My secret project for the day was working to get the new website and blog, tv.liesllee.com, created and up and running so that we could use it to feed into AppleTV by tomorrow.  For Christmas, Liesl got all of her grandparents AppleTV units so that they can use the AppleTV to keep up with her.  The AppleTV will subscribe to Liesl’s Flickr stream so that all of her pictures show up on it automatically.  The AppleTV will also subscribe, via iTunes, to LieslTV to automatically download Liesl’s videos.  This is the coolest way to keep up with grandkids ever.  Just plug in your AppleTV, set your subscriptions and grandchildren magically appear just like they are television stars.  I imagine that this will be the new means for everyone to see far away family as AppleTV-like devices and high quality camcorders become more and more prevalent.

It was extra hard doing all of the setup in secret because Dominica’s parents won’t know about the AppleTV (which arrived from Amazon today – buy them from Amazon and you save $10 over the Apple Store price and you get free shipping) until tomorrow morning when they unwrap it.  My dad got his today and opened it because our tradition is to open presents on Christmas Eve as it was ever since I was little.

Getting everything set up was no small trick.  There is a lot to do when setting up a new website and getting the blog working and getting the video feed working in its enclosures and making sure that it works through iTunes.  By early evening I had LieslTV working in iTunes and the website was working well.  There was no way for me to test with an AppleTV, though, to make sure that the video that we have ready for tomorrow is going to work (the AppleTV that Dominica and I own at home has not been hooked up yet so we could not test there either.)  The plan is, after everyone goes to bed tonight, that Dominica and I are going to work to hook up the AppleTV in the living room and get it all set up with iTunes on the Toccos’ computer and get the subscriptions set up so that all they have to unwrap is an AppleTV remote, turn it on and see the first video right away along with all of the photos that we took throughout the day today that should already be available on Flickr.  It is a major project.

Most of the day was spent in the living room for me.  I did not have today off from work so I was logged onto my laptop all day although the work load was pretty light.  I did some installations and talked to several people at the office but it wasn’t bad.  The market closed early today so my work stopped completely around two in the afternoon when the last stragglers headed off for home.  By the end of the day I was pretty soar from having sat on the couch all day with a laptop on my lap.  I can’t wait to get back to a desktop again.  At least I should not have to use a laptop all that much tomorrow since the office is closed and the website is all set up.  Only additional picture processing and posting to Flickr should demand my time tomorrow.

At a quarter until five we all loaded up and drove over to church to attend Christmas Eve Mass.  This is Dominica’s first time in Frankfort on Christmas Eve in seven years and my first time ever.  So Christmas Mass is new to me although, in reality, it is practically indistiguishable from the Presbyterian Christmas Eve Candlelight Services that I have been going to for almost all of my life.

After church we came home and did family pictures.  I got a ton of pictures and was able to, around midnight, get them edited, thinned out and uploaded to Flickr.  I am excited that I was able to get them done so that when the AppleTV gets hooked up it will show the Christmas Eve pictures from tonight which will be a really nice touch.  I know that the Flickr portion will work.  It is the video portion that I have not been able to fully test yet.

After pictures we had dinner all together.  Then the girls pretty much went straight off to “bed” where they watched first Beetlejuice from 1988 and then A Christmas Story all thanks to Netflix while the adults hung out in the living room.  Francesca and I spent the entire evening, almost two hours, working on finding an appropriate theme for tv.liesllee.com.  We finally got it down to two choices and let Dominica make the final decision which we all really like.

Tonight is the very first time that I have ever been able to witness the Christmas Eve craziness in action firsthand.  I have seen the present layout after arriving from dad’s house as Dominica and I have always done but this is the first time tha tI have been able to watch it actually occur.  What a project.  Plus this is the first year when their are four grandchildren instead of just two (Emily’s first Christmas was my first Christmas at the Toccos’ so it has always been two grandchildren as long as I have been around.)

It is a quarter after midnight and I just got the Flickr updates posted so that dad can see Liesl for Christmas online at the very least and so that everyone here can see them via the AppleTV.  I am posting and heading upstairs to do the last minute wrapping of Dominica’s Christmas presents.  Our big present to each other was the XBOX 360 and Fable 2 which we got a month ago.  We weren’t going to get each other anything else but there was something that Dominica really wanted and so I got it for her.  But that is for tomorrow’s update (on the off chance that she is checking the site somehow.)

6 Work Days Left for Dominica.

It is another early day for us.  I was up and logged in to the office at six thirty.  At least I get to get a jump on the day because I have a ton of homework that really needs to be done today as some of it is due tomorrow and tomorrow is my busy day.

Dominica took the PR5 to Wayne Mazda this morning for some light work.  She was blocked in and couldn’t leave Newark for twenty minutes because of an ongoing dispute between the Eleven80 valet service and the local businesses.  (Just one more week… just one more week…)  They didn’t have a shuttle driver for her this morning at the shop so she got a courtesy CX7 to drive around for the day.

More car surprises this morning.  Turns out that the belt noise was coming from the alternator which was never fully installed the last time that the car was in a shop.  The bolts were never tightened down and the thing was moving around.  The shop said that we were really lucky that the thing didn’t just snap off sometime while we were driving!  So we had that fixed which cost a fortune since they had to disassemble everything to get to it.  We also had the sway bar and brushing taken care of which needed to be dealt with for quite some time.  So today turned into some extra surprise expenses (although nothing is really all that surprising anymore after how the last two months have been.)

Oreo is very itchy again today after having been exposed to grass yesterday.  This is not a good sign.  He is still on the steroids.  This new house is going to be really rough for him.

We have decided, at least initially, that the living room is going to get a television/monitor.  Our plan is to hang it above the fireplace so that it takes up no space and is positioned diagonally into the living room and easily visible from the dining room.  The mantel is a perfect place for the AppleTV which will be used to power the monitor.

We have decided that the Nintendo Wii will be going into the living room as well as its primary purpose is as a gaming system for friends and family when they are visiting and there is no better place for people to hang out and use such a “physical” gaming system.  I think that that means that we will be putting the PlayStation 2 there as well although that has not yet been determined and might be determined simply from the availability, or lack thereof, of component video inputs into whatever monitor eventually goes there.  Our current 32″ 720p unit will be there immediately so that people have something to use until we buy something larger and newer that will go there.

In the long term, we are planning to have three televisions around the house – one in our bedroom, one in the living room and then, of course, the den downstairs which will be the main entertainment area and where, we hope, we will have the XBOX 360 and, at some point, a BluRay Player.

I did some packing today.  Not a lot but it is progress.  Every little bit helps.  There is so much to do before Tuesday.  It is very stressful.  I can’t wait until the move is over and we can move into the new house.  I need a break from this type of stuff.  Dominica really needs to get into the house as well as her nesting instinct is kicking in and she has nowhere to nest.

Dominica came home and we walked over to Subway to grab a simple dinner.  Then we finished watching the first season of How I Met Your Mother which is by far one of the best sitcoms that I have seen in a long time.  Neil Patrick Harris is awesome.  What great casting.

Dominica went to bed around ten but I had to stay up and do homework for RIT.  I took care of my normal, weekly homework tonight that is due on Sunday.  I have extra work that is due tomorrow that I am going to focus on tomorrow.  I realize that that sounds out of order but getting the easier and more straight-forward normal homework out of the way today will let my brain be free and clear to really focus on the one task that I need to do tomorrow.

I keep forgetting to mention that Dominica is hooked on watching Wine Library Television.  She discovered it through the AppleTV’s podcast guide.  I’ve known about it for some time because of the billboards up on Route 78 that I used to see when commuting to Warren.  That alone should tell you how long they have been around.  The show gets around 80,000 viewers per day.  She has been watching it for a few weeks now and is really loving it.  She had no idea that the show is local to us here in Newark and that the Wine Library itself is located in Springfield, New Jersey which is a suburb of Newark.  It really is a great show for people looking to learn about wine.  A good example of the power of podcasting.  As far as I know it is now the most popular English language show on wine.

Apple has added another feature to the AppleTV: Remote. Remote is a free application that owners of an iPhone or an iPod Touch can download and use to control their AppleTV or iTunes on their computer from anywhere on their network. This sounds a bit silly at first until you realize that you can use your AppleTV to power an all-house audio system and you can control everything that it does from anywhere. It is actually pretty cool. Not a feature that many people would consider paying for but as a free feature it is pretty neat.

Depressingly, Los Angeles is a gorgeous seventy-two degrees today while here in Newark it is ninety-two. Hot, humid, hazy and ugh.

InfoWorld ran an article about the lack of customer support people are getting from Dell and how, now, Dell is flatly refusing to support their products if sold through Best Buy! Customers think that they are buying a Dell and are even being told by Best Buy salespeople that there is a Dell warranty that Dell will service but Dell’s policy is that they just don’t honor those warranties – at all, period. Now we’ve discovered that they have this policy with machine purchased via Best Buy (what are you doing buying a computer there anyway?) but if they can choose when to refuse warranty service then what makes them service machines purchased anywhere? Apparently Dell’s warranty service is seen by them as optional. Maybe they will soon see actually delivering the computer that you bought as optional as well.

Mary called today. I have her new mobile phone number now if anyone is attempting to reach her. She is in Dansville these days rather than Warsaw.

My walk into the office in Manhattan was not nearly as hot as I thought that it was going to be. It is certainly hot and humid here today but it could be a lot worse. Because there is some possibility of rain there is a decent wind that helps to keep things from getting too warm. That is something that really gets to me in Manhattan is the complete lack of air movement. I am especially susceptible to a lack of air movement in keeping cool. Air temperature is not nearly as important to me as humidity and air exchange rate.

I forgot to mention yesterday that both Dominica and I had coworkers who had children born yesterday! Both were people directly on our teams.

Dad had a dentist appointment up in Rochester today and discovered that he has become quite a celebrity. Apparently the story of the little Boston Terrier, rescued from a shelter in Houston, Texas who went through being poisoned and then getting onto the Manhattan news and into a Boston newspaper, who recovered and now lives in a skyscraper with views of Manhattan, spends his days at doggy daycare and rides around wearing goggles in his BMW convertible is quite the story. They tell it to all of the dog lovers and children. So dad is now known as “Oreo’s Grandpa” and all of the patients at the dentist’s office know him (by reputation at least.) He walked in today and they called out “Oreo’s grandpa is here!”

I managed to escape the office at just about six in the evening which isn’t really too bad.  Dominica met me at Food for Life where we ate dinner.  It made the evening quick that we were able to eat so early and without any prolonged decision making or waiting as food was delivered.  We were home before eight.

Dominica spent the evening watching the last half of Stardust which she had rented from NetFlix but had not gotten around to finishing yet.  I recorded the 60th Episode of the SGL Podcast but was so tired and worn out that I was unable to get it posted until the morning.  By nine thirty when I finished the show I went straight to bed.  Dominica was not tired and stayed up for a long time reading.

Dominica is still fighting a really bad cold and we fear that it is now a sinus infection.  Oreo got me up in the middle of the night, around two in the morning, to patrol the perimeter and then to go back to bed.  He can be a very goofy dog.  I will be working in Warren tomorrow so I will be hard to reach.  I plan to return home early so that Dominica can pick me up at the train station on her way home.

The rain that we have been promised all week but have not seen finally came during the night.  Maybe that will cool things down a little bit although the forecast doesn’t seem to think that it will.

Apple sees the AppleTV as a centralized media consumption device.  Obviously the AppleTV is targetted for tech-savvy home users and, from what I have seen from Apple’s officialy advertising, they expect a multi-computer home to have iTunes running on several computers (in bedrooms, home office, etc.) and a single AppleTV unit places in the home’s “media center” location attached to a large screen display and surround sound audio system.  Under this design the AppleTV is the media consumer interface to all of the home’s computing resources.

I am sure that for many potential AppleTV customers, especially those already very much entrenched in the ubiquitious use of Apple’s iTunes, that this model may make sense.  A family of four could have a Mac or a PC located in the parents’ bedroom, in each of the children’s bedrooms each running iTunes and containing the individual users’ personal audio and video files.  Then a single AppleTV device placed in the living room or den and hooked to a big screen LCD high-definition television display and a surround sound audio system could be used for serious viewing or family time and the individual computers could be used for personal viewing or listening.

This model makes a lot of sense, especially in a home where all users have computers available to them and each person is likely to want to maintain their own repository of media.  In many cases I believe that this may not be the optimum approach.  This “centralized AppleTV – decentralized media” approach leaves much to be desired by my reasoning for the average media consuming family.

My proposed architecture is based on the theory of “decentralized AppleTVs – centralized media.”  I feel that more often it will be a better use of resources to have many AppleTVs located throughout the home wherever media consumption is desired.  For example, having an AppleTV in each bedroom and in the living room and/or den.  Then, to support the AppleTV units, one single Mac or PC computer running iTunes would be used as a centralized “media server” so that all files are managed from a single location.  This gives each AppleTV throughout the home access to the entire family media archives very simply.

Of course you can use Mac desktops running FrontRow to replace specific instances of the AppleTV.  This can allow for mixing and matching additional functionality as needed without disrupting the base home media architecture.  This system allows every room to use movies and music through a dedicated “entertainment” machine while the desktop computers, if they exist, can be used solely for computing and will not have to share resources – most notably screen real estate – with video content.

Storage of media under Apple’s proposed architure requires each computer user to choose, store and protect their own media.  This means that each computer must be treated as a valuable resource and required dramatically more long term media management.  It also means that there is a likelihood of media duplication throughout the house.  If every family member wants to be able to watch Disney’s The Little Mermaid when they are going to bed at night then each computer has to have its own copy of the movie.  It only takes a handful of movies before this causes significant storage bloat.

Under my proposed architure you can simply use the “media server’s” internal disk for media storage, or if you grow beyond that point you can install a larger drive or just attach external hard drives.  If you have serious storage needs then you can back the iTunes application with an external storage system such as a NAS device.  Consumer grade NAS devices start under $1,000 and it is not financially unreasonable to move to custom server-based storage solutions which can easily hit 14TB today and will scale far beyond this in the near future.  (For reference, a typical new desktop machine today holds around .16TB with the largest drives being just 1TB – so 14TB is a significant amount of storage.)

Possibly the biggest advantage of having centralized media storage is that backups are very, very simple.  There is no bloat as there are not multiple copies of the same files floating around in different locations, and backups are only necessary from the media store (either the local drive, the external drives or the NAS device.)

In a previous article I discussed using the AppleTV as a means of controlling content being made available to children.  Apple’s architecture does not really take this advantage of their own system into account, but under my architecture children can safely have an AppleTV installed into their bedrooms with them having unlimited access to it without any worries that they will be able to access unintended content using it.

We managed to do so much Handbraking that we are running out of storage space – which is a big deal since I have half of a terabyte on my main desktop reserved for h.264 files and am using a bit of space over on my other desktop as well.  I have to start moving files out to the Netgear SC-101 SAN drives now.  We have an additional one terabyte there but access to it is painfully slow and less reliable so we don’t want to store anything there that we want to access anytime soon or that we are worried about losing.  Our plan is, after we get a house, to install a large server dedicated to our media archives that will have lightning fast access to everything all in one spot.  We are hoping to be able to install around eight to twelve terabytes there  as that is pretty likely to be what we will need in the short term to power our AppleTV(s).

I kicked off the download of OpenSuse 11.0 this morning.  It is still early and people are trying hard to get their own copies so the downloads are pretty slow but at least I have it running.  Maybe by tomorrow I can try an installation.  I am doing the download over BitTorrent which isn’t the fastest way to get it, yet, but at least I am contributing to making the system faster so that other people can get it that much more quickly.

My work day was pretty long.  I started at ten after seven this morning and my deployments were not completed until almost eight in the evening.  We ordered in Chinese for dinner from Golden City.  They ran out of tofu so there was only enough to make Dominica’s dinner but not mine.  So I had vegetable fried rice and extra spring rolls and cheese wontons which was a bad idea as it gave me a tummy ache which would get me up in the middle of the night for quite a while.

We watched more Third Rock from the Sun tonight.  I also started work on a neat little Ruby command line application that makes doing a large number of Handbrake jobs easier.  I call it HandBrake Helper.  The design is to have folders into which you can drop files to be processed by HandBrake.  Each folder has a configuration file in it telling HandBrake what settings should be used for files in that folder.  Then you just place your files to be converted into the appropriate folder and kick off HandBrake Helper and it automatically processes your files for you and cleans up after itself.  I just started work on it this evening but had enough done that it is now running the HandBrake jobs on my Linux machines.  I was able to kick it off before going to bed so that it would work through the night for me.  Using HandBrake Helper makes doing conversions much more convenient and it keeps track of my preferred settings so that I don’t have to enter them every time hoping that I don’t get them wrong.

Tomorrow Dominica and I are going in to Manhattan around eleven in the morning to meet up with Nathan, Tammy, Bob, Lisa, Eric and other friends from Ithaca at Planet Hollywood for lunch.  Then it is on to see Mary Poppins on Broadway at a matinée.

Unless otherwise stated I do my conversions to the .mp4 MPEG4 container and extension using h.264 for the video and AAC for the audio. My intent is to have videos that play with excellent quality with consideration to storage requirements on my first generation AppleTV and on VLC. I am not concerned with compression time. I always use two pass compression and do not select “turbo first pass.”  I always use the “H.264 (x264)” codec option considering the target devices that I intend to use.

Update: I have since added a Sony Platstation 3 (PS3) to my output targets and am now using Handbrake 0.9.3 which is needed to support the PS3 due to codec limitations.  I am using this settings for AppleTV, PS3 and VLC for desktop use.

Anamorphic Cinema Content from 480p Source (such as DVD)

Bitrate: 2,500Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Detelecine: VBR
Container: .m4v (Needed for AppleTV support of dual audio.)

Wide Screen HDTV Content from 480p Source

Bitrate: 2,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Container: .m4v

Newer American Television NTSC (1990s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,800Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On

Traditional American Television (1980s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,600Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 128Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak

Old British Television (1980s Britcoms)

Bitrate: 1,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slow
Denoise: Weak

Cartoons

Bitrate: 400Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: Off
Decomb: On

Hopefully this collection of settings will provide you with a starting point in getting the most out of Handbrake. At this time I am currently using Handbrake 0.93 and getting great results from the x.264 encoder. For computer based playback I highly recommend the use of VLC over QuickTime as its playback is much smoother.

AppleTV is a versatile device that works in several different modes. It has direct Internet access through YouTube. It can play media files that are loaded onto it. And it can play media files provided to it through an iTunes “server” application running on a host computer. It is these later modes that are of the most interest to parents looking for a “controlled” solution for their children.

The first thing to mention is that the AppleTV has very good parental controls built in. With these control parents can do a range of locks including removing all access to YouTube and Internet direct content, removing the ability to access the iTunes Store to obtain new, external material and can control the ratings of movies and television shows that will be allowed even when access to them is permitted. So right away there are a range of options that make the AppleTV safe and simple for parents to provide.

The true versatility of the AppleTV for youngsters comes from its “one level separation” from being directly connected to the Internet. Because there is a complete separation between the AppleTV and content on the Internet it is far easier and more secure for parental supervision to be enforced.

The AppleTV gets its content from an “iTunes Server” – that is a computer on your home network that is actively running iTunes and is paired with the AppleTV. Because iTunes is used to feed media to the AppleTV there is a level of direct control that does not readily exist in other systems. Here the iTunes can be set to subscribe only to trusted channels or not to have any subscriptions at all. iTunes can be set to allow nothing but audio and video files loaded onto it by the parents. This is an extremely simple and effective means of content control far beyond what is possible with a DVD player since any DVD can be put into the player but the AppleTV can allow only that content that is preapproved.

Content on iTunes can be purchased through the iTunes store, purchased elsewhere online or can be generated locally either as home movies or by using tools like Handbrake to convert purchased legacy media into AppleTV ready h.264 files. AppleTV’s native video format, h.264, makes for some extremely small video files at very good quality. Perfect for storing large collections of childrens’ shows.

If access to your entire media collection hosted on iTunes is still too wide of content access (perhaps you have some PG movies in there and want to limit accessibility to just a select few films or television shows) you can choose to lock iTunes so that only content that you explicitly load onto the AppleTV through iTunes sync mechanism will be available. This makes it simple to load a large amount of media and then to limit it on a very granular level for very exacting control.

No matter which method or group of methods that you choose to limit content access the AppleTV is truly an answered prayer for parents looking to provide content access in a safe and simple manner for their children. The ease with which it can be used and the level of security that it offers is really remarkable. And because the device requires no physical contact to operate it can be installed safely out of reach of young children who can operate all of its functionality using nothing more than its small, plastic remote. This will relieve much of the concern over putting an expensive electronic device into a young child’s room or den where accidents will often happen.

Unlike services which are purely Internet streaming in nature the AppleTV’s local caching makes their device also work even with unstable Internet connection or even in situations where there is no connection at all. This type of media device will operate surprisingly like a DVD jukebox when pre-cached with content. Children could have as much as 160GB of media sitting ready to go at any time for themselves or for watching with their friends without needing intervention from you.

The AppleTV really represents an opportunity to feel confident about having control of children’s content availability in an age of much uncertain access.

This week I am really on the early morning shift unlike last week when I just thought that I must be. Oops. So the plan was to sleep until the very last second this morning and then start working. But twenty minutes before I was going to get up Oreo got out of bed and had a little emergency. He needed me to walk him, and not just his short walk around the building but his long walk around the block. He had a bit of a tummy ache. So I got him home and fed him his breakfast. But no sooner had he eaten than he needed to go for another emergency walk. It is going to be a long morning for me, I can tell.

One of my jobs today was getting the AppleTV hooked back up in our bedroom now that we have wireless working in the apartment again. I did some cleaning on the top of our bedroom bookshelf and found a good spot for the AppleTV, hooked it up and got it updated to the latest 2.0 software package. Then I worked to get a few h.264 videos that I have been testing transferred over to see how they would work on it. The first few videos worked extremely well. Handbrake successfully took 1.2GB MPEG2 files and turned them into 330MB h.264 files for the AppleTV that look better than normal SDTV. We are going to be very happy using the AppleTV for watching our own collection. And Dominica is going to be very excited to be able to watch YouTube from bed again.

One channel that we discovered that we really like on YouTube is Howcast. You can watch them on their own site or through HowCast YouTube.

It was a fairly busy day. I wasn’t hurting for things to do. I tried to do some cleaning in the apartment when the opportunity arose but there wasn’t much chance for that. All I really managed to do was to clean up some shelves that have been inaccessible while we were storing all of the stuff that we just shipped to dad’s house this past weekend. The shelves were pretty prominent in the living room and were driving me crazy so I am much happier having gotten them mostly cleaned up. It looks much better now.

I did manage to do two loads of dishes and made a big dent on the recently acquired mess in the kitchen. And I got the cardboard trash out that has piled up over the last few days and I took out the old office chair and switched over to my new one. The new chair is tiny compared to the old one and is more attractive as well.  Just by switching to it we have tons more space in our tiny office spot.  Now it is much easier for Dominica and I to work at the same time since before our chairs were always touching.

Dominica was really hankering for a vegetable stir-fry which, for some odd psychosomatic reason always gives me a headache so she ate that and I just ran over to Food for Life to grab some dinner for myself.

We discovered the ultimate “meal bar” food today: Fiber One Chewy Bars by General Mills.  Dominica bought the oats & caramel flavour the other day and I had my first one today.  Wow are they ever good and loaded with fiber too!

I did about an hour of homework tonight and Dominica did as well.  We have so much to do that there isn’t much chance to avoid it.

We met up with Ramona and Winni around noon. We would have been over there sooner but our valets today completely fell apart and it took us fifty-five minutes to get out car out of the garage and we had to go over there and get it ourselves. Then we had to fight with the managers in the garage who just couldn’t understand that we wanted to be able to drive our car and that holding it hostage was not acceptable. The turn around time on a car is supposed to be just fifteen minutes and waiting almost and hour and having to walk to Military Park to get the car ourselves on a slow Sunday afternoon when there should have been more than ample time is really a problem.

The four of us drove down to Elizabeth, New Jersey to try to find some board games at Toys R Us. But really shopping in Elizabeth is not the best place to find intellectual games and the store there was completely devoid of them. We did pick up Mad Gab which Dominica and I learned to play while we were last visiting my family in Ohio. So then we were off to breakfast.

We discovered a diner in Elizabeth that we ended up really liking. The food was good and inexpensive and the people there were really nice. We will definitely be going back there again. They also had fried New Jersey crab cakes on mac and cheese which I have not had since going to the Omega Diner down in North Brunswick more than a year ago.

We hit Best Buy because our wireless access point hasn’t been working recently and it was always a bit problematic. So we decided to just pick up an Apple AirPort Extreme to use as our wireless. It wasn’t cheap but it is attractive and supposedly works extremely well so we decided to just give it a try. It has an included Gigabit Ethernet switch which might be nice depending on how we end up using the system. The AirPort also supports 802.11n which is makes it the first device that we have that will do that.

We recently decided that we are moving our home “entertainment system” over to Apple Mac and AppleTV based so the AirPort Extreme plays into that very well. Our short term plan is to get a Mac Mini for the living room which we will use as our “iTunes Server” and to keep using our AppleTV in our bedroom as our remote television station. Eventually, if and when we manage to get a house again we expect that we will have a guest bedroom and, in that case, we will add another AppleTV to add television to that room as well. We have a plan and it seems to work pretty well.

What I wish that Apple would now do, considering the pieces of the system that they have in place already, is design and build a dedicated “iTunes Media Server”. The ITMS unit idea would be that it would be a standalone unit with four hard drives (up to four terabytes of raw storage or three terabytes with RAID 5) that runs iTunes internally and is used to feed program content out to AppleTV, FrontRow or iTunes on Windows. It should also have one or two USB connections that could be used for syncing an iPod. The interface would be controlled by iTunes on Windows or Mac (or Linux, hint, hint) but all data would be handled local on the ITMS. The iTunes on the ITMS would run continuously so that no computer would need to be left on in order for subscription content to be downloaded at any time day or night. I believe that this is a key component missing from Apple’s iTunes and AppleTV strategy. And I also think that if they decide to build such a device that they should send me one for free for coming up with the idea (hint, hint.) Other possible features of the ITMS could be the inclusion of Time Capsule compatibility, a built in AirPort wireless access point and possibly even routing capabilities to make this truly an all-in-one unit. Although I would prefer it without all of the extra capability with the exception of the Time Capsule feature which I think is perfect for this device and ends up filling another important gap in the Apple lineup – that of RAID protected Time Capsule storage.

We came back to Eleven80 and set up the AirPort so that we could put Ramona and Winni’s laptops online and we taught Dominica how to play Settlers of Catan online. We ended up having someone from Slovakia jump into our game. He was rather annoying but it gave Dominica a chance to learn to play with Ramona sitting with her and showing her how to play. It worked really well and Dominica ended up completely demolishing everyone.

We had a small shipment from Amazon arrive today too. I am guessing that it actually arrived yesterday and we just failed to check the mail. We received the first season of A Different World and the second half of the fourth season of Family Guy. I also got “Lake Wobegon U.S.A.” which is the third in a collection of “News from Lake Wobegon” Audio CD collections. The other two in the series are “News from Lake Wobegon” and “More News from Lake Wobegon”. They are generally considered to be roughly the best fifteen hours of the classic “News from Lake Wobegon” stories. I also got the book “Agile Retrospectives” which I have been looking forward to reading for a while.

We ordered in dinner from Dominos. And then it was back to Settlers.  The game took a while to play (we are playing to thirteen points) and that was all the more time that we had tonight.  Ramona and Winni headed back home at eleven thirty on the Eleven80 shuttle.

On my way in to work this morning I finished listening to Garrison Keillor‘s latest book “Pontoon“. “Pontoon” was okay but definitely not one of his best works. It was slow, hard to follow and rather sad. One thing that Garrison has begun to do recently, which I find very strange, is to take some of his most popular “News from Lake Wobegon” vignettes and to modify them just slightly and to include them in his books. He is definitely getting more mileage from the stories this way but it is strange.

The same thing happened with “Lake Wobegon, Summer 1956“. After reading the book I later heard one of the more memorable scenes from the book abridged and used as an episode in A Prairie Home Companion. And it is always the same episodes that are put onto the collection albums so you hear them several times if you buy the collections.

Most of “Pontoon” is not based on any PHC skits but as you come to the end of the book several of the storylines come together and mash several “New from Lake Wobegon” episodes together into a single, huge scene. In some ways this is extremely interesting because it explains how so many stories in the “News from Lake Wobegon” can happen in such a small space and it provides hours of backstory filling in the gaps and fleshing out the characters and events in some of the well known stories. But it is also strange that after reading a lengthy book that the climax of the book is the bit that you already know and, in some cases, know very well.

Unfortunately that was the last Audible book that I had queued up on my iPod Nano so I will have to get it restocked with books over the weekend. It will give me a good chance to get the latest music from Amazon’s MP3 service moved onto my iPod as well. I have been buying tons of great stuff from there recently. I love that service. And I found that lots of good new stuff was on there today too.

The Spot at 45 Commerce Street in Newark, New Jersey is set to have a little party for us Eleven80 folk tonight. So we are hoping to make it over there this evening to support them. We don’t have final details on this yet so we are playing it by ear.

Dominica is addicted to the idea of taking a cruise. She has been investigating Disney Cruise lines as well as things like the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 to go from New York to Europe. It would be really cool to be able to take the QE2 before she is retired later this year and moved to Dubai to become a floating hotel.

I found a great reference for beginning BASH programmers today: 10 Seconds Guide to Bash Shell Scripting.

Something that I have not used in a long time that I am returning to recently is “My Yahoo“. I really like the Yahoo start page which acts as a personal portal that I can use both at home and at the office. They have done a lot of work to the Yahoo “My Page” since the last time that I looked at it and I like that it shows me email, weather, RSS subscriptions and more all in one view. I often find that having RSS subscriptions in a dedicated feed aggregator (how is it possible that the standard dictionary does not have that word?) is a problem because I move from machine to machine and don’t want to manage the feeds. My Yahoo fixes that and makes it easy.

Interesting tidbits about Yahoo. At the moment their search engine is considered to be on par with Google competing to be the most useful search engine in the world. Yahoo is more popular, overall, than Google (not for search but in page views) in the United States but Google is more popular globally. Yahoo has recently been the target of a rebuffed Microsoft buyout but could yet still be purchased by them if a better offer comes through.

In the news today is word that researchers believe now that the same genes that allow some humans to resist colds may be the same genes that cause weight gain leading to obesity. I now know why I almost never get a cold!

Another era is coming to a close as Verizon, AT&T and Alltel prepare to shutdown the United States’ last remaining analogue cellular services on Monday. This is estimated to effect hundreds of thousands of customers clinging to antiquated and costly legacy services and will hit extreme rural regions the hardest as digital service is not yet available in all areas where analogue has been available for some time. Analogue cellular devices are more costly to maintain than digital and use more electricity making them environmentally unfriendly. Maintaining two separate systems has been expensive for these large carriers and the government, as of Monday, is no longer requiring them to support the old systems.

Scott Adams commented on Death by Frozen Poop.

Comcast today has stated that even under the FCC’s 2005 Net Neutrality law (providing equal access to the network for all customers) Comcast is claiming that discriminatory blocking of applications and customers on their network is within their purview under the heading of “reasonable network management.” Is it any wonder that net neutrality is critical today if even with it in place companies believe that they can get away with picking and choosing which paying customers get service and which do not?

Mary Lou Jepsen has left the OLPC project to start her own for-profit company to capitalize on technologies that were developed for the OLPC. She is predicting that we are just two years away from the production of the $75 laptop! What amazes me is that we can talk about a $75 laptop but can’t make a $75 desktop! It seems to be that cheap desktops would be far easier to produce. And yet the cheapest that I have seen to date is $199.

The OLPC project is in the news recently as they attempt to test the XO in Haiti in a project giving the laptops directly to students.

Work was busy this afternoon and I was stuck in the office until well after six thirty.

I did some research on the AppleTV based movie rentals and discovered that they are insanely expensive. The idea is great and, in many ways, beats out the Netflix approach by providing a system for people with slow Internet connections to be able to get 720p HD h.264 movies over the Internet by caching to iTunes (downloads could take eight hours or more but you could start it during the night or when you head off to the office) but the cost is so high that it is hard to imagine anyone taking advantage of it. Five dollars for an Internet based movie rental is way too high. For less than the cost of two movie rentals in a month you could have a full subscription to Netflix and get unlimited movies! Only those rare people who can’t watch more than one movie a month are likely to find this to be very useful.

We got home and met up with Kevin and Pam and we walked over to The Spot to check out the scene there. The Spot was very busy – we were very surprised. There was barely any space anywhere. It looks like The Spot is going to be very popular. We hung out there until a little before midnight then came back to Eleven80 to get some pizza.

I walked Oreo and we ordered in some late night pizza from New York Pizzeria and then it was off to bed.

I have written these things and have been disputed again and again that television is so dominant and that the idea of getting videos on physical media is so core to our culture that it would be many years if not many decades before these things will change. But I believe that the end is already here. Driven, in part, by the industry division caused by the competing media formats which are too complex for the average consumer to differentiate between, partially because of the poor standards of HDTV and its inability to handle the de facto high definition standard of 1080p, partially because of intentionally misleading marketing and specifications on high definition display products but mostly because the time and technology are right.

There are several technology players who have stepped up to the plate recently to tackle the world of physical and traditional media. I have opined in the past that non-commercial services like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and RSS feed based downloadable content from shows like Rocketboom, Wandering West Michigan and others through software like FireANT or Democracy would be the disruptive factors deciding the fate of media. I still believe that they will remain major plays and, over time, will come to dominate the marketplace as people turn away from commercial production finding more niche content delivered in a more personal way to be more valuable. But before that can happen there is an intermediate phase, I believe, in which commercial content will be delivered through next-generation methods and this will remove the underpinnings of traditional media.

Enter Netflix and AppleTV. There are others, of course. And some that came earlier. Amazon Unbox covers much of the same ground. But Netflix and AppleTV look to be the most disruptive and visible of the players in this new content delivery space.

The first serious, large scale implementation of a network delivery system for digital video content came from Apple’s iTunes. iTunes and AppleTV together form a cache and store content delivery network with complex Digital Rights Management (DRM) allowing for a simply and traditionally styled interface to television like content delivered over the Internet. Because of its cache and store architecture iTunes is able to function with very high definition video even over slower and less reliable network connections. The iTunes licensing team has secured a large volume of current television shows and movies that can be purchased through iTunes and watched on a computer, on a media center or on the AppleTV. The system is straightforward for most consumers and works very well. And the quality of the content generally meets or exceeds the alternatives of broadcast HDTV or DVD. Additionally the iTunes system blends alternative content from RSS/Atom feeds seamlessly into the picture allowing The Jet Set Show or Channel Frederator programs to appear as any other “television” content. Even YouTube can be viewed through the system. For consumers used to the high costs of cable and the unavailability of broadcast signals iTunes and AppleTV is a high quality, low cost competitor to traditional television with the advantage of having no commercials and all content being available on demand.

Netflix has recently entered the arena with their own disruptive service. Netflix’s primary business is as a movie rental alternative whereby movie renters can sign up for a monthly rental service and have DVDs or, more recently, HD-DVD and BlueRay Discs, delivered to them by post. The cost is extremely low and the ease of use and vast selection makes it very easy to choose over traditional rental services. Over the past few years Netflix has become very popular especially with the serious cinema market.  The new service from Netflix is the ability to view movies over the Internet via a streaming video service.  This service is included with all of the normal movie rental pricing plans making it “free” for their current user base to test and try.  This service, for people with moderate quality Internet connections, provides instant access to a massive, and constantly growing, library of “on demand” movies, documentaries and television programs.  For only a tiny fraction of the normal cost of cable service one can subscribe to Netflix’s unlimited download service and get unlimited, commercial free on-demand content.  The system is new but massively disruptive.

What is truly amazing about these two systems and their competitive counterparts like Amazon Unboxed is that they are not competing with the content of current media but only competing with the content delivery system.  By switching from traditional television and movie rentals to these services one will, under the vast majority of circumstances, save money,  increase easy of use after initial learning curve, remove commercials, remove reliance on “schedules” or “hours of business”, reduce necessary planning, increase selection, increase quality and remove expensive and incompatible devices which are currently popular to “mimick” these types of services such as DVRs.

What we are seeing now is an adaptation allowing people to continue to use the content that they are used to while receiving it through modern methods.  These new distribution systems will, in all likelihood,  prove to be ideal conduits for new types of content that can be delivered just as easily as traditional content.  The end of traditional television is here.  No longer is television just a legacy technology delivering a unique form of commercial entertainment and content that was not yet available through modern means – now it is simply legacy.