• Apr 7, 2011

    Confused AppleTV

    This evening I went to watch a show on my AppleTV as I've done every night in the last week. I used my iPad to select the show and when I hit play nothing happened. I used ezDesktop to look at my Media Center and saw that iTunes was running fine. There were 2 possibilities; the AppleTV was confused or the Mac Mini needed a reboot. I browsed the shows on my iPad via the Videos app and started a show without problems which lead to only one possibility.

    After a quick reboot of the AppleTV using the only method I could find (yanking the power plug), it came back and was able to watch the show.

    Why did the AppleTV become confused? Why isn't there a way to reboot the box without getting off the couch? I have no idea.

  • Apr 7, 2011

    Experimenting with WordPress Caching

    In the last few days, I've read about caching WordPress blogs to improve performance. I've played with this in the past, but always gave up as it wasn't something I needed, at least not yet. However, I took another stab at it and installed W3 Total Cache to see how much good it would do.

    The plugin is amazingly easy to setup and seems to work well. However, one thing that kind of annoys me is that new blog posts don't update the home page. Of coure, I can turn off caching of the home page, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a cache. As a happy medium, I turned down the caching to 300 seconds (5 minutes). If I ever get Fireballed, I'll change things around and hope for the best. (For those out of the "know", fireballed means getting linked to by John Gruber's Daring Fireball site. Basically if you get linked from there, your site is going to get pounded with hits.)

  • Apr 7, 2011

    WordPress SSL Admin and Twitter Tools

    For a long time, I've used WordPress for my blog hosted on my own server or virtual server. This has allowed me to experiment with plugins and play around with various settings. As I've been doing a lot of posting from my iPad using the WordPress for iOS app, I realized that the posting link was over a non-secure link, so my admin password was passing in the clear over the Internet. I set out to secure the admin portion of my blog. I read an article over on WordPress's site.

    The actual securing it wasn't that difficult. I already had an SSL certificate from StartSSL which works well and the price of free is good. In addition their certificates use a subject alternative name which lets me secure blog.gruby.com as well as gruby.com if I choose to use that in the future.

    After a few posts, I realized I had a problem. I use the Twitter Tools plugin to tweet each time I post. The URL in each tweet had https in it and I didn't need to put excess load on my server encrypting public pages. So I went about figuring out how to create my own WordPress plugin to remove the https and replace it with http. I'm not a php expert nor a WordPress plugin expert, but I came up with a plugin that appears to work.

    This plugin is free to use and maybe it will help someone.

  • 
        Apr 7, 2011
        
    
          
            The rise of the casual gamer
          
        
    I've always been intrigued with video games, but was never very good at them. I had a PlayStation that I bought at a clearance sale, then bought a refurbished PlayStation 2, and now have a Wii that a client bought for me. Video games hold my attention for a little bit, but I grow tired of them quickly, probably because I have to turn on the TV and go into another room to play. I believe (as do some tech experts) that console gaming is going to be relegated to the hard core gamer and that smartphones and tablets will be more than sufficient for the casual gamer.
    

    In fact, I think that smartphones and tablets (e.g. iPad) is making people that really aren't gamers into people that are playing more and more games. If you look at the types of games available for iPhone and iPad, there is a huge range with some of the more addictive ones such as Angry Birds requiring very little skill to play. I think that one of the problems with game consoles is that some games require far too much time to master and have too many controls (look at the number of buttons on a PlayStation controller).
    

    I have a bunch of games on my iPad and really enjoy playing them; I think that Angry Birds informed me that I had already passed 5 hours of playing! Ouch, that's a lot of wasted time! My manager told me that she has probably passed 80 hours playing it on airplanes (that seems a bit much to me, but what do I know). In addition to the simplicity of the games (in terms of mastering), the very low cost makes it a no brainer for people to pick up the games.
    

    Is it bad for more people to play games on these devices? If it helps pass the time and relaxes people, I don't think it can hurt. If it becomes so addictive that they play them while walking across a street then, yes, there is a problem.