ePad – Rockin’ It Like It’s 1987

You know you have something going right when the spoofs are spectacular…

Then we have this dream sequence/history of Apple’s computer designs. Beautifully done, but I don’t see how they could have left out the evolution of the iMac or iPod, except maybe they couldn’t get the curves of their virtual rendition to look right…

Finally we have the latest iPad ad, that debuted during Sunday’s Oscar broadcast…

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Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

Then there’s this excellent example of the tech news analysis by Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman in CNET’s “Real Deal” podcast. The two put the iPad announcement into the historical context, looking at many of the previous, mostly failed, attempts to popularize the tablet/handheld class of computer. Make sure to visit the podcast website, these guys have excellent show notes and links to all of the gadgets mentioned in the video/podcast.

Then there’s this speculative editorial that wants to pass itself off as news reporting. Molly Wood is a smart, funny journalist, but she’s definitely from the media personality school of thought where snarky strong opinions are pushed to the front, generating huge positive or negative responses. I can’t watch this video without getting pissed-off. Ack. Moving on.

Discounting the noise being made by those who flat out hate all things Apple, iPhone or Steve Jobs, I’ve noted at least two trends between the fanboys and the haters. The first trend seems to be that pretty much none of the haters have actually touched the device and are making their vitriolic pronouncements based on the videos and the device spec sheet. This leads to the second observation: all of the haters are freaking out about all of the things the device doesn’t have. Oh my god, it doesn’t have a walk-in closet! Perhaps you missed that opening slide in the keynote where Jobs placed the device between a smart phone and a laptop. The idea is that the device will have things missing in the smart phone and won’t have things found on the laptop, like a three-car garage (crap, now I’m sounding like Molly Wood). Moving on.

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Moving Media Around the House

By definition, this is a “first world” problem. In the news gap between CES and the Apple event next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might manage my media collections between all of my computers. The buzz around the Boxee box and anticipating the need to have most of my working data in the cloud so that I can access it regardless of what computer or platform I’m using has inspired me to find a better way to work with my media. Actually this is a “problem” that I didn’t have until I moved from my one-room studio to my one-bedroom apartment and then two-bedroom townhouse. I have four macs floating around the house (and anticipate a fifth Apple in the form of an iPad-netbook-media-thingy), each with their own full copies of my iTunes library, DVDs ripped to a couple macs, and daily podcasts downloaded to all four computers. In the past I manually erased podcasts I’d already listened to on one of the four computer and my iPhone, but given how many podcasts I listen to this method is just too much work. I’d also been hoping to store my DVDs on one computer and be able to view them on any of the other devices. The upcoming release of the Boxee box has me rethinking my media sharing scheme.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that even though I’m using fast wireless “N” and or a fast “power” Ethernet connection between the first and second floors, ripped DVDs stored on hard drives in their original Mpeg2 format won’t play across the network without lots of buffering or dropped frames. Unacceptable. I was anticipating using my PS3 as the movie/media player downstairs (still working on that), so I had previous converted some movies to mp4 and those videos seemed to play nicely across the network. So, even though I’m a firm believer in having access to all of the “extra features” that I look for with my DVDs (and how convenient they are to access using the DVD menu system), I’ll need to rip and convert my media to a more network friendly format, like mp4 (which makes each extra feature into it’s own separate video file). Grrr.

I have a huge DVD and music collection and get most of my more daily news and entertainment via video and audio podcasts, so I need some kind of box attached to my TVs so that I can get my Internet/network media. I was hoping to use my PS3 as the player in my living room, but it has a crappy web-browser and doesn’t do RSS, so it can’t natively do podcasts. More work needed here. At the moment my mac mini is doing living room media duties. I love the Front Row interface, but it seems a bit confused that my episodes of StarTrek (classic and Next Gen) are not movies and won’t let me organize things. So maybe the updated Boxee interface will do the job.

I’ve played with Boxee previously, but couldn’t break away from my iTunes addiction. With the software upgrade and set-top box, I’m thinking that this might be the solution to my Internet TV/podcast thing, either the software or the set-top box. Depending on my success using the PS3 as a media player, I still might need another set-top box for the bedroom TV. I’m also thinking that I need to plug into the NetFlix thing (streaming and disc) so that I don’t find myself buying every movie I want to see. So whatever box I get needs to do Netflix, access my music and DVDs across the network and either grab podcasts off the net or the ones stored on my other computers. Having invested in the PS3, I’m aware of the problems of getting a box that isn’t as expandable to handle all of the twists and turns that tends to happen in the media market.

Sources:
* Boxee Demo. http://www.boxee.tv/box retrieved on 1/23/2010
* FrontRow image by Joe Bustillos
* Tekzilla » Episode 124: “Should I buy a Boxee Box or a Roku or Stick With My xbox?” http://revision3.com/tekzilla/veronicapc/should-i-buy-a-boxee-box-or-a-roku-or-stick-with-my-xbox-360- retrieved on 1/23/2010
* Tekzilla » Episode 121: Boxee Box. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/2010newyear/boxee-box retrieved on 1/23/2010

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Form Factor: 8×11

Nope, this isn’t about grading assignments while drinking beer, though that practice clearly deserves a blog entry/study of it’s own. This one is about a unexpected discovery I made last Sunday when I needed to get away from my domicile and plant myself at a local pub to watch a day of NFL goodness. Of course having 10-page student papers to grade wasn’t going to stop me. Now, because access to a power-outlet was in doubt and previously the wifi was iffy at best, I took the unusual precaution of actually printing out all of the assignments and choose to read through and make notes on these pages before uploading the comments onto my laptop. I’m pretty fanatical about NOT printing out things, so I can’t remember the last I graded something in the dead-tree version. But I have to tell you that it was remarkably convenient to quickly flip through the pages, mark them up and then move on. And from the perspective of my small table in the bar, it was a lot less conspicuous and I wasn’t looking over a screen to see the TV(s). Weird. It was just amazingly natural to work in an 8×11 form factor.

How much more efficient would it have been if I had some device, roughly 8×11, where I could have marked up the documents (in their native electronic form), that could run all day on a single charge and had access to the Internet even when there’s no nearby wifi. Hmm. No, I guess I could make the notes on the text with my finger, but a stylus works too. I doubt it’ll have a stylus, but I have to wonder if Apple’s upcoming announcement next Wednesday will include the announcement of a device that fulfills this content creation need. The announcement better not be just a rev of the iLife suite. Ack.

Sources:
image by Joe Bustillos

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Interactive IKEA Catalog – Apple iPad?

Apple reserved presentation space for the end of January and the rumor mills is cranking up around the Apple netbook-thingy… At CES2010 everyone and their brother is announcing all sorts of tablet/slate/netbook/e-book readers devices, all trying to fight against the buzz of a device that hasn’t been announced yet. Amazing.

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Time Inc. Media Pad… Hints on Apple Tablet

In case you haven’t noticed, this is the year of the media pad/e-reader. And no, Mr. Ballmer, we don’t want to read/interact with our media on a big fat (hot!) laptop or, God forbid, desktop computer. We want something small (w/ a big screen), sexy and fast! Is this Time Inc. Pad the unicorn/Apple Tablet? Since I posted this video in my blog, rumors about the Apple unicorn/tablet have really taken off again. End of January announcement? Stay tuned.

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Macworld expo, gnomedex or SxSW 2010 – What’s a Media Educator To Do?

Over the past three years my attendance at Macworld Expo has been completely automatic but with Apple pulling out of the conference and then having the conference moved to February I’m not sure that attending the 2010 conference will be the best use of my increasingly diminished conference funds. I recognize that the Macworld isn’t just about the keynote, but I had the good fortune to go to the historic 2007 keynote when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and none of the following keynotes have matched that high. And as great as the keynote can be as far as being a geek rock show, the real experience is to rub elbows with my fellow apple geeks famous and not-so-famous. Alas, in the time between expos I haven’t made much of an effort to strengthen the conversations I’ve had with many a mac-pilgrim over the past three years. So not going isn’t as painful as it might otherwise be. Then I got a link to this year’s Gnomedex conference. I think I’m experiencing conference lust (a geek off-shoot of wander-lust). Damn.

Community is so important and I haven’t been to happy with my level of “commitment.” The last few times I went to my more local CUE conferences (Computer Using Educators) in California I was not too happy that I wasn’t more involved in presenting or contributing to the process, but I always seemed to be more than busy enough with my days filled with teaching and my ill-fated graduate studies. So, it’s not like I’m sitting around wondering how I might get more involved. but it seems hardly efficient to just go to these conferences hoping for a new tech/geek high. It’s just too expensive (especially traveling from the East Coast). Damn. What a media educator to do? I wonder when SxSW is going to be?

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Damn You, HD Nation!

Several months ago I was contemplating simplifying my home-theater thing by drafting my Nintendo Wii to take care of media server details. Only a couple problems with this plan: 1) No DVD support, 2) low-resolution screen, 3) No native iTunes support. Yeah. Not so great. Not being able to just play a DVD was bad enough, but the Wii has such a low resolution that it makes doing simple web browsing ridiculous and made it impossible to use the Wii to play my iTunes media (using the MyTunes software on the MacMini). Fail. Then I fell in love with the idea building a Hackintosh to do the media server role, especially because of how great the Apple app Front Row works with DVDs and videos stored on connected and networked hard drives. I was building a case against investing in BluRay, because, except for digital animations like Wall*E, the sharpness of the picture takes me out of the movie (I feel like I can tell we’re on a film set and fully expect to see a boom mic fall into the frame). Then I started watching Revision 3’s latest offering, HD Nation. Damn it, now I can’t imagine not doing BluRay. Argh!!!

I’m much closer to putting down the cash for a PS3… then I heard that Sony is going to do some upgrade/product roll-out sometime in August. Damn.

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iPhone bsod

Given how much I rag on anything Microsoft, it only seems fair to note when things go very bad for Apple products. Here’s one that really doesn’t need a blog post, but I couldn’t help myself. Eileen Rivera, from Revision3, posted the above image of her faltering iPhone on her posterous blog with the explanatory note: ***FYI*** this is not a jailbroken 3GS, nor was I trying to jailbreak it. It had been acting funny all day and I turned it off. After an hour I attached it to the charger (still not turning the power on) and the screen on the pic immediately popped up. So even the beloved “Jesus phone” isn’t immune to black-screen-of-death messages. (Weren’t black BSODs an IBM thing in the distant past? Hmmm).

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Hackintosh as Media Server

This time last year I confessed to one hidden cost I hadn’t counted on in moving to a one-bedroom apartment from a studio: purchasing another TV. Well, I seem to be back at it again, contemplating the not-so-hidden costs of moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom townhouse. This time around, in addition to another TV/monitor, I’m thinking of what to use to “drive” it. What I mean is that I don’t have cable TV and don’t plan to, so I need some kind of media player/server on the three TVs for my music, podcasts, video-podcasts and DVDs. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a PS3 for the living room and another mac mini for the other bedroom, but I’m not so sure if I’ll be happy with the PS3 playing networked media stored on the mac minis. Then I saw the following segment on the Tekzilla show about building a “desktop” hackintosh (9:30 into the episode), that would make for an awesome media player/server that would be much more flexible than a mac mini. hmmm….

Of course I need to get the paperwork through the over-loaded CA teacher-pension system before spending said moneys. Ack. Fingers tapping.

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