Dec/082
Christmas Pics
I’ve been organizing the pictures I took over the Christmas holiday with my family. Here’s a couple of interesting low light pictures. I had the forgot to adjust the focus point on the manger scene, my bad. The slow shutter really made it hard to hold the camera still enough. I really wish I would have brought my tripod with me.
Dec/080
Small Town Indiana
I traveled home last weekend to the small town of Hebron, Indiana to visit my family for the Thanksgiving. It was a great time, but a horribly dreary couple of days for taking pictures. Still I managed to snap a couple when the sun temporarily poked its head out:
Dec/080
One Month with Boxee
My last posting float the idea of Apple expanding its App Store to the Apple TV. In it, it held up Boxee as the type of compelling application that would result. Well, I have a cofession to make. At the time, I hadn’t used it. My exposure to it was solely from videos posted by the Boxee people on their site. I had applied for an alpha invite, I just handn’t been granted one.
Shortly after that post, I received my invite, and, within an hour, had used the wonderful atvusb creator to create a patchstick and install XBMC and Boxee on my Apple TV. The patchstick leaves the Apple’s software complete functional, it simply adds an menu for Boxee, XBMC, and updating the two, to the main frontrow menu of the Apple TV. So, you can still purchase / rent Apple content, if that is your thing, and still have the whole iTunes syncing functionality going on, you just have this orthoginal Boxee funtionality as well.
So, has Boxee lived up to my expectations? Absolutely. Its interface is slick. The social media recommendations are nice. The local media management could use some work in terms of organizing your media. There are better methods that hierachial directory organization for this sort of thing. Quite frankly, since I’d already had to convert every thing to iTunes compatibile formats for the Apple TV, I still use Apple’s interface for that sort of thing. The codec support is fantastic. However, its the internet media interfaces, particularly last.fm integration on the audio side and Hulu, CBS, and WB on the video side. I used it for a solid two weeks before Apple’s automatic 2.3 software update wiped it out. Fortunately, the atvusb creator was updated after a week, so I just got up and running again. I find myself using the Apple TV on a daily basis now, and that certainly wasn’t the case before.
There’s definitely room for improvement. The aforementioned interface for orgainizing media, the lack of direct access to your iTunes content, and little tweaks here and there. The Flickr module should grab high resolution versions if available, give you access to your group pools, and let you browse the forums. Boxee will play VOBs from ripped DVDs, but there is not way to navigate the menus. You find little things like these all over the place, but there are several updates to the software a week, and it is evolving rapidly while remaining remarkable crash free (they do happen on occaision).
I am, however, finding that the Apple TV is becoming a limiting factor in the equation. The CPU, GPU, memory constraints, and @#$#! six function remote of Apple’s $229 hobby product keep an upper limit on what you can do with non-Apple media, and even that is limited (2.5 Mbit HD, indeed). With the recent announcement of Netflix support the Mac and Boxee’s integration to it in their latest release, I would seriously consider a Mac Mini if I didn’t already own an Apple TV.
Overall, I’m very impressed…to the point that I may even consider upgrading my hardware just for Boxee.
Nov/080
Hey Apple, how about expanding the App Store to the Apple TV?
You must have noticed that, much like your other closed platform, the iPhone, communities have sprouted up around your hobby project to add functionality that it lacks and people want. Also like early iPhone developers, they’re doing it without your help. At times, even in spite of your efforts to thwart them.
You may have also noticed once you made those iPhone developers legit and fostered them, your new platform took off like a rocket. I wonder what would happen to your hobby project if you got behind the pent up demand to develop on that platform?
p.s. You better hurry. AwkwardTV, XBMC, and Boxee are pretty compelling without you.
Nov/080
What the National GOP should learn from Mitch Daniels
In the wake a fairly healthy shellacking of all things GOP, perhaps the national party should take note that, despite a flurry on new voters likely making party line votes1 and turning Indiana blue for the first time since 1964, Mitch Daniels was re-elected by a larger popular margin than Obama managed to achieve (18% vs. 7%). Mitch isn’t the most charasmatic politician on the planet. He certainly can’t conjure the rhetorical flourish that makes people believe he can “make the oceans cease to rise, and the earth begin to heal”. In fact, over the course of his first term, he managed to tick off just about everyone at one point or another. He began by angering his base with the suggestion of raising taxes temporarily, and quickly moved on to angering many in the north by earning interest on leasing the toll road rather than continuing to loose money operating it. Yet, in the end, an astonishing percentage of Hoosiers decided they’ld like him to lead the state for another 4 years. Why was this? I’ll sum it up for you in two words: competent governance.
The current administration in Washington came to power by shrewdly playing the political game. Love him or hate him, you have to admit: Karl Rove’s got game. However, political success and governing success are two very different things. The administration chose to continue to play the political game throughout their eight years, always sticking to an ideallogically driven political agenda, even when facts on the ground changed and policy change was warranted from a governing perspective. As a result, so called conservatives presided over some of the largest expansions of the federal goverment since the Great Society.
In stark contrast, Mitch inherited a terribly managed state goverment and managed to nicely turn the ship of state onto a better course in just four years. Not by playing political games, but by adopting innovative and fiscally responsible policies and producing results. In the end, those results hold much more sway with the voters than who scored more points playing the game.
- Based, completely, on my anecdotal evidence watching a flood of new youngsters at my precinct go in and out of the booth in 30 seconds ↩