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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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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Weak – Laptop Hunter Picks PC for Video Editing

Come on, Microsoft. Clearly you’ve forgotten one of the first tenets of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, To not attack the enemy where they’re strongest, but where they are weakest. You had a good foothold emphasizing that a Windows PC tends to be cheaper, has more applications, and more video games… but NOT video editing, at least not out of the box. No one who has used the product is going to suggest Microsoft’s MovieMaker. A recent PC Magazine article lists MovieMaker as among the free crapware loaded on PCs that no one wants. I know there are folks who are happy with their video editing experience on Windows PCs, using Adobe’s Premiere Elements 7 (list $140) or Sony’s Vegas editing program(s), but that’s a bit like saying that there are people who are perfectly happy living in Siberia. I mean, they’re happy mostly because that’s all they’ve ever known. I’ve owned PCs far longer than Macs and made videos with PCs, but whenever a video project came up I’d try to do it on a Mac first because it was a far less kludgy experience. Getting a laptop for video editing for less than $2,000, definitely doable, depending on how many times you want to reboot under Windows and/or restart the whole project when the under-powered machine crashes in the middle of your project. How valuable is your time?

Here’s a video blast from the past that kind’a sums it all up:

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Teleport & Share-screen for Ultimate MacGeek Control Out of the Office

Sitting in my dining area I want more screen real-estate and want to control my iTunes playing on the Mac Mini in the bedroom. Teleport and Mac OS X share-screen function to the rescue. Teleport, possibly a descendant of the much loved synergy, was recommended by iJustine on MBW #133.

"Griffin Evolve Wireless Sound System for iPod" (Griffin Technology)

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The Quest for the Perfect Laptop Bag

You can tell I’ve just gotten back from traveling because I seem to find myself on laptop bag websites trying to figure out what is going to work best for my next flight (in two weeks!). When I switched up from my little 12″ iBook to my current 15.4″ Macbook Pro I really started noticing the shoulder strain dragging my gear about in various backpack and messenger-style bags. Of course I’m one of those idiots who insists on carrying every bit of gear not only in-transit but also when cruising the convention floor. At Macworld expo two years ago I saw these funky hybrid messenger/backback bags that were designed to sit low on one’s “bum” to reduce shoulder strain from a New York design company called BBP (which stands for “Bum Back Pack”). I’ve loved my Hampton ever since. Alas, I’ve recently purchased a digital SLR camera and I now need to add the 35-mm style camera and lens to the carrying equation. Damn.

For this last trip I went minimalist and just used a sleeve with a strap from Tom Bihn for the computer and a very small generic Case Logic camera bag when on the Expo floor. That worked okay, but I didn’t have room for water or my 55-250mm lens. Damn. Thank god I was wearing my Internet cargo pants, so I had the pockets, but I wasn’t happy having my camera lens bouncing around in the thigh pockets (nor the bruises I was sure to get afterwards). Fortunately at one camera bag vendor I saw a reference to a camera/laptop hybrid bag from Tenba. Alas, by the expo’s first full day they’d sold out of this mysterious bag so I will have to see if this bag fits the bill when I get a chance to run down to my local “photography” store. Then in the course of my post-expo research I found out that one of my prior bag vendors, Tom Bihn, had produced an interesting TSA friendly computer bag. Camera/laptop bag… right. I need to stay on track. Thus the quest for the perfect laptop (/camera) bag continues.

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Smaller but Available Everywhere: more DIY Netbook Thoughts

Clearly I have small netbooks on the brain. After writing the DIY blog entry I found the following entry about how to do “netbooks” with something like an iPhone that I wrote on my flight a week ago to LA:

Just spent several cramped hours in economy class writing on my mbp. My laptop and I need to lose some weight. I could type but it was difficult using the track-pad. A privacy screen on the LCD might have been nice, but I couldn’t fully open the laptop because the passenger in front of me was tipped all the way back, so the privacy screen would have backfired on me. Something XO-1 sized would have worked. Or maybe a foldable Bluetooth keyboard with a detachable stand to prop my iphone on. Or maybe something Kindle-sized but less “Soviet” era in the style department. I’m tempted but I don’t want to go back to Windows. And I want to have my Zinio magazine subscriptions and my documents on the thing. I guess I need to put more of my ongoing work up in the cloud. But what do I do about the fact that my workflow in everything except my blog goes through a mac app from Circus Ponies called Notebook. Stuff that I want to be able to edit across platforms and on multiple machines is done on Evernote. Damn. I’m spoiled. jbb

P.s. Next time I pack goodies for the flight I need to transfer the goodies to a pocket I can easily reach. I mean why wear cargo pants if I’m not going to fill all the pockets? Camera bag under the seat might as well be with the checked in luggage. Lesson learned. I’m really hungry right now.

All errrorrs courtesy my iPhone

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DIY Mac Netbooks?

While every mac-fan podcaster I know continues to pine away for Apple to introduce a low-cost small-sized notebook, commonly referred to as a netbook, I heard the most amazing podcast from Victor Cajiao, the Typical Mac User Podcast, where he loaded the Mac operating system on to an Asus Eee PC (one of the more popular netbook PCs) (Episode 155). Yeah, DIY Mac Netbook. Victor said that a friend got him up to speed, but that the details on how to do this can be found at the following link: “OSX86 on an Eee 1000H,” an article on the Eclipse Empire blog. Job’s said last Fall, after introducing the new “solid aluminum” Macbooks, that he couldn’t see anyone putting out a $500 laptop that wasn’t a piece of junk. We’ll see at next week’s Macworld Expo whether that comment ends up with the “no one wants to watch video on an iPod” comment Jobs made some time before introducing the 5th gen video-enabled iPod. But if Apple continues to ignore this part of the market then there might be a number of us who will probably choose to boot up copies of Mac OSX on our tiny little Asus netbooks. jbb

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The Lie of the 4th Screen

The following video was brought to my attention by a coworker as we both love watching stuff being presented at the TED conference. Alas, this video continues what I believe is a false cultural perception about the increasing general dehumanizing nature of technology. Admittedly it needs to be a bit bias, it’s a Nokia ad. But there is something that the ad misses about why these technologies succeed.

From the big screen to the small, the ad would have us believe that what was once shared (the big screen), was lost in the next two steps (TV & computers) but wonderfully recaptured in this latest iteration, specifically the N-Series Nokia devices. Um… bullshit.

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My Year with the OLPC – NR4PT

Around this time last year I was very excited to receive my OLPC (One Laptop per Child), called the XO-1. Having drunk the Negroponte gatorade I was endlessly frustrated with Dvorak and other tech journalists who kept their criticism of the XO-1 focused on either Negroponte’s eccentricities or the fact that the creators made it specifically to not be a Windows PC. The concept, begun at MIT’s Media Lab, that technology in education is not about training students to be little MS Office drones but to use computers to teach programming in order to teach thinking and communication seemed to waft past the XO-1’s dissenters. Leo Laporte and David Pogue got that the little green XO-1 wasn’t about attacking an untapped technology market, but was an humanitarian cause to bring the gift of technology to Third World classrooms.

In the ISTE Keynote address that I heard Negroponte introduce the XO-1 he quipped that they must be doing something right to have raised the ire of Intel and Bill Gates. Alas, maybe the joke in the end was on Negroponte when Intel promised to play fair but couldn’t resist the temptation to undercut Negroponte’s “humanitarian cause” and sell their competing kid-size ultra-light laptop, the Classmate, to the same countries Negroponte was trying to reach. So the Gospel according to Negroponte fell on deaf ears because the Win/Tel hegemony couldn’t hear the words for the vastness, opportunities and profits presented in possibility of harvesting the Third World educational/government technology nickel.

This holiday season the OLPC foundation is repeating their give one/get one campaign that I participated in last year to get my own XO-1, only this time they’re working with Amazon.com to get the word out and do the distribution. The commercials are very cute. My own XO-1 sits on a top shelf in my bedroom, part of my shrine to sentimental technology I’ve previously invested in (I really wish I had kept one of my old Kaypros to put in the shrine). I hate to think that Dvorak and the others might have been right after all.

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Shuffling Three Monitors

I love screen real estate. Duh. Like many other things there is no such thing as too much screen real estate. But there are always weird limitations. Pretty much all laptops have one port for one external monitor. I’ve added a USB converter from Gefen that gives me a second external monitor. Love all the screens. Alas, web video runs really slow on the USB connected monitor and DVD doesn’t run on it all. Also, iMovie won’t run with the USB monitor adapter connected and with the recent Final Cut Pro installation, I want to jump into more video editing but it’s unlikely that FCP will like running with the second USB monitor adapter attached. Additionally, even though my 32″ Vizio is by far the biggest screen, it has a lower screen resolution than the much smaller LCDs (1024 vs. 1440). So the plan was to use the big ol’ Vizio for DVD/Video playback, but make it detachable so that I can video edit with other monitor… ah, no go. So, I need to switch it all around, putting the mbp back in the middle, connect the DVI to the Vizio and connect the second monitor to the USB adapter for slow web browsing and email monitoring (No Video!!!). See what I go through to have such an amazing rig. jbb

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