I got made at the cable people some time ago and get all my HD thru the air for free.   It was interesting to read in this Wired article that cable companies are compressing the HD signals and thus not giving the viewer the best experience they can get.

Yet when he tuned in Sci Fi HD for a recent episode filmed in high definition, the image was soft and the darkest parts broke up into large blocks with no definition. Explosions, he said, were just dull.

“It kind of looked like they took the standard definition and just blew it up,” said Swanson, a 33-year-old graphic designer and videographer who subscribes to Comcast Corp.’s TV service. “I couldn’t really tell if what I was seeing was really better than what I saw on regular television.”

As cable TV companies pack ever more HD channels into limited bandwidth, some owners of pricey plasma, projector and LCD TVs are complaining that they’re not getting the high-def quality they paid for. They blame the increased signal compression being used to squeeze three digital HD signals into the bandwidth of one analog station.

HD enthusiasts crying foul over cable TV’s crunched signals

I know, I know … I have been a little or rather not as much as I would want to, been blogging.  Work has been busy and I just do not seem to have as much time as I would like.

However, I have managed to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 and it is pretty cool.  Granted this is my first post with it.

ab initio

1. from the beginning

The Space Shuttle Endeavour lights up the early morning sky at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, lifting off at 2:28 a.m.

Endeavour’s mission, STS-123, will carry two new components to the International Space Station: the first section of the Japanese Kibo lab and Canada’s two-armed robotic system, known as Dextre.

zaibatsu

1. a powerful financial and industrial conglomerate of Japam

I like Adobe Photoshop just as much as the next guy and it is really great when you need to really work with an image, modify the contrast, levels and so on. It works great when you need layers and filters … I could go on but you get the idea.

But if all I need to do is take an image, crop it, take out the red eye (which is not as simple as it sounds in Photoshop) make the image B&W and easily save it to your local system or send it off to things like Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa then I have found the coolest thing that for just that. What is it, it is … picnik

What is Picnik?

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

What can I do with Picnik?

Pretty much everything! We’ve got amazing Edit tools that can fix just about anything that could possibly go wrong with a photograph. Lacking photo-editing prowess? A bunch of our editing tools are one-click fixes, including auto- fix, exposure, colors, and red-eye. And the others, like rotate, crop, resize, and sharpening, can be controlled with easy-to-use sliders.

Move over to the Create tab and you’ll see our custom-made Effects (most of which have the ability to be painted into just the areas of your image where you want them), an awesome text tool with dozens of fonts, dozens of shapes, including seasonal shapes for holidays and events, and some super customizable frames. Not to mention the touch up tools and new Advanced Editing tools.

The best part is that is FREE — Yes FREE!!! They have a premium service for $24.95 a year. Not a month but for a whole year.