5 of The Now

Man, I managed to pick a bunch of tracks that are hard for you all to hear. I apologize that I don't have links for some of these.

• Boards of Canada - Peacock Tail
  Perfect for an early evening cocktail sitting on the deck watching the sun set.


• Das Efx - Set it Off
  Das Efx made a splash back in '92 with Dead Serious. They've continued to make good music but have stayed mostly under the radar. "Set it Off" rocks a club nice.


• UNKLE - Lonely Soul
  "I believe there's a time and a place, to let you mind drift and get out of this place." That's the first lyric of the song and I think it says it all. Dj Shadow's work on this track is mind blowing.


• Matrix & Futurebound - Coast to Coast
  Drum & Bass, but not like you'd expect. Truly original. It's the one named MATRIXFUTUREBOUNDCO on the myspace page.


• Riton - Anger Man (Riton Re-Rub)
  This will either sound like complete noise to you or it will crawl in your head and grind your thoughts into powder which will be blended with dance juice and immediately absorbed by your system. Try and sit still!

The Google Gods Have Smiled On Me

Despite the silly name, I use iGoogle as my homepage. It was always annoyed me that it was so difficult to get to the other Google services from iGoogle. I had to keep gmail, calendar, and reader widgets around just for the easy link to the other services.

Google has finally fixed this. They now have a nice little link bar at the top of Google, just like you find in their other services. Thank you Google. You have made my day a little brighter.

Futura Coincidence

I went to wash my truck a few weeks ago and was floored to see what I thought was graffiti from one of my favorite artists, Futura 2000. Right there on the wall was the stylized letters spelling Futura.

In a few moments, I realized that it was not graffiti, but actually the name of the carwash system. I still thought the font looked very similar and took a picture for comparison. The more I look at this, the more it is just a weird coincidence. They aren't really all that similar, but you can see where I might have thought they were at first. The white box with black text is Futura 2000's signature. The colorful sign is from the carwash.

Go Where the Wind Is

While feeling a stiff breeze this past week, this image popped into my head. What if there were massive windmills that could walk to where the wind is? They'd carry huge batteries that could hold the charge until they were back near transmission lines. The energy to walk could come from the wind and sun.

Yes, this is probably pure fantasy, but I spent a few minutes combining an ATAT with a windmill. It's a fun picture.



Special thanks to the site where I took the original ATAT picture from.

Perils of a Bootcamper

Today, just a tale of woe for those of us that spend time on both sides of the OS fence.

As you know, Watch Now from Netflix requires Windows and IE. So, I'm on the MacBook, booted into XP and half way through a film. A scene of quiet dialog came on and I reach to turn up the volume.



F5. That's an evil key. My MacBook brain thinks volume up. My web browser thinks refresh. Click click. Ohh, look, my movie is gone. It's negotiating to transfer the movie again. Fantastic.

Stupid F5 key. Stupid Watch Now player. Stupid keyboard overlay that doesn't match the actions. Grrrrrr.

Sea of Links

I'm loving Google's My Maps, but it is missing something. As the folks at work keep saying, you need to be able to save a link to maps that other people send you, and I agree. Google gives you links to recently viewed maps, but as far as I can tell, you can't save them.



Until Google gives us that feature, try this hack. Pick a random spot in the world. That will be your link drop. Then, just drop a placemarker for each map you want to save. Then in the description, set it to HTML mode and edit in your link to that map. You really don't need the marker on the map, but this will keep those map links within Google maps at least.

Intel Inside...the TV

Mark Cuban has a post up at Blog Maverick discussing HDTVs as PCs. As to computers in the TV, I agree 100%. It just has to happen. Computers are now amazingly cheap and TVs are getting amazingly complex, or at least the stuff they need to display is getting amazingly complex.

Mark did say some things that had me shaking my head though.

Remember when you would buy a new PC every couple years to keep up and you would buy a new TV every decade ? Well thats about to reverse itself. You no longer feel the need to get the latest and greatest desktop PC, but you are about to get in the habit of upgrading your TV every couple years as new and original features and applications are developed for it.

Yes, I remember the computer treadmill. A new one every 2 or 3 years, just to be able to run what was current. There's no way I'm going to do that with TVs, especially TVs that now cost in the thousands, not the hundreds of dollars.

In 3 years the mainstream TV will be 70" and cost less than $1500. In 5 years, it could be 100" for $2500 dollars . Yes, you will make room for it. You will redesign the family room or your bedroom to make room.

I'm guessing Mark's house is a little bigger than mine. There's no way I can fit a 100" tv in either my family room or my bedroom. It might fit downstairs in what can be a home theater room, but even then, 100" is gigantic and you need to sit a long way away from that screen. People aren't going to build bigger houses to hold their bigger TVs. At least, not the masses.

So back to the computer in the TV. Absolutely, I want this. If you've seen an Apple TV, your first thought is Why can't they just cram that in the back of the LCD? I wonder if the current Apple TV is the first in a family of products. It doesn't take much imagination to picture a 30" Apple display with an Apple TV built in.

Apple isn't the only company that can make this happen, but they appear to be one of the few that care. The on screen menus of many of todays DVD players, receivers, and HD tuners look like they were designed by engineers. They navigate like they were designed by engineers. They frustrate the crap out of their users. In case I'm being too subtle, most engineers can't design UIs. The ones that can are usually designers.

Part of the reason they suck so bad is that they're written in low level languages running on very basic display hardware. It takes a lot of effort to make stuff look good with those resources. Contrast that with the Apple TV. It's a full-blown computer running a full-blown OS that can make use of full-blown development tools and techniques. The Apple TV costs $300, but that's not that much more to pay on top of a TV that already costs $3000. I say build it in. You might think this leads to the upgrade path that Mark suggests. I'd like to think the opposite. Build in some general purpose hardware and let folks at it. Look at all of the new functionality that has been built on the Apple TV. Look at the tremendous work done to add functionality to routers with the DD-WRT project. If you open it up (intentionally or not), they will build for it.

Let me run widgets on my TV. Let me cut out the weather warnings with stylesheets for TV. Let me build a channel guide that doesn't suck.

It seems to me that this is what Mark Cuban would want, and I think he does. He wants people to continue to sit in front of their TVs and watch HDNet. To keep them there with compelling user experiences. He even points out some of the ways that features are being added to TVs. However, pay attention to the subscription fees for services like caller-id on your TV though. I don't want a plan for my TV!

So, to sum it up, TV manufacturers need to build up the development capabilities of their TVs. Focus on the experience. Focus on the interface. Do these things and you'll get my dollars.

Photo Hunt CR 2

A new Photo Hunt is starting and I've given it its own site. It officially starts on Monday, but the first locations are up, so come join the fun.

iPod Wireless Sync - Still Hoping

The rumors of a wireless iPod are starting up again. It's been over 2 years since I first called for a wireless iPod on this blog. So if it hasn't happened by now, why would it?

• Apple TV trickle down - The work of figuring out wireless syncing is already done. Apple did that work for the Apple TV and it works well. They've already dealt with the errors and the intervals. Now, this is over 802.11 flavors, not Bluetooth, but at this point, wireless is wireless. I'll live with Wi-Fi, but I still want Bluetooth.


• Cost - It's years later. The Bluetooth radios are dirt cheap now, especially in iPod quantities.


• Market has been prepped - The Zune has plowed that road. The wireless hasn't proved to be a killer app, but people are aware that it is in there. Apple loves to come late to the party and do it right. Here's an opportunity.


• iPhone trickle down - We still don't have any good info on whether the iPhone can sync wirelessly, but Apple engineers certainly learned plenty of mechanical and electrical lessons with the radios they put in the iPhone.


• Draw Upgrades - If you have a 5G iPod, what would make you upgrade? A bigger hard drive? Doubtful. They're getting pretty big. Until they get a bigger screen, people aren't rushing to toss gigs and gigs of movies on them. Size isn't an issue. If you wanted something smaller, you'd get a nano. Battery life might be nice, but would you buy a new one for that? Wireless done right could be a feature to upgrade for.

Now, why wouldn't it happen?

• Cost - Adding even $5 on for a Bluetooth radio is quite a bit, not only in parts, but development time and support costs.


• Product differentiation - If you can sync wirelessly with the iPhone, Apple might want to keep that feature high end to drive sales of the iPhone.


• Battery life - If you believe that the iPhone only gets 40 minutes of battery life then you probably think the iPod would only get 30 :) In any case, radios do burn juice. You don't get to use them for free.

Chapters and the iTunes Store

When the iTunes store first opened, you could buy continous mix CDs from DJs, but you only got the individual tracks. This sucked because of the lack of gapless support in both iTunes and the iPod. They've since added gapless support, or so they say. I still thinks it sucks because it only works about 20% of the time for me. The gap is gone, sure, but usually they cut the tinyest bit of the music too. You probably won't notice it in a live show, or perhaps even a mixed album, but you hear it in DJ mixes, especially if you have a DJ brain and can't turn off the counting in your head.

So gapless playback is poor, but the iTunes store has made this better by giving you a free continous mix, all in one track, along with the individual ones. Electric Calm 3 is one example of this. The problem with these all-in-one files is that you can't jump between the tracks like you are able to on a CD. We know that Apple has a tool to add chapter markers to files. Is it that they don't work on protected files? I decided to find out.

I made a copy of my purchased Electric Calm 3 file. I then whipped up a quick XML file with some chapter points to apply to the copied file. ChapterTool was called, and after a long delay, ChapterTool tells me status: ok. Cool, time to try it.



Sure enough, it plays just fine and the chapter marks are fully functional. This really makes me wonder why they don't do this from the start. It would make the file far more useful. Well, I guess I have the power to do it myself now. Time to write some code to auto-generate the necessary XML file.

Apple TV Linkage

It's all coming fast and furious now. Here's some links.

Fudbuster - So everyone is linking the AP technology review and blowing things out of proportion with the Barely Watchable comment. It's true, there is a lot of bad content on the iTunes store, but you can't pin that on the Apple TV. The output from it can look stunning. For proof, fire up one the HD video podcasts like the one from DiveFilm.

Features - Engadget has a nice walk-thru on how to add codecs for DivX and Xvid. I really don't care, but plenty of people seem to.

Fudbuster - Roughly Drafted has some fantastic facts on the Apple TV myths, including 5.1 audio and comparisons to Xbox. You might recognize some of the arguments.

Features - Make your Apple TV run Perl scripts. There's a hack I can get behind. Now where did I put my camel book?

Features - Make your own Apple TV scrensaver.

It's pretty obvious that the Apple TV is pretty wide open at this point. You can add just about anything to it and that's only going to get easier. Now if someone would figure out how to get widgets on it so I can stop with my cheesy image hacks. Maybe Perl is the key.

My Maps Impresses

Man, I love Google. They just keep giving us the good stuff. The latest is My Maps which lets you draw, annotate, link, and add multimedia to your Google Maps. The tools are simple but very powerful. I love this idea. I loved it when all of these folks built their own implementations use the Google Maps API. Unfortunately, I never loved it enough to muck around with those setups. Now, I don't have to. Google has made it dead easy.



To try it out, I made a map of the locations from my Photo Hunt that ran on this blog back in 2005. It was very easy and a lot of fun. You just click the map to drop a locator and then type your title and text. If you want to add links and photos, just switch to HTML mode and edit away. I found that the rendering will respect img attributes like align and height. You can use height to limit the rendering size of an image that might be a little large for the locator description. The only drawback is that you need your photos to already be online. They don't (yet) have an image upload feature like Blogger does.

These maps are really a lot of fun to make and they will be great for your friends and family to view too. I've written enough about geotagging in the past for you to know I'll be making maps of my vacations :)

Next up, I plan to map some of the cycling routes around town that I enjoy. My Maps is great! Thank you Google.

Podcasted Television - Is Viacom Learning?

So we all know that Viacom has sued Google for a billion dollars. They don't like their content up on YouTube, and I don't blame them.

Viacom isn't all evil. Comedy central has some video podcasts that I enjoy, and just this week I subscribed to The Best Week Ever podcast from Vh1. My wife and I enjoyed the show when we had cable. We were disappointed to see that the podcast was outtakes, and other random junk. That is until a couple of days ago when the full weekly episode showed up!

Now we're getting somewhere. I don't get why you can't already subscribe to television shows (ignoring Joost until they let me into the beta). I know that networks like to sell season DVDs and show by show on the iTunes store, but at the same time, all of the major networks, and many cable networks, are putting up their content for free streaming on the net. They include commericals and I'm fine with that.

Unfortunately, watching TV on your computer isn't the greatest experience. Hooking you computer to your TV makes it better, but you still have to do crap like this with cables hanging everywhere. Ugg.



So now I have the Apple TV. 1 wire hooks it to my TV. It is small, sleek, and ready to rock. Now I just need the networks to get over the mental hurdle that seperates streaming television vs. podcasted television. They can still include the ads. They can even limit the resolution and bit rate to less than DVD quality if they want. Rather than fight their viewers, they should just embrace them. Look at the silly minute shifting they do to keep your DVR from recording their show (or other network's shows). You don't need a DVR if you can get the content directly from the broadcasters!

5 of The Now

• Lemongrass - Aloha Perhaps this would make a good ring tone on the iPhone :)


• Bloc Party - On The whole album is good. I could have listed 4 or 5 here.


• Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches You probably remember Robyn from her '97 album Robyn is here. I lost track of her since then. I really didn't even know she was still making music. Well, she was, and some of it is "new" on the iTunes store now. This track has a Gwen Stefani, Fergie feel to it, but since she originally released it in 2005, you really can't say she's jumping on the bandwagon. If you are wondering about the track title, I believe it is because she's signed to Konichiwa records. At first I was digging the Trentemoller remix, but the original is now my favorite. The video is quite the experience.


• RJD2 - The Third Hand I can't pick a single track just yet. Right now, the whole album sounds pretty good.


• Shonky - Olympia Spacey, airy, watery, all in one. This one really builds and I love the "shake" sounds.

Google Themes Waste Pixels?

I use the custom Google homepage. It isn't the greatest thing ever, but it works well for me as a homepage with weather, RSS feeds, stock quotes, Gmail subjects, and of course, search.

I like the minimal style of Google, but when they added themes, I gave them a try. I'm using the cityscape theme, and I'm liking it.


We got in a discussion at work about how these themes waste your screen real estate. Some use more space than others. For me, I don't mind giving up the 56 pixels.

Add Features to Apple TV Using Automator

One of the things I really wish the Apple TV had was widgets. I'd find them far more useful on my TV than I do on my computer. Specifically, widgets that would show me the weather and TV schedules. So what do you do? Shove that content in any way possible!

The Apple TV can show images and things like weather and tv schedules are pretty easy to find on the web as images, or at least data that you can use to generate your own images. I was lucky enough to find a local TV station that hosts plain ol' jpegs of the weather at a fixed location. You get these by clicking on them in the website, perfect.

Through some trial and error in Automator, I came up with this set of actions.

1. Get Specified URLs - The ones that show the weather


2. Download URLS - Pull the content locally


3. Rename Finder Items - I tack on the date and time, mostly for initial testing, but eventually I'll set this up to run on a regular basis and I don't want to mess with the dupe import dialog in iPhoto


4. Import Photos into iPhoto - I made a Weather album that I'm importing into. I then set the Apple TV to sync the weather album and I'm all set.

This is pretty rough still. I haven't figured out a good way to clean out the old weather images and I haven't yet set a cron to make sure I have current data on the Apple TV. The final hurdle is figuring out how often the Apple TV autosyncs, or perhaps a way to force the sync programatically.

I already mentioned TV listings, but I'm sure you can think of all sorts of content you could sync, such as contact data, RSS feeds, Netflix queues, email headers, and on and on.

Apple TV is Worth It

2 cables and 2 minutes. That's all it took to get the Apple TV up and running. I connected power and the HDMI to my TV. I chose English, chose my wireless network, entered my password, and then entered the generated passcode into my Mac mini downstairs. That's all. I was live and living.

You probably don't like to read my paragraphs, so let me tell you why I'm loving the Apple TV in list form.

• Easy setup - I just covered that


• Tiny size


• Album art looks amazing. The "drifting" art screen saver is great. I could sit and watch it for hours.


• Menus are snappy and handsome - I don't know why people are saying the interface looks like crap. It's simple and sleek. What do you want it to be?


• Streaming is working great. The smallish hard drive doesn't seem to be a problem when the streaming works so well. For reference, both my iTunes library and the Apple TV are wireless.


• Syncing setup is simple, although slow on that first sync ;)


• It syncs your playcounts like an iPod! This might be my favorite feature so far. I know, I'm weird. If you think about this, it makes sense since it will sync only your unwatched shows by default, but since other playback of "shared" content doesn't update the playcounts (like playback from another computer over the network), I wasn't expecting this. I still need to see if streamed content updates. I know sync'd content does.


• Movie trailers start-up almost instantly. You could always do this in iTunes, but it was such a pain in the ass. Now you can be sitting in the family room with friends and decide what movie to go see as a group, right on the TV...without going and hooking up any other gear.


• Video podcasts - You'll hear folks saying the Apple TV doesn't do anything more than a video iPod with the video output cable. I agree, as long as you forget the fact that you have to leave a cable hanging from your TV for your iPod....and your iPod has to be charged...and your iPod has to be with you...and you don't mind running to the iPod every 3 minutes to start a new podcast...and you don't want to pause...and...and....hmmm, I'm writing paragraphs again :)


• Photos - I've sync'd photos to my ReplayTV before. It was great once they were there. Getting them there was terrible. Now I tick a box for the album I want and I'm done.

At this point, I'm definitely recommending this.

Apple TV and Mac Mini - Not the Same Size

Here's my contribution to the Apple TV mania. Lots of people are under the impression that the Apple TV is the same form factor as the Mac mini. While they are the same shape and colors, they are different in size (7.7" vs. 6.5"). Take a look at the pictures and decide for yourself whether they are meant to be stacked together or not.






I do like that the lights are in the same general spot so that they would look good if you stacked them.

When wondering why the mini is smaller, do remember that it has a big external power supply. I wouldn't mind seing Apple update the Mac mini to integrate the power supply and use the same footprint as the Apple TV.

Apple TV vs. Media Center Extender

Everywhere you look that has comments about the Apple TV are comments about how stupid you'd be to buy an Apple TV and how smart you'd be to buy a Media Center Extender, specifically an Xbox 360. Here are 5 reasons why I chose the Apple TV over an Xbox 360.

1. Availability - No, I don't mean the fact that the Apple TV is finally shipping. I mean that you can use an Apple TV with any computer that can run iTunes. That's a lot of computers. That covers about any Windows or OS X computer built in the last 3 or more years. On the other hand, to use an MCE, you need Media Center (MC). According to Microsoft, you can't install MC. You have to know you want it, and buy it up front, assuming the computer you want even has the option.
   
   

   I have a really powerful Windows XP-based computer. Can I upgrade it to be a Windows Media Center-based PC?
   Unfortunately, no. While a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is also a powerful Windows XP-based computer, Microsoft does not retail Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 as an upgrade. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is only available pre-installed by PC manufacturers or qualified computer system builders.




2. Size - This matters to me. You might have a huge entertainment center, and I do to, but not with the TV that I want to run the Apple TV with. To me, the Apple TV is perfect for its small size and integrated power supply. The Xbox 360, while more capable, is gigantic. It has an external power supply that is nearly as big as the Apple TV itself. I don't want another power brick to hide. The cord is bad enough. Ignoring that power supply, the Xbox 360 is still nearly 4 times the size of the Apple TV.



3. Power consumption - Apple TV has a 48 watt supply. The Xbox 360 has a 160 watt supply. Save money and the environment :) with an Apple TV!



4. Cost - Apple TV is $299 and plenty of folks say that's far too much. Xbox 360 with a hard drive is $399. The Xbox can do a lot more than the Apple TV, but we aren't really discussing that here. We're discussing the video playback functionality. If you want to use that Xbox wirelessly, add on $89 for the adapter. Another $20 for a remote. If you aren't going to buy games for the Xbox then it doesn't look like that great of a choice for Media Center Extender.



5. Store Tie-ins - I like the walled garden of iTunes. I don't want to trade money for points that I can trade for content. Folks are quick to point out that the Xbox can play Divx, xvid, exlax, exwife, and xterra. That doesn't matter to me. I don't download shows over bittorrent (yet?), so being able to play the latest ripper codecs aren't a selling point for me. The iTunes garden does have a big swinging gate. If you can get content in to iTunes, it sounds like the Apple TV will play it. I plan to use that gate to get my purchased DVDs into iTunes.

5 of the Now

• Lyrics Born - I Changed My Mind (Stereo MCs Rattlesnake Mix)
  I've always been a huge Stereo MCs fan. I was lucky enough to find this on vinyl. You can get it digital though. Funk it up boys!


• Funkdoobiest - Bow Wow Wow
  Bringing this one out of my archive. I haven't listened to this album in forever. This is from my Cypress HIll days when I just had to have anything produced by DJ Muggs.


• Citizen Cope - Let the Drummer Kick
  This should be called Let the Drummer Kick Back. Mellow, soulful stuff.


• Booka Shade - Night Falls
  You barely get the fell for this in a 30 second sample. It builds and builds and makes you glow from the inside. I'm in a dilema on Booka's albums. I love them enough that I want to buy them, but Amazon wants $18 for them! Based on my rules of purchase this almost fits in the import prices, but I really want the real album, even though they are available for $10 on iTunes. Luckily I have plenty of Booka stuff in DJ mixes to listen to while I decide if I want to pay Sam Goody like prices on Amazon.


• Dilated Peoples - Live on Stage
  Thanks to Jason for bringing some focus to these guys for me. There's always the groups that you are peripherally aware of, but it takes someone saying "listen to this" to make it sink in sometimes. That's one of the points of the 5otn right? It's me saying "listen to this" :)