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Do not look gift AppleTV in the control port.

I haven’t written much about the woes I’ve experience with my AppleTV[1], since the topic seems well-covered.

But mostly, it hasn’t really ever worked.

With a 40GB hard drive vs. a 160GB music collection and a 50GB video collection, actually syncing anything to the device is a lost cause, which means I’ve always been running in “streaming” mode from the iTunes running on my PowerMac G5. Over 802.11g.

I realize I’ve just enumerated three key barriers to victory - the relatively slow wifi network (in an apartment house where we, alone, have about 10 wireless devices, not to mention what our neighbors have going on), and the streaming thing. Oh and the PowerMac G5 was plenty fast… four years ago. [2]

But the basic issues were:
a) can’t navigate the menus without significant / constant hangs
b) entire OS on unit hangs requiring reboot
c) other general suckery

I had sort of written the thing off as the gen 1 Apple “hobby”-itis Jobs referenced a while back, joyously concluding I’d, you know, rabidly buy/pre-order a gen 2 at the first possible moment. Because with Apple, often it is right to throw good money after bad.

Then a funny thing happened. Well, two funny things:

a) I bought an iPod Touch, and discovered that the various and sundry major menu performance issues I experienced via the AppleTV user interface (i.e. over the TV) didn’t seem to effect the ipod touch/iPhone “Remote” application. So playing around with that sort of got me in the mode of thinking all may not be lost

b) then, some time in the last few weeks, clearly some sort of code push happened to made the AppleTV front-end… well, work. As in, for the first time ever. Oh yeah, here it is. What do you know… it looks like my AppleTV has been under some kind of DoS attack for… two years.

Still periodic minor pauses, but no hangs in two weeks.

So dig that AppleTV out of the compost heap, and re-engage.

[1] I have a first gen 40GB model

[2] but on unrelated note, the last three tower macs I’ve owned have had really good lifespans: PowerMac 9500 1995-2001, PowerMac G4 blue and white 1998-2005, PowerMac G5 dual-core 2004-current.

One more small voice in the chorus.

Google is apparently doing OK and has some money to invest in world-changing ideas.

Their project 10 to the 100th is the opportunity for you to submit those world-changing ideas. Submit by Oct 20, 2009.

This has kept me up some nights recently, mostly because I’m arrogant enough to think I have one of those idears, then I go out and Google it, and someone is already doing it, and I get to start over. I have 17 days to get, what, 10x smarter? It’s a task that almost suggests a persistent, altered state.

I’ll either need to sleep on the couch for the home stretch (as I’m doing tonight, because I grew weary of waking up Kelley walking in and out of the bedroom), or bring the laptop in.

Perhaps a worthy idea is a system to allow cats to crawl all over you when you want, and not when you don’t. Seems like a win-win.

Key caps below:

You can do it.

Third exercise, this via the free wordpress for iPhone app. Very nice, clean, basic. Did I mention free?

Return to actual content soon…

Why didn’t the google challenge go to the blue pill?

survivor is in hi-def now. Thats all I can tell you comfortably.

Or technically, she stopped podcasting about a year ago. But now the final plug is being pulled, as she’s canceled her libsyn account. All episodes archived here.

The top search results on cuil shows me holding a fish, or maybe a mermaid/man, or some other object that cannot really be seen, even when you click on it. also, that’s not a picture of me. also, about half the results either don’t feature me, or are from about 11 years ago.

I have nothing against holding fishes, but I’ve never done it. I’m ready, though! Can one be brought to me?

… but I have no choice in the matter.

I’m hoping the heart-stopping screech my computer just emitted at the end of this install process was a result of some unrelated situation (ex. the 150 deg F internal temperature) as opposed to a feature of Google Desktop for OS X.

In my standard/excellent style of getting on “deck” with things a year or five behind the wavefront, I recently became aware of 5ives. If your A.D.D. prohibits you from getting all the way to 1 (or 3) on any given top-ten list, check it out and, at last, get your satisfaction.

That looks like fun. Let’s kick off the party right, six-style:

Six Things that Should Be Nuked from Orbit, no order, 12-16-2006:

1. Oasis albums after “Be Here Now”[1].
2. Any Fanninghive-related organism.
3. Noise-canceling headphones sold by Brookstone.
4. The xenomorph-infested atmospheric engineering facility residing on LV-426.
5. The TV Mini Series Event The Lost Room. I know life’s not f-ing fair, Peter Krause. Neither is the fact that this show sucks in a most intense and onerous way, except for the presence of Julianna Margulies… which was only a passing fancy/distraction once Kelley told me she saw JM in a sushi place in NYC once, and that (on that particular night) she has a freakishly huge head in proportion to her body. Instant downgrade from “stone fox on the career rebound distracting me from the belief that The Lost Room was being written as it was being filmed” to “new-style Burger King commecial freakism”.[0]
6. Not being able to think of six things that should be nuked from orbit, due to a general sort of malaise/torpor/vapor filling the room this evening. But wait, I got it…
6.1: Malaise vapors!
7. (bonus) The Burger King commercial Burger King.

[0] I’m all about making friends in Hollywood.
[1] Be Here Now should also possibly be nuked from orbit. If a half-yield, sort of 1 kiloton nuke is possible, I’d consider it. But then again, do you want the target destroyed or not? Of course the answer is “you want it vaporized”. Be Here Now, mon amore.

TiVoDecode Manager is a one-click OS X interface to pull TiVo video from your series 2 TiVo and save it as a VLC-playable MPEG file.

Pros:

1. More or less one-click.
1. You don’t have to hack your TiVo - operates via the TiVo2Go/media access key interface.
1. It’s free. A lot of software is in this day and age, but still…

Cons:

1. Doesn’t claim to work with anything other than TiVo series 2 (so forget series 3, OEMs, etc)
1. Queue function doesn’t really work well on my system (which is probably a function of the fact my Tivos are WIFI-attached, and therefore extremely slow to transmit data.)
1. I’m confident this whole process breaks any number of right-to-use and terms-of-use systems inherent to tivo function, so enjoy it while it lasts[1].
1. Nonexistent reporting on transfer status.

[1] ie. until Tivo releases a patch to ensure that any alleged “TiVo2Go clients” connecting to the box are exactly what they say they are.