Search Everything looks to break five thousand downloads this weekend (if not today) on Wordpress extend. I lost the prior totals before I committed all my downloads to extend but I’m guessing the total downloads since version 1 is around 7.5K.
All this with the recent news that WP 2.4 will be including the ability to “search everything”, almost exactly how I laid out in my recent posts on wp-hackers, benifiting Wordpress and our community.
From Wordpress Tac #5149:
Description
Extend search to include pages and other things. The more comprehensive the better, limited only by performance considerations. Care will need to be taken when including pages in the search results since themes that display full post content may break. Putting a filter that strips tags from page content returned in search results would suffice. The search should be as hookable as possible to allow customization via plugin.
Possible things to search on:
- Post title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Page title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Comment content, author
- Post/page meta fields
Features that would be nice to have:
- Order search by relevance
- Excerpt relevant areas of content, search engine style
Relevant discussions:
This is great news, granted my sites traffic will take a major hit but I’ve felt strongly that one of the major issues with WP core is the default search functionality. But even though Search Everything will be deprecated and useless after 2.4 I’ll be looking to create a new search plugin that will filter the results, the opposite of what SE does now. Maybe I’ll call that new plugin search nothing.
2.4 looks to be a major milestone in WP, with the inclusion of search and the new backend redesign it looks to be the most noticeable upgrade since 2.1.
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.
I’m purging my online identity to just a few locations that I actually use since it was getting out of control. The major account escape that led to the purge was myspace, as you might have noticed if I’m a friend of yours. The others include:
On the chopping block
The ones I’ll keep:
There are more but as you can tell there are way to many listed already.
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.
After seeing this I had to buy an Apple TV. I guess the next step is to get USB to fully work so we wouldn’t have to VNC into it. It’s going to make a great Myth box or Haxed up OSX TV. And hopefully soon Apple will partner with someone to get HD content to the box. My wish of a Netflix partnership looks like it fell through. Maybe a Tivo/Unbox deal will suffice. A YouTube/Google Video should be inevitable but what do they have to deliver.
Looking at ReviewMe this morning I noticed Best UK Casinos wants me to review their site.
The Gaming Directory offers reviews of UK online casinos, poker rooms and land based casinos located in The United Kingdom. An indepth resource for UK casino gambling.
Well, the site will never come in handy for me since I live in the states and if … Read More »
March 10
Again Microsoft is making me break the law.
Microsoft has released a new EULA (End User License Agreement) that states that only certain versions of Vista – Business and Ultimate (and Enterprise for corporate customers) are eligible to be run in a virtual machine. The EULA says that Home Basic and Home Premium CANNOT be run in a virtual machine.
Here’s the tecnical legalese from the EULAs:
For Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions:
“USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.â€For Vista Enterprise and Ultimate Editions:
“USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device. If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.â€In short, this means that if you’re a user and you want to run Vista virtually, you MUST buy the highest end versions of Vista, or you’ll be in violation of the Microsoft EULA.
The Official Parallels Virtualization Blog: Vista is here. So what does it mean for virtualization?
The Apple TV was the first out of the gate at today’s Macworld and it’s by far the most thing I’m excited about. The device is a media streaming device as well as a media player that syncs your library from another machine on it’s own hard drive, very similar to how an iPod syncs.
I’m interested in a few things: … Read More »
January 09
