One of the main topics we covered was the new exhibition technologies of 3D and Digital Projection. While these have been around for decades, and for over a century in the case of 3D photography, the new push for faster frame rates seem as a new way for Hollywood to separate itself from other cinemas from around the world.

David Bordwell has recently covered the campaign for 48 frames per second—double that of the traditional sound film frame rate of 24 frames—led by Peter Jackson and James Cameron as a way to eliminate the artifacts visible in their digital-effects-heavy films. I won’t repeat everything he has to say in that illuminating article but I found a few points relevant for our discussion.

• In order for theater owners to adopt new hardware, there needs to be a viable path to recovering those costs with profitable software. It’s hard to imagine filmmakers with a better profit potential than Jackson and Cameron.
• By pioneering new projection technology, it will be hard for other filmmakers—both within and outside of Hollywood—to match them in terms of spectacle.
• Bordwell is right when he points out the 48 fps debate overlooks the entire issue of story. It’s not that the two are mutually exclusive. It’s just that they are almost working with an entirely different medium than other filmmakers.

We have seen in various other nations numerous attempts to foster a strong national cinema. International co-productions and complex financing arrangements were such methods, but while they might have matched (or approached) the scale of a Hollywood film, they rarely accomplished any sustained success. What had worked was making films with a strong personal vision, complex characters, and drawing on rich sources such as history, politics, or philosophy. These films might not have yielded immediate financial successes, but films like these kinds fostered a strong sense of national identity and also became the hallmarks of international cinema. I tried to screen films of these type throughout the semester.

As filmmakers chase the apex of digital realism, we should not let the digital revolution foreclose what made the cinema, not just entertaining and spectacular, but an international art form.

I wonder if Gogo, the inflight WiFi provider, has blocked certain ports that Messages uses. If I remember correctly, most inflight WiFi services block VOIP apps to keep people from yapping away on their computers. (Actually, I don’t know why they do that, but if I were an inflight sysadmin, that’s the main reason I’d block any VOIP ports.)

As a workaround, I sent an email.

Update

Back on the ground. Messages still doesn’t work. Neither does FaceTime for Mac. When I try to add the Chat function to any of my accounts in Lion’s Mail, Contacts, Calendar preference panel, I get the ominous “An Unknown Error Occurred” message.

I spent about $50 at a different place, let’s call it “Comedy Club Y,” putting me well over the $50 milestone. But instead of a $5 credit, it was only a $2 credit for using LevelUp at a place for the first time (“Comedy Club Y”). However, I received a new enticement:

…and after going back to “Comedy Club A,” this…

How much do I have to spend to get a credit?

Thanks so much for reaching out! While you are definitely correct that are certain businesses you will earn $5 after spending $50, this set of constructs is not the same for every business you will visit on LevelUp. At some you will earn $20 after spending $200, earn $3 after spending $25, etc. It all depends! The onboarding incentive also changes, so while you may have $1 waiting for you at one business the first time you pay there, you could have $7 waiting for you elsewhere. Does that help?

Tiers are confusing! It’s why consumers can’t understand airfares and cable/satellite bills. Nuance is fine for the law and academic scholarship, but it’s not for a consumer product.

In March, our Verizon FiOS broadband had significantly improved, not in terms of upload and download speed, but the latency and packet loss had improved dramatically. I had posited that Verizon technicians had done some work to improve our connection. I was very happy.

The monthly SamKnows report arrived today, and it looks like it reverted back to a pretty poor connection. SamKnows performs hourly tests for download, upload, latency, and packet loss. In April, our download speed remained robust at a little over the advertised 25 Mbps rate. However, around April 18th, the upload speed plunged to about 7 Mbps, less than a third of the advertised 25 Mbps rate.

At the same time, the packet loss climbed dramatically suggesting that there was a compromised connection on the upstream causing this problem. This is unacceptable. The reason I came to Verizon was for the robust upstream. I upload a lot of files, as is the joy of being a media scholar and shutterbug, and I need a zippy symmetrical connection.

If anyone in the neighborhood finds this and wants to report their results, please share in the comments.

the move by Hulu toward the new model — called authentication because viewers would have to log in with their cable or satellite TV account number — was behind the move last week by Providence Equity Partners to cash out of Hulu after five years, these sources said.

The major networks founded Hulu to prevent everyone from circumventing revenue-producing way of watching television. The move has been great. It has been a formidable way to get TV shows, and I have been a subscriber of Hulu Plus since the service launched. The appeal has always been that I can watch the television shows I want to watch and when I want to watch them.

This move could threaten the a-la-carte model that Hulu provides in favoring of bundling a package of channels that I’m never going to watch. While the Post article indicates that Providence Equity Partners is behind this strategy, I question that thinking for two reasons.

1. the fact that one of the owners of Hulu is Comcast, the biggest and least favorite cable MSO in the United States, and a deal like this really help retains its customers; and…
2. Hulu was up for sale last year, but then the sale was pulled due to its “unique and compelling strategic value”.

Free Press has launched an online petition to save Hulu from its possible fate as some “TV Everywhere” service that will only inflate cable bills.

(Via TV News Check.)

I’ve had the phone since “Launch Day” in June 2011, but I am still covered by AppleCare so I took it to my local Apple Store. A Genius inspected it and, without hesitating, offered to replace the phone. He said that the display was the problem and since there is no way to simply repair the screen, he would have to replace it.

If you are still covered by one-year warranty or by AppleCare, take the phone to your local Apple Store. Chances are good that they will replace your phone or at the very least replace it. Of course, your mileage may vary.

As much as Samsung and others have promoted “Smart TVs,” the reality is that consumers with tablets think their tablets are even smarter, and at least some of the time prefer to watch the content from their small device on the big screen.

If I’m going to watch something alone, I’ve been choosing the iPad apps, especially Hulu Plus, over the TV. Call me a miser, but I’m trying to save electricity!

I began to look for an alternative, even if I had to pay for one. I prefer to use an application to read email because I need a unified inbox, and reading mail on the web doesn’t allow me to do that.

Enter Sparrow. I read a lot about this app in recent weeks, especially the iPhone version and its inability to push alerts, which I actually consider an advantage since it will keep me from checking email incessantly. The desktop version, which has a lot of the same features, seemed intriguing enough for me to buy it from the Mac App Store.

The app caters to Gmail users, which I never was until I added Google Apps for my professional domain, and I appreciate some of those features. It is really easy to either archive or deleting a message. The Delete key archives the message, and Command-Delete moves it to the Trash. It is also easy to reply to a message. There’s a quick reply function that makes it really easy to reply to messages. My favorite feature is the send and archive. As the name indicates, it allows you to reply to message and, with one keystroke (Command-D), your message and the original message is archived and out of your inbox. You can also add cute features like having your friend’s Facebook profile photo appear next to his/her message.

There are however a couple of serious flaws disrupting my email workflow. For example, I like seeing my messages listed with the oldest messages at the top. I think that’s a remnant from my days of reading email with Pine, which listed the messages in chronological order. (Did I mention I’m old?) There’s no way of customizing this in Sparrow like you can in Thunderbird or Mac OS Mail. For some reason, this doesn’t bother me in the iOS client for instance, but it does on a desktop app. The other challenge is that when I archive, delete, or file a message, it navigates to an older message not to a newer one. I like reading email in chronologic order, and Sparrow doesn’t allow me to do that. Sadly, it was this drawback that made me ultimately abandon Sparrow on my home machines and return to Lion’s Mail.

Because Lion’s Mail is part of the Mac operating system, it integrates really well with the other apps, such as adding events or contacts from a message. No third-party app can do that.

I really enjoyed using Sparrow for a few days. You read email with it, and that’s it. I love that. It makes it really easy to deal with individual messages, such as reading, replying, forward, archiving, deleting, or filing, but it is not conducive to my workflow when my inbox explodes. I realized this when, after teaching a four-hour class last week, my inbox swelled to over forty messages. I like having as close to a zero-message inbox as possible, and I found myself fighting Sparrow more than conquering my email. Every time I processed a message, I kept going to an older message instead of taking me to a newer one. I couldn’t retrain my brain to read email in reverse.

With Sparrow, I couldn’t tame my messages efficiently. Part of this might be due to the Gmail mentality for email. Gmail lets you manage your email by just letting it sit there in a capacious inbox. If you want to find something, just search. I can’t work like that, and I can’t work with Sparrow…at least not now.

When I was first thrust into teaching media classes covering subjects that I did not study in college or in graduate school, I had to quickly learn about industries, such as newspapers, magazines, and advertising. I suspect that every teacher has gone through this experience at one time or another. After all, nothing makes you a better student than to become a teacher. Although the finer points of these “new” media industries were fascinating, none rivaled radio as an exciting subject. It really seemed like magic and was reminiscent of what the Internet seemed to me when I first used it.

The Bowery Boys, who produce one of my favorite podcasts, released an episode on the origins of radio in New York City. They cover all of the major milestones in the development of radio, albeit from the perspective of New York City history. They cover Nicola Tesla’s early experiments in the late nineteenth century, the establishment of American Marconi, Lee deForest’s audion, the Titanic disaster, David Sarnoff, RCA, Edwin Armstrong, the early radio stations in New York, and the beginnings of the radio networks with flagship stations here in New York.

Focusing only on radio history in New York doesn’t leave out too much from the standard accounts on the development of radio. For better or worse, the history of radio is very New York City-centered. Only the major accomplishments of Heinrich Hertz, who first transmitted a radio signal in Germany, Reginald Fessenden, who first transmitted the human voice in Canada, and Frank Conrad, who started the first bonafide radio station in Pittsburgh, receive mention in the mainstream histories of radio. Curiously, New York also looms large in the history of newspapers (as the birthplace of the American penny press and yellow journalism), American advertising (Madison Avenue), and motion pictures (as the base of Thomas Edison and his Trust).

Download or subscribe to the podcast from their website.

One more thing: if the Bowery Boys, Greg and Tom, ever find this post, I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced “Goo-yell-moh.”

Unless you’re a veteran Mac enthusiast or a developer of one kind or another, chances are good that you’ve never used it. However, it remains one of the best software applications I’ve ever used. If Microsoft Word is bloatware for the laser printer era, then BBEdit became and remains the best, most efficient tool for the web: from code to content.

When I was in college, one of my first tech jobs was working at UCSB Extension. Although my job was desktop support, I ended up fixing a lot of web pages. It was 1996, and the World Wide Web was the place to be. My boss at the time was a young, bespectacled go-getter named Matt Groener. Probably half of what I know about computing came from him. (And given how much computing has changed since 1996, it really shows how much he taught me.)

As I was learning HTML in 1995, I had used SimpleText to edit my HTML documents. Why not? It saved plain text files, and it came free with my Mac. Almost immediately after seeing my working with SimpleText, Matt introduced me to BBEdit for composing web pages. Using it was an absolute revelation. It color coded syntax so it was easy to distinguish between text and markup. It indented text properly, which was key to nesting markup, such as lists and subheadings. It had the best search and replace I can ever imagine, and it even made Grep seem a little less scary.

The absolute best feature of BBEdit was “Save to FTP Server.” More than a dozen years before the era of the cloud, BBEdit actually allowed you to directly edit your HTML file from the server. Before this feature, my process was cumbersome and consisted of at least nine steps to make a simple change:

• Edit file
• Save file on your local disk
• Open FTP client
• Upload file to the correct place on the server
• Confirm to replace your file
• Wait for upload to finish
• Open web browser
• Refresh web browser page
• Is there a typo? Then repeat the process all over again.

BBEdit eliminated all this. Saving an HTML file to a web server was as easy as saving it to your hard disk. It didn’t matter if the web server was in a closet a few yards away or part of a server farm on different continent.

Since then, I have probably used BBEdit for some purpose at least once a week. I’ve written loads of HTML and CSS, edited PHP and Javascript, and batch edited loads of class rosters and countless text files exported from Excel. And naturally, I wrote this blog post using BBEdit (in Markdown).

Thanks and many happy returns.

(Via MacWorld and Mother Jones.)