Trey’s Blog

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.

Despite not actually having any fast cars, I really do enjoy watching, driving, and hearing fast cars go fast. Most of them are out of my budget, so unless something major happens, I’ll likely never have a car with more than 200hp. Anyway, a lot of people out there like to put their cars to the test, Dyno test to be specific. Some of those people video tape these tests and put them online. Check out this drag-ready Mustang blowing 1200hp. Notice how the turbo charger blows loud enough to cancel out the engine noise.

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.

Has anyone had an issue with creating a YouTube account? I have one, but a friend of mine is having an issue. She fills out the form to create the account, but then gets presented with the following error:

“Sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register for YouTube.com”

I thought this was very odd because nothing she put into the form as abnormal, deviant or criminal. What criteria do they use to determine who can and who cannot create an account? I’ve seen a large amount of videos on YouTube and there a lot of stupid stupid videos on there. How did those people get accounts?

See Imelda’s post here

I think the first thing I should mention here is that I live in Harris County, which surrounds Houston, TX and beyond.  With that said, I was wondering if we had the most amount of police coverage in the state or even the country.  The following are the police patrol cars that can be seen on the average commute around Houston:

• Houston Police
• Metro Police
• Harris County Sheriff
• Harris County Precinct Constable
• Texas State Trooper (Department of Public Safety)

Obviously they all have overlapping jurisdictions, but I thought it was odd that we can pass this many different officers on a single trip into town.  Is that normal for larger cities or counties?  That is my random thought of the day.

This is a very neat photography site where the photographer always seems to find the perfect moment to capture with lots of vivid color and beautiful landscapes. Well, they’ve just released a book in hardcover and softcover and I’ve put in my order. You too can get one here, but I recommend checking out the site first. If you like photography at all, then you’ll likely appreciate this work.

daily dose of imagery

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m fond of most things indigenous to the Chicago Area. I’m not from there, but I grew up with cable and watched a lot of WGN programming including the Chicago Cubs games. When I met my wife, she took my up to Chicago and I fell in love with the city. Anyway, besides the obvious Deep Dish Pizza, there are several other things that I think of when I think of Chicago. One of them is Fannie May Chocolates. My wife was shopping at Walgreen’s last week and noticed they now carry Fannie May chocolate in little two packs for $0.99 each or small boxes from $5.99 to 9.99. So far I have found Pixies, Trinidads, Eggnog Creams, Mint Meltaways, and one other I can’t recall at the moment. If you haven’t tried these chocolates, you must try them.

http://www.fanniemay.com/

First of all, let me say there is probably nothing more heinous than a sex crime because it involves both mental and physical abuses. With that said, I think requiring registration (that is made public) of sex offenders or anyone for that matter is a huge violation of privacy. This is not to say that I think sex offenders should be walking around freely doing whatever they’d like, but we should definitely rethink our judicial system that let them back out. If we think these people are so risky that we must register them and have the rest of the world monitoring their every move, then perhaps we shouldn’t be letting them out in the first place. If some one’s actions warrant their home be listed as SEX OFFENDER, giving the public the all of the information they need for vigilante justice, then perhaps we are doing things all wrong. To thwart this malicious behavior, we should have steeper consequences. In no way, should we allow these people out in public, where they can strike again, or be stricken against. Am I the only one who thinks that the public register is a violation of privacy? Or do these criminals that haven’t been given proper justice lose that right to privacy?

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.

This was by far the easiest upgrade yet. The last one I documented was a GUI-based upgrade using Synaptic. This time, I went with a command line version and it couldn’t be easier, assuming you know the commands. This is what I think makes this more difficult for the average user. I used this set of commands:

sudo sed -e ’s/sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade