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Roku player

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Roku player

Our geek-owned beach house includes a Roku Digital Video Player. Formerly known as the Roku Netflix Player, this player has branched out beyond Netflix. It now has dozens of video and podcast streams that can be delivered straight to your television.

I admit I had my doubts about this modest little box, but after seeing it in action I’m convinced. We already enjoy Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” video streaming through the built-in capability of our Samsung Blu-Ray player. To my surprise, the Roku blows our Samsung away. The Roku user interface is far better than our Samsung player’s.
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Posted in Futurist, Media, MythTV, Reviews | No Comments »

Raleigh’s media sites can’t search, either

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Before our area media start feeling high and mighty, I was amused to find it nearly impossible to track down today’s story on Russ’s comments about the city’s website on the News and Observer website. After searching in vain using the N&O’s own search engine, it took me some thoughtful Google searches to turn it up.

With each iteration of its website, the paper’s search engine has become less useful. What’s even worse, with each redesign all the web links to online stories have changed completely, breaking not only any links any outside sites made to stories but also any links indexed by search engines. Thus if you couldn’t find what you’re looking for after the N&O redesign, God help you because Google certainly won’t. I’m no web professional, but even I know to create forwards from old links to new ones whenever humble MT.Net makes changes. That’s Webmastering 101.
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Posted in Follow-Up, MT.Net, Media, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Raleigh’s website woes

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

The City of Raleigh’s new website was in the news again today. City Councilor Russ Stephenson picked it apart in an email to City Manager Russell Allen. Russ’s experience is the same as most folks’: he tried using the search engine to find something and failed utterly. When I critiqued it myself, I faulted it for simply relying on the search engine as heavily as it does. That wasn’t even considering that the search engine seems so completely broken.

My buddy Scott has built many a website in his many years of geekdom. He’s a professional. He tells me that he had seen many $500,000 websites, and what Raleigh got is not one of them.
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Posted in Community, Follow-Up, Politics, Reviews | 2 Comments »

The City of Raleigh’s new website

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Yesterday, the City of Raleigh unveiled it’s new website: the first update in a dozen or more years. The old website has long been a pet peeve, with it’s cryptic, miles-long URLs and lack of photographs or graphics. To find anything useful, users often had to resort to using the search box.

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem with the new website: to find anything useful the user has to use the search box. In fact, it’s more of an issue now. The old site at least attempted to categorize information in a hierarchical format (for every page, you saw a list of breadcrumbs that showed you where you were in the site). The new one, however, makes no attempt at all at organizing data (at least as far as I can tell).
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Posted in Community, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Alberto Contador has no class

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Here’s a good writeup explaining why the Spaniard Alberto Contador might be the winner of this year’s Tour De France, but he will never be the champion.

Alberto Contador was being dropped again by Andy Schleck just as the mechanical happened. There is no doubt that Contador is strong and perhaps would have closed the gap to Schleck had the mechanical not happened, but to see the Spaniard rise out of the saddle and accelerate just as Schleck was experienceing his equipment malfunction was hard to watch . . . and it cheapens Contador’s lead in the race. Should the Spaniard win this year’s race by less than a minute, those who watched will remember that he is not truly the winner of the 2010 Tour.

Read the rest here.

Posted in Reviews, Sports | 1 Comment »

TestDisk for undeleting files

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

My son Travis accidentally deleted a digital movie he took with his camera. He was so disappointed, so I took up the task of trying to undelete the file. If his camera’s SD card was formatted with Linux’s ext3 filesystem his file would be impossible to retrieve.

Fortunately, all digital camera cards are formatted with the tried-and-true MS-DOS vfat filesystem, which makes undeleting files trivial. I even found a Linux tool called TestDisk that can easily retrieve deleted files. In seconds, I had fetched Travis’s deleted file.

If you are a Linux-head like me and need to bring a file back from the dead, try TestDisk!

Posted in Reviews, X-Geek | Comments Off

Google lets users opt out of background images

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Looks like Google realized that some of its users prefer the plain-Jane Google page rather than the Bing Bling version, and now there’s an option to remove the background image. Simply click on the lower left link for “Remove background image” and you’ll have the familiar Google-on-white-background page you’re familiar with.

Posted in Check It Out, Follow-Up, MT.Net, Reviews | Comments Off

Google background images irritate some

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Google opted today to splash some color on its trusty, rusty search page using background images. Some aren’t so hip to the change, said by some to be a response to Microsoft’s BING search engine.

I’d be okay with the change as long as it didn’t slow down the loading of my Google page and I had the option to turn it off. While this could have been a welcome change, Google screwed up when it didn’t give users the ability to disable it.

Attention, Google: I use your search engine for the results it provides me, not because it’s pretty (or not pretty, as the case may be). Give your users the option to turn off the BING bling and everything will be cool.

Update 3 PM: Google listened, and now users can get the old-fashioned page back again. Thanks, Goog!

Posted in Check It Out, MT.Net, Reviews | 4 Comments »

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I just finished watching The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a film about the life of the actor best known for his roles in the Pink Panther movies and Dr. Strangelove. It showed a side of Sellers I was unfamiliar with, that of a man who was emotionally stunted to a severe degree. Like millions I was captivated by Seller’s performances, as he always seemed like a bomb ready to go off. Apparently there was good reason.

Geoffrey Rush plays Sellers and does an absolutely fantastic job of it. It isn’t easy to slip into roles you so closely associate with another actor but Rush wins the audience over into believing he is Sellers. Charlize Theron is also great as his suffering second wife. And John Lithgow plays Blake Edwards masterfully.

Sellers didn’t live a happy life, at least from what this film shows, but he was a brilliant comic. Watching Sellers’ life in this film isn’t always easy, but it is fascinating look at a talented but troubled man.

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Netflix streaming with the Samsung BD-P1600

Friday, January 1st, 2010

For Christmas, my parents gave us a gift card to apply towards a Blu-ray player that could stream Netflix. I did some research on models this morning and picked out what I wanted: the Samsung BD-P1600. I don’t own any Blu-ray discs and may not ever. All I wanted was a player that would excel at streaming Netflix movies. If it could play discs too, well, so much the better.

I spent the evening playing around with it. How does it perform? Fantastically. On the first power-up, it took several minutes for the system to download an apply a firmware update. After that, though, it’s worked very well. I was stunned at the picture quality when I tried streaming some movies: it’s amazingly good. So much so that I’m not at all surprised now that the big cable companies are shitting bricks over this technology. The writing is on the wall for cable TV: I have 12,000+ titles of movies and television shows available for watching anytime. Why would I want to saddle myself with a costly cable subscription?
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Posted in Futurist, MythTV, Pandora, Reviews | Comments Off

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