Tom Karlo - Karlo.Org

Howto: Building a Mac Mini Home Media Center

Out here in LA I tend to watch less television than I did before, view more feature-length films (especially because I'm working on projects related to the industry) and drive a whole lot more. Last week I had my high speed modem installed, but I decided not to subscribe to cable television, which saves me about $100 a month in service fees. Instead, I'm going to try using a Mac Mini, along with a number of parts and accessories, as a home media center that depends on the Internet, and eventually Over-the-Air (OTA) digital broadcast television, to satisfy my video entertainment needs. I want the system to take care of the following tasks: - Play from streaming media sites such as Hulu and Netflix - Play DVDs and downloaded video from services like iTunes - Play edited HD home movies to the television, in HD - Provide an easy-to-use interface to my MP3 collection and streaming audio online I also require that it:

• Be stable as a rock. Never crash. I want continuous uptime measured in months, broken only by the need to restart to install a system update.
• Have minimum maintenance and upkeep - this in particular is why I am using a Mac over Windows, it reduces update hassles and hardware compatibility headaches. I want an appliance, in essence, not another system to babysit.
• Be quiet. No loud fans - I'm looking at you, Xbox 360.
• Conserve energy. At 13 watts, the Mini burns far less power than my Tivo HD and Cable Box used to. As I work my way through the process, I'll continue to extend this post with relevant information and links to the parts and software I'm using.

Photoblogging from the Field via the Verizon MiFi

Just a quick thought this morning - if you combine the new Verizon MiFi portable access point with an Eye-Fi Explore memory card with its built-in wifi, you can have your digital camera upload photos from the field (anywhere there is 3G signal) as you're shooting, without any computer on-site. Could make for a very interesting setup, especially if traveling within the US. The added bonus, of course, is that having the MeFi means that you, and everyone you're traveling with, has access to the Internet (and, via Skype, voice calls) from their laptop in the car, hotel or wherever you are.

My Gmail Experiment

My first experiences with email were all server-side applications. Bulletin boards, Compuserve and dialup Internet, then the Athena Unix terminals of my years at MIT. At the time, it made sense - modems were slow, downloading messages took time, and there weren't attachments.

In the interim, I've been a die-hard user of desktop email clients. At my old finance job, I regularly received 100-150 emails a day, which sounds like a lot until you realize that if you're working on 10-12 projects or pitches, that's only 10 emails between team members per day. (Bankers tend to use CC: reflexively, but you are expected to be up to speed on all the threads even if you're not the direct recipient.) I was an Outlook power user by day and a Mozilla Thunderbird wonk by night, plus I carried (and still carry) a Blackberry that gets checked compulsively. (The dog, mind you, gets jealous about how much attention the berry gets.)

Even when not connected to the net, I want access to my email - it's not just a communications tool, it's also a major database of filed information I need when working. But with the addition of offline Gmail access via Google Gears last week, the final issue tying me to desktop clients has been resolved - I can now read and write emails on flights and away from wifi using Gmail.

For the next week, I'm going to try using Gmail's web interface exclusively when at my computer, a MacBook. I've removed Thunderbird from my application dock so I don't open it by mistake, and I've installed Google Notifier in my menu bar so I can see when a new message has arrived. There's a printout of the cheat sheet for Google Mail keyboard shortcuts and I'm going to to my best to force myself to use them so I can get up the learning curve faster. And I'm going to see how using a web-only interface to my email box works out.

I'll admit I'm skeptical... I have a hard time seeing how a web-based app can outperform a "sovereign" application like Thunderbird or Outlook. (Although I was never really happy with the keyboard shortcut support in Thunderbird, relative to Outlook.) But there are a lot of obvious benefits as well, including the ability to get the same interface wherever I can access a web browser. I'll post in a week how it's been, and whether I'll be able to remove Thunderbird from my MacBook permanently.

Tagging Runners with Disposable RFID Tags

One interesting tech detail at this year's Miami Marathon was that they've switched over from using the "traditional" ChampionChip technology for tracking the times of individual runners to a disposable RFID tab based on a chip from Alien Technology.

Traditionally, in large organized running events, recipients would each attach to their shoe a circular, plastic device called a ChampionChip that would allow the race officials to record when they crossed large mats placed at the start, finish, and intermediate points on the course. The system worked well, but it had serious drawbacks. The chips cost $25 if you lost them or wanted to buy one to own, they were too bulky to mail to runners (so you had to pick them up before the race, often waiting on a long line) and you also had to remember to return them after the race or risk a $25 fine.

"Native" chat for the iPhone - Please!

Exchanges like the one on the right are why I'm really, really wishing the iPhone had a built-in chat application (not just SMS) that could run in the background, even though I don't own an iPhone myself. (I've highlighted the time stamps to make it obvious how little time I had to respond before Marissa dropped offline.) Because folks are using an installed, application to reach their IM logins (most likely Google's own Google Talk app), they're not able to stay connected unless that application is in the foreground, because Apple doesn't allow third-party applications to run in the background. So you get that contant login-message-logout pattern from iPhone users. In an ideal world, Apple would let third-party apps run in the background, but on a mobile device I can understand why they don't. So they should at least provide a "built-in" chat application that can connect to the major IM networks and stay logged in even when in the background, given that instant messaging is as common a method of real-time interaction these days as voice calls or SMS (at least for certain people.)

If Apple is just doing this to force folks to SMS via the AT&T network, they should be ashamed of themselves. There's no reason users should have to be paying on a per-message basis for sending 140 character text clips when they have a TCP/IP connection available for web browsing, etc on an unmetered basis.

Even my Blackberry Curve handles this issue better than the iPhone -- and it's pretty rare that I say that for anything unrelated to its hardware keyboard.

Bringing together online sects... Rails and Merb merge

"We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that."

David Heinemeier Hansson has this evening posted a remarkable missive about the merging of Rails and Merb, two independent but parallel frameworks within the Ruby community.

While the merger itself is huge news for anyone who works with Ruby, Rails or Merb, the letter and the merger are also of broader interest to anyone who follows online communities. In the face of a broad trend of fragmentation, division, and overall entropy within special-interest online communities, the friendly (and, potentially, massively productive) merger of two relatively healthy collaborative programs is worthy of note.

When corporations merge, one of the reasons they always cite is the cost savings from eliminating redundant infrastructure and employees ("synergies") despite the fact that they are seldom realized. Conversely, for volunteer or open-source efforts, this effect is too often overlooked entirely - creating situations like what used to exist between Rails and Merb, where two essentially similar communities were building very similar products in parallel, for a similar user base, and in the process duplicating a lot of effort that in reality was of little consequence to their respective constituencies. By agreeing to "unbranch" these two technology platforms (I use quotes because they did not, in fact, arise from the same original code base), these teams have the opportunity to spend a greater portion of their time on work that really matters rather to their user base. And that is a good think (TM) for everyone.

There's another parallel this brings to mind: real world churches have traditionally fractured, split, grown or withered, but almost never merged. It's not easy, but there are good reasons to do it if you're able to be flexible. (Unfortunately, churches don't generally have "flexibilty" high on their list of traits.) In the process, a lot of good community work and effort goes to waste, because either a church keeps growing, or it gradually withers away and disappears. Open-source projects have traditionally suffered similar fates. Hopefully, intelligent, thoughtful mergings of communities, not just technologies, like the Rails/Merb merge, will be the future trend.

Updated: David has written more about the situation, talking about it at a more conceptual level.

Vitality GlowCaps

The Vitality Glowcap, recently released and available on Amazon starting at $30 is just a great example of design and technology applied to a longstanding, everyday problem: making sure folks take their medicine. They have both the simple, self-contained "glow" model, which bugs you every 24 hours to take the pill (and is reset when you unscrew it off the bottle to get the medicine) and a more complex version that connects via the internet to keep track of your usage, a testament to the design truism that giving users lots of options is often worse than giving them none. Both units have almost zero user interface or configuration requirements. Vitality is a new startup by David Rose, who used to head Ambient Devices.

Ambient Devices Weather Watchers

I just changed the (rechargeable) batteries in my Ambient Devices 5-day Weather Watcher and I have to note that not only is the original version a great device, but they have a new Ambient 7 Day Weather Forecaster that has a number of really great new features -- in particular, the background color changes to indicate the temperature outside, which means its readable from across the room.

Both of these devices are almost zero maintenance and they're great as gifts or for your own home. It might seem odd to spend $50-200 on a device that gives you the same information you could get from the web, but this is something you're needing every day, and it's massively convenient, especially for folks who spend a lot of time outdoors walking the dog, etc. (I do think the price point on the 7-day is too high.) I need to get one for my parents -- they're not on the web as often, and it's a huge bonus from them to be able to just look on the fridge and instantly see the latest forecast.

Cuil.com

The NYT has an article on the launch of Cuil.com, a search engine by some Google alums. It's interesting, but I'm getting a lot of weirdness in the results for searches. When I search for "Tom Karlo" (Doesn't everyone throw their own name into a new search engine during the first session?) I get some really odd responses, including Google.com and on occasion, either 600,000+ matches, or zero matches. And when it does come back with matches it often has the weird pairing of my home page, and an image I've never seen next to it as my "photo". It also spat out fails for "Britney Spears," "George Carlin" and didn't include itself in the front page results for "Cuil." I suspect they're having some first-day issues.

Calibrating (or Not) the Dell 2709W LCD

I just bought a new monitor for the first time since 2000. I had a great 16" SGI LCD I bought when they got out of that business -- $600 for what was a $3000 monitor at the time. But it was getting obvious that it was time to replace the old screen, so I bought a Dell 27" UltraSharp Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor to replace it. It's a $1000 but when I did the math on the cost per hour of my last LCD it was obvious that I get my money's worth -- it came to less than $0.06 per hour or so, roughly.

So far, it seems to be pretty good -- but I'm having a bear of a time trying to get it even moderately calibrated. A lot of reds and oranges, in particular, seem to be wildly flourescent - the Firefox logo is a primary offender. If I can't find a way to get the color under control (short of buying a calibrator) I'm going to have to return this monitor and get an Apple 23" Cinema Display or something else with more reasonable color performance.

The worst part is that Dell makes a big deal out of the color accuracy of this monitor on their web site. But then they don't really provide any great guidance on getting it calibrated properly.