Soap Box – Page 7 – Roo's View

Travel & WiFi

Here I am sitting in the Vancouver airport waiting for my flight, writing a blog post using the free wifi access. It isn’t all that speedy – but its free. The Las Vegas airport also had free wifi, and better speeds.

Now the Ottawa airport doesn’t have free wifi – they’ve partnered with Boingo to provide a for fee service. At least the wifi in Ottawa gives you access to the airport website for free, so you can check flights etc.

If you naively connect to the Boingo wifi and open your browser, you are redirected to the page which lets you sign up. You can choose between a monthly rate of $11.95 or a 24hr pass for $9.95. The monthly rate seems like a deal. Of course you can also use your Boingo account a number of other places, but from what I saw it wasn’t enough other places to make it useful.

Examining the URL that I was redirected to, it was clear I was getting a special deal via a promo code: &PROMO=UNL01093CAD3. Removing that promo code, resulted in the same page – but with different pricing. Monthly jumps to $14.95 and 24hrs drops to $6.95. Seems like the promo code doesn’t really help as much as it should.

Digging around, Boingo also provides 30 days free for mobile access. If you read the terms of service, they specifically restrict laptops.

The National Captial Freenet offers DSL service for about $30 a month, and encourages you to share it with your neighbours. While the costs might be slightly different for something the scale of an airport, it has to pale in comparison to some of the other airport costs. Most of them levy an airport improvement fee in any case. If you didn’t want to squeeze out the for fee providers, just make the bandwidth and reliability the distinguishing factor.

Time to get on a plane..

Blu-ray wins!

Amazingly quickly the format battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray has reached a conclusion. Anyone following the saga will have seen numerous reports of the demise of HD-DVD after Netflix, BestBuy and WalMart had made statements that they would be backing the Blu-ray format. The writing was on the wall, and many news agencies jumped the gun before Toshiba had made their official announcement – which they have now made today: February 19th.

Hopefully this works out well for the consumer now that there is only one choice. Currently Blu-ray players are around $400, and the media is still at a premium price over DVDs. It is my opinion that the players need to fall to the sub $200 range, and the media needs to average $20 a disc.

The next threat to Blu-ray will be downloaded content. Both low-fi content such as YouTube as well as hi-def downloads via services like iTunes (with Apple TV).

HDMI Cables

HDMI has been around since late 2002, but until about 2006 it was a total non issue for most folk and I’d consider it still in the fairly early adopter stage. Easy for me to say, I’ve got an HDMI video chain now.

If you are considering a new TV / Display then HDMI should factor in to your decision, but don’t buy into any of the sales pitch on deep colour etc. The real benefit to HDMI is that it is a digital connection between your source (DVD Player) and the display (TV). The content it carries is the same (for the most part), but keeping it in the digital domain is a real benefit.

Most of the cable makers are taking people to the cleaners. FutureShop’s cheapest HDMI cable is $49.99. If you want to stick to a big brand name, the Monster cables start at $83.99 up to $156.99 for a 1M cable. What is shocking here, is that almost all of the cables come from the same small set of factories in China – you really are paying extra for the name brand.

From my research and reading, assuming a reasonable level of quality in the cable construction, up to 5M you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth capabilities of the cable. Even the cheap cables will handle 1080p and beyond. Additionally, as most consumer equipment is only just starting to pass 1080p there is no reason to support more than that – with the one exception of cables that are run in the walls. For a 1M cable, you don’t need to spend a lot, and you can buy in wall rated cables relatively cheaply as I did.

My choice was to go with Blue Jeans Cable, specifically I bought their Tartan line of cables. Let’s take a look at what came in the mail:

So for my setup, I needed two 15foot cables. One HDMI/HDMI for my new Oppo 980 DVD player, so I got the slightly more expensive 24AWG cable for $15.75. The second cable is for my Starchoice DSR 505 for which I needed DVI/HDMI, since the best I can get out of this box is 720p/1080i I chose the less expensive 28AWG for $6.00. Yup, six dollars, and it will very likely support 1080p over that distance.

Here you can see them plugged into my projector:

The 24AWG cable jacket is bigger than the power cord. I strongly suspect that the FutureShop cables are 28AWG at best, very likely a smaller gauge. Oh yeah, and shipping was $5.75 – so I still came out way ahead.

The cables work great, no issues at all. In summary, yes HDMI is a good option to have but don’t pay an arm and a leg for the cables.