Tag: Reviews

I recently found out from some friends of mine that our local Target was selling a $50 Philips DVD player that has an extremely simple hack you can use to change the region of the player (more on that later). As an added bonus, this player has component video. I figured at that price; I just had to check it out, so last night I headed over to Target and found the player hidden in the back corner of their “electronics” section. The shelf model was a decent, blue color but all 4 of the remaining boxed versions were a nasty neon-orange color. I also found that Target was selling them for $59.48 and oddly enough; the boxes weren’t sealed. In fact, while I was standing around there debating whether or not to actually buy the thing, I decided to open one of the boxes up and look through it. The player and all of it’s accessories were wrapped up in plastic bags and shut inside of a clear, plastic shell. I looked over the owner’s manual and at the hookups on the back of the player, confirming that this cheap, little player actually had component video. It did, so I bought the unit and a generic component video cable. I bought this generic cable, as the player only comes with an RCA audio/video cable and I opted not to spend the money on a better cable because I doubt the player will put out sufficiently good video signal to make it worth investing in a pricier cable.

$59.48 | Philips DVP320F DVD Player
$09.99 | Generic Component Video Cable
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$69.47 | SubTotal
$03.48 | IA Sales Tax
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$72.95 | Total Cost

When I got home; I immediately started hooking the player up to the rest of my A/V gear. I was expecting this to be the most painful part of the whole deal, but the component video cable let me plug the player directly into the empty plugs on the back of my TV (my other DVD player only has S-Video out) and there was an empty set of audio inputs on the my amplifier/stero unit. Plus there was still 1 free power outlet on the surge protector! 🙂

There’s a couple of things I should mention at this point:

  • This is a cheap player and some of those cost savings really show. One in particular is the back panel of the player where all the hookups are; this panel is a thin sheet of plastic and I could feel it flexing like it was going to break as I attached the power cord.
  • The remote is only slightly larger than a credit card and thinner than a CD jewel case; but don’t let the small size fool you, they packed a lot of buttons on to this little remote. This is both good and bad. Good in that the remote has lots of features; bad in that to do so all the buttons are equally tiny. Some additional notes about the remote:
  • The remote is made of a cheap plastic and feels like you could crush it with hardly a thought.
  • The remote is powered by a flat battery (like those used in watches) and that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing but opening the battery compartment reveals that the battery is held in place by a couple of plastic tongs that are part of the cover to the battery compartment. A much better solution would have been to have the batter compartment cover a seperate piece altogether that screws into place, alas Philips didn’t go that route on this player.

After getting everything hooked up; I immediately tested out the region hack that had been mentioned to me. This hack allows you to set your player to whatever region you desire and you can accomplish this by:

  1. Turn the player on.
  2. Open the disc tray, but do not insert a disc.
  3. Press 999 on the remote.
  4. Press the number of the region you want the player to use (e.g. 0 for no region).

After doing that, you should see a bit of white text appear on the screen in the upper left saying…
Region: 0 or whatever region that you were switching the player to. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any non-region1 DVDs handy to test with, so I can’t say for absolute certainty that this works now but I feel confident that it does. What I did have handy was the next disc in The Avengers – The Complete Emma Peel Megaset. I popped it in and started playing it. The video quality seemed pretty good to my eyes, but then I was watching remastered copies of 1967 color television; so your mileage might vary.

Some additional notes:

  • The DVP320F spins up much faster than my old DVD player.
  • The remote as a button that takes you directly to the root menu of the DVD. I haven’t tried it on a lot of discs yet, but it seems to work pretty damn well (hopefully allowing you to skip the “enforced” trailer watching).
  • The player officially supports normal DVDs, DVD+R, DVD+RW, Audio CDs, VCD, SVCD, Photo CDs, discs with straight MPEG files burned to them. Rumor has it that DVD-R discs will work too.
  • Unlike my old player, when you pause your movie on the DVP320F; it leaves a still image on the screen (my old player switched to a stupid graphic which looked like a piece of movie film and written on one of the frames was Intermission. I’ve always hated that about my old player.
  • The DVP320F has a zoom feature that will zoom into the center of the screen about 8 times and when and can zoom out to show more picture up to about 1/16 err… “anti-zoom”. Unfortunately, there’s only one button for this feature; so you have it press it multiple times, cycling through all zoom modes if you want to get back to the regular 1/1 zoom setting.

If I get a chance and the inclination; I’ll see about taking some pics of the player and adding them to this post. Of course, people making requests increases the odds of me doing this…

I finished reading He Shall Thunder in the Sky and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by it. I had been finding Ramses and company to be more an annoyance than an interest in some of the previous books, but in He Shall Thunder in the Sky, they felt more like complete persons in their own right which made them far more interesting. Also, there was that surprising twist about Sethos’s past which was revealed at the end of the book. I liked that, in part because it caught me so off guard and because I think Ms. Peters wrote that scene particularly well.

Overall, I give this book 4.5 out of 5 points.

Next up, I’ll be reading Ms. Peter’s next book in the Amelia Peabody mysteries, Lord of the Silent. Till next, happy page turning.

I just finished reading Mr. McKiernan’s Silver Wolf, Black Falcon and while I found it to be an enjoyable read; it was nearly as good as some of his other books (e.g. “The Eye of the Hunter“). The characters were not fleshed out as fully as had been done in previous books and in part that it likely because this book brings an end to the Mithgar saga. Alas, the book has a certain sense to it that Mr. McKiernan was tired of writing about the Mithgar world and wanted to move onto other projects. The ending in particular feels a bit rushed, but still if you’re a fan of Mr. McKiernan’s other works, then this is a good book for you to read. Overall, I give it: 3 out of 5 points.

Next up, I’ll be returning to the Egypt of early 1900’s by reading Elizabeth Peter’s He Shall Thunder In The Sky. However, since I won’t be stuck in some stupid hotel room for a week with nothing to do; I probably won’t get through this one quite as quickly as I did the last.

I finished reading Elizabeth Peter’s The Falcon at the Portal last night and while I did enjoy it; I’m finding that I like the newer books in this series less and less. The idea that Ms. Peters is the Editor of Emerson family’s personal papers and has assembled the books from the remains of Ameila’s journals and some manuscripts/letters written by Ramses & Nefret just isn’t working for me. It didn’t help that this story took a darker turn that most of the Ameila Peabody mysteries (e.g. not all of your favorite characters walked away unscathed at the end of this book). For having a darker end than I cared for and continuing this trend of assembling the story from the “incomplete and scattered papers” of the Emerson family; I’m only giving this book 3 out of 5 points.

Since I knew that I was getting a bit tired of a steady reading diet of mysteries; I didn’t bring the next Amelia Peadbody mystery with me. Instead, I’ll be reading Dennis L. McKiernan’s Silver Wolf, Black Falcon next. Since I’m stuck at the home office all week, I will most likely finish this one in the next couple of days.

I finished reading Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. the other night. I’ve been a bit busy, hence the delay in writing up my little review of the book.

First, there’s a couple of things that you should keep in mind about my opinion on this book:

  • My general reading interests keep me firmly planted in the fiction section, so this was quite unlike anything I’ve read
  • Prior to reading this book, I have had little to no direct exposure to Franken’s work.
  • I didn’t vote for Bush.
  • I don’t like the way the Bush administration has been handling things since they came into power.
  • I am not a lawyer or an election official but I still think the 2000 presidential election had some fishy things going on in it (particularly in Flordia).

Now that I’ve got those disclaimers out of the way, I can tell you that I greatly enjoyed this book and will definately be looking at borrowing the rest of Franken’s books (from friends or my local library). Franken’s sense of humor and sharp sarcasm really struck a chord with me. That I agreed with a lot of his points throughout the book, didn’t hurt either. One of the things that I really liked about the book was how well Franken (and his team of Havard students) documented all the quotes that Franken used, via footnotes at the bottom of the pages and in the bibliography at the end of the book. It really gave the book a feeeling of professionalism that frankly, I wasn’t expecting. From what I’d heard about the book via the media; I was expecting it to be more along the lines of drinking burnt coffee made with reused grinds rather than the smooth latte that it went down as. However, that is not to say that the book is without it’s faults.

When you turn the page to a new chapter, you can expect it to have little or no connection to the previous chapter; this makes for a very rough transition between chapters and reduces the readibility of the book. Also, at points Franken lowers himself to the level of the people he’s complaining about in the book (the Right) by resorting to childish namecalling. Generally, he does it after he’s just finished quoting somebody from the the Right do it and walked you through several paragraphs to show how wrong that person from the Right was. Sometimes it’s even funny when he does it; however overall, it’s not a technique that works for me. I’d rather have seen him stay above that sort of thing and instead just continue to use things that the Right have said to show their inconsistencies and stupidities.

Well, that’s all for now (my break’s over and I need to get back to work). I’ll be reading Elizabeth Peter’s The Falcon at the Portal next.