Warning: Geek Rant – On HD Content Delivery

Last year Apple announced a new product, that we were all expecting, called the AppleTV. When it first came out, there was much celebrating, and this site even got in on some of the action. Then reality set in. Here was a $300 castrated Mac Mini that played video in only one codec and required you to sync with your home computer instead of streaming your content.
It’s like they got the vision, and then totally failed on the execution. Or maybe they had a different vision altogether.
See what Apple and Microsoft are trying to do (Microsoft with the XBox Live Marketplace) is to make the current HD format war irrelevant. That’s a good thing. For those who don’t keep their finger on the pulse of the industry, technology giants like Sony and Toshiba have been fighting a public battle over control of the next-generation DVD disc format — to the detriment of the consumer. Its like VHS vs. Betamax all over again, only this time its worse. What they don’t really realise is that the delivery medium is about to change.
Who really wants shelves full of discs anyway? 5-6 years ago it might have been cool to show off your DVD collection, but now its actually a little embarrassing. What we really need is digital content delivery. I want to pick up my remote, chose any movie ever made, and with a touch of a button, start watching it.
This is the goal of the AppleTV and the XBox 360 — living room dominance. What Apple failed to do with their product is to respect the pioneers of this concept.
While the big companies have spent the last 10 years in-fighting over how to do this and how to make money on it, their gadget buying consumers have been making it happen for themselves. The original XBox actually made a stellar Media PC when hacked to run Linux and the XBMC software. The Mac Mini, with its small footprint, FrontRow software and handy remote was decent as well. And we put those devices to work — years before Apple or Microsoft got their crap together.
All of our household DVDs (save some of the Disney ones) are on our network in DVD-quality DivX format. We’ve been able to watch them all with a touch of a button for the past 3 years. Why would I buy into a solution, like Apple’s, that forces me to abandon that content?
Today, as I write this, Apple is announcing AppleTV Take 2. They now have a better movie library, and finally support movie rentals. Congratulations, Apple. This is what we’ve been asking for. But you still missed the boat. Despite the fact that the AppleTV is a perfectly capable little computer, you’re still screwing over your customers by refusing to stream our own content in the common Codecs we’ve been using. It’s not like it would be hard for you to do — the software exists already.
I will not buy a BluRay/HD-DVD player, and I will not buy an AppleTV 2.0. I want to buy it — I’m an admitted Apple fanboy, but all of the above have missed the point. You can’t step forward by abandoning the early adopters who pioneered the technology you want to sell. You have to respect the people who built this market for you. Sadly, Microsoft is the only one who gets this, and as long as the XBox 360 is the only device on the market that both sells/rents HD content AND allows me to continue to consume my own, then Microsoft is going to win the vote of my wallet.
The MacBook Air on the other hand… that’s pretty hot…

Holding my Breath

Today is beta test day for my project. This is where customers actually get to use it against their data and see what they think. Its too late to make any big changes to the code, but this is kind of an indicator of how well the project will be accepted in the market. They’ll also get the opportunity to pinpoint any functionality holes or bugs — giving me a little under a week to react!
On top of that its MacWorld day, and every good Mac Geek will be refreshing their favourite gadget blog all afternoon to find out what Steve wants us to buy next. This is like the Super Bowl (or Stanley Cup if you’re Canadian) of geekdom, and I can’t wait to see what the coolest computer company ever is going to unleash this year! I’m almost more excited about their projects than my own. Even my boss, a recent Mac convert, seems a little torn over which presentation to pay attention to…

Please don't stop the music – a Benjamin update from Nicole

Despite having an ear infection for the past 2 months, Benjamin is doing great and still making us laugh.

Since the last big update Ben now has 4 teeth, two on the top, huge ones that look like Chiclets, and two on the bottom. I think some more might be coming in soon. He is walking with much more confidence and turning around great. I don’t know that I would say he is graceful at it yet but getting better everyday or at least with as much grace as any of my kids will have since they have me as their mother.

He now also attempts to run — but as some parents know their feet sometimes just won’t move as fast as they would like and he ends up doing a face plant on the floor. He doesn’t do it so much now but he used to point at something and then walk or run to it, making you wonder what is he doing and what is he looking at!
One of his newest things is peek-a-boo – where he’s the one hiding. He does it mostly after a bath and he’s wrapped up in the towel, he laughs and laughs even though eventually he has uncovered himself except for a tiny piece of towel covering his face. Another is hide and seek… Say you’re in the kitchen and he leaves and walks around a corner and you say “Where’s Benjamin?” a couple times and he will then come back around the corner with a great big grin and a laugh, and back he goes to hiding…he’ll do this for about 5 minutes. Laughing with glee the whole time.
Also I wish we could catch this on camera because it is very hard to describe but Ben has this new smile/grin that’s so weird and silly looking, it is a very big toothy grin from ear to ear and he eyes get all squished too…see very hard to explain. I’ll try to get a picture of him doing it, maybe.

The other day I was working on the computer and Benjamin had knocked over our wall mirror — I thought nothing of it since he loves to smile and wave at himself. Then suddenly he starts freaking out and I look over and he is trying to get to us in the bedroom but can’t because the mirror is on the floor completely blocking the doorway. It was face-up and he couldn’t cross it, because he was apparently scared that he might fall in! I go rescue him and then we start to play with the mirror on the floor so he won’t freak out next time it happens…since then he has walked on a tiny bit of the mirror to get by but only if he is holding on to the wall!

Ben also loves music and loves to dance but he can be picky with his music. He won’t dance and get all excited about every song but when he hears one he likes his feet start going and his arms start waving, almost like he is trying to fly away. Sometimes instead of moving his feet and hands he just does a kind of bounce but that normally leads to him falling over because he gets too excited!

For those who are wondering, he’s feeling much better. Our New Year’s eve stomach problems made all of our tummies a little tender, and Benjamin took the longest to get back to normal. Finally this week he’s started eating (and sleeping) like his old self again.

I blog, therefore I am?

So its another year of jonandnic.com too. This little of hobby of mine, after only about 7 years, is finally starting to feel like it has a bit of value. I’m not in a terribly literary mood today, but I’m stalling on delivering the rest of the “big changes for 2008” news until it gets ironed out a bit, so here’s some ramblings around this here website of ours…
Last month 42% of the visitors to jonandnic.com came from the States, 33% from Canada, 13% from Europe, 3% from Australia, and my parents holding 1.08% from Asia (since Chad and Nicole are home in the States for a year.) A lot of other regions provided enough hits to make it on the map, but not enough to be statistically significant. Still we’re very glad you dropped by. There’s just a few parts of Africa there that aren’t visiting… but they can probably be excused for that until we get some more OLPCs over there!

We average about 100 visits a day, and 56% of you are new visitors (or got a new computer) since August.
Most of you stay for just under 2 minutes, and visit 1.5 pages per visit. Which, to be honest, is about how much time I spend on any given site.
Not that’d I’d ever be able to go the dooce route, and make a living on blogging, but I would be interested in hearing from you all, if you have any thoughts:
Why do you visit? What parts of the site do you like/find interesting? For those of you who lurk, and don’t comment, why not? Any suggestions on what we could change/update to make this site more interesting or worth visiting?
As for why this blog is here… well, I found this quote while reading a book called “North to the Orient,” by a very old-school blogger, which I thought perfectly summed up the answer to that question…

What, then, is this collection of chapters? How to explain it? Why did I write it? There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one’s own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one’s own life, and a personal trivial immortality of an old self assured.
And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half-cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experiences becomes — translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself — the more vivid it grow. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, “Do you see — I can’t tell you how strange it was — we all of us felt…” although actually, at the time of the incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone on a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that it is, in reality, bright blue.

– Anne Morrow Lindberg, 1935

If I only we had adventures like hers to write about!

XBox360 + Connect360 + Linksys WRT54g (firmware hacked)

Nullriver’s Connect360 is a fantastic little app that you can run on your Mac that will fool your XBox 360 into thinking its talking to a PC, allowing you to share your iTunes, iPhoto and video libraries with the 360 dashboard. The video transcoding is a little lossy, but for SD applications it works exactly as advertised. Well worth the $20 they’re asking.
According to the Connect360 Support website, you can’t use Connect360 on your Mac to connect to your XBox 360 if your network uses a Linksys WRT54g with homebrew firmware on it. They’re right — it doesn’t work.
The solution is pretty simple, however. Abstract the Mac and the XBox from the router using a good* network switch. The switch will allow the two devices to communicate (via broadcast) with each other without having to go through the router, and all will work as expected.
*Note: The Connect360 site also warns that some switches may cause a similar problem. I’m using a NetGear Gigabit Switch to accomplish this, and it works perfectly. YMMV.

Using Mail.app with multiple users — using AppleScript!

OK, this is pretty brilliant — and SO simple.
Here’s the setup: my wife and I share a Mac at home. For memory reasons, among others, I don’t want to use Fast User Switching, and because of my automated tasks, I don’t want the primary account to ever be logged out. So all many of our programs need to be set-up for two different users. Firefox has user profiles, that once configured, works perfect. Mail.app has no such thing. What I decided to then, was write an AppleScript that would switch Mail.app between users for us. This example is for two users, but it could be edited for more. Here’s how to use it:

  • Setup Mail accounts for each user
  • Modify the script to prompt for each user you have, and reference their account name
  • Replace your Mail.app dock icon with a link to your AppleScript (you can even give it the Mail.app icon)
  • Whenever you launch Mail, you’ll be asked which user you want to use
  • Even better than that, you can switch users just by clicking the Mail icon in your dock again. You don’t even have to close down Mail!

The result looks like this whenever you invoke the script, and launches/reconfigures Mail within two seconds. Set the delay to longer if Mail.app takes longer to start on your Mac.

The code is dead simple, and took me only moments to put together. Note that the delays and the order in which things are done is important so that it doesn’t hang waiting for Mail to start if its not already open.

-- Mail Account Chooser, by Jon Wise
-- Add user profiles to Mail.app
display dialog "Choose the Mail account to use" buttons {"Jon", "Elizabeth"} default button 1 with icon note
if the button returned of the result is "Jon " then
  tell application "Mail"
    activate
    delay 2
    set enabled of account "Elizabeth Home" to false
    set enabled of account "Jon Home" to true
  end tell
else
  tell application "Mail"
    activate
    delay 2
    set enabled of account "Jon Home" to false
    set enabled of account "Elizabeth Home" to true
  end tell
end if