So BBC 2 here in the UK finally got to air the first and second "Heroes" episodes of Season 1 last week - probably one of the last channels in the world to do so I mean the US started Season 1 in September 2006 (yes, some 10 months ago), the episodes were available for, ahem, download mere hours later and most countries had started airing by Jan-Mar 2007.

In fact, the UK premiere of "Heroes" was actually on the subscripton-only Sci-Fi Channel and they went through the entire 23-episode run of Season 1 before BBC was even allowed to air one episode ("sloppy seconds" is how one UK newspaper quaintly put it). So we have net downloads *and* a UK cable/satellite channel already beaten the BBC to the punch in the UK, but they still decided to repeat the life out of each and every "Heroes" episode!

The first week saw the first two episodes air consecutively on BBC 2 on a Wednesday, only to be repeated the following night (ridiculous! A show shouldn't be repeated the very next day, IMHO) and yet again on Sunday evening. I think they're also showing the "next episode" on BBC 3 on Wednesdays, shortly after the one that airs on BBC 2 on Wednesdays as well (I suspect not many people know about that...).

Anyway, the sad over-repeating of "Heroes" isn't the reason I'm posting this entry up - it's actually about the mini-documentary "Heroes Unmasked" that is being produced by the BBC and each 10 minute segment airs on BBC 2 after each Wednesday episode of "Heroes". It's a *world exclusive* and has plenty of interviews with the actors and also clips from season 1 thrown in. So you'd expect such a tasty morsel to be repeated like the main "Heroes" episodes? Well, NO! Incredibly, with two channels between them (BBC 2 and 3), they have decided not to repeat any of "Heroes Unmasked", which considering the crazy repeat schedule of "Heroes" itself smacks of sheer idiocy.

Needless to say, the scheduling morons at the BBC let the first "Heroes Unmasked" start late by 7 minutes, so I lost the last 2 minutes of my recording and I was completely fuming at the lack of repeats of "Hereoes Unmasked' and the disastrous scheduling of what was supposed to be a big BBC 2 event.

This is *exactly* the circumstance that BBC's new iPlayer Beta (which I've joined to see what all the fuss is about) is supposed to help out - they keep the last 7 days of BBC progs online (don't ask me why online versions of TV programmes self-destruct after7 days - another piece of BBC ludicrosity if you ask me). Great, so I'll log in and find last Wed's progs...only to see that 9.00pm is blanked out - no Heroes or Heroes Unmasked online at all - arrrrrrgh!

Mind you, I surf/watch videos using Linux + Firefox + mplayer - the best and most secure combination available today...and completely wrong according to the Microsoft-loving BBC, who say that the iPlayer stuff can only be run using Windows XP Service Pack 2 + Internet Explorer + Windows Media Player 10! More lunacy from those BBC idiots methinks (yes, you can't use Vista, Mac OS X, Linux, Firefox, Opera, Safari or any other media player to view the iPlayer stuff - this is completely appalling for a national broadcaster with a public service remit).

So how did I get to see Heroes Unmasked's first episode then? Well, no repeats on any BBC channel, not available on the iPlayer service (or indeed *any* legal video download service in the world), so I looked on the P2P networks and what do I spy? A BBC HD copy of "Heroes Unmasked" - I downloaded it for free in 5 minutes with no DRM and viewed the final 2 minutes in quite impressive quality (better than my Freeview box can display it). *Now* you know why the BBC's iPlayer service is doomed!

WARNING: This posting contains spoilers!

The new Bionic Woman series (with Michelle Ryan in the lead role) was recently leaked onto the Net so I, ahem, got to see it probably at least 6 months before the UK airs it. It got me thinking that really this show is just far too long coming to make much of an impact nowadays.

I recently bought the first season of the original "The Bionic Woman" on DVD (only 6 pounds!) because I loved that 70's show. OK, it wasn't groundbreaking in the way "The Six Million Dollar Man" was (it's just a female spin-off), but the fact that a woman took on the lead role of a major 1970's US TV series - and in a strong role at that - was something to shout about back then.

Between the old and new series, we've had a constant stream of equally strong female "kick-ass" leading roles - "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Dark Angel" and "Alias" perhaps being the three most obvious - so some of the original's impact has been lessened some 30 years on.

So how did the first episode of Bionic Woman fare? "So-so" is probably my initial verdict - they crammed in too much into the first episode in my opinion. I'm actually quite pleased that the stroppy deaf sister of Jaime is being recast - hopefully she'll be less stroppy which annoyed me (she'll not be deaf, though that wasn't annoying). Spoliers coming....

Jaime is now the *2nd* bionic woman (first one is another female kick-ass refugee: Katie Sackhoff...ironically the female version of Starbuck in the excellent Battlestar Galactica remake), she sleeps with her boyfriend only minutes after recovering from her bionic implants (Lindsay Wagner was *never* in bed with a lover as far as I can remember!), nothing happens with her bionic ear in the entire episode and her bionic eye is way too much like Arnie's visual display in Terminator 2.

Plus points include some quite good action sequences - though having a hand-to-hand fight with Katie Sackhoff in the very first episode was surely far too early in the season? - and daring to show Jaime running at full speed (though it was in a forest and she was strangely warped by CGI meddling, don't ask me!), which is something the original bionic shows hardly ever did. I miss the classic da-da-da-da-da bionic sound effects from the old shows though - it's all completely silent this time (and no slow motion either, which was a cheap effect anyway).

I guess it'll all boil down to the writing - Battlestar Galactica showed that if you get decent scripts, you can make "seriously good sci-fi", even when the original was quite cartoonish (hey, I bought the original series on DVD!). Time will tell if "Bionic Woman" can pull off the same trick or not - I'm not so convinced about it myself. At least Michelle got to act a bit more than than her current stint in BBC 1's "Jekyll", but at this point, I still prefer Lindsay Wagner's version of the character...

I blogged earlier in the year that Picket Fences - one of the best US dramas of all time, IMHO - was finally coming out on DVD. Well, after many delays - primarily due to music rights I believe - amazon.com now has Season 1 slated for a US DVD release on 19th June.

Predictably, there's no sign whatsoever of a UK DVD release (barely anyone knows the show here in the UK, because it was never broadcast on network TV - you had to have cable/satellite in the 90's to see it). It's this sort of scenario that pushes people to source the show from "elsewhere" - if the DVD box set came out in the UK at a reasonable price, I'd snap it up, but there's zero sign of that happening.

It happens a few times a year with my favourite US TV shows - they get unceremoniously dumped by the US networks for a drop in ratings. It was particularly brutal for me in recent weeks - every single one of these shows I watch regularly (only, ahem, a day after the US) has been cancelled:

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (West Wing meets 30 Rock, nicely scripted but perhaps not too original. Suffered by airing at the same time as 30 Rock really and as silly as it is, I think 30 Rock is a bit more fun to watch than Studio 60. Mind you, Amanda Peet vs. Tina Fey - sorry, Tina, it's no contest...)

Jericho (think Survivors, but far too "clean" compared to that great 70's British sci-fi show)

The O.C. (dismal since Mischa Barton snuffed it. They probably never should have bothered with Season 4)

Day Break (Groundhog Day mixed up with 24 - stood no chance because of the necessary repetition of each episode. Final episodes stuck on the Web, which is freaking useless for non-US people - we're blocked from downloading them...no worries, there were "other routes" to get them)

In Case Of Ermergency (not particularly funny, but Kelly Hu and Lori Loughlin in the same show? I'm there...)

Veronica Mars (excellent show, hadn't yet jumped the shark yet. Where were the fans from the previous season that did stunts to rescue it? All gone over to Jericho with their nuts protest I guess, despite Jericho not really being all that great. Looks like we'll get to see the FBI trailer they planned for Season 4's possible Veronica-goes-to-The-Feds concept though. Might even be a Veronica movie in the future too!).

Drive (showed some promise, but yanked after 4 episodes in true network-knows-nothing manner)

Andy Barker, P.I. (was warming to this show, but even Conan O'Brien's pull couldn't save this)

The Black Donnelllys (ended its brief run shunted onto the Web [and ultimately onto my hard drive via another route]. Quite liked this show - Irish Sopranos if you will - and Olivia Wilde is certainly soothing on the eyes as a nice bonus)

Raines (probably a doomed concept this one - The Sixth Sense did it all in under 2 hours after all)

Big Day (really enjoyed this one, though you wondered how they'd stretch it beyond one season [someone else's wedding for Season 2? Er, pointless...])

What About Brian (I was seriously getting into this - the addition of Tiffany Thiessen to the already attractive women in the cast just made the show total eye candy as the Americans would say. Even been picked up by E4 in the UK just as it got cancelled)

Six Degrees (another one terminated and dumped on the Web - not hugely compelling really and arguably too similar to What About Brian)

3 Lbs (BBC picked up a clanger here - House, Grey's Anatomy and the should-be-killed-off-now E.R. completely dominate US primetime medical dramas and the BBC doesn't have any of them. Decided to get this, only for it to be dumped after 3 episodes - BBC seems to have aired most of them, but it really wasn't that a great of a show and the grumpy Stanley Tucci character is just too close to Laurie's surely?)

Smith (really quite liked this one - sort of Hustle/Ocean's 11 territory. Ray Liotta was good in the lead role and this one ended being Web-dumped as well)

The Wedding Bells (another show I was warming to, but maybe the Big Day crash-and-burn didn't help. David E. Kelley had a flop - that's shocking enough - but I'll give a heads up to Sarah Jones here - her Sammy character was super sexy, especially in episode 4 [The Fantasy] if I remember correctly)

Yep, that's 16 shows terminated - thanks a bunch you useless US TV execs...if it isn't some lame quiz or reality show, you idiots don't know what to do with a good quality show! Mind you, it's not much better here in the UK. For example, how the freak does My Family survive so many bleeding years when it's so cringefully unfunny? And why does Casualty survive so long and even spin-off equally dire shows like Holby City and Holby Blue when Grey's Anatomy and E.R. are so much better?

Whilst I was setting up my new laptop, the trusty 24" widescreen CRT Sony Trinitron that I've got in the downstairs lounge started playing up. At first, I thought it was the twin digital tuner hard disk recorder I had attached via SCART, but after trying different SCART sockets and cables, plugging the analogue aerial directly into the back of the Sony CRT proved that it was the set itself playing up. The symptoms were increasingly frequent picture blackouts - though the audio remained on - and when it returned, the green channel/input info appeared on the screen as if the set had lost its signal/just been turned on/had its channel changed.

It had had nearly a decade of service as a faithful analogue-only CRT set, so it was time to look for a replacement. Well, I'm a major Sony fan when it comes to TV sets: even if you have to pay a 20% premimum on their prices, they just ooze quality. So it really was just a question of buying a Sony Bravia set that would be roughly the same width and height. I eventually settled on a 26" LCD set (yes, a tape measure confirmed its WxH is the same as 24" CRT set) that Amazon UK were selling.

It came with two tuners (one digital, one analogue, though bizarrely you can't do a live picture-in-picture of the two!), a swivelling stand (handy to angle it towards you), an excellent clear/sharp picture as long you view it from more than 5 feet away and one trillion picture and sound settings that you get tempted to constantly tweak in the hope of finding picture quality nirvana.

I've posted up a fuller review here as the "rklrkl" user - it's now 4 quid less than when I bought it (I paid 529.99 pounds), but I'll claim that back via a 30 day price drop refund request

Well, I'm a bit late - OK, several weeks late - with the promised laptop review because I've been tinkering with it and have now completely replaced my old Acer T140 desktop with it. Yes, that means an external monitor (21" Philips CRT - sorry, but old school CRTs still beat LCDs for picture quality), external keyboard (picked up a Gigabye Technology US layout keyboard with a free optical mouse for only 4 pounds from Ebuyer!) and an external USB optical mouse (not the free one I got, but one I got from Ebuyer a year or so ago that's just ace).

Love the quietness of the laptop - the fan does kick in every few minutes (and if you hammer the CPU, it'll speed up the fan) to cool the unit down, but even with that minimal fan noise, I can still sleep through the night with the laptop on overnight in my bedroom - something I definitely couldn't do with the Acer desktop.

Installed 2GB RAM into the laptop - 78 quid for some Corsair Value Select SODIMMs from Ebuyer - though I had to return one of the two sticks via recorded delivery because it didn't work (the replacement was fine though). I'm running a rather bleeding edge 64-bit Ubuntu at the moment on the laptop - Feisty Fawn pointing to its dev repositories and, yep, the devs do indeed randomly break things.

I was initially worried that the Intel 950 onboard graphics had some sort of glitch that caused occasional lines to stay on the screen, but after a few weeks of updates had filtered through, it looks like it was an X server bug and no problems now.

Still using mplayer in Linux (fullscreen) to watch US TV shows and it does a sterling job on the laptop, even though its 1280x800 resolution still leaves black bars above and below a widescreen programme. For games, I tend to reboot into 32-bit Vista and once I realised that you have to install DirectX 9 in Vista (yes, it can co-exist with DirectX 10 and hence it's 100% ludicrous MS didn't ship Vista with DX 9 and 10!) to get XP games to work in Vista, then things seemed to run fairly smoothly.

I bought the Fritz 10 chess game - 17.99 quid at play.com, which I thought was a decent price for one of the strongest chess progs in the world - and the Intel graphics struggle a bit on the 3D boards which disappointed me slightly, but I was cheered up when Flatout 2 ran fine at 1024x768 with the textures/viewing distance slightly turned down (yes, I remembered to bring my saved game settings across from the old PC too). Basically, the laptops will play some games with settings turned down, but I'm not expecting the latest and greatest to run particularly well (hey, that's what my next desktop PC - a quad core with 4GB RAM - I'll be buying next year will be for ).

I'll probably replace Ubuntu with 64-bit Fedora 7 final when that's out next month, because I found Ubuntu frustratingly devoid of many packages I regularly use and I had to run Synaptic over 20 times as I kept remembering stuff that wasn't on the default media install of Ubuntu...grr... The worst thing was the lack of gcc and its associated dev tools - I can't remember the last time I installed a desktop Linux distro that didn't have those in the default install!

Overall, I'm very happy with the laptop - dual core 64-bit goodness with 2GB RAM and a gimmicky Web cam, what more could you want?...