Around midnight Pacific time last night, 30GB Zunes began restarting and locking up at their boot screens. Reports have swamped official forums and fan sites, and Microsoft has yet to officially comment on the reason for this pre-New-Year’s Zune apocalypse.

I guess all part of the coming Zuneday apocalypse that all the Zunesayers have been predicting.  As someone who has owned multiple mp3 players all the way back to a Rio MP3 CD player before there were any solid state or hard drive mp3 devices up to a couple of iPods I find this kind of funny.  Instead of the Y2K bug it is YZK. Welcome to the social, oops never mind.  Good to see that the blue screen of death has a Zune equivalent.

Though there is the Simpson’s bully saying “Ha, Ha” over the misfortune of others that is not right.  iPod owners having a laugh at fellow mp3 owners having their devices go dead on the last day of the year is not exactly charitable.  But people do like their cliques and the Microsoft/Apple divide is just another way we like to divide ourselves.

Actually I would like to see the Zune become an even better player. It has certainly come a long way since it’s first release and the software has improved with more features (except this new “feature”).  In any market you really want to see at least two or more dominant players (pun accidental, but I like it).  When you have such competition it keeps prices down and usually gives us more choices and better products.  The iPod is so dominant and other mp3 players only have a minor market share in comparison.  Though the different iPods have certainly steadily improved and Apple seems to be a company not all that concerned with market forces when it comes to prices.

Plus having different players can continue the pressure that downloadable music be free of DRM. We have come along way in that regard with the Amazon MP3 store being totally DRM free and Rhapsody, Napster, and others having the same thing now.  The iTunes store is only partially DRM free, but that is because music publishers for some reason want to punish iTunes for being succesful and have not made the same deals with them as of yet that they have done with others.  Having device independent music formats is extremely important.  Somebody could be quite happy with iTunes with their iPod now, but who know in five or ten years what will be the best player?

Oh well, for you 30gb Zune owners may they patch this one quick.

I have followed the Netbook craze with some interest and it is rather fascinating how fast this part of the marked developed with more and more companies putting out small notebooks with 12 inch and under screens with predominately Atom processors. While these machines are decidedly underpowered compared to most notebooks, there purpose is as the name suggest used for web browsing and other tasks that don’t require much power. Many of the Netbooks have some form of Linux installed on them (or Windows XP) so they do make good use of the processor power and fairly small memory they do have. Their main appeal is having a small and very light computer at your disposal.

They are though not a Techtemption for me since the idea of having such a small display and less than full sized keyboard is less than appealing to me. Though I can understand their appeal by others. I am more of a desktop person wanting full power and lots of display space, so my idea of a laptop is one with a full sized keyboard, lots of power and and 15 or 17 inch screen. This is pure prejudice since the things I would do on a laptop fit within the Netbook’s area of expertise.

The quest for ever lighter notebooks has reached a point that bothers me. Now as someone who use to carry around a Zenith Supersport 286 laptop that I am sure made one arm longer than the other, I can appreciate that carrying around a heavy machine is burdensome. But when we complain about carrying around a five or six pound notebook it just seems overboard to me. It sounds to me like telling your grandkids “I remember having to lug around a six pound computer” as if the weight is something so excessive. I can just imagine arms atrophying over time. Now the footprint of the computer can certainly be a concern depending on where you need to use it, but the whole weight thing just seems a trifle excessive to me.

Maybe the largest factor of why a Netbook is not tempting to me is that I use my iPod Touch pretty much like I would use a Netbook. I can check email, browse the web, use an RSS aggregator, monitor and update Facebook/Twitter/Plurk etc. The fact that the iPod Touch’s display and keyboard is even smaller than a Netbook only shows that I have an irrational prejudice against them.

Since I had some gift cards burning a hole in my pocket for Best Buy I ended up browsing three Best Buy stores until I settled on something.

I ended up getting a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-Ray player.  Since the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format wars had ended I had been wanting one, but it was still rather pricey last time I checked.  Low end players cost about half as much as they did last year. They had an insignia one for $199 but it really looked like a piece of crap.

So we selected the Samsung one which was $50 dollars more knowing that we could always return it.  I was not stupid enough to buy a HDMI cable for it at Best Buy because that is for suckers.  A digital cable is a digital cable and will either work or not work. No reason to buy fancy Monster cables or other high priced brands.  It’s only a cable.  I would suggest Monoprice.com for low priced HDMI cables.  Regardless you want an HDMI cable since component video cables that come with it will not display full resolution to the TV because of copy protection concerns (I so hate DRM which only punishes the consumer).

We bought one Blu-Ray movie Hellboy II to test it out with.  Movie manufactures are wondering why Blu-Ray isn’t catching on all that fast.  Well they might want to take a look at 25 to 29 dollar movie prices.  This is the old trick media companies always pull on us.  When they went from record to cassette they increased prices. When they went from cassette to CD they increased prices even though manufacturing prices went down. Now they are doing the same thing with Blu-Ray.  If you want a faster adoption rate make them the same price as regular DVDs.  Yeah the resolution is much better, but that just means that they were selling us movies before that were at a lower resolution.

So we decided to get a NetFlicks account since they have Blu-Ray movies and this will be a much cheaper way to watch Blu-Ray movies.  The next model up for the Samsung Blu-Ray player included the ability to stream movies from NetFlicks built in, but at a hundred dollars more for that model I am more likely to stream them to my computer instead.

Hellboy II was a good movie to test out Blu-Ray. Quite stunning visually and actually a pretty good movie and a step up from the first one.  The resolution is excellent and the picture is so much sharper and clearer and without the normal soft blur that we get use to.  Really is quite worthwhile over regular DVD.

Most Blu-Ray players have upconverters that will play regular DVDs at at higher resolution and I certainly wanted a player with this feature.  I was quite pleased with how it displayed a regular DVD and it is a significant improvement.  Though you can’t compare it to Blu-Ray since the software is making guesses to upconvert and so it is nowhere as crisp, but still a major improvement.

As a geek I love the fact that more and more consumer electronics allow a firmware upgrade.  This is especially important with Blu-Ray devices.  I was able to easily download the latest version of the firmware and install it via a USB thumbdrive by inserting it into the USB connector in the back.  There is also an ethernet port to do upgrades and enable some of the advanced Blu-Ray features.

So far I am quite pleased with the Blu-Ray player and having some gift cards was a good incentive to make the plunge.  Though one annoying thing is that while my TV has an HDMI port it only has one and it is being used by my satellite receiver.  Maybe one day I will buy an HDMI switcher, but I found it just as easy to unplug the HDMI cable from one unit and then plug it into the other along with the optical cable used for the sound system.  A bit of an annoyance, but for weekend movie watchers not that big of a deal.

So if you are a movie lover and have an HDTV it is a pretty good time to take the plunge with Blu-Ray.  Though of course players will get cheaper over time, but good players are no longer at only a premium price.