Month: June 2007

Hooked on Stargate SG-1

I remember watching the Stargate movie at the cinemas in the 90-ies and the story really struck a nerve in me. It was a twist of science fiction that got me. It somehow seemed a little bit more realistic in some way and still had all the ingredients of exploring the unknown. The thing I remember the most was not liking the ending and that I desperately wanted to see more. Therefore it is both strange and unfortunate (as TealĀ“c put it) that I did not really discovered the TV show until this year.
Stargate SG-1 is a wonderful show about exploration of new worlds with a lot of fun and interesting characters. Since I work in the Swedish Air Force and is somewhat a techno nerd I can of course identify with Captain Samantha Carter (I know she is promoted along the way :-). Reading about the show and how fun all the people in the production crew seem to have is probably the reason why it turned out so good. There seemed to be a special kind of feeling among everyone involved and I heard they took really good care of the fans when they were invited to the set. I am really sad that MGM has decided to not make an 11th season. However, I really look forward to the two feature lengths movies coming up soon. I hope (and beg) that MGM will reconsider and at least make one season more of the show!

Previously I have not considered going to any of these Sci-Fi conventions but I would actually like to go to a Stargate convention once to meet some of the crew and talk to other fans about the whole story. There are so many things to explore further. Everything from how the script writers actually thought to facts and plots that need some clarifications. It would also be interesting to know more how the actors relate to their characters and the story of the show.

The Apple TV isn’t so bad after all…

I recently decided to buy an Apple TV to use together with my LCD projector. I had gotten tired of using my laptop as the playback device since I always had to move cables around. Thought it would be good to have everything permanently setup for once. Earlier I had some doubts about the Apple TV since it is a bit crippled compared to other solutions out there including using an old Xbox with the hacked media center application. But buying something from Microsoft to my home seemed a little bit too much for a Mac-person like me. The main drawback of the Apple TV is of course the limited set of codecs it supports. However, that turned out to not be a big factor when I discovered VisualHub which is a great media transcoding application. It eats a lot of useful formats and has presets for converting to the Apple TV or an iPod and even adds the content to the iTunes library. So when everything is converted it is automagically synched to the harddrive of my Apple TV and is ready to watch.

The image quality is great even on my big screen. I use component cables now and the 720p PAL resolution and for HD-encoded clips it looks just great. The interface is very good looking and it show it comes from Apple which I really like. The recent updates also adds content from YouTube and it also works just fine. Even there the image quality surprised me. Not as good as the HD-clips I have of course but not that much worse than standard resolution TV sometimes.