I got an Apple TV

I've been interested in the notion of downloading all of my entertainment content from the internet for a while now. It makes sense. Cable TV sucks - I don't need most of the channels that they give me, and even the channels themselves really don't provide value: why do I care what channel "Heroes" is on? I want to watch the show.

I've tried a lot of these media players over the past few years. The Apple TV is the latest, and I decided to get it because it sounds like it got a lot better with the new software update. Here are my thoughts:

Out of the box: where are the wires? They don't even supply the basic wires necessary to use it. I have a box full of spare wires, and there are multiple ways to connect the Apple TV to your TV, so I'm not sure where I shake out on this. Probably good to not include the wires since I don't have to pay for wires I don't need. That's just for me though.

Once hooked up, it asked me to sync with my iTunes, so I got out my laptop and entered the code, and it started cranking away. The preferences seemed reasonable out of the box, except for trying to copy all of my music. Too much.

Video that played was nice, and generally looked good. Videos I already had on my laptop played nicely. The Apple TV only supports H.264 video, which is kind of annoying because almost all of the stuff I already have is in the DivX or XviD format, so I'm going to have to figure out how to convert it.

I was able to buy a TV show from the iTunes store, and it downloaded and sync'd to Apple TV automagically, so that was cool.

I thought you could buy/rent movies right from the device? If you can, I don't know how to. I RTFM, and I still don't know how to. I see there are movie rentals in iTunes when I browse it on my laptop, but even that is not very clear. Renting movies is one of the things I really wanted to do. Bummed that it's not clear, and the selection is pretty poor too. Movie trailers were pretty cool - I liked being able to browse them right from the remote. Music playing is pretty sweet too. My Airport express was never reliable enough, I think the Apple TV will work.

It's too early to tell whether the Apple TV is going to supplant my 3 year old networked DVD player from Japan, but it's possible. We'll see.

Update: It turns out that they shipped the new Apple TV with the old software. There is no indication of this anywhere. So, now I'm sitting around waiting for the new release.

The Slingbox is really cool

I just got a Slingbox. It's totally sweet. Here's what they did really well:

1. It just works. Like TiVo, there are a lot of wires, but once you connect them, it pretty much just works. You run the install disks on your computer, they connect to the Slingbox, you click next, next finish, and it working. You can watch TV on your computer. Some caveats - the install CD's software only works on XP and below, so if you have Mac OS or Vista, you have to go to the website and download some software, but that was pretty easy and just took a few minutes.

2. It just works. It was pretty cool that it worked on my home network right out of the box, but it was even cooler that it worked on an external network right out of the box. After I was done installing, I brought my laptop down to a local cafe to grab some lunch, and give the Sling Player a spin. All I did was open the player software and it almost instantaneously started working. Amazing.

3. It just works. Because of where I live, I have pretty slow DSL at home, and I was on a wifi connection at the cafe. I expected the picture to be pretty crappy. Wrong. Somehow they're able to auto-adjust everything so that the picture and the sound all work well, even with that remote connection. Cool.

4. It works on my Treo! I downloaded the Treo app and installed it pretty easily, and I entered a very long string of numbers to identify my slingbox, and it also connected and just worked. The picture even looks pretty good. I don't really take trains or wait for buses, but I do have the unlimited data plan from Verizon, so maybe when I'm mad at them I'll leave this on all night so that I can use a lot of data.

Overall, I'm really impressed with this. I know it works with TiVo too, so I think I'm going to hook up my TiVo to this whole setup. I was wondering what I was going to do about watching the Olympics - now I have my solution!

Keeping track of your stuff.

I've read enough other bloggers to know that they have code names for the important people in their lives. We'll use Big D for my Dad.

Over the past few days I've noticed a pattern of how he intereacts with his gadgets and other stuff he has to carry. When he comes in the room, he leaves these gadgets in "logical" places when he sits down to relax. Then, he'll need one of them, and he storms around looking for it in any number of logical places. When it's not in place #1 or place #2, he starts getting angry and swearing under his breath saying "where the f$% did I put my X!?!" Eventually, he finds it, but by then, he needs another item. The process starts again. He needs a third item. Unfortunately, by the time he finds the third item, he has put the first item somewhere, and he needs it because it was the reason he got up in the first place, so the cycle starts over.

So, we have learned that he can really only carry 2 items at a time. In order to carry more than 2 items, there needs to be some sort of tracking system, at least when traveling, as I don't see this happen as much at home.

Unfortunately for me, I see some of these same things happening to me, so I have a pretty strong incentive to either figure out a good system for him, or get myself down to just 2 items.