Today’s links of interest:

• Analyst Sees ‘Modest Success’ for Zune
  Well, it’s better than what they’re saying about the Putz — we’ve heard rumors that the batteries are being recalled before they’ve been manufactured.
• Reviewing Mike Judge’s Idiocracy
  Buried by its studio, we’ll all be watching it on DVD
• ‘Veronica Mars’ Makes Warhols A Little Less Dandy
  Apparently, they’ve slightly messed with the theme song. I’m still waiting for the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s version. And you should be watching "Veronica Mars" when it debuts next Tuesday.

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The sad irony of home entertainment technology is that we love new media devices, but we hate their remotes. It’s not that the remotes are bad (although some are terrible), it’s that we hate the way they accumulate on the coffee table and add unnecessary complexity to what is supposed to be leisure time.

Consider the simple act of switching a home entertainment system from music mode to television mode. In the average living room this task might involve selecting three separate remotes from a pile of six and pressing the correct commands on each in just the right order. Pick the wrong remote or press the wrong button and you might spend 20 minutes trying to undo your mistake. It’s sort of like taking a roadside sobriety test in your living room - every single night.

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Today’s links of interest:

• Sheen set to become highest-paid sitcom star
  Meanwhile, Steve Carell, Jason Lee and — especially — Jason Bateman are wondering WTF?? Really, WTFF?
• Humpable Huggable, Giant iPod Pillow
  Will this iPod silliness ever end?
• Apple?s iTV & The Case of the Missing DVR
  More on why iTV isn’t going to be a DVR. Hint: Remember Ultimate TV? I didn’t think so.

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When I made the decision to be a DVR early adopter, I chose Replay-TV over TiVo. It’s just that I thought that the Replay was slightly better for the money. It wasn’t a Mac vs. PC decision: I wasn’t taking sides in some great cultural war or anything. At the time, if you said that you were getting a DVR, people had no idea what you were talking about, anyways.

Meanwhile, a lot of other people got TiVo, and fell in love with its easy-to-use interface, and its iconic boo-bop noise, so it became the verb, even while teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I bought a second Replay — the one with the infamous commercial skip — just a couple of years prior to the company being sold, and being sold again. Now, it’s essentially a software company, and good luck to them — rarely does a technology change my life the way theirs did — but their PC Edition doesn’t fit what I need right now, what with my HD TV and everything.

What does fit, it looks like, is this new TiVo Series 3 with the HD. There is, however, a problem. There is always a problem.

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Today’s links of interest:

• ‘Gilmore Girls’ isn’t what it used to be
  The problem: people are speechifying *at* each other (like in an Aaron Sorkin show) , instead talking *to* each other (like in an Amy Sherman-Palladino show).
• Which masterpieces are secretly crap?
  Yeah, you’re gonna disagree.
• Resurrecting ‘7th Heaven’ — on the Cheap
  Or, as we like to call it, the show that wouldn’t die.

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About five years ago I started phasing CDs out of my life entirely. I digitized my entire music collection and moved the jewel boxes into the garage. I stopped buying new CDs and committed to only acquiring new music in a digital format (eMusic helped tremendously). Then I began looking for the perfect stereo component that would play my digital music collection through a traditional home entertainment system. Ultimately, I bought a Turtle Beach AudioTron.

The Audiotron fits into a stereo rack and connects to a receiver like a normal audio component, but it also has the ability to connect to a home network and play audio stored on a PC or media server. The AudioTron was an amazing innovation in its day, effectively liberating digital music from the PC and bringing it back into the living room where it belongs.

My AudioTron served me well over the years, becoming an integral part of our household, until last week when it suddenly died. In our home the death of the AudioTron qualified as a stage-one emergency. All other activities ceased while I considered my options.

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Today’s links of interest:

• Pirate Radio Challenges Feds
  The one thing nobody has explained to my satisfaction is how they’re public airwaves, yet only a few are allowed to access them.
• When the Bad Buzz Arrives Before the Movie Does
  Darn audiences, always paying attention to negative buzz. Or maybe it’s just that they’ve decided going into hock for bad movies is a dumb idea.
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
  In other words, pretty soon, we’ll be accessing our laptops via wireless connections on the Haight.

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The idea of true, pure, unfettered video-on-demand has been a movie industry chimera since the dawn of time. What if, executives say teasingly to their audiences, we gave you everything in our catalogs whenever you want it? You would never leave the couch.

Never mind that that studios don’t necessarily even know what they own. Video-on-demand, as imagined by consumers, requires unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and unlimited time. I think we’d settle for wide selection at reasonable prices. First, of course, we need to get the households of America wired and networked for downloadable video. Total downloadable domination isn’t technically feasible yet, so why are the studios so terrified of angering Wal-Mart?

Let’s face facts. DVD sales are declining. Internet usage is up. Shelf space in bricks-and-mortar stores is limited. Hard drive space is cheap and easily expandable. Not everyone has access to a Wal-Mart. Not everyone has a broadband connection. Read the entire entry …

Today’s links of interest:

• This is your ass on drugs
  Perhaps the first anti-drug spots made by people who have some experience with actually taking drugs??
• OLN Switches to ‘Versus’
  "Spike." "The CW" "Logo." And now "Versus." Are there really no more good network names left left? Rock bands keep doing it, and there are way more of those out there!!
• John Hodgman holds forth on eels, mole men, and Macs
  It turns out that Mr. PC is actually a Mac user.

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Sigh. Nothing worse than life imitating a throwaway joke. Last week, writing about YouTube’s copyrighted material discovery software, I called it “the digitial equivalent of drug-sniffing dogs.”

Little did I know that the MPAA had already taken my silly joke and turned it into an even sillier reality. In a move that sounds more like a YouTube parody than anything else, the MPAA has trained a pair of dogs to sniff DVDs. I swear to gods that I am not, in any way, shape or form, making this up.

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