford it.


• We'll still have greedy mortgage brokers pulling the wool over lenders' eyes. The broker gets paid when the mortgage is signed, and keeps the money even if the homeowner defaults.


• And we still have many homeowners teetering on the edge of delinquency whose defaults have yet to show up on banks' balance sheets.

Secretaries Paulson and Bernanke say the time to do the bailout is now; changing the regulatory laws will be done later, once the financial system has been stabilized. When is "later?"

"Later" is after the new year. We'll have a new President and a new Congress. Many of them will be new to Washington, new to the intense lobbying that comes with the job. You can bet that the Big Banking PACs, flush with $700 billion in cash, will really turn up the heat on our representatives to convince them that the regulatory laws which so desperately need changing should either be left alone or altered to benefit the banking industry.

Imagine the kind of influienc you could have on your representative if you had even one million dollars. Now imagine what you could do with $700 billion.

I'm not convinced that, once the dust settles, that anything will have changed at all. But I do know this: the Big Banks will be $700 billion richer and we taxpayers will be $700 billion poorer.

"The Cloud" Saves the Day

So my iMac went in for repairs. The video card needs to be replaced. I suspect that it's been bad for quite a while, but since I don't play games, it hasn't been an issue. Until I started seeing more and more blocky artifacts scattered about the screen.

The computer will be gone for 3-7 days. Am I completely dead in the water until I get it back? Of course not, and here's why.

First, I have a backup computer: my trusty MacBook Pro which I carry around just about everywhere.

But what about my data? Thanks to "The Cloud," I have nearly all of the necessities easily accessible.

My email--four accounts' worth--is stored on IMAP servers, meaning the messages themselves are kept on the mail server and downloaded to my computer only when I need to read them. They stay on the server until I delete them. And even then, GMail archives them for a couple of years instead of deleting them outright. All of my email is equally accessible from any internet-enabled device: my MacBook Pro, iMac, iPhone, and anything with a web browser. GMail for domains is my hero.

My address book, email account settings, calendars, and Safari bookmarks are all synced among my three Apple devices using MobileMe, a service that costs about $99 per year. Well worth the money just for that feature alone.

Many of my bookmarks are also stored on Delicious.com, a social bookmarking site. Thanks to a plug-in for Firefox, the Delicious.com bookmarks are listed right in the Bookmarks/Favorites menu; I don't have to go to the delicious.com website just to see them.

I have lots of notes, to-do lists, and web clippings stored in Evernote, a free service that stores the notes in the cloud and syncs them to all my devices almost in realtime. If you've never tried Evernote, do so. The coolest thing: picture notes. I just snap a picture with my iPhone or the camera built into my computer and it's instantly uploaded to Evernote. There, some magic happens: all the text that's visible in the picture is recognized and made searchable. For example, I recently needed to go to the pool supply store to have my spa water tested. The guy there recommended some chemicals I needed to buy to balance the water. Before I left, I had taken a picture of all the chemicals I already had. I simply typed in the name of the chemical and if the picture popped up, I knew I already had it and didn't need to buy more. Nifty!

All the important data and applications on the iMac itself are backed up through a an online service called Mozy. It's free for backups of up to 2GB; about $5/month for unlimited backups. If my Time Machine backup ever fails, everything I need to get a new machine back in service can be downloaded from the Mozy backup.

There you have it. Cloud Computing is the future, thanks to the Internet. But the next time I write about The Cloud, it will be when the Internet has blown up and none of my data is accessible.

Comcast, Back In My Life?

Today's Status Updates
I think Comcast and I have reached an amicable agreement, thanks to good folks like Frank Eliason. About an hour ago I got off the phone with Mary, a regional rep from San Mateo, and we arranged for a very inexpensive HD package consisting of:

Basic Limited Cable, $12.35
Two CableCards, $1.79
Monthly total: $14.14 plus taxes and fees (approx. $19 total).

That's good news, and cheaper than I expected! This package will give me the local broadcast stations, public access channels, and QVC and/or HSN.

However, I also just got a return call from Herman James who expressed doubt that the package would actually work in Sacramento, citing some possible "technical issues." We'll see how this pans out.

In the meantime, UPS delivered my antenna today. Out of curiosity, I'm going to hook it up and see how well it performs.

Finally, I inquired with Discovery Channel about the availability of MythBusters on legal download sites, such as discovery.com and iTunes. They wrote back:

Dear Viewer:

Thank you for taking the time to contact Discovery Networks. We appreciate
your interest in our programming and are delighted to hear from our
viewers. Unfortunately, Mythbusters is currently not available for
download.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Boo. Will I need to wait until after the season is over to rent it? Or will I resort to BitTorrent?

A bigger question is: would I rather pay $19 for basic cable, or get the same service from an antenna for free? I think so. Setting up the antenna will cost about $200. That will pay for about a year of cable service. Over the long run, cable will cost more, for sure. But it might be worth not having to hassle with the antenna.

Still, I'm going to hook it up and see for myself. :)

No Love From Comcast

Called Herman today and left a message. He hasn't returned the call. So.... I ordered the antenna and mast from Amazon.com. They should be here by Thursday, just in time for my cable to be turned off.

What I'm Asking For

Let's be clear about a couple of things: I'm not asking for Comcast to lower their rates. I'm not asking for them to make any undue sacrifices. They are free to charge whatever rates their customers will pay.

What I am asking for is the absolute cheapest HDTV package. After looking through their website at all of the packages available, I believe that the following combination is possible:

Limited Basic Cable. Covers channels 2-13 plus a few others like public access, and the Home Shopping Network (ugh). $12.85.
+plus+
Limited Basic HDTV. An $8.00 add-on for any cable package. It gives me the HD versions of the channels in the other package, where appropriate.

Combined, this package should cost roughly $20.85, plus taxes and fees. But the customer service rep I spoke to last week insisted that I also needed to rent a converter box. She claimed that because the package I was trying to order "was not a digital package," a converter was needed to receive the HD channels.

Say what? What, exactly, is that converter box converting?

Perhaps she thought I had an "HD Capable" TV, which does need a tuner in order to receive HD channels. But not only is my TV "HD Ready," so is my TiVo Series 3. The latter even has CableCard slots, conveniently filled with two Comcast CableCards that I've been using the past two years.

Or perhaps the converter is needed to convert the analog channels into digital versions that my TV/TiVo can receive. That doesn't hold water. HD channels are by definition digital. I'm only interested in receiving the local broadcast stations in HD: KCRA, KXTV, KOVR, etc. Believe me, being able to watch HSN in stunning digital is the last thing on my list. It ranks even lower than the public access channels. I've got my TiVo configured to never, ever, EVER record that channel.

So there you have it. My request to Comcast is humble: bundle Basic Limited Cable with Basic Limited HDTV for roughly $20. Your website says it's possible. Will you do it? If not, I'm getting the antenna.