I’ve used MX Revolutions for what seems like ages now and I still haven’t found a better mouse. The Magic Mouse with Magic Preferences makes it very close. After my Magic Mouse review, which I’m still committing a few more weeks to, I may just go back to the classic revolution mouse.
My only complaint is the charging. I tend to always forget to charge it every night and having it stop working in the middle of the day is awful. This really shouldn’t happen with battery technology these days, I … Read More »
Sara, Avery and I will be heading up to Hume lake tomorrow for the next 5 days. I’m hoping it will be a fun trip and I’m looking forward to the disconnect from work and this virtual world. I will be taking my computer for the off chance the forest will be transmitting free WiFi and I’ll have my iPhone for the rare occasion I must “clean” out my inbox. When I get back I’ll tackle my growing tada list of things to do and two major development projects I have lined up.
We’ve had the Tivo HD for a few weeks now and this post has waited just as long. I initially wanted to post about the unpacking, setup and all it’s features; like a real review. Instead I’m going to make this short since the Tivo HD has been exhaustively reviewed around the web already.
Setup:
In order to get HD you’ll either need an OTA HD tuner or HD cable cards from your cable provider. I called our cable provider shortly after the online order and they stated all I needed to do was pick the two cards up from the local store, and as expected that was completely wrong. TW requires that someone to come out and spend about 1.5 hours sitting there waiting for the cards to activate after spending the first five minutes inserting the cards into the TivoHD and calling “home base”.
The experience of the cable card install wasn’t the best through Time Warner, especially since I had to call twice for them to reset the cards which resolved one card from not picking up our premium channels but we then had to have another tech come out in between sunrise and sunset to do nothing but call and get the second card to reset so the channels would show.
It also turns out that the techs for TW in our area do not work for TW directly, they’re just on contract with the company. I found this out because initially they said they don’t install cable cards on anything but TV sets. The guys were nice so they went ahead but I could see this being a huge problem since TW is required to provide cable cards but the contracted companies have policies of their own.
Luckily our cards are not Scientific America cable cards since a lot of people are having issues with artifacts and blocking. Time Warner gave us motorolla cards.
Use:
It’s a Tivo and that’s why I bought it. It’s very easy to use and very responsive. The only thing I wish they would add is PIP for the Tivo menu, that’s something I miss on the old TW moxi box and it’s just annoying to leave a show in order to get a season pass setup. With that aside it’s wonderful, did I mention it’s easy to use. The ease of use can be contributed not only by it’s navigation or season passes but it’s other features, e.g. suggestions.
I’m very surprised with the capacity the 160GB drive can hold, we have 98 suggested shows that Tivo has recorded for us and another 4 hours of HD content. It’s not like we’ll ever watch that much but the wonderful thing is if we sat down to watch TV and we had nothing pre-recorded the chances are we’re going to find something we like. Even a show we’ve never heard of could be suggested and it would turn out great.
Tivo Tranfers:
One of the best features, that we’re using a lot of since we have our Apple TV, is the ability to transfer the recordings to a computer and then export them for “archival” or playback on other devices, like an iPod. We use this a lot for Avery’s shows, this way she’s able to watch he show while I’m on the computer with her. It works on the mac BTW.
Conclusion:
If you want a PVR and you have HD I would strongly recommend a Tivo HD. The cable boxes I’ve dealt with in the past are slow and very clunky. The cost is of the box is $299 msrp but just a few days after the release I was able to purchase mine through Circuit city at $260 so I’m sure they’ll be lower this holiday. The one thing you need to expect is the subscription cost, it’s about the price of the HD box rental from your cable company (about $13). For us since we already have a Tivo the second is discounted to $7 a month (our first was already specially discounted so we’re not paying more then $15 a month).
Tivo is also actively developing new features through it’s beta programs, which I may or may not be a part of.
This has got to be the best review/article on the age old debate of Linux vs. Mac. The article is extensive but the conclusions on the topic mimic my sentiments exactly.
In the following pages, they lead a guided tour of the two OSes, paying particular attention to eight important areas: Installation & Migration; Hardware Support & Power Management; Networking, Web & Wireless; Productivity; Entertainment; Security; Working With Windows (because we couldn’t completely ignore Microsoft); and Stability, Backup & Disaster Recovery.
Which is the better OS? Only you can decide –but you’ll make a more informed decision after you’ve taken this tour, and you’ll discover you have some companions on your journey.
I will admit I have not completed the entire article, I have skimmed and read the beginning and end but it is something I want to go back and finish. I also don’t think anyone can conclude that either writer is biased because from what I’ve read the entire article plainly exposes the downsides of each platform in almost every major factor of any OS. It’s really apparent within the conclusions which they make the reader decide what’s best for them.
The conclusion of the review that mimics my take exactly (spoiler alert):
Conclusions: Linux
Linux gives you freedom on many levels: the freedom to tinker, the freedom to work without arbitrary constraints on your system setup, and the freedom to make decisions about nearly every aspect of your system.That freedom does come at a cost, though — the cost of a certain degree of effort. I haven’t yet dealt with a single Linux install that didn’t require me to edit some configuration file somewhere. That said, the amount of effort required to get the Linux system you want (or need) has gone down enormously with time.
If the freedom to use your PC in as unhindered a way as possible is important to you, that’s what Linux delivers — although keep in mind it comes with a learning curve, one that is still flattening out rather slowly.
– Serdar Yegulalp
Conclusions: Mac
If you believe that open source is a moral choice — and many people do — then buying Apple is making a deal with the devil. Apple is arguably the most proprietary hardware / software company in the industry, despite Mac OS X’s origins in BSD Unix, and the products’ compliance with many industry standards.You think Microsoft locks users in? At least with Microsoft you can buy a PC from a huge number of big and small vendors, or build your own from components. With the Mac, you buy your PC from Apple, you buy your operating system from Apple, and you’re also encouraged to buy your mouse, keyboard, display, audio device, and smartphone from Apple, all at an Apple Store where you can get Apple service.
But if you’re willing to live with lock-in, Apple is a great choice for computing. Installation isn’t a problem — Apple does it for you. Networking is easy. Productivity is a dream. The Mac offers a broad variety of entertainment options. It’s a secure platform. It interoperates well with Windows. It’s highly stable, and offers solid backup choices for the data losses that are inevitable on any computing platform.
Right now, Apple is smokin’, and its customers are happy. But if the Apple gets rotten and starts coming out with inferior products — as it did in the ’90s — its customers will have the choice of suffering, or making the painful switch to another platform.
Until then, I’m sticking with the Mac. It’s a great computer.
– Mitch Wagner
Well said…most of you know where I stand but no platform is perfect and it’s up to the user to decide what they value the most.
Well the wait is over for me. I talked myself into buying an iPod last night after toying around with it for just a few minutes and my experience with it for 20 minutes today at the mall solidified my decision.
 Yes, the iPhone does do what many other phones do already. That’s clear but it’s the how that counts. The simplicity may be a drawback for some (or at least one I know) but like the BlackBerry OS it’s almost perfect. Just look at how the BB and the iPhone handle the filesystem: the Blackberry does let the user notice that a structure is there when digging through images (which is a must for finding images or files with the expansion card) and the iPhone doesn’t let you worry about such things, making you think it’s not there. The Treo is similar but the Windows mobile OS is heavily constructed around the computer OS mentality to find and finally display files or run programs through a tree hierarchical system. Maybe this has changed since the Pocket PC OS but from what I’ve noticed it hasn’t. Some say this is a drawback to the simplicity of iPhone, I disagree; the Treo made it clear you didn’t need to worry about anything but launching apps and the BlackBerry proved it. iPhone is just banking on it.
And no, Apple does not tell people what to do. They know what people want and they let you do it. Basically, it just works how you want it. If it doesn’t, so be it, because in my experience Apple doesn’t tend to make Swiss Army devices that have a great spec sheets without anything more to back it.
Personally, that’a why I like iPhone (and the Apple TV). I just want a device that works. If I can’t get some clumsy 3rd party app that makes my phone (Treo, PPC, WMD) freeze or hard reset I don’t want the phone. That’s why I believe they’re completely closing the phone to widgets (javascript and CSS) and the web, giving the OS a chance not to deconstruct and fail by bad programming.
iPhone doesn’t make you struggle, similar to the blackberry it’s a phone and an application device. It doesn’t try to be anything more through sacrificing usability.
Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of missing pieces to this puzzle. Many of which can and will be updated through software updates. And the pieces that need hardware updates will come along on the mystery train that Apple loves to use for product releases.
Those hardware functions that lack on revision one are the reasons that I’m giving up my plot to buy an iPhone. What are they? Well, Edge although very responsive to my tests this morning could be replaced with 3g but that’s not why I’m not getting one. And, the storage size limitation of 8 gigs isn’t practical for me but that’s not the reason either, since I would need to sync the iPhone every night to charge anyways. Is it the lack of stereo bluetooth on the first bluetooth iPod? No. Is it the price of that hardware? No, it’s actually worth it as a computing device. The simple small little detail that noone is mentioning is…
No video output.
And since I use my iPod Video daily to watch video at our lunch hour it’s not an iPod to me. And it can’t be to many others who use it to display all the iTunes purchased or other video on their TV. My guess, “why add it while we have the AppleTV?” which is just another shitty marketing cross-sell idea because they think it’s not that big of an issue.
It is a big deal to me. But who am I when millions of iPhones have been sold to very happy consumers.
So for now I’ll still be running with my BlackBerry curve that I still adore. It hasn’t failed me yet and although it may be “limiting” it does what I need it to do, except run full websites (Opera doesn’t count) like Google Reader or Google Talk or have the most highly resolution screen I’ve ever seen in a small device or have hand gestures or motion sensing or come smaller or have WIFI.
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
OpenDNS added shortcuts today. I’ve been an OpenDNS user for sometime and it’s an excellent service. I haven’t noticed any speed advantages from their caching but I’m glad that we’re safer with it blocking phishing sites, it also helps with some quick URI typos.
Setting up the shortcuts feature took 2 minutes. I just needed to setup an account and add my IP (which was already populated for me) then add a few shortcuts. Now instead of http://www.google.com/reader/view/ I can type gr or rss and the page loads. I’m actually impressed that I have this functionality without needing to install anything and without it being slow what-so-ever.
If you’re not using OpenDNS on your network or your computers your going to have to spend a few more minutes configuring your router or computer but I’d fully recommend OpenDNS even if you don’t care for shortcuts. Even the network admin has a bunch of great tools like network stats.
Thanks for the great service guys.
After just a few days of using the Apple TV I’m thoroughly impressed. The major reason I purchased the Apple TV was because of all the hacking that’s been going on and with Apple practically saying, “it’s your box do what you will” we can expect some more great hacks, if running full OS X wasn’t enough. I had planned at least to install some Xvid/divX playback through a very simple hack but involves cracking the case open. Instead of jumping right into doing that I’ve instead planned to just use it as intended.
I already live out of iTunes so the unsupported codec didn’t pose a big problem. All my TV Shows have already been encoded for iPod playback so 90% of my video was ready for use. The other 10% had been movies I ripped to DivX to playback on your Heleos DVD player. I truly dislike re-encoding video especially when the original format is already compressed (divX) but I tested out a few conversions and they looked great.
It took me a day or two to export 30-40 movies straight from Quicktime through the “Apple TV” export setting on my MacPro and I’m positive that exporting this much video isn’t practical for the majority. Especially since my assumption would be the majority having more video than I and wouldn’t have a fast pc or mac that could export 10 videos at a time.
After getting all my video to a codec that the aTV supported the device shines. The one problem I have now is whether to export my future video for iPod or aTV. It should be easy since I’m not getting rid of cable anytime soon so I’ll just export any full HD downloads for the aTV (like Lost or Sapranos), otherwise all other TV downloads will go for my iPod which I use daily at work. And all movies will be exported through QT Pro or if it’s a DVD I’ve found ripping it straight to from handbrake is the ideal process.
Quality of converted HD content looks surprisingly good. I downloaded a full HD tv show and converted it’s original format to h.264 through QT pro. After streaming it over wireless, on a g network might I add the video looked great. I didn’t notice any difference in quality from the original format of HD DivX playback on my computer then through the aTV.
Another majorly mentioned drawback to the aTV is streaming HD over wireless. Some say that anything lower then a n network wont work but I’ve got a G network streaming video perfectly fine with about 5 seconds of beginning buffer and solid fast forwarding. It takes forever for iTunes to sync with it in the beginning since it sends 30+GBs of data but ever since I’v had no need to drop a cable.
In conclusion the aTV doesn’t have any drawbacks (for me), other then the minor process of waiting 30-50 minutes for converted HD downloaded video to be supported. And it’s wonderful not having to worry about burning DivX cds or finding a CD/DVD to play some kid video. With it’s simple interface we can pull up a full media library from upstairs on our TV in seconds.
Including in that library is podcasts, photos and images. Watching video podcasts is great. I only wish now that I had a faster internet connection so I can drop cable TV and just download all our HD shows to playback on the aTV. Or what would help, HD content downloads from iTunes.
I’ll still be following the Apple TV hacking scene and I’m sure they’re going to compel me to break the box soon.In the meantime I’ll order a new 2.5′ drive so I can keep the factory drive untouched.
Update on hacking the TV, there is an extremely easy tutorial on how to get your apple TV to do just about anything I’d ever want from a media center. One awesome step is to replace frontrow with centerstage. Centerstage is an opensource application for digital media that will play just about every video format. Another great thing to hear is the enabling of quartz desktop to make the TV another computer.
Before anyone asks why choose TV when you could just buy a computer and do the same thing with Myth. The same reason I always give it’s cheaper, smaller, quite and simply has all the video connections you’ll need to hook up to an TV. All without having to worry about hardware compatibility.
AppleTVHacks.net has some other interesting posts, one includes a bounty to make the TV a Asterisk box and another with Joost.
Joost is a service I’m really excited about. And I’m really close to buying an TV.
Work purchased a Black Macbook for me and I’m planning on triple booting it if I figure out why resizeVolume is error’ing out. I haven’t been able to use it until now because work has been crazy and I’m in the server room more than at my desk but already I like it. It’s going to take some time to get used to the desktop having less realestate, overall I prefer the smaller screen because it’s then a smaller computer. The black is cool and I can tell it’s going to get dirty and finger printed a lot which will be annoying for a few weeks until I just give up on cleaning it. Other then it being faster then my pro it’s noticeably cooler and quiet which are the “problems” I have with the pro.
Enough about me, Sara also got a gift today. I bought her a Macbook to replace her “old” iBook and she’s loving it. Maybe she’ll post about it, yeah right. Me being home late from work is the reasoning for the large gift, I also hated looking at that old replaceable ibook and it’s dark/low-res screen. I’m hoping it will last 3 years and I’m stoked to share a power cable again.
Anyone want to buy a 12″ G4 iBook?
