An airport story

Dave Farquhar Society ,

I found a link to a six-week-old story by Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) about an adventure at an airport.
Long story short: Jillette got grabbed in the crotch by a security guard. Whether it was intentional or not, when Jillette pointed it out, the guard went on a power trip. But touching someone’s crotch without permission is assault. Even if you’re a post-9/11 airport security inspector. The big question is whether someone can be charged with assault while working that particular job.

A juicy quote: “[F]reedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I’ll spend to find out how to get people more of it.”

As I read it, I couldn’t help but remember some stories Charlie told me about flying in and out of Israel. I don’t recall whether he said he was searched, but he was interviewed. It’d be a whole lot better if he’d tell the stories, but he said at the end of the interview, he felt like a terrorist.

They’d point at random people and ask if he was with them, and if he answered yes, they’d ask for the person’s name. If I were traveling with a group of 50 people and just met some of them, I’d get uncomfortable. (I’d also answer the question wrong.) Sometimes they would say the other person had told them something outrageous about him.

That line of questioning would make anyone with pure motives uncomfortable. They didn’t seem to be as interested in Charlie’s answers as much as they were interested in how he answered them.

Now, when I go through airport security here in the States, I always get screened. Maybe I set off some kind of religious zealot alarm or something. I don’t know. But they always want to test my shoes and my carry-on for explosive properties. And I’m always carrying lots of electronics (a laptop computer, still and video cameras, and, with me, you never know what else), so they want to see them working, to make sure I haven’t figured out how to build a bomb into a Micron TransPort laptop.

So it’s not much fun for me to get onto an airplane. I try to be as gracious as I can, because I know these guys get more lip from people than probably anybody else in the world and I know giving them more isn’t going to get me anywhere.

Neither will putting vile and disgusting things in my luggage so that they have to touch them when they look through my stuff. That’s really immature.

There are some things I’d be packing anyway that probably do work in my favor. There’s my Bible (single white Protestant males aren’t exactly known for blowing up airplanes), and when I think to do it, I wear a cross, for the same reason. I figure since, legal or not, constitutional or not, politically correct or not, there’s profiling going on and nothing’s going to stop it, so I might as well make it work in my favor.

The last time I went through airport security I had a brief and nice conversation with the security cop about video cameras. Yes, I have had a nice conversation with an airport security troll. It’s possible. I hadn’t given him any trouble so I guess I seemed like a fairly nice guy, and he liked my camera, so he asked about it. And let’s face it, by asking me about my camera he was paying me a compliment.

I try to be as polite and nice as possible to everyone I can, whenever I can (there are times when I’m not very capable of that). And I’ve found that most people–not all people, but most–want to be nice to strangers and will be if given the excuse. They’ll just as quickly be not-nice if given the excuse. That’s true of the checker at the grocery store and it’s true of the airport security troll.

Now I don’t know if Penn Jillette got an attitude with the guy in the airport or not. I wasn’t there, so I have no way of knowing. I can think of some people I’ve had the misfortune of meeting or corresponding with who’d have real problems in an airport because of their attitudes. Some of them are twice my age, but they still need to grow up.

Personally, I’m willing to give up some convenience–within reason–to keep the plane I’m on from becoming a missile. The problem I have with a lot of civil liberties advocates is that many of them forget that my individual rights end as soon as my exercise of them starts infringing on someone else’s individual rights. Sometimes one individual’s rights trump another’s.

If the owner of an airplane doesn’t want me on the plane because s/he doesn’t like the color of my shoes, then that’s his or her right. If I want to carry an armory with me when I travel, then I can get my own plane. Most freedoms have always been for those who can afford them.

The biggest problem I have with the current state of airport security is that I think there’s a better way.

One, take the feds out of the equation. I can’t think of a single airline that can afford the financial hit of having an airplane blown up at this point in time. Airlines have a whole lot more at stake than the federal government does. Let them handle their own security. If the feds want to “help,” then fine. Give the airlines money to pay the salaries of their security people. But make the security people accountable to the airline, not the government.

Two, change the approach. The U.S. approach looks for weapons. The problem is, that’s changing all the time. Weapons used to be guns and knives and pipe bombs. Then it was anything that could cut. Then it was shoes. It’s a moving target and it’s always just a matter of time before some terrorist organization gets around it until we cut off the terrorists’ air supply by not buying oil. Since we like our gas guzzlers too much, that’ll never happen.

The Israeli approach doesn’t look for weapons. It looks for terrorists. And it doesn’t really differentiate between armed terrorists and unarmed.

Israel definitely has its problems, but safety on its airplanes isn’t one of them.

This is a blog

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

News flash: This is a blog.

It appears that some people who post their news and opinions online on a daily or occasional basis have problems with the label “weblog” or “blog” and want to distance themselves from it as much as possible.

The argument invariably goes like this: Bloggers aren’t serious. The barrier for entry is low; one need not have much technical knowledge to get started, and since the barrier for entry is low, a blogger may not necessarily be a professional anything, and, by some opinions, might not be qualified to say much of anything. So the people who do what bloggers do but reject the label, presumably because they want to be taken more seriously, try to distance themselves from the phenomenon.

It’s similar in a way to my typical argument against talk radio. Most of the people whose opinions matter to me don’t have time to be calling in to radio talk shows.

The difference, I think, between blogs and talk radio is the way you filter through the stuff you care about. You can’t really do that with stuff that’s broadcast to you, other than blindly fumbling through station presets, but there’s no guarantee that the guy talking on the next station is going to have anything better to say than the one you came from.

Finding the good blogs is much easier. Visit a site like blo.gs and click on the most popular link. Search for a blog you read and like, and you can find out what blogs are “related” to it, based on what other blogs people who track that blog also track. You can go here to find some blogs that people who like my stuff also like.

And almost every blog–including mine, now–has a blogroll: a list of blogs the owner reads and recommends personally. See the same blog on multiple blogrolls, and you’ll start to get an idea who regularly has compelling things to say.

Or you can use Google. Google searches blogs just like it searches any other Web site. So far this month, more of my traffic comes from Google than from any other way. I have no way of knowing how many people who stumble upon this site from Google become daily visitors. That depends on whether I consistently deliver content that’s meaningful to them. It has nothing to do with what I call myself.

And getting back to the argument that serious professionals don’t blog, if the likes of San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor, professors Lawrence Lessig and Ed Felten, software pioneers Dan Bricklin and Ray Ozzie, InfoWorld columnist Jon Udell, and former Byte columnist Scot Hacker aren’t serious professionals, then frankly I don’t know who is. I’d be flattered to ever be mentioned in the same sentence as any one of them.

Compare their work to that of one large blog-like community, some of whose members violently reject the blog label as too amateurish. There you’ll find people who post new content every few months or so (or who have abandoned their sites altogether), or you’ll find people who talk about their household chores or their pets or what they ate for dinner as often as they talk about serious, professional matters.

And if you examine the typical blog versus the typical daynotes site, most blogs have sophisticated navigation, comments systems, archiving, integrated search, categorization, centralized notification (so you can visit one place, such as blo.gs, set up a list of favorites, and find out when your favorite sites have updated) and other niceties that make it easier to sift through the information they contain. That’s rare in the daynotes circuit. But without those niceties, given a few years’ worth of entries, the information contained inside can be at once substantial and overwhelming. Wisdom and insights are nice things, but they’re worthless if you can’t find them.

To compare the two aforementioned lists is to invite a butt-kicking. Who looks amateurish now?

Let’s face it: “blog” or “weblog” is just a word. Nothing else. To use a pretentious metaphor, you don’t see Rolls-Royce distancing itself from the word “car” just because they don’t want to be associated with Kia uses the label now and Yugo used the label in the past. Rolls-Royce raises the bar and Yugo definitely lowered it. But both products are machines with four wheels, an engine, and seats, designed for transportation.

Whatever the label, you’re talking about someone who keeps a journal online for all comers to read, and whatever the label, there’s no guarantee who has or doesn’t have compelling things to say.

Power supply secrets

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

A good question came up here yesterday: How do you know when your power supply is causing problems? There may be many power supply secrets, but that’s the one most important to know.

There are lots of symptoms of an under-rated power supply: frequent BSODs, spontaneous reboots for no reason, and the screen going black and the system crashing. A failing power supply can also cause other components in the system to fail much more frequently than they should. But generally you’ll see those other symptoms earlier.

Have you ever heard those horror stories about a lemon PC that’s had virtually every component inside it replaced at least once and it still doesn’t work right? Usually you can head off those kinds of problems. The trick is to replace the power supply after seeing two components fail.

In the previous story here, reader Glaurung asked if his IBM Aptiva’s 100-watt power supply might be causing him problems. He observed that two CD-ROM drives died in the system. I think it is.

IBM had a bad habit of skimping too much on the power supplies in its Aptiva and PS/1 lines. The business-class IBM PC line, in my experience, is good quality.

I don’t want to claim to know more about building a PC than IBM. But in that case I’d be replacing that power supply with something bigger. First check to make sure factory power supply doesn’t have any funky auxiliary connectors on it. A small few, especially those that mount their expansion slots on riser boards, do. Assuming yours doesn’t, a 400W unit from a reputable maker like Antec or Sparkle should only run $35 and prevent future peripheral death.

Usually, a low-power power supply becomes a problem when you start expanding. If you start with a system from a reputable maker (particularly a business-class system), the power supply ought to have enough juice to power everything they put in the box. You’re more likely to run into problems once you add a second hard drive and a CD burner. Some clone shops skimp on the power supply to save costs. The consumer machines you see in retail stores (like Compaq Presarios) typically have skimpier power supplies than business desktops (like Compaq Deskpros).

Whitebox systems built by your friendly neighborhood local clone shop vary. A lot of clone shops pride themselves on quality and build better computers than any of the big name brands. Other clone shops pride themselves on being cheap and cut every corner imaginable. The power supply is usually first.

While there are some really nasty motherboards out they aren’t as bad as they were in the past. Most causes of poor reliability in recent systems are due to cheap, commodity power supplies or cheap, commodity memory. PC Chips is notorious for making bottom-feeder motherboards. But given the choice between a computer with a PC Chips board and a quality power supply and quality memory or a computer with an Asus board with a no-name power supply and memory, I’d take my chances with the PC Chips.

Cheap PC upgrade options

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Cheap PC upgrades
Quick: What do you do when a friend or relative has a five-year-old PC that’s just barely inadequate and you want to bring them up to something fairly current without spending much money?

Options vary, depending on the PC. And I get this question really often, but the best option tends to change pretty frequently.

Many five-year-old brand-name PCs use an ATX or MicroATX form factor. You can identify ATX and MicroATX by looking at the back; if the keyboard, mouse, serial and parallel ports are all on the same backplane next to the expansion slots, it’s ATX.

If those ports are all mounted on metal slot covers, it’s probably AT.

AT boards are a tough find these days; I’ve seen Asus boards at www.softwareandstuff.com that max out at a 700 MHz VIA C3 processor in the $60-$70 range. That’s enough speed for word processing and e-mail and Web browsing (read: what 90% of people are interested in) and the price is pretty good. If you’re trying to escape a 64 MB memory limit and/or a 233 MHz processor ceiling, one of these boards plus a 128-meg DIMM can be a very nice upgrade for $100. One of these boards plus a 7200-rpm hard drive will be enough of an upgrade to make the person’s head spin, and remember, if a system is that old, its hard drive is probably near the end of its life anyway. That’ll increase the cost of the upgrade to closer to $170.

If the system is ATX already, or if you’re willing to buy a new case, your options increase dramatically. It’s easy to find an AMD-based board from the likes of Chaintech, Shuttle, and MSI at Newegg.com for $50-$60. AMD Duron processors start at around $30; Athlon XPs start at around $60. You can also find some closeout ATX mobo/CPU combos at places like softwareandstuff.com and compgeeks.com.

Be careful if you buy too much motherboard and CPU; you may have to get an AMD-approved power supply.

The upside to buying a new case and motherboard is current flexibility and future upgradability. You should still be able to buy something to fit in an ATX case for years to come–remember, the basic AT form factor was the standard for IBM-compatible PCs from 1981 to 1997 or so (though in the early years it wasn’t called that) and the ATX form factor, unlike its predecessor, was designed with longevity in mind.

Another inexpensive option can be to buy a newer, but still used, system. It’s fairly easy to find Pentium II and low-end Pentium III-class machines for $100-$150 or so from places like compgeeks.com and pcsurplusonline.com and usually you’re getting former office machines that were pretty well maintained and replaced during an upgrade cycle. If a system is so old as to have few, if any components beyond a keyboard and mouse worth salvaging and you’re not terribly comfortable ripping out and replacing parts anyway, that can be a good option on a shoestring. The ideal system in this situation would be a recognizable name brand and true ATX form factor (Dell uses a weird pinout on its power supplies), but at this price point, you can’t be picky if you want something now because the selection’s always thin and quantities limited. There’ll always be more next week, but next week’s selection will always differ from this week’s.

And of course there’s always the Wal-Mart $199 special. You can pick up a legal copy of Windows cheaply at www.softwareandstuff.com if you don’t want to mess with Lindows or Lycoris Linux. For your money you get a very basic 700 MHz computer built by Microtel. A big-brand used machine will usually have slightly better-quality components, but for some people the extra speed and longer warranty will be worth it.

The downside with buying a complete budget system, new or used, is that the hard drive is often a low-end model. On low-end systems, the hard drive is usually either the biggest or second biggest bottleneck, so a motherboard swap combined with a hard drive upgrade can be the best performance option, even if it ends up being more expensive than replacing the big box outright.

How to connect a C-64 to a modern TV’s S-Video input

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , ,

In the 1980s, a computer monitor offered a clearer picture than a TV by eliminating the need to modulate/demodulate the video signal, which caused degradation. But in 2003, it’s next to impossible to find affordable composite monitors for 20-year-old computers, and when you can find them, their size pales in comparison to a $99 TV. Why bother with a really old, curvy 13″ monitor when you can retro-compute in luxury on a flat 19″ TV?
Fortunately, if a TV offers composite jacks, you can connect a computer directly to it. No tricks involved–you connect it just like you would a VCR.

But Commodore 8-bit computers (the 64, 128, and Plus/4) used a trick to get a clearer picture: They seperated the chroma and luma signals. This is exactly what S-Video does today. So it’s possible to get a better-still picture out of a Commodore, if your TV has S-Video jacks.

Note: Older C-64s had a 5-pin video connector that only provided straight composite. Those connect just like a VIC-20. Don’t modify it to provide S-Video, the machine is worth much more unmodified.

By far the easiest way to connect a Commodore to S-Video is to buy a cable. They’re common on Ebay for about $20.

You can also make your own if you want. Making video cables isn’t difficult, assuming you have decent soldering skills. Usual disclaimers apply: I make no guarantee as to the accuracy of this information. I believe my sources are accurate but I don’t have a working Commodore to try this on right now. Connecting the cables wrong should only result in lots of noise and lots of snow on your TV screen, but if you somehow mess up your computer, it’s not my responsibility.

Later C-64s, C-128s and Plus/4s used an 8-pin DIN connector. S-Video uses a 4-pin mini-DIN connector, the same connector used on Macintosh keyboards from about 1986-1997.

If you already have a Commodore video cable, you can easily make an adapter. Get a 4-pin mini-DIN connector and two female RCA plugs, red and yellow. Connect S-Video pin 3 to the center of the yellow plug. Connect pin 2 to the outside of the yellow plug. Connect pin 4 to the center of the red plug, and pin 1 to the outside of the red plug.

If you don’t have a cable but can locate the appropriate connectors, you can make a cable like so:

   Commodore              S-Video

        2                  4   3
     4     5              2     1
   1    8    3
     6     7

  (solder side)        (solder side)

Commodore pin 1 goes to S-Video pin 3 (luma)
Commodore pin 6 goes to S-Video pin 4 (chroma)
Commodore pin 2 goes to S-Video pins 1 and 2 (ground)

Commodore pin 3 goes to the center of an RCA connector for audio. Connect the outside of the RCA connector to Commodore pin 2.

To make a straight composite cable for a C-64 or VIC-20 (the VIC had a 5-pin plug, and so did early 64s–the later plug is backwards compatible with this 5-pin plug), connect Commodore pin 4 to the center of a yellow male RCA plug. Connect Commodore pin 2 to the outside of the yellow plug. Connect Commodore pin 3 to the center of a white RCA male plug, and Commodore pin 2 to the outside of the white plug.

Looking back on 2002

Dave Farquhar General

It’s been an interesting year.
The biggest change, obviously, is that I now know how it feels to have a six-figure debt. For those who are curious, it feels better than renting.

I started dating again, and while this relationship isn’t yet my longest-ever, this one certainly feels a lot better than my longest-ever, which was the first one to ever force me to ask the question, “Is this better than nothing?” and then answer, “No.” That was two and a half years ago.

In the process of dating again, I had to ask and answer that question twice.

We had a round of layoffs at work. I escaped the chopping block this time. I do believe there will be another round and I’m not at all convinced that upper management is smart enough to not cut our department. And yes, I have an exit plan.

The inescapable tide of Windows XP rendered my book obsolete.

My book seems to have gone officially out of print (I don’t know if it’s customary for publishers to tell authors those kinds of things) and it’s started to show up in remainder bins. My monthly statements are finally giving hard sales figures. At remainder-bin prices, it’s selling again. But I think it’s been more than a year since I’ve cared.

I joined my church’s board of directors this year. We haven’t fallen apart as a result.

I moved this website to a completely database-driven content management system. I really like the results. I can envision a site that does a better job at letting people get at its content, but this one is on its way to that ideal.

I questioned publicly whether I should move from b2 to Movable Type. For now, I’m going to wait until b2 hits version 1.0 and then consider it again. While MT is the industry leader, I don’t think its lead over b2 is insurmountable. And neither b2 nor MT can reach that ideal I’m envisioning without modification.

I alienated some longterm readers this year. That’s par for the course, and I know that’s something that happens just about every year. But I alienated even more people in college than I do today. I’ve always believed you can alienate some of your readers or you can bore all of them. It bothers me when it happens, but there usually isn’t a whole lot you can do about it once the damage is done. In every case I can think of, it was a matter of somebody being disappointed that I didn’t share their opinion about something or think the way they did.

I’m human. I reserve the right to be wrong.

On the other hand, I seem to have gained more in the past year than I’ve lost, as my daily visits is a generally upward trend. (I stopped keeping track about mid-year last year, then picked up again mid-year this year.) It peaked in October; I lost a couple of days in November and December due to problems upstream of me and that hurt my numbers.

There’ll be changes around here next year, but it’ll have little to do with what I say or how the site looks and everything to do bringing more of my content from the past under this roof and with finding related content more quickly and easily.

A sizable number of my readers run Linux now, and I have more computers running Linux than I have running Windows. I expect both trends will continue. Open source has been a growing trend since 1997 and there’s no reason to believe that won’t continue.

I entered the 21st century and got a DVD player and a digital camera.

Here’s to a better 2003.

Need public domain art?

Dave Farquhar Copyright

It finally occurred to me to type “public domain” into the Wikipedia and see what came up. Lots of things, that’s what.
Among them I found a mother lode of sources of public domain images. So if you need art a Web page you’re working on and want to be free and clear, or for some other project, there’s the place to go.

The Library of Congress’ American Memory site is especially helpful. Key in whatever you want, and let it search. If the photo was taken by or for a government agency or is older than 1924, you can use it in your own work.

Note that panning and zooming on a still in a video project can be extremely effective. It’s a trick I employ all the time in order to avoid showing a talking head.

Another look at Mozilla’s anti-spam features

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

I downloaded and installed the most recent Mozilla 1.3 alpha build today (actually from Dec. 12).
For the past few weeks, I’d been using a nightly build I downloaded back in early November. It was buggy, but without assurance that any given night’s build would be any more or less stable than what I already had, I stuck with the familiar.

Initial impressions: The spam filtering still isn’t complete but it works (it just won’t act on the spam it finds–yet). The speed is comparable to anything else I’ve used, and one annoying bug in the mail client is gone. I’ve grown so used to having the spam filtering that I’ll put up with almost anything in order to have it–I get an unbearable amount of spam, and Mozilla quickly identifies it all for me. After a couple of months of using it, I think it’s pretty safe to say only one or two messages per week get past it anymore. I can definitely live with that.

Once when I visited news.google.com in the browser and clicked on a link, after I hit the back button I got a confusing “The file / can’t be found”. The nightly builds I used previously had the same bug. So far that’s the only one I’ve found, and the workaround is to visit a couple other sites, then go back to the troublesome one.

I’ve only been messing with it for a few hours so I can’t make any sound judgments on its quality. But as an evolutionary, not revolutionary, upgrade from its predecessor, it ought to be fairly stable.

If you’re desperate to get unburied from beneath an avalanche of spam and you’re willing to put up with a few quirks from your Web browser in order to do it, this is the most effective filter I’ve found yet.

Giving something back to the intellectual commons

Dave Farquhar Copyright

As I bounced between social responsibilities, work, and personal responsibilities, I spent some time over in the Wikipedia this week.
I guess part of it is just a sense of duty. I use a lot of GPL software and expect to be tapping the public domain very soon for some upcoming projects. I’m not in a position yet to contribute anything back to the public domain.

But I get extremely annoyed at companies like Disney that see the public domain just as something to be appropriated without ever putting anything back into the pool that benefited them.

I can’t program, and at the moment all of my intellectual property is tied up by the rights of others. But I can write. And the Wikipedia has holes. My knowledge can fill in some of those holes.

So I would encourage anyone who has benefitted from GPL software (and if you use the Web, you’ve used Linux and benefitted from it, even if you’re a Windows-only kind of guy or gal) to head over to the Wikipedia and take a look around. Punch something into its search engine to see if you know anything it doesn’t know about. That even means useless trivia. Punch in your favorite sports team or your favorite band. If nothing comes up, add it. I find the Wikipedia to be strong on current events and current pop culture, and strong on things like presidential history where there are government documents in the public domain that can be appropriated, but not so strong on recent history.

Many wikipedia articles are elaborately written. I spent a couple of hours this morning researching and writing an entry on my great-grandfather’s boss, Mark Hanna. I’m sure even more work went into some of the others.

But if you’re old enough to remember encyclopedias that were printed on paper, you’ll remember that some encyclopedia articles gave little more information than your typical dictionary: Dates of birth and death and one notable achievement. On the Web, where storage space is unlimited and there’s no reason not to go into a fair amount of depth, these articles aren’t ideal. But they’re better than nothing. Someone else is more likely to expand on something that already exists than to create it.

Ways to save money on your DVD player

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , , , ,

If you’re the only person left in the United States without a DVD player, you might want some tips on how to buy them.
I know, I know, since this year was the year of the DVD player, this information would have been a lot more helpful a couple of months ago. I don’t always think of things as quickly as I should.

Believe it or not, your best bet for a DVD player is very likely the cheapest one on the shelf at your local store, the one that’s a brand you’ve never heard of and made in China.

The main reason most people want a cheap DVD player and don’t know it is old TVs. I’ve got a Magnavox console TV that looks like it should be sitting in a shag-carpeted living room with an Atari 2600 connected to it. DVD players have S-Video and composite outputs. The only words of that sentence my ancient TV understands are “have” and “and”.

There are two ways you can put composite inputs on an old TV like mine. You can connect an RF modulator to it–that’s an accessory you can buy at Radio Shack for $30 or most consumer electronics stores for $25 that plugs into your TV’s antenna jack and gives you composite and possibly S-Video inputs.

The second way to put composite inputs on an old TV is to connect a VCR to it. Chances are you already have a VCR. Every VCR I’ve ever seen has composite inputs, which are intended to allow you to chain two VCRs to a TV.

But most brand-name DVD players have copy protection circuitry that detects the presence of a VCR and degrades the picture to an unacceptable level. This is because Hollywood is convinced the only reason someone would connect a DVD player and a VCR in tandem is to make copies of DVDs. And since the lack of composite inputs on old TVs presents an opportunity to sell more stuff, and most big-name makers of DVD players also make stuff like TVs, they’re more than happy to comply.

The brands you’ve never heard of, however, really don’t give a rip. They care about making stuff cheap. And, well, extra circuitry means extra cost. So that’s one reason to leave it out. And China is notorious for thumbing its nose at Western copyright law anyway. (I find it really frightening that totalitarian China is more interested in my rights as a consumer than the supposed Republic of the United States, but that’s another topic.)

Connecting a VCR to a TV through its antenna doesn’t noticeably affect picture quality, because VHS’ picture quality is lower than that of broadcast TV. Connecting a DVD player through the antenna–whether through a VCR or an aftermarket RF modulator–does reduce picture quality. But the picture will still look better than VHS-quality.

Every time I’ve looked, I’ve been able to find no-name DVD players for $60-$65. Name-brand ones cost closer to $100. So a cheapie could potentially save you $70, if it saves you from having to buy an RF modulator.

But even if your TV has composite and/or S-Video inputs, you probably still want the ability to chain your DVD player through your VCR. Because chances are you still want to keep your VCR around for recording TV shows (don’t tell Hollywood) and watching all your old tapes that you don’t re-buy on DVD.

An awful lot of TVs that have those inputs have two sets of inputs, one on the front and one in the back. If you ever connect your camcorder to your TV, you want to save your front-mounted inputs for that, to save fumbling around. If you have a videogame console that you’re in the habit of disconnecting and reconnecting, you want your front inputs for that.

Having the ability to chain your new DVD player to your old VCR gives you more options in setting things up. Options are good.

If you just got a DVD player and you’re having problems with it, you might just want to exchange it for a no-name model.

Finally, if you’re into foreign films and want to import DVDs to get movies you can’t get in the United States yet (if ever), you’re much more likely to be able to disable region codes on a no-name cheapie than you are on a big name brand.

What about reliability? Yes, a $60 no-name model is probably more likely to break than a $100 brand-name one. How much more likely? It’s hard to say. Is it worth the risk? Absolutely. In all likelihood, by the time your cheapie breaks, you’ll be able to buy a replacement cheapie for 40 bucks. Or, since many cheapies use a plain old IDE DVD-ROM drive like your PC, and that drive is the only mechanical part in a DVD player, you stand an awfully good chance of being able to fix the thing yourself. It’s pretty easy to find an IDE DVD drive for $50 or less right now. Within 18 months, I expect them to be selling for $20. If not sooner.

Finally, a tip: If your TV has S-Video inputs, use them. Using S-Video instead of the more conventional composite gives you a sharper picture and better color accuracy. With VHS, this doesn’t make a lot of difference because the format is really low-quality to begin with, and tapes wear out and reduce it even more. There are a lot of things that can go wrong before the signal even starts to travel down that set of cables.

Since DVD has much higher resolution and doesn’t wear out, you’ll notice the difference.