Digital media for your living room

Digital photos and audio have been extremely popular for several years. Programs such as iTunes and Picasa make them easy to integrate into our daily lives, especially with the death of DRM (Digital Rights Management) for music files. DRM basically tied your music to one computer and forced you to only use the music player which you purchased the songs with.

Digital video has been around for a while too, but it has always been limited (and somewhat taboo) due to the complications involved in either converting a DVD to a digital file, or downloading that video illegally from the Internet.

Just recently a push has been made to legitimize digital video content with services such as Amazon Video on Demand, iTunes Store, and Netflix streaming. There is also Digital Copy, which is a digital copy of a movie that comes with several new DVD and Blu-Ray movies. Unfortunately, all of these options use DRM and tie you to using a specific computer, or a specific program to play it. The Amazon and Netflix services mentioned can easily be streamed to any computer that you are logged into their service with, but what about if you want to copy that movie to your laptop or iPod to watch while riding a subway to work, or when you are traveling and don't have Internet access? And if you don't have a device that is compatible with the service then you are pretty much out of luck.

That's a huge problem, and is what is holding back the adoption of this technology from the mainstream public. And Blu-Ray is in a weird limbo too because it is sandwiched in between the established DVD technology (which everybody has), and this new digital media technology.

Digital Copy was also poorly executed. I have several movies that came with Digital Copy versions of the movie, but I haven't activated a single of them because you have to choose at the time of activation whether you want a version that will play in iTunes or if you want a version that will play in Windows Media Player. You can't have both, and you only get one activation. How do I know what computer or devices I want to use that file on in the future. If you have an iPod/iPhone, only the iTunes version will work. But what if you have a Zune HD, or any other device? Digital Copy will never take off as long as it contains DRM and you are limited as to what you can use to play it.

I want to watch movies/videos on my television!
The other challenge has always been how to get the movie/video files to play on your living room television.

Media Center PCs have been around for several years. I have built a few myself, and they work relatively well, and are usually the most diversified in what they will play on your TV. But they are generally high maintenance. You've got to keep up with Windows updates, driver updates, software updates, and antivirus protection. You pretty much have to be an "IT guy" with lots of time and patience in order to even consider this option. And who wants a huge ugly PC sitting in their living room with the loud fan buzzing away? There are some more attractive Media Center PC options available today such as the Dell Inspiron Zino HD and the Apple Mac Mini, both of which have a small footprint.

AppleTV was the first device which made it simple to stream content to your television that was purchased or rented from the iTunes Store. This works great for iTunes content, and is the only device which can play iTunes video on the TV. It has a beautiful simple to use interface. But that limitation of only playing iTunes content is what eventually caused me to get rid of mine.

Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will stream content from your PC, but both are very finicky about what file formats they support. And neither will play DRM protected audio or video, unless purchased from their own respective online store.

I recently purchased a WDTV Live for a couple of family members. The user interface is nothing to write home about, but it is completely silent and it plays a wide variety of video file types. It has Pandora, Flickr, and Live 365 built into the box. And you can use a program such as PlayOn to stream a plethora of other content to the box, such as Hulu and Netflix. If you need/want something right now, I highly recommend WDTV Live.

However, Boxee has recently announced that they will be releasing the Boxee Box. Speculation is that it will be available Q2 2010, but no official release date has been announced. It has an extremely polished and intuitive interface and connects you to an extensive amount of online content (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) natively without the need for additional software to be run on a computer. And just like the WDTV Live, Boxee has long been known to play a wide variety of video formats. I'm not too fond of the sunken cube look, but the Boxee Box uses an RF remote. This means that you can hide the box in a cabinet because the remote control does not require a direct line of sight to work. I think the Boxee Box is going to change how a lot of people watch their video content. Watch out for this one!

Here's the announcement video for the Boxee Box.

Photo calendars make great holiday gifts

For the past few years, I have been creating calendars for my family using my photos and family birthdays. They've been well received and I'm constantly reminded to do a new one right around Christmas time.

Gather your dates
The tedious part of creating a calendar is gathering and documenting birthdays and anniversary's of everyone that the recipients of the calendars might want. If you are from a broken family, or are giving the calendar to multiple families, then this can be a lot of work. I find that it is best to document all of the birthdays in your address book and group each of the people into tags or groups based on what calendar they should be included in.

If you are just creating one calendar for your parents, then it is pretty simple and straight-forward.

However, if your parents have separated and have families of their own, it becomes much more complicated. You have to split the birthdays into separate groups... one for your father's family and one for your mother's family, because your father probably isn't concerned with the birthdays of your mother's side of the family and vice versa. If you have a sibling who is married, then another group of dates might be required to include their spouses family. When you account for the birthdays/anniversaries of aunts, uncles, and cousins, it adds up.

I find that it is easiest to use Google Calendar to create a separate calendar for the dates that you want on each of the calendars you are going to create. Here is a list of the Google Calendars that I have solely for creating photo calendars to give out at Christmas.

Mother - Includes her side of the family, as well as the dates of her husband's family.
Father - Includes only his side of the family.
Me - Includes everything in the Mother calendar and Father calendar.
Sister's husband's family - Includes only her husband's family dates.
My Sister - Easiest one... includes everything from all of the calendars listed above.

Choose your photos wisely!
The first year that I created calendars, I just used some of my best photos... no people at all!

Once you start adding people to photos, it complicates things. You run into the same challenge of segregating your photos based on who is in the photos. In the calendar examples above, I wouldn't want to put photos of my father in my mother's calendar. And my sister's husband's family probably wouldn't enjoy photos of my parents. Someone is bound to be offended.

If you don't want to drive yourself crazy spending countless hours sorting photos, stick to a common subject or stay away from people photos completely. One year I made a calendar of just photos of me and my sister growing up (there are some embarrassing ones in there!). And for the past two years, the calendars have been of my niece, so that is appealing to everyone! When picking photos, I just try to pick ones that don't include other family members.

Creating and ordering your calendar
Choosing a calendar service for creating and ordering your calendars is important. So far, I have used Apple, Kodak Gallery, and Shutterfly.

Apple - For Mac users it's a no brainer! Create your calendar in iPhoto and order the calendar from Apple. They have the best quality calendars of all three services I have tried, but they are also quite a bit more expensive. Calendar creation in iPhoto is a simple and seamless process. It pulls dates directly from your iCal calendar(s), and the photos directly from iPhoto. I created my calendars in Google Calendar (as described above), and then set up iCal to pull those calendars by the Google Calendar links. Sadly, I don't use a Mac anymore, and I haven't found any other calendar services that offer that level of integration with your existing data.

Kodak Gallery - I used Kodak one time. Overall, I was pleased with the quality of the calendar, but the spiral binding was too small for the calendar pages to turn. So you ended up having to force the pages to flip to the next month. Also, everything was a manual process. You have to upload your photos to the Kodak service using their proprietary photo web uploader, and you have to enter the dates manually. It was a lot of work! In the end, I chose not to use Kodak again due to the issue with the spiral binding.

Shutterfly - This is my second year using Shutterfly, and overall I like them. The overall quality is nice and the pages flip easily in the spiral binding. Unfortunately, you do have to upload your photos to the Shutterfly website using their proprietary web uploader, and you do have to manually enter all of the dates into their website. But the site maintains those dates on your account, so you only have to enter them once. Unfortunately it does not allow you to group the dates or assign tags. Pricing is nice and the calendars are very customizable. I will continue to use Shutterfly in the future unless something better comes along.

Ideal calendar solution?
What I really want to see is a company that lets me use my existing data where it currently resides. I am a Google person, so I would like to use my own Google Calendars, and my own GMail contacts, and my photos from Picasa or the Picasa Web site.

Google already has all of the functionality in place that Apple has for a fully integrated calendar service. Google just needs to add an add-on/plugin built into their Picasa application. Picasa can already pull data from my GMail contacts. I am sure it would be simple to have it input the calendar information from my Google Calendar too. Google wouldn't even need to build the integration. Calendar websites, such as Shutterfly or Kodak, could build plugins so that you could build the calendar in Picasa and then automatically upload the compiled calendar data/photos to Shutterfly or Kodak for processing.

Seems like a no-brainer, but so far nobody besides Apple has made photo calendar creation a seamless process. We'll see what happens next year.

What are your thoughts and recommendations?

Blogger comments needs improvement

As I mentioned in my last post, my main gripe with Blogger is their comment system. I am a big fan of people being accountable for their actions/comments. Most people are honest and considerate. But there are a few who hide behind the anonymity of the Internet and sling rude comments, disrupting the experience for others.

Unfortunately, the only way to dissuade this behavior is to require people to create an account and sign in to post a comment. I don't feel that this is a very good solution, because that's just one more login and password for you to remember.

About a year ago, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect were created to be your personal centralized identity that you can use to log into any sites that choose to adopt the technology. I run into sites left and right that have implemented Facebook Connect for their commenting system, but aside from Blogger, I haven't seen Google Friend Connect anywhere else.

Google/Blogger was one of the first to embrace OpenID, and I applaud them for that. But what about allowing comments for users of other popular systems that tie an identity to that person, such as Twitter, MySpace, and most importantly Facebook Connect?

Over the past couple weeks that I have been considering switching back to Blogger from a self-hosted Wordpress site, I have investigated options that allow this kind of freedom. So far, I have found only two that are worth mentioning...

DISQUS is free. Their system allows visitors to your site to choose to leave a comment with their Facebook, OpenID, Twitter, or DISQUS identity. Nearly everyone is going to recognize what Facebook and Twitter is, but who in the heck (besides the tech savvy) is going to know what OpenID or DISQUS is? Probably not many, and that's why I won't be implementing DISQUS into my site.

JS-Kit ECHO is not free, but they appear to be on the right track. ECHO allows visitors to choose from several identities, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, and several others. They also allow the visitor to subscribe to the comments thread, include images and video, and also re-post their comment to their personal site (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) if they choose to do so. These features can all be enabled or disabled as desired. The fee for this service is $12 per year.

I am considering JS-Kit ECHO for my blogger comments. It is a nice system and offers a lot of flexibility. They have a 30-day full refund policy if you aren't satisfied, but would much more prefer a 15-30 day free trial instead to see if I want to purchase it.

That said, if Google would just add Facebook Connect as an identity option for posting comments, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

I'm back on Blogger

After switching back to my self-hosted Wordpress site for the past year, I have decided to hang that up and come back to Blogger. Maintaining a self-hosted blog has a lot of benefits. You have so much more flexibility with what you can do with your site.

But it's a lot of work to maintain. You have to perform upgrades to the software, and do regular backups of the site and databases. If you want to switch themes then you have to make sure that any extra code that you have added is copied into the new template. I just decided that I wanted something simpler that I can focus on writing instead of maintaining the site.

Blogger has come quite a ways. I like that you can now easily use photos from your Picasa album. The one thing that I am going to miss is the ability to use Facebook Connect to allow Facebook users to leave comments via their Facebook account. I know that Google has their Google Friend Connect, and I like it... but I hope that they consider adding Facebook Connect as a means to leave comments and subscribe to a Blogger site.

A lot has happened since my last post. I'll provide details soon.

Upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Release Candidate

I am an early adopter by nature. I love new tech! Sometimes it bites me in the ass (Windows Me, Windows Vista), but other times it is a wonderful thing!

I have been beta testing Windows 7 off and on over the past several months. I started testing it on my Mac Pro using VMware Fusion (virtual machine) early on in the beta program. I was impressed with the stability and speed so early in the beta.

As the beta matured, I started re-thinking whether I wanted to stick with my Mac, or switch back to PC. I had originally switched to Mac after experiencing the abomination of Vista during it's early days. Vista was unstable and XP was having stability issues of its own, so I switched to the greener pastures that Mac OS X.

Between the news of Diablo III began circulating (which I knew I was going to want to play), first-hand knowledge of the stability of Windows 7, and my thirst for new technology, I decided to build a new PC and install Windows Vista Ultimate x64. Vista has come a long way! Overall, I have been pleasantly surprised with Vista's stability and driver support. However, it still feels like a sluggish memory hog compared to Windows 7.

About a week ago, Microsoft released the Release Candidate for Windows 7. I had thought about installing it in a dual boot configuration and keeping Vista as my primary OS until the final release, but after reading the forums and finding no show-stopping issues, I decided to dive in head first and install it as my primary OS.

Upgrade: I performed an upgrade from Vista x64 to Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The upgrade process took about an hour, but once you start the upgrade you can walk away from it and it will do the upgrade with minimal user input at the end of the upgrade. This is the most smooth upgrade in the history of Windows!

Driver Support: All of my devices that were working under Windows Vista were still working under Windows 7! On May 6, nVidia released a WHQL-certified driver (version 185.85) for Windows 7. Creative Labs also has a Windows 7 beta driver available for their sound cards, but I did not install that yet. My audio is working fine with the existing driver.

Problems Found: The only problems that I have experienced so far are:

• My iPhone (1st gen, 8 GB) is having conflicts with the CD/DVD drive. Whenever I plug the iPhone in, I get the regular sounds associated with Windows detecting new hardware. But then I get a series of sounds of hardware being added and removed. This happens several times and usually results with the CD/DVD drive being disabled. One time, this even crashed Windows Explorer. After I undock the iPhone and scan for hardware changes (or reboot the computer), the CD/DVD drive returns.
• I received the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) when I left my computer on overnight. When I woke up the next morning, I found a message that my computer had recovered from an a bluescreen error. I have since updated to the WHQL-certified nVidia video driver and have not been able to reproduce the BSOD. I suspect this fixed the issue, but I sent Microsoft a bug report with all of the pertinant information so hopefully they will blast that bug before final release.

Final thoughts: Windows 7 is a vast improvement over Vista. It is faster, feels snappier, and stable. This will be a must-have upgrade for all Vista users, and Windows XP users finally have an OS worthy of upgrading to. I don't recommend everyone installing the Release Candidate as their primary OS (wait for it to hit retail), but if you do decide to do so then you won't be disappointed.

Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One for $179

If you're in the market for a quality printer or All-in-One (AIO), you might want to consider the Epson Artisan 800. It retails for $299, but Microcenter and the Staples website have it on sale for $229. Staples still has it priced at $299 in their stores, but they told me that they will price match their website and sold it to me for $229.

Staples also currently has a promotion where if you turn in a printer for recycling, and buy a new one for $179 or more, then you will get an additional $50 rebate. That brings the total cost for this $299 printer down to $179.

Here's a trick to save even more money! If you already have a halfway decent printer that you are upgrading from, go on Craigslist and find an old beat up printer for $5 or $10, even better yet find someone who is giving one away (free is best!) and turn that one in. It doesn't even matter if it works. Then you can sell your existing printer, or give it to a family member or friend.

I did my research before purchasing Epson Artisan 800. It was between this and the HP C8180 Photosmart All-in-One Printer, but after seeing the Epson and reading customer reviews I went with the Epson.

I've been using it for a few days and have been impressed with the photo print quality. I've been printing on Epson Premium Photo Paper Glossy and they come out as good or better than photo lab prints. Scans have also turned out great! The Epson software that comes with the printer is easy to use. I have also effortlessly printed some photos from Picasa. I haven't tried printing from Lightroom yet, but I'll try that this weekend when I have some free time.

I decided to set up this printer as a wireless printer. Setup was a breeze (as opposed to my HP wireless printer that this replaced) and I was up and running in minutes. The instructions are very clear and walk you through each step. You also have the option to connect the printer via USB or network cable.

Building a new PC

It's been a few years since I built my last PC. Since that time, I became a Mac user for a couple years, but now I'm ready to switch back to Windows, especially with Windows 7 coming up.

After extensive research and consideration, here are the parts that I have chosen for my PC...

Case: Cooler Master HAF 932
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz
CPU fan: Cooler Master V8
Motherboard: EVGA X58
Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 260 SC
Memory: Corsair Dominator 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
Hard drive: 2 Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA 300
Power supply: Corsair 850TX
CD/DVD: Samsung 22X SH-S223Q SATA
Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech Wave Wireless

For the LCD, I'll use my 23" Apple Cinema Display for now. Dell has some LED displays becoming available next month which have my eye.

I keep telling myself that I'm not going to get into PC gaming again, but I'd be lieing if I said I wasn't excited to break this machine in with Diablo III whenever it's released.

Once I get the parts I'll post pictures of the build process.

Is Apple losing its appeal?

I made the switch from PC to a Mac Pro a little over two years ago. I wanted a taste of the simple life that I had heard so much about. I liked my Mac so much that I went fanatical about Apple products. Here are some of the Apple products that I have purchased:

• Mac Pro
• Aperture (for photography)
• iWork '08
• iLife '08 upgrade
• .Mac
• Apple TV
• iPhone
• iPod
• Airport Extreme
• Bluetooth Wireless Mighty Mouse
• Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard
• 23" Apple Cinema Display
• Lots of music from iTunes

That's a lot of stuff (and money). But I'm starting to see Apple in a different light. Sure, the TV ads are fun, but what are you really getting when you buy into Apple?

GOOD COMPUTER HARDWARE

One thing I have to admit is that the Mac hardware is excellent!

The Mac Pro case is well designed and you can easily install a hard drive or memory in less than 5 minutes without even breaking out a screwdriver! I wish I could find a PC motherboard and case like this at Newegg. My only complaint about the Mac Pro system is the weight due to the all-aluminum case. This thing is a monster, weighing in at close to 45 lbs.! I had to take it down to an Apple Store one day to have WiFi installed. If you ever have to do that, bring a dolly to roll it around on.

The 23" Apple Cinema Display is a beautiful screen. It's bright and the colors are rich. It too is quite heavy. I have experienced some ghost images in the dock area, which may be burn-in. That's disappointing, and I will probably contact Apple about it soon since it is still covered under Apple Care.

NOT SO GOOD COMPUTER HARDWARE

I purchased the Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard because it had such a small profile. It lacks a number pad, which I really don't miss as much as I thought I would. Number pads are convenient if you type in a lot of numbers, but otherwise it's pretty much just wasted desk space. However, I find that I miss the deeper keys of a regular keyboard. I have gotten somewhat used to this keyboard, but I still find that I have an easier time typing on my regular Logitech keyboard at work. Also, I frequently see "Lost Connection" messages for the keyboard, although the keyboard still functions fine.

The Bluetooth Wireless Mighty Mouse takes a lot of getting used to if you've never used one. Some people swear by it... I swear at it! It doesn't feel comfortable at all. I have big hands, so that may be part of the problem, but I have to make a kind of umbrella shape with my hand to use the mouse. I have to squeeze the left and right sides of my hands together to get a grip on the sides of this skinny, low-profile mouse. My hands often feel cramped. If my hands are dry (as they often are in the winter), it makes it even harder to keep a grip on the shiny, slick surface of the mouse. The small scroll ball constantly stops working due to dust/dirt/particles that get in there with regular use. Since you can't open the mouse and remove the ball to clean it, you have to go through this ritual of turning the mosue upside down and rubbing the scroll ball around rapidly and tapping the mouse against the desk. The bottom of the mouse also gets dirty pretty quick and I am constantly scraping the dirt off.

The AirPort Extreme router is simple to set up (with a Mac). What can I say... it's a router! It only has three network ports, instead of four like most routers. Mine is one of the earlier ones, so it lacks Gigabit speeds. Unfortunately, the wireless signal was not very reliable. I ended up replacing this router with a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router which has worked flawlessly for me.

SOFTWARE

Now let's talk about the real reason why people switch to a Mac. The software and its ease of use.

Apple ships iLife on every new Mac. iPhoto '06 was the probably the most significant factor towards my purchasing a Mac. I wanted something simple to use to organize my photos and fell in love with iPhoto. Great piece of software! If you like doing creative things with photos, such as calendars or photo books, iPhoto does this very well and photo calendars that I have ordered from Apple have been excellent quality. Much better quality than calendars that I have ordered from Kodak and Shutterfly.

Getting drawn into the world of Apple, I got a .Mac (later renamed MobileMe) subscription so I could have a cool @mac.com email address. But I soon realized that .Mac was complete garbage. The email contacts would not stay synced between my Mac and the online .Mac web mail. There was no online calendar to sync with the calendar on my Mac. The photo sharing site was a nightmare to navigate or tell people how to get to. And, Apple was charging about $100 per year for what other companies such as Google were giving away for free.

Then in early 2008 Apple released iLife '08 for about $79. Even though iPhoto is the only application that I use in the iLife suite, I purchased it anyway for the revolutionary upgrades to iPhoto that I had seen Steve Jobs show off at Macworld. Once I got it, I was less than impressed.

Apple just announced iLife '09 a few days ago (another $79), which does seem like an improvement over last years version, but guess what else got released a few days ago... Google Picasa for Mac! Picasa is a great photo manager just as easy to use as iPhoto... and IT'S FREE! With Picasa now available on Mac, I will no longer be forking over $80 a year to Apple for iLife.

I wanted to get more serious about photography, so I was faced with the decision to choose between Apple's Aperture 1.5 and Adobe's Lightroom 1.0. After trying them both briefly, I chose Aperture because it was a little easier to learn and it was something else with the Apple brand to buy. After only 3-4 months of using it though, I saw how more functional Adobe Lightroom was and I ended up switching to Lightroom. Aperture was a huge memory hog and chugged at any less than about 1.5 GB RAM. I have not tried Aperture 2, but I have heard good things about it. I am happy with Lightroom 2.

At the same time that Apple released iLife '08, they also released iWork '08. This was Apple's answer to Microsoft Office. They had previous versions of iWork, but they lacked a spreadsheet application to compete with Excel. With my Apple goggles on, I dove in with promises of ease of use and full compatibility with Office. It is a pretty application... I'll give it that much. But I found that Office files that I opened in iWork (and vice versa) usually did not retain the proper formatting. This is vital! If Apple wants to be a serious contender with Microsoft Office on Macs then they have to get formatting issues resolved. I ditched iWork after a couple months and went back to using Microsoft Office.

One area where Apple truly excels is their operating system. Mac OS X is an extremely solid OS, and at $129 it is at an attractive price. OS X only comes in one version too, so there's not any confusion with multiple versions such as the case with Windows Vista (4 different versions!). The downside is that software is not widely available for Mac OS X as it is with Windows, and those Windows programs that do get ported over to Mac are usually inferior to their Windows counterparts.

OTHER STUFF

The final Apple products that I want to mention are the iPhone, iPod (5th Gen), Apple TV, and iTunes Store.

The good: All of these devices/services are outstanding. The hardware is built well and looks aesthetically pleasing. And the interface on each of these devices is extremely well designed and simple to use.

The bad: Apple likes to have absolute control over the services it offers. In order to use any of these devices, Apple makes it so that iTunes is the only software that you can use to sync your media to each of the devices. Apple doesn't license it's 'FairPlay' DRM to anyone else, so anything from iTunes that has DRM can only be played on an Apple device such as Apple TV, iPhone, or iPod. Apple has created this closed system that doesn't play well with outsiders. Apple has recently announced it's intent to drop DRM for the music it sells, which is definitely a welcome step in the right direction. Unfortunately if I want to upgrade my iTunes music purchases to non-DRM versions, Apple is going to charge me to do so, squeezing out even more money.

CONCLUSION

The smoke and mirrors of Apple is fading for me. In the next few months I think I will be building myself a new Windows PC and selling my Mac Pro. I am currenlty beta testing Windows 7, and that is leaps and bounds better than the disappointment that is Windows Vista. Even though it is still in beta, Windows 7 is solid and snappy, and feels like a retail product.

I have additional thoughts on iTunes, the iPhone, and Apple TV, but I'll save those for another day.