Jan
21
iLike
Filed under technical, mac at 5:17 pm | 5 Comments
Dec
2
distro switch
Filed under technical at 4:41 pm | 2 Comments
Earlier this year I switched from one Linux distribution to another. After about 10 years of living in the Red Hat / Fedora family, I finally grew bored enough to change to Ubuntu.
When Ubuntu first came out, I was skeptical for a couple reasons. First, the initial graphic I saw for the distro was a group of people hugging in a circle. With a little research, I discovered the meaning behind the group hug: “Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.” Admirable, but a bit touchy-feely for my tastes. Second, lots of early-adopters were raving about Ubuntu, and early adopting is something I tend to avoid in most areas of life.
It’s not that I disliked Fedora, but I was less and less excited about it with each release. Even though I’m not a huge fan of change, the packages, design, and functionality in Fedora weren’t changing fast enough for me. Additionally, some things that really should “just work” never seemed to do so (e.g., software updates). Mostly, though, I think I was simply bored with it.
After a good bit of research (surprise, surprise), I decided to give Ubuntu a try with our home machine. The install was very simple, without making me feel as if the install was making all the decisions for me. More recently, I upgraded to 7.10 and couldn’t believe how flawless it was. I literally clicked an option that said “Upgrade now,” confirmed that I really wanted to upgrade, and after a couple hours it was done.
I’ve been using Ubuntu exclusively for about 9 months now, and am very pleased. I love that things just work (package updates, detecting new printers, automatically handling removable devices, etc.). And I enjoy little touches they include like this:
$ dos2unix
The program 'dos2unix' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install tofrodos
bash: dos2unix: command not found
How convenient is that? I realize many of the small things I now enjoy may be bundled in Fedora as well (since it utilizes many of the same underlying packages and tools), but I feel no need to go back. I’m very content, and see no need to change … until the next upgrade.
Oct
1
unwrapping Unbox
Filed under technical, movies, tv at 10:19 pm | Leave a Comment
Amazon has a service called Unbox, which gives you the ability to purchase or rent TV shows and movies in a downloadable format (e.g., on a computer). Earlier this spring they partnered with TiVo to allow the downloading of those purchases directly to your TiVo unit. They offered a $15 credit to everyone that registered their TiVo by a certain date, so I gave it a try.
We’ve used it close to a dozen times, both for TV shows and movies. Here are my thoughts on the service so far:
- All in all, I’m really impressed, and am enjoying the service, mostly because of its convenience and ease of use. I can browse Amazon’s site, use their 1 click purchase to buy or rent the movie or show, and within a couple minutes it’s already downloading to my TiVo.
- More recently, they’ve added the ability to browse and purchase from Unbox directly through the TiVo. It’s a slimmed down version of what’s online, but that’s probably necessary to make the interface usable on the TV with a remote.
- For some reason, closed captioning is not available with any of the downloads. There have been a couple movies where the audio didn’t seem quite balanced (voices are soft, but music and sound effects are loud), and closed captioning would have been nice.
- Unfortunately you have to wait until the movie or TV show is completely downloaded to your TiVo before you can begin watching. I wish you could begin watching once a sufficient amount had been buffered, but knowing that ahead of time it’s easy enough to plan ahead.
- Download speeds have been about real time (e.g., 2 hours for a 2 hour movie), from what I’ve seen. That’s acceptable to me, given the fact my TiVo is connected to our home network wirelessly.
- Once the movie or TV show has downloaded, you have 30 days to watch it before it’s automatically deleted. However, once you start playing it, you then have only 24 hours before it’s deleted. During that 24 hour period, you can treat it like any other show you’ve recorded, watching it as many times as you want, fast-forwarding, rewinding, etc. I can live with these DRM measures, but I would like to see something like 36 hours rather than 24. Frequently we start a movie one night (after the little guy’s in bed), and don’t quite finish it. The next available time to watch the rest is the following evening, starting at the same time. With only 24 hours, that’s too late to go back to it. If the window were bumped out to 36 hours, that would allow two evenings to get it all in, while still making the DRM folks happy.
Even though we’ve used up all of our $15 credit, we continue using the service. On weekends they always have a handful of new movies for $0.99, and with the TV season ramping up, they’ve been offering series pilots from NBC and FOX for free– even before they’ve aired. I’ll admit that’s the first time I remember ever watching the pilot for a show, and wouldn’t be surprised if we give one of the shows a try this season.
If you’ve got a real TiVo (not those DirecTV look-a-likes), I recommend trying out the Unbox service. I’ve certainly gotten good use of it so far.