Tag: Technology

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Shattered (Media Center) Dreams

Now that I’ve made the leap to HDTV, I had to find a way to record HD shows. I thought that I’d turn a Mac Mini into a media center with El Gato’s EyeTV. I bought the EyeTV 250 Plus, hooked it up and was immediately disappointed. I’m used to TiVo and the user interface is second to none for using and scheduling. While my wife isn’t technology adverse, sometimes she’s a bit slow in adopting the technology I throw at her. It took awhile for her to accept the TiVo, now we don’t know what we’d do without it.

The EyeTV software is computer software and not consumer software; scheduling basically needs to be done with a mouse. I can use Apple Remote Desktop and schedule from my laptop, but that kind of makes it more difficult to program.

I looked briefly at the HD TiVo and the price tag didn’t faze me, but there are 2 things about the device that basically killed it for me. First, I have basic cable which also gets me 6 or 7 digital HD channels. The HD TiVo requires CableCARDs to get guide data for the digital channels. The second is that the HD TiVo cannot record 2 HD channels using basic cable at once. This completely baffles me, but their FAQ tells me this. TiVo has actually confused basic cable and digital cable like I did. (The guide with the EyeTV provides guide data for the digital channels I get over basic cable.)

I had hoped to ditch my TiVo and retire my Apple TV to switch to a Mac Mini, but at this point, it looks like I’m going to keep the TiVo so my wife can program it for most shows and use the Mac Mini for HD shows. We’ll see how this works. So far, the HD recordings are nice, but the scheduling is not easy to do without using Apple Remote Desktop.

Oh well. I think that this is a conspiracy to get me to get me to buy “Digital Cable” from my cable company; something that I refuse to do as I’m unwilling to pay an exorbitant amount of money for TV when we watch just the regular over the air channels.

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Going green

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the company that handles my flexible spending only accepting faxes for reimbursement requests. Well, I sent them email through their contact form and got a reply back saying that they do accept submissions electronically. OK, it definitely wasn’t obvious to me how to do it.

Last week I did another submission and looked around for how to submit electronically. I used the contact form again (it was secure) and saw that they had the ability to attach a file. I selected “Other” as my issue, attached my reimbursement and off it went. Today I received confirmation that they received it and they thanked me to helping them “go green”. My next suggestion will be to make this easier to find instead of having to guess what to select.

In any case, this is great news as I don’t have to print out the reimbursement form and receipts that I assembled using Paperless.

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Review: Vizio SV370XVT

Today I finally bit the bullet and entered the world of HDTV. I bought a Vizio SV370XVT at Costco. I did my research and decided on Vizio as it had features I wanted and got some decent reviews (some reviews have been mixed). This TV replaces my 7 year old Sony 32″. Last week we were at Costco and I had settled on getting the VL370M as that’s what they had in 37″. This week, they had the newer XVT model which was $120 more, but had TruVolume and a we other features.

Like my father, you might ask why 37″? That question is quite easy to answer. 37″ is the largest TV that will fit in our entertainment center! It has doors that close over the TV which is important for us to signify the end of watching TV for the day for our son and doesn’t make the TV the focal point of the room.

The first thing I noticed about the TV was how light (in weight) it was; I was able to easily put it in our entertainment cabinet. This was after my dad, wife and I barely managed to get our old TV on the floor (first onto a table and then onto the floor); the old TV weighed about 170 pounds vs. the < 35 pounts of the new one.

I plugged the TV in, hooked up the right cables (it does help to plug it in), went through the initial setup to scan for channels and presto, it worked. I started flipping through the channels and had already read that the -1 channels were HD channels, so I was excited to see what we got. My wife and parents were in the room as well and when I hit CBS or ABC HD showing golf, everyone at once ooed at the clarity of the picture.Pros

  • A plethora of inputs
  • An HDMI input that also has stereo audio; this is necessary for my Mac media center as I have a DVI to HDMI cable for video and RCA left/right for audio.
  • Simple setup
  • Very light in weight
  • Remote lets me easily switch inputs (my Sony required me to cycle inputs; the Vizio cycles through HDMI, but quickly goto component and TV inputs
  • Very sharp picture; granted I haven’t had another HDTV in my house, so I don’t have a comparison.
  • It’s very thin; the box says 2.2″. Wow, I had to make the hole in the back of the cabinet larger to fit the back of our old TV through it.

Cons

  • I wish there was a second component input. I have a TiVo with component outputs and have cables for my Wii that output component. This may be a moot point soon when I move to a Mac based media center.

While I’ve only played with my new TV a few hours, so far I’m quite pleased with it. Once I put together my Mac based media center, I’ll be able to give it a more thorough test drive.

I know that some people will say that the Vizio is the bottom of the barrel HDTV, so I’ll just have to see how much I like it in 6 months. For the longest time, I said I didn’t care about HD, so maybe my standards are quite low.

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Misinterpretation of Analog vs Digital Cable

I’m a technology person by interest and training, but realized today that I really didn’t have a clue about cable TV. I always referred to my basic cable server as analog cable as I don’t have a cable box and simply have the coax go right into the TV/TiVo. What didn’t help is a quote from my cable company’s website:

Just bought a new HDTV set? HD service is FREE with Digital Cable from Time Warner Cable*. Upgrade today and start enjoying an enhanced HDTV experience.

This led me to believe that my basic cable service didn’t get me ANY HD channels and didn’t get me any digital content. Last week I read that cable companies had to carry HD channels at no additional charge for the broadcast stations, i.e. NBC, ABC, CBS. I saw this and was excited that I didn’t have to pay more for cable to get some HD channels.

When I plugged in my new TV, it scanned for channels and found 46 digital channels and something like 69 analog channels. Wow, that was quite promising. This, of course, meant that the basic/expanded cable I have is not just analog, but also carries digital channels. This should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t.

So, with just a new TV and basic cable, I get a number of digital channels as well as some HD channels. The cable companies don’t seem to want people to know about this so that they can upsell people on the cable packages that contain lots and lots of channels that many people don’t watch. At this point, I can’t justify upgrading my cable to get more HD channels.

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Unable to control my excitement

Snow Leopard is set to be released on Friday. I had originally ordered it from Amazon, but once I saw that the Apple Store guaranteed delivery on Friday, I cancelled my Amazon order and ordered from Apple. Amazon dropped the price a few bucks today and without tax, would have been cheaper, but I couldn’t wait! Amazon may actually deliver on Friday, but I decided to spend the extra bucks so I could play with it this weekend (not sure I’ll have much time, however).

I ordered the Family Pack as I have 4 computers and may get another one to use as a media center. While I know that there is no difference between the single user copy and the Family Pack, I’m doing the right thing by getting fully licensed copies of it. It’s not all that expensive, so it doesn’t hurt much to spend the money on it. If it were $150-$200, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the family pack and would only have upgraded my main machine.

As others have already written, most of the changes are under the hood. Those changes should lead to a more stable operating system, at least that is the hope. I’ll likely do a clean install (if the install DVD lets me) and start rebuilding my system. This will take awhile, but after having my machine for 10 months, I’ve installed a lot of cruft.

We’ll see how this upgrade goes; at this point, I have no plans on upgrading our company as I need to kick the tires for awhile and see if there is a real benefit for deploying it.

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Apple Tablet Rumors

The rumors of an Apple tablet are quite amusing to me. While I believe that there exist prototypes of tablet like devices, I don’t see Apple jumping into the tablet market quite, yet (I may be proved wrong in the near future, we’ll have to wait and see). The market isn’t mature enough and I don’t think that consumers are ready to abandon their keyboards for a bulk of their computing. The combo devices with a flip around screen haven’t really become mainstream, either. Apple, of course, is ahead of the curve in some areas; I don’t think this is the year of the tablet.

Anyone that has ever had a behind the scenes tour of Apple knows that Apple works on lots of different designs. Many years ago, I interviewed with and was offered a job with the Newton group at Apple and got to see some device designs that never made it to market. If I recall correctly, there were at least a few tablets (larger than any Newton produced).

So the existence of prototype hardware at Apple means very little. I wouldn’t bet on seeing a tablet quite yet.

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Amazing spam filter

These days, any site that has comments or lets users send email, must have some type of anti-spam system. The most common type is a captcha challenge. For me, it usually takes 2 or 3 tries (if not more) for me to get a challenge correct. I stumbled upon a WordPress plugin called WP Hashcash that uses a Javascript “challenge” to fight spam. The really cool part is that people that use standard browsers that have Javascript turned on (if you have Javascript turned off, you pretty much can’t see many cool sites), don’t see a challenge and can just comment normally. Automated systems haven’t been trained to actually run the Javascript on the comment pages therefore the plugin marks the comments as spam. The plugin is catching a ton of spam.

This is just too cool to have a system in place that (for now) combats spam without inconveniencing my readers!

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Review: i-Got-U GT-120

Several weeks ago, Mobile Action Techonology contacted me about reviewing their i-Got-U GPS logging product. I was given the choice of the Bluetooth one or just the USB one; I chose the USB one, the GT-120 because it was smaller and Bluetooth is kind of pointless as you have to plug it in to charge it and I didn’t have a use for it as a GPS hooked to my computer. (The Bluetooth one has a much larger battery, however.)

In a nutshell, you use this GPS unit along side your digital camera (it doesn’t connect to it) and then when you upload your pictures to your computer, you extract the GPS log from the device, and based on the timestamp of the picture, the photos are geotagged. Combined with iPhoto ’09, this is cool for people that travel and take pictures. While I don’t travel all that often, I think the concept is fantastic, so I was pleased that I was offered an evaluation unit.

Prior to receiving the unit (I do get to keep it, but it won’t affect my review), I was informed that it was Windows only, so I’d have to use VMWare to test it. As a Mac user, using Windows is something I want to avoid at all costs. Of course, enterprising hackers have already reverse engineered most of the protocol and created a program that reads the data off the device and outputs a GPX file. The GPX file can then be imported into a variety of geotagging software.

I received the device yesterday and started playing around with it. The first thing I noticed is the size. I can easily wrap my hand around it and make a fist. It has one button on it that is used to turn the device on and off. It has 2 LEDs and that’s it for user interface. The package came with a mini-CD with the Windows software. I’m not sure what computers these days read the mini-CDs, but no laptop or desktop computer that has a slot loading drive can, so I downloaded the Windows software from their web site and installed it in VMWare.

My first real test was on a trip to the zoo with my son. I turned it on and snapped some pictures around the zoo. I basically forgot about the device and was on my way.

The hardware

The hardware is pretty cool; the battery seems to last awhile. The battery charges over USB, so that’s convenient. My only complaint is that it uses a proprietary USB connector instead of mini or micro USB (I now have to carry another cable).

The software

I installed the software on Windows XP under VMWare and it worked fine talking to the device over USB. I imported my tracks and photos. I found the software a bit cumbersome. Editing waypoints just seemed awkward; I had trouble removing points that I didn’t want, but after a few tries figured out how to click on a point and see it on the map.

It’s cool to see the Google map representing the track and seeing the photos on it, but the software just doesn’t seem easy to use. Maybe I’m used to Mac software and haven’t used much Windows software, but they must be able to do better.

The output on their @trip web site works well. I didn’t see any option to export to my own site (I could have output it to Picassa or Flikr, but I like having a bit more control over my photos).

Other reviews of GPS loggers indicate that the software is pretty weak as well. The developers should work with developers that specialize in writing software and just concentrate on the hardware.

Since I’m a Mac user, using Windows software pretty much makes me want to poke out my eyes. There are a few Mac products out there that I’ll review at a later time. Even with the non-streamlined workflow, the Mac software options are so much better than this.

Conclusion

I really like the concept of geotagging photos and the iGotU-120 seems to fit the bill. I’m disappointed that there isn’t a native Mac solution, but hackers have filled in the gap (the workflow isn’t all that clean, however). Would I buy the device if I had to? At $70, it’s a bit steep for me as a casual photographer. If I took more pictures, I think it would be worth it. For Mac users, you might want to invest in other geotagging applications.

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Is Apple evil?

Awhile back, I wrote that developers that wanted to write iPhone apps should just deal with Apple and the AppStore approval process as the upside of getting an app in the AppStore could be huge. Well, I’ve read lots of stories about the AppStore approval process and my views have changed a bit. Apple rejecting Google’s Google Voice app and pulling other Google Voice apps really would have ticked me off as it could easily have happened to me. When I created GrandDialer last summer (GrandCentral turned into Google Voice and GrandDialer was basically the first Google Voice app), my only problem getting it in the AppStore was that I had to change the color of the dialpad so it didn’t look like the iPhone’s dialpad. Then the stories about dictionary apps having to get a 17+ rating because you can find bad words in it is just baffling.

I’m not sure I’d want to create an app for the iPhone now without some financial backing as the risk is too great for me to go at it alone. I could spend a lot of time on an app and only have it rejected by Apple with little to no explanation why. Maybe Apple could review the ideas first (yes, I realize that is a huge undertaking), but it could help out developers that want to invest time. Even if developers had to pay some amount for this, it would definitely be worth it.

Am I going to develop for another platform? For better or worse, I really don’t write code anymore. The iPhone platform is great for developing, but the closed nature of the AppStore makes it a crapshoot to develop applications that will see the light of day. Is the Pre or Android any better? I have no idea. The huge success of the iPhone has caused a huge following and lots of applications; if the other platforms were this successful, would they see problems with their stores? Maybe. There must be a better way to not tick off developers as people acknowledge that the availability of apps makes or breaks a smartphone.

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Get with the (electronic) times

Today I went to submit for reimbursement from my flexible spending plan. Since I scan in all my receipts, assembling the information was quite easy. Our plan allows us to use a “wizard” to prepare the reimbursement. It generated a PDF cover sheet with all the information filled out. I added all my receipts (stored in Paperless), filled it out using PDFPen, added my signature and had one massive PDF. The form said to mail it via USPS or fax it. Since I pay $0.10 per page to send a fax via j2, I printed out the 13 pages, shoved them in my fax machine and sent it (the fax number was toll-free, but I have unlimited calling, so it didn’t matter). Now if I had been able to upload the PDF to their web site, I would have saved the paper.