Friday, July 03, 2009

The San Francisco Treat

This is an overdue post, but I wanted to write about it while it’s still semi-fresh in my mind.  Between June 18-21, Alison and I went to San Francisco to celebrate 5 years together.  It was a trip just for us, no responsibility to see family or anything and it was great.  Similar to the LA Trip, we used my flight benefits and Alison’s hotel benefits to basically travel for free.  We also had to fly in the coach section on the way down there, the humanity!  But at least we got exit row seats..  Again, we didn’t go with many plans made in advance, but we wanted to see the city and Alcatraz. 

The flight out was pretty smooth but early.  We are both used to the late shift, since Alison works nights at the hotel.  We were able to get from the SFO airport to the hotel via train and checked in without problems.  Out to see the city!  Despite tiredness, we started walking down the pier, hearing rumor of excellent clam chowder and sourdough bread.  Starting at Pier 1, we walked across the shoreline for about a mile or so until we got to Pier 39, where all the action is.  We looked out into the bay.  Alcatraz island was partially hidden behind some sea fog, looking ominous in the distance.  There was also a surprising amount of sea lions around the buildings.  A plaque described how they all of a sudden showed up a few years ago and just never felt like leaving.  We moved on into the shops!  Lots of good looking food and deserts.  We stopped at a little place and Alison got the clam chowder and I got a seafood basket.  Both were pretty good.  Then we hit up the chocolate store, and Alison got some gigantic strawberries from another shop.  Continuing our touristy adventure, we passed an aquarium and decided to stop in.  It wasn’t that big, but had some neat things.  Weird looking crabs, jellyfish, sharks, and an octopus.  We walked around a little more and got tired, and decided to head back to the hotel and think about dinner.  We jumped on a trolley car which took us almost right next to the Hyatt Regency.  I have to give a shoutout to the iPhone’s Google maps application.  The public transit directions it gave were almost flawless (except for one time) and helped out a lot in a new place.  Saved a lot of time.  We rested a little and then went looking for a place to have dinner.  After a lot of searching we found a steakhouse but I can’t remember the name.  It was Perry’s or something.  Anyways, Alison chose it because she liked the tablecloth of all things, but it turned out to be an awesome restaurant.  I had a fillet with mac and cheese (always an awesome combo), and she had some sort of dinner salad.  Both were great.  Exhausted from the long and early day, we walked back to the hyatt to end the night.

For the next day, the 19th, we decided to go hit the Golden Gate park.  It’s a long way away from the Hyatt where we were staying.  Thanks to google maps public transportation, we were able to jump on a bus out there pretty easily.  Some guy on the bus asked us where we were going and we told him.  Turns out there’s a lot of pot being sold there.  Declined his offer, as we looked at each other in apprehension.  Sure enough, about 5 minutes into our morning walk, someone asked us again if we wanted to buy some “nuggets”.. uhh no!  The park was a strange mix of stuff like that, but also little kids on field trips, tennis courts, homeless people walking about, museums, busy streets etc..  We settled on looking around the japanese tea gardens.  We had to pay $5 each to get in, but oh well.  There were some neat things in there like a giant arched bridge and huge stairs, but we decided to leave the park and hit up Chinatown.  Rode the bus some more and ended up in a Chinese looking area.  We walked back and forth but there weren’t a lot of shops for tourists - mostly food shops, and they didn’t look too sanitary.  Little did we know, we were in the more residential area of Chinatown, about a block away from touristy-chinatown.  We headed towards the Trans-America building and went back to the Hyatt for some rest and a quick bite to eat before we went to the Giants-Rangers baseball game.  I had been wanting to go to a baseball game for a while so we went and it was fun.  Cold, but fun.  The fact that they were playing the Dallas team was a coincidence, but the Giants won anyways.  Had hotdogs and pretzels and stuff.

Our last day, the 20th, was our Alcatraz day.  Turns out, they only allow one company to take people over to island.  Hello monopoly!  And since the pride rally was coming up that week, everything was sold out far in advance.  A little bummed out, we went out exploring again, starting the day out with a ride up Nob hill on the old fashioned cable car.  Pretty neat ride, but the driver was a bit of an ass.  We got off at the top and walked our way down, finding the Grace Cathedral and the “real” Chinatown.  At least the one for the tourists.  I picked up something for my dad for father’s day, and Alison got a chinese fan.  Then we headed up to Pier 39 again and booked a boat ride that takes you out to the Golden Gate Bridge and around the island of Alcatraz.  Our tickets were good all day, so we went up to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream and chocolate.  I had a brownie sundae and Alison got a caramel sundae.  Pro-tip: Get the brownie sundae when you go.  Alison’s was sugar overload and mine was awesome.  We shared a lot, so it’s all good.  Headed back down to the Pier and got on the boat.  It was a fun ride, very cold as we went into the wind and very pleasant when we turned around towards Alcatraz.  Got some good pics, got to see the monstrous bridge and got to see the island pretty close.  Next time we’ll be smarter and book our tour in advance.  The day ended with a nice dinner at a more fancy place that I also can’t remember the name.  I was trying to decide between a new york steak and bacon-wrapped pork chops..  Alison was sweet enough to order the pork chops and I got the steak.  They were good but the portions were small.  More Money = Less Food yay.  Oh well it tasted good and we had some dessert.  Headed back to the Hyatt to get some sleep for the early flight next morning.

As the trip ended, we met the SuperShuttle around 4am on the 21st and headed out to the airport.  We both got first class on the way home, but our seats weren’t together :(  I spent most of the flight sleeping anyways though.  All in all we both had a lot of fun and maybe we’ll go there again some day.

Check out all the pics in my gallery at http://www.darkmercury.net/gallery2/v/sanfran/

Thursday, June 04, 2009

The Apple TV Experiment

A few days ago I picked up a used 40gb Apple TV off craigslist for $150 (retail price $230+tax).  I talked to the seller for a few minutes as we did the transaction, I looked it over and he counted the moneys.  He said it was a good device but he just found himself never using it.  He didn’t have a lot invested in iTunes and he just preferred using his computer to use Hulu and view his divx files.  I neglected to mention the hacks available for the apple TV, but he owns a PS3 and so I told him to look up Tversity as a way to view his divx videos on his TV.  So is the Apple TV a good enough product to stay in my living room, or will I follow in this seller’s footsteps and put it right back on craigslist?

First of all, let’s take a look at my TV setup.  It’s pretty simple, just a 40” Samsung LN40A550 HDTV and a Playstation 3.  The PS3 takes care of DVD, Bluray, games, and can even stream media served by the Tversity service running on my computer.  It looks neat, has a nice bluetooth remote, and is pretty good at being an all-in-one device.  However, the user interface takes some time to get used to, it can’t access iTunes content (which is most of my good music), and most importantly: it’s loud!  We have it in a TV stand with closing doors and the PS3 will heat up quickly and start blasting fans to cool itself.  This interrupts a lot when trying to watch a movie, especially quiet ones.  And while Tversity is a great product, it does have some downfalls.

Tversity is a service that will re-encode your divx/xvid/whatever files on your computer into a DLNA-compatible format, which is what the PS3, Xbox360, and others look for in a media server.  It’s nice because you can have a file in almost any format and not have to convert them all into another format to view them.  But it’s not perfect.  While I can use it to play about 95% of the files I have, there are videos that don’t work.  The files have to be indexed similar to iTunes, which means folders have to be scanned and this pwns my computer when the process begins.  So basically, keeping the service running on my computer is a hassle. 

The Apple TV in its original state, is self-admittingly, a “pet-project” of Apple.  It’s designed to be an iPod for your TV.  It syncs the same, holds your music and movies on the internal hard drive, and with the 2.0 software, you can download and rent movies right from the box itself without a computer.  The 1.0 software was better at this concept, and was very similar to Frontrow on the mac.  With the “Take Two” (2.0) software, the focus is more on buying shit from iTunes.  For example, in the Movies menu, “Top Movies”, “Genres”, “All HD”, “Search”, and “Trailers” all refer to online streaming movies and your actual content is all the way at the bottom.  It makes for extra scrolling and makes the menus annoying.  It’s the same in the Music, TV shows, and all the rest.  It’s kind of neat to have the Apple Movie Trailers at your disposal any time you want, but I haven’t tried the movie rentals or purchasing content from it yet. 

Streaming content looks really good over the Apple TV.  It has good vertical sync and high detail even on low resolution shows.  It can do up to 720p.  It will choke on 1080p.  Maybe if a new version which can handle 1080p is released I will update to that.  The Apple TV’s best feature is that it’s whisper quiet.  It is always on and always warm, but it never gets hot and we can keep the TV stand doors closed while using it.

What I don’t like about Apple TV is, of course, that little tiny remote.  I have a hard enough time keeping track of the Samsung and PS3 remotes and not only is this another one to keep track of, but it’s tiny.  I’ve gotten used to the bluetooth remote of the PS3, and the Apple TV being infrared is like a step backwards.  The display when playing music is annoying to me as well.  In an effort to avoid screen-burn, the display flips the cover art from the right side to the left and back every 30 seconds or so.  The screensaver does this too.  I find it highly annoying and even unnecessary with modern TVs.  Since the Apple TV doesn’t even work with non-HDTV sets, this is a feature I hate.

So the Apple TV is great if you have a lot invested in iTunes.  I keep my music organized with iTunes so it works with my iPhone, but my movies and TV shows are in xvid format stored in a directory format.  To play these, the Apple TV must be hacked.  Hacking the Apple TV is pretty easy these days.  You simply create a “Patchstick” USB drive using a simple program and restart the Apple TV.  It boots into Linux and writes over some files and installs others.  About 300 megabytes of downloading later, you have the XBMC Media Center and Boxee.  XBMC was originally created to turn the first Xbox into a media center similar to the 360, and now the project is open source and cross-platform.  It allows you to play media of almost any format (xvid included) and does NOT require the Tversity software.  It uses plain and simple Windows Samba service, which is great because my computer no longer has to re-encode video on the fly.  Boxee builds on this by adding social networking to the software.  You can see what your friends are watching and view recommendations.  Previously, hulu.com content was available but that has been taken off due to legal requests.

Boxee’s problem is that it’s too intense for the Apple TV’s 1.0GHz processor to handle it.  It’s too slow on the Apple TV and so I find myself using XBMC to watch divx video on the TV.  XBMC is also better than the Tversity/PS3 combo I was using before on the PS3.  It plays anything that’s shared on samba, including DVD iso’s.  So now I can play video without having to worry about opening the TV stand doors and everything I have can be played.  And since it’s not being re-encoded, it looks even sharper.  With a little bit more time, I can probably get a bittorrent script working to download in its idle time. 

There’s still room for a lot more hacking and messing around with the Apple TV.  I need to get SSH working and it would be pretty cool to get a complete installation of OS X installed on it.  I think it would be neat to have the 40” TV as another PC in the living room.  I don’t think it will run very fast though, after looking at Boxee.  Still would be fun to try it though, and there’s enough functionality with XBMC to justify keeping it around.  I don’t think there is a perfect Home Theater PC setup without a lot of cash.  The PS3 had a nice remote and features at the expense of the user interface and noise.  A HTPC is usually similarly loud, and expensive.  The Apple TV is cheap, quiet, and has enough features to justify its cost.  After it’s hacked, of course…

Thursday, May 21, 2009

A Week in the Life

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Friends Page Architect

The friends page I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by one monumental issue. The inevitability of it is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every friends page, where I am forced to constrain other people’s web posts into a more limited format in my friends page. In the new 4.0 site, images wider than 700 pixels had a tendency to break the tables. After waiting 6 months for Swiftwulf to make an update and get rid that Obama picture that was too big, I started editing my friends script to detect images in the RSS feed and resize them.  But the [img] tag is too complex, even after spending hours researching Regex.  I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive person named Bobomega.  And the problem was solved with CSS by adding the following line to my CSS page:

img {max-width: 680px;}

A whole day wasted!  You can see the beautiful results at: http://www.darkmercury.net/site/friends/ and scroll down to Swiftwulf’s Obama pic. 

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Microsoft Ads Attacking Apple?

I made an animated gif file that more accurately portrays the latest microsoft anti-apple ad:

I don’t understand why Microsoft is making these advertisements.  Do they feel threatened by Apple?  They honestly feel that Apple is stealing significant marketshare away from them?  But if you’re going to start an advertising arms race, at least do it right.  The only thing this ad managed to say is that Apples are “sexy” even though they are expensive.  We all know the argument by now: Why buy a Lexus when a Ford Pinto is cheaper? 

Some people are hailing these ads as if Apple will respond by lowering their prices, but we should all know by now the most we’ll get is another tacky Mac vs. PC ad.  Apple is selling computers.  If they were too expensive, they wouldn’t sell.  So as long as they are selling, Apple won’t change anything.  See ya next time, folks!

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