Charles Jade: Why can’t Apple blog? 
I’m with Josh Marshall, Kerry has nothing to apologize for.
Olbermann: “Kerry called them stupid and they were too stupid to know he called them stupid.”
I think in retrospect, the Democrats came to life when Bill Clinton did the interview with Chris Wallace at Fox. Throwing punches is something people don’t expect from Demos, and it’s refreshing. Kerry said something that is totally, obviously true. Bush better watch out if he decides to make this an issue, it’s likely to backfire. All Kerry has to say is that he’ll apologize after Bush apologizes for the deaths of 2800 young Americans in Iraq.
Hil introduces the RSS Pumpkin. Ha!
I was going to pre-order a Zune player, but I checked to see if it would work with a Mac, and apparently not. Arrrgh. What kind of competitor has Microsoft become. What if someone prefers a Mac desktop, thinks it’s possible to do better than the iPod, and wants to give Zune a whirl? I have to use a PC? Oy oy. NFW. What if my opinion influences others? I imagine that many of the opinion leaders in this market already use Macs. I doubt if I’m willing to dust off the PC just to try out their audio player.
There was a political bloggers meetup at Berkman last night in Cambridge.
Ed Cone interviews PodShow CEO, Ron Bloom.
HDMI question 
I bought and HDMI to HDMI cable to connect my Denon DVD player to the Sony TV.
I tried hooking the two together, but no luck, when I clicked through all the video sources on the TV, the output of the DVD, which I could hear, never showed up on the screen.
I’ve read all I could find in the two manuals with no clues. Any ideas?
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Randy Stewart on October 31, 2006 at 8:37 am
My bet is a bad cable.
Randy
Posted by Will Cate on October 31, 2006 at 9:10 am
re Zune: You may not want to go to the trouble, but you could run WinXP under Parallels or Boot Camp and feed your Zune player that way…
Posted by Peter Janick on October 31, 2006 at 9:22 am
I had the same problem hooking up my Toshiba DVD to my Toshiba HDTV. The problem was setting the output of the Toshiba DVD player to HDMI instead of composite. They ports were not active at the same time as one might assume!! I had to read the manuals 4 times without figuring it out and only succeeded by going through every conceivable option on the DVD player (which I had to do with composite cable connected so I could see what was selected). I only knew I succeeded when the picture disappeared from the composite connection but reappeared when I switch the TV to the HDMI connection.
Posted by kosso on October 31, 2006 at 9:25 am
Zune:
No ‘proper’ wifi
No rss/podcast support (nor in Window Media Player 11)
Cant run on Mac and PC.
Nice screen though.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Did the original iPod work on a Windows PC at the outset? I seem to remember it didn’t.
Posted by kosso on October 31, 2006 at 9:27 am
I believe there are two types of HDMI.
HDMI-A and HDMI-B
Sounds like you have a mismatch.
Posted by Dan on October 31, 2006 at 9:52 am
Make sure that the HDMI source on the DVD player and TV are both enabled/selected. My TV, by default, will only cycle through the inputs that I have previously enabled.
Posted by Dave Winer on October 31, 2006 at 10:23 am
Peter, I think you’re right, but no success yet, I’ve been fiddling around, re-reading the docs over and over, and I keep finding mistakes. Too many choices. The TV has three HDMI jacks (luckily the DVD player only has one) and aparently each of the three is for different situations, but the docs are reallllly sparse.
A side-note, there’s a real opportunity for an all-in-one system where no configuration is needed. Someday someone will make such a product. A TV with satellite speakers and a builtin player (and a builtin mac too, of course).
Posted by Dave Fourputt on October 31, 2006 at 11:15 am
It’s Bush’s fault. 🙂
Posted by kosso on October 31, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I didn’t know Bush still made TV sets ;p
Posted by Ryan Tate on October 31, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Dave of course the logical company to make such a system is Apple. I predicted they would go into car stereos but it hasn’t happened. I could see them going into home AV. They are already there, really, just need that last step. They are a design and interface company now.
Posted by Michael Markman on October 31, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Here’s Kerry’s statement. But it’s what needed saying. Pretty rapid response. Catch it in the same news cycle.
I remember at Gnomedex, when Marc Canter popped up told Sen. Edwards that Democratic politicians needed to grow a pair. I’d say growth is happening.
Posted by Wes Felter on October 31, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Yep, an all-in-one system that really works would be a great improvement. (Just one example pet peeve about home theater: almost all HDTVs have non-removable, built-in speakers that will never be used because the sound goes through a separate receiver.)
But it would have to come from a company outside the AV mainstream, because they are all trapped in analog/backward-compatible thinking.
Posted by Jeffrey Jones on October 31, 2006 at 2:41 pm
If you can hear the audio, but have no picture it is most likely a bad cable.
-Jeff
Posted by Jacob Levy on October 31, 2006 at 3:48 pm
This is not in response to anything Dave wrote, just an interesting video of what *really* is going on in Iraq. Kids loving our soldiers for bringing freedom? Nah, more like kids throwing rocks at our soldiers and they’re under orders to not do anything about it. Totally crazy.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=065a93ef9a
Posted by Eric on October 31, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Careful with that HDMI stuff. A friend of mine has a top-of-the-line Denon receiver with HDCP/HDMI and all that jazz. It’s so swank they even threw in a repeater to boost the signal. Problem is, half the time he tries to plug in a new cable box or game console via the HDCP connection, the box freaks out when it detects the repeater and throws up a full-screen error message that claims he’s trying to pirate the signal. He contacted Denon to see about getting a patch, but they weren’t willing to disable the repeater and when Comcast finally got around to patching his DVR, all they did was change the error message text from “You are pirating the signal” to “We don’t support Receivers with repeaters.”
Posted by Steve Gillmor on October 31, 2006 at 4:54 pm
It seems clear Rove is betting the Democrats are already fully energized. The good news is that this time the Republicans will burn many bridges for 08 in energizing their base. To use a Republican strategy, better that they hold Congress long enough to sink 08. Of course, if they come up short, we’ll take it.
Posted by Andrew Eisner on November 2, 2006 at 10:38 am
At the risk of been accused of self-promotion did you try the forum and blog search results on retrevo.com? I poked around and without knowing your model number saw a few references to similar complaints about Denon and HDMI
Posted by Dave Winer on November 2, 2006 at 11:22 am
Andrew, it’s a Denon S-301.