Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

I just purchased my first computer in 2 years.  For me, this is a big deal.  That last computer was a Mac Mini that I still use quite a bit.  Since the purchased of that Mac Mini, I decided I would not purchase a computer other than an Apple.  Just before Black Friday, I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro.  Why refurbished?  While I really appreciate the design and software provided by Apple, they are very proud of their products and charge the end user for that.  A refurbished Mac puts the computer in my price range.  Is it worth it?  Well, that really depends on the user.  I’m completely happy with my purchase.  It works just as advertised.

This purchase made me realize something.  I’m very fond of most Apple Products.  In my collection, I have a MacBook Pro, two Mac Minis, an Apple TV, an iPhone, an iPod Touch, two 4G iPods, a 1G iPod Nano, and a 2G iPod Shufle.  Though it is not a complete collection, I think Apple has done well to get my money.

The Apple TV always seemed like one of those devices that didn’t quite fit my needs.  It lacks one very important component from being a good DVR, the actual TV tuner to record from.  It lacks one thing from being a super DVD player… the DVD player.  So what is it good for?  Streaming media from the Internet or your home network, and it does it well.  Out of the box, this device is very polished, but limited to YouTube as its source for Internet media.  While this seems nice at first, it gets old very quick.  This is where the ATV USB Creator comes in.  This project has tapped into hidden resources of the Apple TV by exploiting a USB designed for Service Only, and opening up capabilities that were disabled by Apple.  Probably one of the most important features is enabling SSH on the Apple TV so the device is now reachable via command line as well as through SFTP.  The feature that caught my interest was the ability to add applications to the set available through the Apple TV interface.  More specifically, I wanted to install Boxee to gain access to Hulu.com through my television.  Boxee is in Alpha testing at this time, but I was given access to test, and test I did.  Though the occasional bug does popup, its performance is very good.  The only issue I’ve found is getting a decent wireless connection from my office to my television downstairs.

Would I recommend the Apple TV?  If you are really into media and streaming media (videos, music, photos) to your television, and you’ve bought into the Apple way of doing things, this is a great addition.  Otherwise, I would suggest a Linksys or Sonos media device.

Would I recommend Boxee?  If the performance only gets better with Beta and Public Release, I can whole-heartedly recommend this as one of the best media center applications available.

NOTE: I got my Apple TV from Craigslist, and for quite a steal, I think.  I paid $140 for the typical $229 device and it is in near mint condition.

After much research and consideration, I decided to make the switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Apple Mail as my primary email client. Although this path seems easy enough, I ran into an issue where mail mailbox would crash Apple Mail when importing. I figured there was something corrupt, so I was almost to the point of giving up. I ran across a tool that seemed like a good option, and it was perfect. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, designed for migrating Eudora Mailboxes to most other popular clients, also included an option for moving Thunderbird mailboxes to Apple Mail. Almost as easy as Apple Mail’s native import, this tool handled everything and I’m now using Apple Mail.

It seems Tivo has outsourced their TivoToGo initiative to the good folks over at Roxio. This is good and bad news for Mac users. The good news is that Tivo has finally addressed the issue of having TivoToGo for Windows, but not for Mac. The bad news is that in order to get TivoToGo for Mac, you have to purchase Toast from Roxio. Though being packaged with Toast,

Tivo Transfer, as they call it, seems loosely integrated with Toast and the only obvious tie it has with it is the burning of your recordings. I think this is a good idea to keep things from getting bloated. Sometimes I want to burn a Tivo recording to DVD, but most times I don’t. The overall interface is very easy to use.

One thing against this offering from Roxio is the fact that TivoDecode Manager just came out last month for no cost to the end user. The would seem more inline with the previous offerings from Tivo since we do pay for a subscription after all. Which should you go with? That depends on what you are looking for. If you need a cheap way to watch you recordings or back them up onto your Mac, stick with TivoDecode Manager, but if you want the ability to make DVDs from your recordings, and have the interface integration with Toast, go with Toast. I’ve personally been using Toast for burning on my Mac, so I’m kind of torn between the two options and might just go for both.

After Steve Jobs pushed aside the Apple TV, Apple’s version of the Media Center [Extender],  to carry on for 90 minutes about the iPhone, I began to wonder if the Apple TV would do what I need it to do. It boasts streaming from any PC running the latest version of iTunes, but one catch is that iTunes only supports videos encoded with H.264 and some MPEGs. This makes sense for iTunes because its primary job is getting Videos from the iTMS (iTunes Music Store) to the customer’s iPod. However, I don’t purchase my movies through iTunes. I prefer to encode my movies using the XVid or DivX codec. All of my DVD Players support this codec so it makes sense for me. In fact, with a simple codec install for QuickTime, I’m able to watch my videos perfectly using FrontRow on my Mac Mini. This brings me to my question. If my videos work in FrontRow, would they also work on the Apple TV? I’m guessing that the interface on the Apple TV is the next version of FrontRow, which might suggest I could watch my movies assuming they were stored locally on the 40GB internal HDD or an external HDD. Streaming may be a different beast altogether since it seems to ride on the shoulders of iTunes sharing features. I use iTunes to listen to music or look through photos on my Tivo, which tells me it is very capable of sharing across Wifi, but by why will they not add DivX/XVid support for iTunes?

A couple of other issues I have about this device is the lack of an optical drive, to replace DVD Players, and the name itself. I’m aware that it outputs through a TV, but why call it “Apple TV” when no TV Tuner is included. The only TV Shows you can watch on this device are those available for purchase through iTunes.

What does this all mean? I guess if I can get some answers to the above questions, I would likely buy this unit because the $299 sure seems a lot better than the $799 Mac Mini alternative, which provides everything I need including a DVD Player replacement for only $500 more [ouch].

Today I was taking some cute shots of my youngest daughter as she was jumping on the trampoline with her hair full of static, but when I wanted to show my wife the pictures I took, my camera said, “No image” with a error code displaying “Err 02.”  Having never seen this code, I thought the worst.  Will I need to get my camera serviced?  I have a first generation Digital Rebel, so I looked on Canon’s site to find out what that error meant and their site really didn’t help matters.  It simply said, if normal troubleshooting didn’t work for this error code, I would need to have my camera serviced.  Worst case come true?  No.  I decided to try another card and see if it was able to write and read using the camera and it had no issues.  All was good with my camera, but I was still missing those pictures.  Having accepted the loss, I decided to reformat the card using the camera’s interface.  When I went to the format screen in the menu, it showed me that I had 22MB used on the memory which sounds like a small load of pictures, right?  Right!!  The filesystem on the card was corrupt, but using an application on my Mac (also available on Windows) called PhotoRescue, I was able to do just that.  I recovered all of the photos I thought I had lost forever, and actually pulled a photo from a few years ago that I hadn’t seen since then.  This software was very very easy to use and only cost $29, but that cost seemed smalled considering how often this might happen.  I think I was fortunate to go this long without having this issue before.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

I always find these to be very fascinating. The first one I saw was about a year ago when some person online had installed a Mac Mini in their Toyota Prius. This one is installed in a Subaru and the owner has posted many videos demonstrating its capabilities. This is one of the best uses I’ve seen for Front Row. I especially like that he is using his cellular phone’s Bluetooth connection to get Internet to his Carputer. I guess this means I need to make sure my next vehicle has some sort of touchscreen LCD in the dash somewhere.  There is no amount of describing I could do to let you how awesome I think this is, so check out his video here.

Others may have not had the difficulty I had with getting files from the PEBL onto their Mac, but for some reason I assumed their weren’t many options. Besides the obvious iSync capabilities that synchronize you contacts and calendar events, OS X has Bluetooth File Exchange under the Utilities list. Bluetooth File Exchange lets you ‘Browse Device” as well as simply Send File. Assuming your phone is already configured from within System Preferences, once you launch Bluetooth File Exchange you’ll need to switch the Device Type to Phones. Find your phone in the list, then select Browse.

The Motorola PEBL provides three preloaded directories for storing personal files. Those are audio, picture, and video. These are self explanatory and actually quite boring. I’m assuming this is to protect the file system that is on the phone.

One thing I can’t seem to find is an easy way to send files from phone to phone without using Multimedia messaging.

Like the majority of digital camera owners, I have a huge collection of digital photos.  Since 1998, I had been using ACDSee to view my collection because of its speedy interface.  Somewhere along the way, ACDSee became another one of the many shops to incorporate a Photo Manager into their application.  Some may find this useful for tagging or labeling photos for quickly locating photos of a particular subject, but I have found that I mainly deal with photos in a date manner.  Since date is my primary classification, I have created directories such as 2001-11 and 2006-11 to hold photos taken within those months.  I haven’t had any issues with this as ACDSee did not force me into using their Photo Management features.  However, when I made the switch to Mac, I was without a good viewer of photos and directories of photos.  iPhoto is included, but it is completely wrapped around Photo Management requiring each photo be imported so it may append additional meta data with each one.  I don’t really care for this much overhead, so I just did without and continued the search for a application that better suited my needs.  QPict seemed to have a lot of following so I gave it a try and it seems to do a good job of giving my everything I need, but only one caveat is with the sorting of directories listed on the left.  There is seems to be no rhyme or reason to the sorting being used.  QPict costs $35 for their Standard license.  Today I found a FREE program that does a great job viewing photos and integrating with OS X as the primary photo viewer.  JustLooking offers the speed and ease-of-use I’ve been looking for, but it lacks a tree view for quickly navigating through my photo directories.  This is a tough call, but free always has a ring to it.  I’ll probably continue to use both and see which completes the package first.

About every six months or so I like to post my current computer lineup which is very basic information about the computers and most importantly, what operating systems I’m running on each.

Mac Mini Core Duo (2GB RAM) – Mac OS X 10.4

AMD64 3500+ (1GB RAM) – Windows XP –> soon to be SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

HP 1.4GHz (1GB RAM) – Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

Sony VAIO Notebook (256MB RAM) – Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

AMD 2600+ (1GB RAM) – Windows XP

This is not looking good for Microsoft. The only remaining machine with Windows on it is the one my daughters use for gaming. However, I did purchase Cedega last year, but never got past the install stage. Cedega should allow me to run all/most of their Windows games under Linux. I may try that in a couple of months. They’ll be due for a reformat of Windows by then anyway.

Anyone who spends anytime surfing the Net is bound to run across an article with speculation around what Apple will release next, but at some point I think the rumors and fakery images tend to skew our expectations leaving us disappointed when we don’t get what we’ve wanted. A perfect example of this is the rumor surrounding a new widescreen iPod. We’ve been through two different product releases and still no widescreen iPod. Does this mean it won’t ever happen? Not necessarily, but what I really want to know is did Apple ever plan on producing a widescreen version of the world’s favorite digital media player, or will they just produce one now to make the people happy? (Chicken or the Egg) At what point do you listen to the people and give them what they want because they’ve asked repeatedly? On the other hand, I think Apple has done a good job so far giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted. I was listening to MacCast, a Mac-centric podcast, and he mentioned that he tries to not put too much stock in the rumors to prevent from setting expectations higher than Apple product development can achieve. Are we, as a geek society, so hooked on these gadgets that we really get upset when a company doesn’t release what we think would be the next big thing?

On the flipside, I’d like to say that while I enjoy a good bit of progress in the world of computing, I find it unsettling that Apple releases new versions of their computers at least once per year. If anyone ever tries to get the best available at any given time, their purchase will only be the best available for another 9 months MAX. I’ve run into this with my Mac Mini where I bought the best available at the time and upgraded my RAM to the maximum allowed (2GB) and now, not even 6 months later, a newer faster processor is now available. Apple has also done this with the new set of iPods, but this time they’ve actually done a major disservice to their customers. They’ve released the new more featureful models at a lower price than the previously better models. In other words, those who bought the best 2 months ago have just had their model depreciate by $100 overnight. Is this the price we pay for style? Don’t get me wrong, I have an iPod and I think it is a great little device, but when I bought mine, I went with the last year’s model at the time just so I wouldn’t feel so bad when the newer new models came out.

I’m not sure where I was going with this post, so it may have been just a brain dump. Getting these thoughts out of my head should make room for more important things.

I feel like I’m the last one on the bandwagon of Tivo or DVRs in general. Everyone I talk to in my everyday life, assuming they even watch TV, has a DVR of some kind. With all of the gadgets that I have, they always assumed I would have one as well. Anyway, the time has come and my wife mentioned how her work schedule wasn’t going to allow her to watch her favorite shows this season. I saw this as a good opportunity to surprise her with a Tivo.

I went ahead and went for the best deal possible which was $30 for a dual tuner Series2 Tivo with prepaid subscription. No rebates were necessary so the deal was immediate. It was quite a hit to take all at once, but it will be hassle free for the next three years and by then TVs might come with built-in DVRs… or not.

On the coolness side, which is what you all are looking for, I was able to use my hardly utilized wireless USB adapter from my OmniFi unit (the D-Link DWL-120R) to connect my Tivo to the Internet and it worked like a charm. In fact, within about 10 minutes, I had my entire iTunes Library and iPhoto Library shared across my house to the Tivo. Very nice.

For those who are wondering why I’ve waited so long to purchase a DVR, I’m still in the mindset that when I miss a show, it is very likely that that same evening or the next day, I’ll be able to download it via BitTorrent in better quality than my basic cable can provide. When I watch my shows ontime, I’m enjoying them on my HDTV with Over-The-Air antenna which has no DVR options at the moment. My wife on the otherhand, was the major deciding factor, because I always knew I could get by with my current methods, but she wanted something easier… something she could control. Enter Tivo.