Despite my ongoing cynicism about high definition TV, I’ve just upgraded my Sky box to a shiny new HD one – not for the HD content, but because I wanted more storage space (series-linking Waybuloo and Timmy Time takes up more space than you’d think) and the ability to record two things while watching something else. Going through the schedules has been interesting, because I can’t make up my mind whether HD’s any cop or not.

The good: picture quality and sound are superb, if you can get them.

The bad: you can’t get them very often.

That’s partly because of my HD box – it’s one of the models that doesn’t have the new electronic programme guide yet, so ITV HD is absent for another month – but it’s more because there’s an HD chicken and egg thing going on. There’s not much HD content because there aren’t very many HD viewers; there aren’t many HD viewers because there’s not much HD content.

Assuming you’re a cheapskate like me and don’t pay extra for the HD movie channels, there’s not a lot: a best of the beeb (which seems rather heavy on Torchwood and repeats of Wallander), Sky One, FX and Channel 4 (which broadcasts everything in HD, although not everything is filmed in HD). There are a few other channels that I won’t watch and neither will you, and there are some surprising omissions – so for example you can get In The Night Garden in HD, but not Top Gear. I’m not sure toddlers really give a shit whether something’s SD or HD, whereas the cinematography (is that the right word for telly?) in Top Gear’s car features would look superb with more pixels.

The other thing about HD is that when you have it, switching to normal channels is jarring. Everything looks blurry, and the over-compressed stuff on the more obscure channels becomes completely unwatchable. It’s like going to the cinema and seeing a YouTube clip. It’s even worse when the HD channel you’re watching actually shows a YouTube clip – such as Rude Tube on Channel 4. Not that I’d watch that crap, but you know what I mean.

The money? It’s £9 per month extra for basic HD, over and above the cost of the HD box and installation. The box itself is nice (horrible dated interface aside), but unless you’re desperate to see 8 out of 10 Cats in HD – and who is? – then that works out as about a pound per programme: four episodes of House in HD and five other things per month. It’s a lot of cash for not a lot of programming.

One way to reduce that cost, incidentally, is to have a look at the Sky packs you’re getting. Turns out I was paying for a bunch of packs – the news and events pack, the lifestyle pack, the something else pack – that I don’t watch, and bumping them cut the Sky bill by £3 per month. So upgrading to HD means I’m paying about 80p per programme.

Don’t get me wrong, HD is lovely. The installer tells me that demand has recently gone through the roof due to price cuts and supermarket promotions, so perhaps things will change quite quickly, but right now it’s a bit like the Xbox 360 movie service in the UK: a great idea that desperately needs more content.

Do any of you have HD? Am I talking out of my arse?

A great post by Eric Karjaluoto of smashLAB on the subject of web design celebrity:

Don’t get me wrong; I believe in design and am a vocal proponent of it. At the same time, I sometimes feel that we too easily inflate the importance of what we do. We talk a good game with terms like “strategy”, “problem solving” and “design thinking”. Mostly though, these remain lofty ideals that surface only occasionally in our daily practice. On the flip-side, we designers love our toys, the novelty of our profession, and the fact that choosing type is arguably more pleasurable than reconciling bank statements.

Aside from a very limited few who concentrate on more socially relevant design, our work rarely dabbles in the kind of relevance we’d like to claim. We don’t save lives or fight poverty. Even those talented designers we laude most aren’t curing cancer. Mostly, we solve minor problems; the rest of the time, we do window dressing. I like to think that we’re the “plumbers” of communication.

Can former online bad boys go straight and not just survive, but thrive? The odds aren’t particularly good.

When the Pirate Bay announced its plans to go legit, a strange sound filled TechRadar Towers: “here we go again,” we sighed in unison.

Over the years all kinds of tech terrors have gone straight, and the stories rarely have happy endings.

So can internet baddies become goodies and not just survive, but thrive? Come with us as we discover what happened to some of the net’s most notorious sites and services.

You’ll recognise some of the names, I’m sure, but there might be at least one surprise in there.

MetaFilter is ten today. Hurrah!

When you spend as much time online as we do it’s hard to believe that the internet isn’t entirely populated by loons, goons, spammers, scammers and people who shouldn’t be given crayons, let alone an internet connection.

Thank God, then, for MetaFilter.

MetaFilter is ten today. That means it’s spent ten years being our happy place, the site we go to when the sheer idiocy of most of the online world gets us down.

A Google operating system? Yep:

Somewhere in America, Steve Ballmer is chucking chairs and bellowing the C-word: Chrome.

Chrome is no longer just a browser: it’s a heat-seeking missile heading straight for Microsoft’s core business. If it’s good, it could transform the PC industry; even if it’s just Quite Good, it’s going to be bad news for Windows.

No matter how it pans it, it’s fantastic news for lawyers.

It won’t be the internet: it’ll be the Googlenet.

Does anybody think the EU and US competition watchdogs will be fine with that?

Sony said netbooks were rubbish. Sony’s changed its mind.

Ah, Sony, Sony, Sony. Just last year your VP of IT products mocked netbooks, describing them as “a race to the bottom”. So what do we have here? My goodness! It’s a netbook!

Two more things on Techradar. First, the Pirate Bay is going legit. That’ll be the end of it, then:

Will The Pirate Bay continue? Of course – but it’ll continue in the same way Napster continues, the old logo and brand name attached to something with very little relation to the original site or service. And the users? Most of them will disappear. People who want to pay for content use iTunes; people who don’t want to pay use The Pirate Bay. The “Pirate” bit is a clue.

And then, Porn 3.0. The adult industry is famous for being an early adopter of new technology, so what’s – ahem – coming soon? Article and images are safe for work, although it does mention “heating element” and “genitals” in the same sentence.

one of our mottos is “never put anything involving a heating element near your genitals”.

As more and more of my writing goes up online, that means more and more of it attracts comments – and because I’m a paid-up member of the “journalism is the start of the conversation” club, I’d like to know when somebody adds something substantial to, or spots a glaring error in, something I’ve scribbled.

Does anybody know of a good, one-stop solution to tracking comments on multiple articles? For example, on Techradar.com I can use the “most commented” thing to see the most recent/busiest comment threads, but ideally I’d like something web-based or RSS-based that would ensure I don’t miss anything.

Does such a thing exist?