Netflix, Hulu, etc. on XBox with PlayOn

From MediaMall Technologies:

PlayOn enables consumers who own a PLAYSTATION 3, Xbox 360, or HP MediaSmart TV to access content from sites including Netflix, Hulu, CBS, YouTube, ESPN and more on their television. We have been testing PlayOn Beta for a number of months now, and the fully featured release will be coming shortly!

We will also be adding support for Nintendo Wii in early 2009. Stay tuned!

Excellent Time Lapse

From Gizmodo.com:

As if our lives don't pass by fast enough, photographer Eirik Solheim managed to encapsulate the passage of an entire year into a 40 second HD clip using photos complied from his Canon 400D.

Kicking Apple TV up a notch

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

I've made no secret about my unabashed love for boxee, the awesome media center with a social kick that can run on your Apple TV. It should be no surprise that my first piece of advice is that you set-up boxee on your Apple TV as soon as you get it connected to your TV and home theater.


Need an invite? If you don't have a friend to ask, check out the boxee forums, hit up the boxee Twitter feed or pester me (@film_girl) and you should be able to get one pretty quickly. On January 8th, 2009, boxee will be opening up the alpha for everyone.


After you've updated your Apple TV to the latest firmware, follow my instructions or take a look the information at the ATV USB Creator project page for the the details in making a patchstick. The process is extremely easy and you just need a USB stick (1 GB or more recommended) and a few minutes to get everything up and running.


Once boxee is installed, you can enjoy Hulu (if you live in the US), streaming video from other services, last.fm and playback of other file types that won't natively play on the Apple TV; you can store those files either on the Apple TV, or that you
access from another hard drive.

Why is there no title bar when I open Task Manager in Windows XP?

From PCHell.com:

When you open up Task Manager in Windows XP, there is no title bar, menu bar, or program tabs showing. Only the running applications, End Task, Switch To, and New Task buttons show up.

This problem is easy to fix, the Task Manager is running in "tiny footprint mode". To correct this, simply double-click on the border around the window and it will return to its normal state. To place task manager back in "tiny footprint mode" again, double click again on the border around the window.

So I got a 3G iPhone...

I said I wasn't going to do it. I already had a perfectly fine 1st gen 8GB iPhone. The 3G model wasn't worth it.

What changed my mind?

GPS
On a recent trip I heavily used the map application. It was fine for locating everything-- hotels, buildings, Starbucks, etc. -- except ME. Most of the time I got a huge circle, sometimes I got a very precise location that was definitely not where I was standing.

A colleague had the 3G model, which worked just like a real GPS should. It tells you exactly where you are. I was jealous.

Now with a proper GPS in my phone, I'm tempted to offload my Garmin Nuvi. This is a sweet device, but it's one more thing to carry around.

3G
I use my phone more for email and web than I do for calls. So if there's any way to speed that up, I'm all for it. 3G coverage in the States is not great, but it's getting better. Europe and Australia have excellent 3G.

???
I wish I could say there was something else compelling pushed me to upgrade. Unfortunately there isn't. I was sitting on the fence and it just took light breeze to push me over.

I would have grabbed this phone a month ago if it had a better camera, or could do video conferencing, or could be used as a modem. The "breeze" was seeing the GPS in action.

Upgrading cost me $340 plus a slightly higher monthly rate. I just hope they don't come out with a new model any time soon.

Mac Dock not doing the "zoom thing"

Every once in a while I've noticed on our iMac that the dock highlighting stops working. The first icon you mouse over zooms up but it doesn't change if you move over other icons.

I've been Googling for an answer, and it took the right combination of keywords ("imac dock not highlighting") to find this thread on MacRumors.com.

In the first post, a person reports exactly what I'm experiencing. People replied with the usual suggestions: Reboot, Repair Permissions, Reinstall Updates, etc.

On the last post I found this comment:

Hi, I had the same problem but in Leopard. All mouse over effects spontaneously disappeared and stayed off even through reboots.

Once I unplugged and re-plugged my mouse, everything worked fine again.

I suppose if you're on a laptop then plugging in an external mouse might help.

Hope this helps!

I gave it a shot and it worked! I hadn't noticed, but now that I think of it, mouse-over highlighting in general seems to be not right. Hopefully by blogging this, other people will find this solution easier.

How Lame

From tuaw.com:

The Washington Post is reporting that Pandora, the Internet radio station available on Mac, iPhone, and iPod touch, may be shutting down service soon.

The reason is that Sound Exchange, the money-grubbing blackmailers royalties collection arm affiliated with the Recording Industry Association of America, has imposed restrictive administrative fees ($500 per year per channel) and ridiculous royalty fees (2.91 cents per hour per listener) on Internet radio stations. While many companies that provide Internet radio services have been lobbying Congress for relief, there doesn't seem to be much of hope that happening in the near future.

Chat and VOIP on the iPhone

From Fring.com:

OK. So if you’re one of the first lucky *#@$%&s to get your hands
on an iPhone, you just got even luckier. We’ve just made a special
pre-release R&D version of fring for your iPhone - a mobile VoIP
app publicly available for the iPhone?…yep that’s a world-first!

Text Editors

Searching for a great text editor is like looking for a great photo in Yosemite-- you'll always find another one if you keep looking.

Look no further (for text editors).

Get Notepad ++ for the PC or TextMate for the Mac.

Features I was looking for:

• Line numbers
• Macros
• Syntax highlighting
• Fast editing
• Folding of indented text
• Parenthesis matching
  

Now go spend your new "free time" enjoying the outdoors.

iPhoto to Shutterfly

Export Assistant for iPhoto
http://www.shutterfly.com/downloads/features_mac.jsp

Works great!

Mac Touchpad Tricks

From Macworld.com:

Depending on the Mac notebook model, there are up to 10 specialized trackpad functions you can use to make navigating the screen, Mac OS X and various applications faster and easier.

The trackpad options discussed in this article are not enabled by default; you can enable them all in System Preferences using the Trackpad tab of the Keyboard & Mouse pane. The exact look of this pane will vary depending on the Mac model and on the version of Mac OS X installed, but most will look something like the figure shown below. Some options require hardware support and thus are available only on specific models.

XP - Out!

From news.cnet.com:

After a long-announced transition, June 30 marks the end of an era at Microsoft. Well, really it's the end of two eras.

Most people think of Bill Gates, of course, and I'll have plenty more to say about his impending shift to part-time work in the coming days. But another epoch is also really coming to an end--that of Windows XP.

As of June 30, large PC makers will no longer be able to sell Windows XP-based PCs, at least on mainstream notebooks and desktops. Retailers will also have only until their current supply is exhausted to sell boxed copies of the operating system.

I want to keep my XP security blankie. ;-)

Boot Camp Update fixed video problems

Well aside from the keyboard troubles (which appear to be gone after reinstalling Input Remapper), I also noticed a welcome improvement in video.

I mostly use Boot Camp with XP on my Macbook Pro. I call it my Macbook PC. The original video drives weren't very smart about whether you were connected to an external monitor or not. I had a Dell Inpsiron 9400 that handled this perfectly. It remembered the resolution of the monitor and would adjust depending on whether I was using the LCD or a monitor.

But the Macbook didn't. After connecting to a monitor at 1680x1050, later on it would keep the same res if I booted standalone. Since the LCD is 1400x900, I'd get a virtual desktop.

But after the recent Boot Camp update (which must have included a new video driver), it remembers the resolutions and adjusts correctly. All is well with my Macbook PC.

Macbook Pro Freezing Randomly

Just when you thought it was safe... even Macs have problems.

I recently installed an Apple update for Boot Camp, then under XP the system started randomly freezing. It was incredibly frustrating.

After some searching around on the net, I found a few other people with the same problem. They mostly blamed the Apple keyboard driver for Windows. There was a mention that Input Remapper happens to disable that driver in order to do its thing.

That's when the light bulb went on.

I already have Input Remapper. But since installing that, I also did the Apple update. The update probably re-enabled the keyboard driver. So I re-installed Remapper and things seem to be much better.

Until I post otherwise, consider this a fix.

HP PhotoSmart 7280 All-in-One Printer

Just got an HP 7280 for the home.

It was on sale, plus we were already looking for a new printer and had to replace our old parallel-port scanner (no more parallel ports on new PCs). So why not kill a few birds with one stone? Metaphorically speaking of course.

The 6280 was also on sale. That's just what we need: Print, Copy & Scan. But due to some weird price planning, the 7280 was cheaper. So we got Faxing too.

I had done some research on inkjet vs color laser. It seemed like the lower end color laser printers could do text or charts in color, but not good enough for photos. And their print speed is slow. You had to pay alot more for speed. Too bad. I was hoping to escape the constant cycle of buying new inkjet cartridges (up to SIX of them) all too often. Laser typically has a longer life span per cartridge. But inkjet makes better photos, and we're not printing that many charts at home.

The 7280 was on sale (and maybe still is) at several stores. I was looking at it in Fry's Electronics. I asked if it had a slide scanner and a sales person said "Yes, when you scan something, the scanner slides back and forth." Uggh. Does anyone know anything at these places?

I ended up getting one at Office Depot. There wasn't a sales person to ask any questions, so I just picked up the box and took it to the register.

I love having a networked printer. No more sharing from a USB connection. All the computers can see the printer.

Installing the "required" software went okay on a PC with Windows 2000. The installer crashed on our iMac. It ended up with just a fax driver but not printer. I deleted it and re-added it as a printer and was good to go.

I thought you needed the software, which consists of several utilities for printing, scanning, faxing, etc. But I was able to print on another Mac without it. I suppose I'd need the software for more than just printing. If you can get by without installing, do it.

We still haven't really put the printer to the test of printing photos yet. I had a chance to make a copy of something. That was really easy.

I'll post more results as they happen.

Flash on iPhone looking better

From Engadget.com:

The word is out, kids. Adobe has apparently gone against old Jobsy's wishes, and it's planning a Flash player made all special for the iPhone (ala Windows Mobile) despite Apple's concerns that the technology -- in its current incarnation, anyway -- isn't cut out for mobile duty. During a conference call today, Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said, "We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone," adding, "We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves." We wouldn't be surprised if Adobe were to be given a pass on all those pesky SDK rules that would likely prevent a proper browser-based Flash component to be coded for the device, though those Apple dudes can be real sticklers for rules.

Flash on iPhone not looking too good

From AppleInsider.com

Over the last year, many observers have wondered when Apple would deliver Adobe Flash support on the iPhone. At the company's shareholder meeting on Tuesday, Steve Jobs made comments that indicate that support isn't coming anytime soon, thanks to architectural limitations in Flash itself.

Input Remapper

Heard about it on TWiT. Input Remapper re-assigns keys on the Mac keyboard when in Boot Camp to be less Mac-like. You can pretty much get the same key arrangement of Ctrl-Win-Alt-Space-Alt-Win-Ctrl that you have on a typical PC keyboard.

This really helps on a MacBook Pro, as long as you don't look at the keyboard and see the markings on the keys. Just go by memory and you'll do fine.

One problem I've had is sometimes at bootup it seems to lose its settings and go back to defaults. I'll have to search around and see if anyone else has this problem.

PhotoShop CS Stuck on Startup

Every once in a while, PhotoShop CS2 gets stuck during startup. Right when it says "Reading Text Global Resources."

There's a Tech Note on Adobe.com that offers two solutions:

1. Delete the New Doc Sizes file.
2. Re-create Photoshop preferences.

The second one usually does the trick.

To re-create the preferences files for Photoshop, start the application while holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS X). Then, click Yes to the message, "Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings file?"

Wifi with your Latte

From the CNN.com:

SEATTLE (AP) -- Starbucks Corp. is teaming up with AT&T Inc. and will start offering a mix of free and paid wireless Internet service in more than 7,000 of its U.S. coffee shops beginning this spring.

The world's largest specialty coffee retailer's move ends a six-year partnership with T-Mobile.

Starbucks (STUX) said Monday it will give customers that use its Starbucks purchase card two hours of free wireless access per day. After that, it will cost $3.99 for a two-hour session. Monthly memberships will cost $19.99 and include access to any of AT&T's 70,000 hot spots worldwide.

People who already use AT&T (T, Fortune 500) as their Internet service provider will have unlimited Wi-Fi access at Starbucks.

Apple TV

At first wasn't sure what it was, and whether i needed it. After re-reading the descriptions on Apple's website a few times, and browsing reviews on ArsTechnica, Gizmodo and Engadget.

One way to look at it is an iPod that connects to a TV, but it can also view/stream live without syncing from a Mac or PC with iTunes. (though it takes a moment to scan the list of available content)

If you have a big screen TV, AppleTV is a great device for showing off photos. The built-in Ken Burns and transitions just about eliminates the need to make slideshows. It even adds background music from your iTunes library.

It also works with EyeTV, which can export to iTunes.

A recent software update lets you browse movies, shows, YouTube and podcasts directly on the Internet. So you're even less dependent on a computer. There are tons of HD podcasts to choose from.

I do find it strange that the main menu is text-only and arranged in two vertical columns where the entire rest of the interface is made up of visual horizontal scrolling views.

I could see renting movies with AppleTV. The selection and prices look good. I do wish the rental time was longer than 24 hrs.My main movie time would be on weekends.

Netflix's instant viewing gives iTunes a run for its money. We have an unlimited 3-movie account, which means we can stream an unlimited amount of movies for no extra cost. The selection isn't as good as the entire Netflix library and it only works on Windows after installing Windows Media Player 11 and a slew of updates and security patches. But like I said, no extra cost.

Useful Apps for the Mac

Chat: Adium
Works with a dozen different chat networks. The owl is sooo cute too. :)

Remote Access: Chicken of the VNC, Remote Desktop

Browser, Email: Firefox, Thunderbird

FTP: FileZilla

Sharing mouse & kb with PC: Synergy
Use one mouse and keyboard with Mac, PC or Linux. The clipboard works too, most of the time.

Video conversion: Visual Hub
This does a great job converting to H.264 for iTunes. I can't believe it's only $23. You can use KeepVid.com to grab videos from YouTube, then Visual Hub to finish the job.

Playing video not supported by QT: VLC Player, WMP with Flip4Mac
VLC plays various flavors of MPEG.
Flip4Mac lets you play WMVs from a PC.

Backups: Carbon Copy Cloner, WinClone
Carbon Copy is a full disk image copier.
WinClone lets you back up your Boot Camp partition.

Elgato EyeTV

Last year we switched to the Mac. After enjoying the benefits of Beyond TV on our PC, we still wanted to be able to have the same capabilities on our Mac. After some searching discussion boards and reviews, I settled on EyeTV by Elgato. It seemed to offer a similar feature range as Beyond TV and had decent reviews.

I ordered the Eyetv 250 Plus, which comes with the EyeTV software and supports for composite & S-Video as well as analog NTSC and over-the-air HDTV.

The EyeTV software runs in the Mac GUI. By contrast, BeyondTV had a non-Windows interface designed for TV viewing. This worked great when using their Beyond TV Link client program to view another PC's recorded shows running the main BeyondTV software. We'd hook a notebook up to the TV and start browsing. But on the main PC, the interface felt too clunky.

The first version of EyeTV that came in the box recorded only at scheduled times. A nice feature of BeyondTV was you could select a show and it would figure out the times for you and only record new episodes. The latest version of EyeTV now has a similar feature called Smart Schedules. The only problem I've had with this is that not all shows use the "new" (aka not a rerun) flag properly so either all shows come up as new or none at all. Smart Schedules let you also specify channel, show title, and other parameters, which gives more precise control than BeyondTV. For instance, Family Guy appears on several networks but new episodes are on Fox. You can tell it to only record from Fox (whatever channel that is in your area).

Like BeyondTV, it can export to iPod/AppleTV via iTunes. We just got an AppleTV, which took the place of the laptop running BeyondTV Link.

EyeTV has a unique feature called WiFi Streaming that runs a web server designed to be browsed by an iPhone or iPod Touch. You can select shows that have been specifically exported for streaming (not just any show). BeyondTV also has a web interface which lets you view the recording schedule, start export tasks (to WMV, QuickTime, etc.) and change system options. The EyeTV web interface is just for watching shows.

EyeTV gets its program guide from Titan TV. The data is accurate as far as I can tell. The interface fits lots of shows together very well, much better than the BeyondTV over-sized GUI.

Since we have an iMac, we had to go with an external capture device. Fortunately The EyeTV 250 Plus is small and attractive. We were using a Hauppague WinTV PVR-250 with Beyond TV. The quality is comparable. I specifically went for the 250 not just because it can input analog and digital TV, but also because it has on-board compression so the CPU isn't doing all the work when it's recording.

The first version of the software had a bug where encoding shows >1gb would stall. A recent update fixed that, showing Elgato's attention to customer issues. I also had purchased Elgato's Turbo.264 device. But that fails to encode every time. I'm currently in discussion with Elgato support to troubleshoot this. I'll post an update when it's resolved.