Part of me really dislikes the idea of the Apple EcoSystem and what it means to the freedom of my content. *cough* DRM *cough* My music has freedom to roam, but TV Shows and Movies are trapped in there once purchased from Apple. They can roam around Apple products with my account and it’s a good user experience, but they are barred from playing on anything else.
I can go through the trouble of converting my purchased DVDs to a friendly format, but if it’s a Blu-Ray disc the poor HD content is trapped on the disc (Stupid DRM!).
I think about the other options I have, but don’t want to mess with them. I have devices that play well together and I don’t have to worry about an awkward experience that requires a lot of work. So I will continue gathering my media into iTunes and streaming it to an Apple TV and watching on my iPhone.
Running CoconutBattery has not only informed me my batteries maximum charge is 90% of what it was when new, but also I am using a 30 month old laptop. Wow. Way to go little notebook.
Another interesting thing is I could buy a new one from an app on my iPhone. Which is an example of software and service being the shit when it comes to cool factors. Also my notebook keeps saying “When I was a young nobody purchased notebooks from a phone.”
Long story short. MacBook Pro needed a reinstall of Snow Leopard and since it hasn’t been my week for technology it hit a few bumps, ran over a digital deer and fell into a crater. The availability of the Lion (OS X 10.7) really makes me want to run that on my notebook, but that is really asking for trouble since it’s months away from release.
The testing I’ve done so far with Lion has revealed a couple of necessary apps I use everyday are not functional yet. Which makes me sad as I’m such a upgrade junkie when it comes to updates and especially major versions. I wish Apple would make some improvements to freshen up Finder. Maybe 10.8 will be “We’ve done it again. This time Finder has been upgraded to stupid awesome.”
Update 3/24/2011: MacBook Pro has been revived with a new hard drive and a migration from my old drive.
I got my OnLive MicroConsole setup today and it’s pretty neat. There are a few reviews online and I’ve posted links for a few at the end of this post for those curious about what people are thinking of it.
It gets me to thinking about how many services I can get by just paying a monthly fee. Let’s think about this.
Subscription:
Music: Napster, Zune
Movies: Netflix
TV Shows: Hulu Plus
Games: OnLive
Piecemeal:
Music: Napster, iTunes, Zune, Amazon
Movies: CinemaNow, Vudu, iTunes, Amazon, Blockbuster
Games: Steam, Xbox Live, PlayStation Store
Subscription services that give you full access to their entire streamable / downloadable items tends to be limited in the number of titles. It’s great to get access to so much content with the ability to try something and if you don’t like it move onto the next. I’m not stuck with a $20 movie that I’ll never finish watching. I can listen to and find new music without having to commit based on the cover art or a couple of 30 seconds clips.
I guess the whole thing reminds me of sci-fi shows where there really are not any stores. Everyone just kinda has stuff they need. I don’t recall any of them subscribing and paying a monthly fee. Maybe subscriptions will be the next bubble to burst as people just end up with too many of them to support.
http://technologizer.com/2010/12/01/onlive-microconsole-review/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/02/onlive-ushers-in-the-microconsole-with-all-you-can-eat-game-plan/
The idea of using a Spring 4G connection as a main Internet connection in a home has come up in conversation so I thought I’d give it a try this weekend. It took a couple of hours as the Sprint EVO hotspot connection was having problems with the Linksys router, but I’ll get to that.
Hardware: Sprint HTC EVO, Linksys WET610N Wireless Bridge, Linksys E3000 Wireless Router, Xbox 360, LG BD390 Blu-ray disc player.
The Sprint HTC EVO is sharing it’s 4G Internet connection to the Wireless Bridge that is plugged into the Internet port on the Linksys e3000 that is the main router for my home network. I had to fight a strange problem where the router would only get a 127.0.0.1 from the EVO and I finally determined that the IP’s used by the EVO needed to be changed.
- Settings, Wireless & networks, Sprint Hotspot settings
- Press the “menu” button and select Advanced then LAN settings.
- Change the IP address to 10.0.0.1 (It will give an error, don’t worry the next step will fix it.)
- Change the Starting IP to 10.0.0.10
I’ve noticed the EVO HTC will hand out all kinds of crazy IPs instead of sticking to .10, .11 it will hand out IPs that end in .178 which wasn’t expected by me. Once I changed it to a very different IP range it started working through the bridge with my wireless router.
Speedtest.net is giving results of 4.6 MB/s down and .92 MB/s up which is pretty awesome for a mobile phone connection. I’ll be doing some actually usage this weekend to see what is working well and what isn’t over this connection.
Actual Usage Results
So far I’ve been able to stream from CinemaNow although it did pause to adjust due to a slowdown a couple times and the quality wasn’t the highest. Netflix is also working pretty well and didn’t notice as much of a pause, but it may have to do with me watching an Anime show which probably compresses a lot better.
Impressed so far. It’s amazing what we can do with technology today.
I am playing around with this Android phone to get familiar with with the Google side of phones. I have owned an iPhone since the 3G and have been interested in Android for a while.
I have installed some of my common applications and my sim card and the testing has begun. I guess the first question is to root or not to root? Especially since at&t has blocked apps not in the official marketplace which rules out swype which is an amazing application for text entry.
The keyboard seems to be missing my voice entry as well. Time to customize this beast.
Edit: I have found swype and the android keyboard in the settings menu.
Are users moving back toward terminal-type ‘dumb’ devices that pull most of their content and applications from a server on the Internet? Are we moving all the processing and power needed to run applications, play games and handle intense computing to somewhere else? Having inexpensive ‘dumb’ devices that will reach a wider audience who keep their whole life synced between any device with a login. Data backup will be handled by someone else, software updates will happen without us needing to do anything and storage will become a lot less important.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve finally been able to play around with one for more than a minute and really like what I’m seeing. I’ve loaded some comic book applications, created a VPN connection to a remote network and used RDP to access a server there. Not the quickest, but a lot of fun to do. The native iPad apps are really the ones that are the most fun to use.
I’ve wanted to use a good touch screen interface for a computer for a long time and even tried my hand at previous versions of Linux and Windows and finally someone has created a nice toy to fill that void.
Now if Google can get some great Android run tablets out so we have something to compare this thing against.
I’m pretty amazed at the changes they announced for the next iPhone OS release. I am especially excited about multitasking, folders to organize my apps, mail being able to use multiple exchange accounts and better encrypt data and iBooks which didn’t make sense to me it wasn’t on the iPhone. I’m a little sad that a 3GS is needed to fully take advantage of the new features and that a new phone hasn’t been announced yet. Everyone guesses June, July or December 12, 2010. My iPhone 3G really could use an update.
I like that the iPhone is not standing still while Android is improving their phone operating system. I love choices and it’s even better that we have two great systems to choose from. I still think Android and their voice to text is amazing and worth the price of admission.
I enjoyed the HTML 5 comment during the iAd demonstration. I hope the HTML 5 standard really takes off. Flash just isn’t built for mobile devices and tablets. It’s also time for more voice interaction and great touch interfaces. (Even YouTube is experimenting with it http://www.youtube.com/html5.)
Resources:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apples-iphone-4g-what-we-know-about-the-iphone-hd/
http://daringfireball.net/
Facebook
Google
Twitter
YouTube