Standing On Boxes

Just renewed the tag on the old buggy. It’s ten years old and has 120,281 miles on it. Only 30K of which are mine.

Today’s update to iWork for the iPad ( 1.2 ) – Pages now has word count.

Installed XBMC and Boxee on my 1st gen AppleTV this evening. (Here are some instructions, though I didn’t follow them myself – I used the instructions at the patchstick site.)

Impressed. Mostly.

A few quirks.

• The XBMC/Boxee patchstick kit included something called ATVFiles – uninstalled. It looked interesting (It allows browsing the aTV file system from the menu)
  so I installed it. Big mistake. It killed the menu on my AppleTV. Apparently it was an incompatible version.
  Had to log into the thing with ssh and install a newer version (found a tip on the XBMC forum in the AppleTV topic). Not sure what the deal is there. Or why enabling ssh is considered a good thing.
• I was playing some music on the aTV. Decided to try out Boxee (fyi – you have to get an account (free) at the Boxxe website before it’ll work.). Started streaming a tv show and the music kept playing in the background! Yikes. Had to exit from Boxee and stop the music. Hopefully there’s a setting somewhere to correct that.

The Boxee video streaming wasn’t too bad – for a while – but towards the end of the show I was watching ( the pilot for “Fringe”) it started stuttering. Painfully hard to watch. And that’s with a fairly good broadband connection. Not sure how often I’ll watch a tv show like that.

I poked around in XBMC but haven’t really done more than configure it for my tv. Need to copy some non-iTunes media to it to see how well it works.

The original La Femme Nikita was a gritty French action picture directed by Luc Besson (He also directed ‘The Fifth Element’ and ‘Leon’/'The Professional’ among others.)

The second version (in English), Point of No Return, starred Bridget Fonda. It wasn’t bad but the original is better. The Wiki says there was a Hong Kong remake ‘Black Cat’ but I haven’t seen that one.

The first tv adaptation, La Femme Nkita

And now there's a new Nikita in town. Played by Maggie Q (A Vietnamese-American Hong Kong action star.) who fits the starving waif-motif more like the original Nikita, Anne Parillaud than Peta Wilson. Set post-original tv series. Sort of.

So, I caught the last 30 minutes of the pilot. Not bad action-wise. The insider helping Nikita out bit seems forced. We’ll see how long that lasts. And hopefully it will have a healthy balance of action and character development.

I need to dig out my DVD’s — I never got around to getting the Peta Wilson series on DVD. Too expensive. Approx. 2X$ most regular tv show series. But somewhere I have at least one of the movies on DVD.

Now that the 2nd generation AppleTV has been announced, Apple is having a ‘sale’ on the most recent incarnation of the AppleTV.

So, I bought one.

Why? Why not wait a couple more weeks?

Well, until last week’s price cut, the AppleTV has been too expensive for my taste. But, at $150 (+tax),
only $50 more than the new one, it is finally within my price range.

What does that $50 get me that the new one doesn’t have?

1. Local storage. 160GB isn’t a huge amount but it fits my needs at the moment. After putting all of my music and the few tv shows I’ve gotten from iTunes on the aTV (You can sync 1 iTunes host (PC or Mac) to it), I still have over 120GB free for more media. And if I ever manage to rip (copy to hard drive) all of my DVD, a 500GB-1TB external drive would suffice. Or I can upgrade the internal drive.
2. The aTV 2G only does streaming. Fine if you have N wifi (I don’t) or ethernet for everything (I don’t.).
3. The aTV 2G only has HDMI video output. I would have to get an HDMI switch (cheap) or new A/V receiver with HDMI ports (expensive). The aTV 1G has component video cables and since it can’t do 1080p (and my tv can’t either), I don’t need HDMI for it for the quality it would give me. If I want higher quality video (Blu-Ray), I’ve got a Blue-Ray player.
4. The aTV 1G is very hackable (It’s running OS X 10.4 on a Pentium something). It can be hacked to run XBMC and Boxee. The aTV 2G? Rumour has it it has some version of iOS under the hood. And no local storage. It’s even more of an appliance than the 1st gen aTV. No one, except Apple, knows if it’ll be hackable.
5. The 1st Gen aTV can be used to heat my apartment in the winter (Yes, it does get that hot. It use the top of the device as a heat sink. And like my DVR it is never really off.)

What DON’T I get from the 1st generation AppleTV ?

1. No NetFlix like the 2nd gen. Not a huge loss – I don’t do NetFlix now and if I did, my PS3 and XBox can do that.
2. $0.99 tv episode rentals. No thanks.
3. The 2nd gen device has better video support. Supposedly. But just barely.

Convinced?

My plans for the fall just got torpedoed this week. Due to a project at work ( it’s been on the maybe someday list for a while but last week someone finally said “Do It!” ), it looks like I won’t have much time for any serious fic’age for the next week/months. Instead, I get to become the local expert in something so I can work on this project.

Granted, that’s actually how my job works – learning a new ( to us) software platform in a horrifically short amount of time and applying/integrating it with one of our products. If one were to read between the contract lines. It can be exciting, once the initial panic at the scope of the project and what I need to know to do it wears off. And I might even get some prof. Certs. out of this one. If I survive.

But it doesn’t leave much brain power for non- work things.

Although I do plan to finish a couple story parts that are mostly done anyway over next couple weeks, unless I need the stress relief don’t expect to see much from me until at least Christmas.