Today I went to the grocery store after roaming about in D.C. with some other photographers as part of the DCist Flickr Photographer meetup. It was just going to be a quick trip, just to pick up some things that I knew I was out of or that I knew that I needed, like fabric softener sheets (I had to do laundry and I was out). I happened to also pick up two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, three cans of Chef Boyardee mini-ravioli, milk and two each of these:
Yes, frozen burritos. These things are fantastic! They’re cheap, and they taste pretty good too!
Now normally I just go to the self-checkout lanes at the grocery store, but this particular one didn’t have those, so I had to go to a usual checkout lane. The lady working as cashier saw my items and said, “Now this is bachelor living, am I right?” and I had to admit that she was right. The best part was when she started to ring up the burritos and I acted totally serious and remarked:
These things are the best ever. They’re only 2 for $1 — I can take care of my meals for a WHOLE WEEK for just $14!!
I think the look on her face was actual shock and horror. Don’t worry, I still get my veggies and the rest of my balanced diet. But you don’t have to take my word for how good these things are — peep these entries for February 11 and 12, 2002! See? Tasty!
Although, I have to admit that even though these are supposedly microwaveable, once you heat them up in the oven it’s such a tremendous difference that you can’t go back to heating them up in the microwave anymore. The problem with oven-cooking for these is it takes a whole hour to cook! But that makes it the easiest meal preparation ever:
1. Take burrito out of packaging and wrap burrito up in tin foil.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and then put burrito in oven.
5. Take the timer and turn until it stops (that’s 60 minutes, you don’t even have to look at the timer for this part!)
6. Wait for the timer to ding.
After my post about the iTunes movie rental service, I figured I might as well give it a try. I rented “The Magnificent Seven”… it’s a good movie, and I hadn’t seen it in years. There were only two problems with this, though:
1. Whenever I saw James Coburn, I thought of Derek Flint and the “Our Man Flint” / “In Like Flint” movies.
2. Whenever I saw Yul Brynner, I thought of… well… this:
I guess it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have Yul Brynner cooking for you; it’d be pretty much safe to say that you wouldn’t find any hairs in your food!
No problems with the rental service itself, though!
One of the big announcements at Tuesday’s Macworld Expo keynote was that people could now rent movies through iTunes, and if you have an Apple TV you could rent movies directly through there as well. $2.99 for older movies, $3.99 for new releases, and $1.00 more for each if you want it in high definition. Pretty neat, right? Some folks don’t think so, with gripes about the viewing period (you have 30 days to start watching, but once you start the movie you’ve got only 24 hours to finish it) and the format choices (a vocal minority wishes that Apple had chosen a more detailed hi-def format, like 1080p or even 1080i instead of 720p). Neither of those would really prevent me from using it, but I was interested in how renting high-definition content would pan out.
John at daringfireball.net went through a few of the differences between the old iTunes terms of service and the new ones. Most of the changes are just slight language differences to accommodate being able to rent movies short-term instead of purchasing outright. But there’s some language in there to say that if you want to download HD-quality movies, you can only download those movies directly to an Apple TV, and you can only watch them on the Apple TV: you can’t download them to your computer, and if you download them to your Apple TV you still can’t transfer them over your network to your computer. He and his readers speculate that it’s because of piracy concerns from the movie studios:
A few smart DF readers have emailed to suggest it’s about piracy concerns — the studios may want to limit the high-def movies to the Apple TV because it has the HDCP DRM-enabled output.
While that may be a possibility, I’ve got another theory — by saying you can only rent HD movies with an Apple TV, the company is ensuring that the equipment will be able to handle the processing power needed to play back high-definition content. Take this real-life example:
I’ve got a PowerBook G4, 1.25 GHz. It’s about 4 years old now. When I try to play HD movie trailers, my computer doesn’t play them very well, if at all. I wanted to try to rent a HD movie just to see how well my computer would be able to handle it, but I couldn’t find any HD movies in the iTunes store and couldn’t figure out why. Once I read that excerpt from the iTunes terms of service it all became clear to me — it’s to prevent people from using computers that may not be able to play back HD content. Just imagine how people would react to that if they were able to download and couldn’t play back:
I was watching a movie, on my PC… and suddenly it went “bleepbleepbleepbleep”. It’s kind of… a bummer.
See, let’s say that I was able to download a HD-quality movie to my laptop — how would Apple know that my computer didn’t have enough processing power to play the file properly? And even if my computer could, then how would my iPod (with even more limited ability) be able to handle the playback requirements? If you were able to download a high-definition movie on your computer then you’d certainly expect that your equipment would be able to handle the load, but Apple has no idea what kind of equipment you have. The only way they can ensure that you’d be able to play the movie and have it Just Work is by limiting the HD-quality video to the Apple TV. Non-HD video can be played by pretty much any computer, the iPod and the Apple TV as well, so it makes sense that this format isn’t limited to only one type of device.
It’s a shame, really, since it’d be pretty neat to watch a high-def movie with one of those Cinema Displays, but I guess a line had to be drawn somewhere.
There’s been some speculation leading up to today that Apple is going to be releasing an extremely thin and lightweight laptop called “MacBook Air” or “AirBook” or something similar. I wonder what it’s going to be?
Now if they only hurry up and tell us how much our bonuses for 2007 will be at work… I’m ready for an upgrade!
January 27, 2008 · No Comments 
