Comcast owns every channel of communication that enter and leaves my house (except my mobile phone service and U.S. mail). They’ve got my internet, VOIP, and TV all to themselves. What a great opportunity to provide convergence and integration of all of this content and across all of these services!

Instead, they offer nothing of the sort. That makes me mad. Not only do they not provide anything impressive, they don’t even offer anything better than adequate. And some of their services are downright horrible. I stay with them because I don’t really have other viable options and I will admit that the convenience of a single billing package is nice.

Although I’m satisfied, but not thrilled, with my internet, VOIP and cable TV, the Comcast DVR experience is so terrible that it makes me think poorly about the entire company. The Motorola DVR that I rent from Comcast is an inexcusable piece of junk. I can forgive poor UI design (to a certain extent, anyway). I’ve been in this industry long enough to see that a good UI can be an advantageous differentiator, but also that a product with a poor UI can succeed if the core technology and performance is good enough to make up for the UI deficiencies.

The Comcast DVR has neither of these. The UI is awful in many ways (that would be a long article in itself). But even worse, the stupid thing is constantly failing in core functionality. A couple days ago, I noticed that the clock on the faceplate wasn’t showing the correct time. For some reason, the DVR’s clock had stopped or it wasn’t registering the correct time. The primary purpose of this device is to help me manage my TV schedule. Um, that is completely dependent on knowing the time. The outcome of this is that several of my schedule programs failed to be recorded. I had to reboot the DVR to get it right again. This is a complete failure of the device, not some UI difficulty. It completely failed to do exactly what it is meant to do.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t all that important. It’s only TV shows that I’m missing. But there is no excuse for this type of bug. There’s nothing difficult about this. It’s simply shodding quality control. It’s not like they need the latest and greatest processing chips or any other kind of technological advancement. It’s pretty basic stuff with really sloppy implementation, telling me that Comcast and Motorola just don’t care. I want you to care. Please care.

I came across this nice mod of a Guitar Hero controller and I ended up browsing the site for a while. Lots of fun stuff at instructables. Good times.

Yikes, it’s been a while since I wrote one of these things.

This one is about the Novint Falcon. I’ve been pretty excited waiting for this to launch and ship. As a reminder, the Falcon is a consumer-level haptic device with 3-degrees of freedom. It’s incredibly inexpensive (something like $250) for what it claims to offer and the hope is that this is the breakthrough that brings haptics to the masses.

I received mine a couple weeks ago and finally got around to trying it out this weekend. Installation was easy and it looks nice enough (though a lot larger than I imagined - didn’t think it would be as big as my head). Unfortunately, I regretfully must declare that I’m very disappointed in what it offers. The actual performance is acceptable, but not stunning. Pretty much in line with what I hoped for at this price point, but it didn’t exceed my expectations.

The real disappointment was in the bundled applications that came with it. The tutorial presented the basic “feel spheres of different textures” and “feel the inertia of a ball on a rubber band” demos that have long made rounds within the haptics communities. The problem is that these are gimmicks. They don’t provide any utility in the consumer market space and do nothing to lift haptics out of its gimmicky niche.

The bundled games weren’t any better. The ones I tried used haptics in ways where force-feedback was not essential to the gameplay (again, making the effect gimmicky) and in most cases, didn’t seem to be helpful in making the game more compelling. Note - I have not tried out all of the games yet, so if anybody has a recommendation for one that will blow my mind, please speak up.

Please give me “Delete All” for my iPhone email.

Thank you.