Apple TV Take 2 – No DVR?

Apple TV

Steve Jobs and Apple announced Apple TV Take 2 at the MacWorld Keynote this morning. Lots of cool features:

  • Movie Rentals
  • HD Movies with Dolby 5.1
  • Podcasts – Audio & Video
  • Photos from Flickr & .Mac
  • YouTube Integration
  • Buy TV Shows & Music
  • Play iTunes Content & Photos

And it sells for just $229.

Obviously Apple is positioning itself to sell content and a hardware device to potential non-mac users, much like they did with the iPod. Steve Jobs even said they got it wrong with Apple TV Take 1, as did all the other players in this market. But Steve, I think you guys are still missing one important feature. DVR! As far as I know (and I might be wrong here), you can’t DVR your shows from your TV to your Apple TV. Only take content from Apple TV and display it on my television. Integrating digital recording would make this a powerful device, one that I’d consider buying to replace the DVR from my cable company.

Anyone out there aware of why this limitation is in place? Is it a hardware issue with the footprint they put in place for the device? Are there licensing issues with the media moguls. Hopefully I can find some answers to these questions and post them here.

Why Don’t Cars Have Heated Locks?

Honda Accord Sedan

I awoke this morning at 7am (I usually get up around 8:00 or 8:30 for work) to Shannan telling me she couldn’t get in her car (a 2005 Honda Accord). It wouldn’t unlock. I’m thinking, great, you left the lights on and the battery is dead. Time to call AAA. But, I decided to go out and take a look. Turns out, the lock was just frozen. We received about a foot of snow yesterday, so my guess is some of it got in there and shut her out.

The FOB wouldn’t unlock it. I couldn’t unlock it with the key either. I ended up gaining entry by opening the rear window and getting in that way.

This got me thinking. Why don’t cars have heated locks? We have heated seats. We have heated mirrors. I’m sure some car has some other “heated” feature I don’t know about. So why is it locks aren’t heated? I think this would be a great feature you could activate from the keychain FOB for your car. Can’t get in ’cause the lock is frozen? Heat ‘er up and you’re set!

Note to car manufacturers, if you do this, I want credit! You heard it here first!

By the way, something else I just noticed today. Newer cars seem to only have one key port and its on the drivers door? No more passenger door lock? That cut my chances of unlocking it the “traditional” way in half. Thanks guys.

ESPN’s Online Video Player

ESPN Sports

I watch a ton of ESPN on T.V. Ask my fiancee, Shannan. I DVR Around the Horn and Pardon the Interuption. I watch SportsCenter all the time, especially during baseball season. I watch this stuff so much that Shannan can recognize and name the hosts and commentators on other T.V. shows.

One thing about ESPN that drives me insane is their web site. Specifically their built in video player on their index page. It plays the default video automatically. So even if I don’t care about that video, it’ll start playing and making noise as I’m reading something else. Talk about annoying. It even woke me up one night because I left my laptop on one night with ESPN loaded in the current page. It just started playing on its own!

So, this is a note to everyone working on ESPN’s web page. Cut the crap. Don’t play the video by default. You might find you save your company money every month in bandwidth in the process too.

No Cash Register No Sale?

Exxon/Mobile Gasoline

I had to run some errands for work today and needed to stop for some gasoline. I pull up around the gas pump at a local Exxon/Mobile gas station and get ready to “fill ‘er up”. Typically I pay at the pump since I hardly ever need anything inside a convenience store, so I look at the screen on the pump and it says please pay inside. Arrgh, ok, no problem.

I walk up to the door to see a hand written sign that says “System is down. Registers too.”

Ok, I’ll go around the other side where I can see the attendant to see what’s up. He points at the sign.

I look back at him puzzled (the door is locked).

I pull my wallet out and flash some cash.

He shakes his head no.

No? No?!?! In this day and age of technology, we can no longer accept the almighty dollar bill in its original form? We’ve become so dependent on credit and computer driven register systems that we can’t accept a $20.00 bill? You’ve got to be kidding me. As I walked away, I felt bad for the guy as I heard some lady scream at him through the door. Lady, its not his fault. He’s probably under instructions from the proprietor to do what he did.

Anyway, my business went down the street to another, competing gas station station (where I did go in and buy a Coke, shame on me). I knew a lot of people can’t calculate change without a register, but actually take cash in hand? Come on now!

The Cost of Bottled Water

Poland Spring Bottled Water

Scott Jangro wrote a nice piece today about how insanely wrong bottled water is. The most abundant resource on our lovely planet and we bottle it up to make a profit, burning fossil fuels along the way. Some of my friends would call me a Tree Hugger Scott, but I’m not that insane about it. I don’t even recycle much anymore (only because its too difficult in my condo and the building doesn’t have facilities for it. Yes I’m lazy too.).

But, what is the real cost of bottled water? Do a Google Search and you’ll find article after article about it. This article goes on to show how much impact bottled water has on the environment. I don’t know how accurate it is as I haven’t done my own research, but common sense tells me that bottled water does more harm than good, at least the way we Americans treat it. I’ll admit there are parts of the world where clean water is hard to come by, making bottled water a necessity. But we don’t (and shouldn’t) send them hundreds of cases of personal bottles. Five or ten gallon jugs please. You know, the reusable kind you send back to the company for reuse.

Bottom line. You pay $1.50 (sometimes more) for a bottle of something that you can find for free. Think about how much oil goes into the manufacturing of the bottle. Then how much to put the water in the bottle. Then to deliver it to you. Then to recycle it (if you recycle it). Starts to seem…insane?

Update: David Wilk from TurnToTap found this post and gave out some kudos for writing it (should thank Jangro since he got me thinking about it. I took a look at TurnToTap and there seems to be some good information there. Check it out!

New England Patriots 16-0?

Patriots Old School

Living in New England, I’m obviously a huge Red Sox, Bruins, and Patriots fan (seeing the Celtics go 24-3 is cool, but I’ve never been a big basketball fan). Tonight, at 8:15 on the NFL network and tons of other stations now it seems, the Pats will go for the unprecedented record of 16-0 against the New York Football Giants.

I’m confident at 100% that they’ll do it. The Giants are no different than any other team in the NFL this year that the Pats have played, so I’m sure the Pats will secure #16. That means the ’72 Dolphins, still a great team, will have to step aside as the only undefeated team in league history. Stay tuned to see if history is made tonight!

UPDATE: Pats win 38-35! Probably one of the best games played all season. Congratulations to the New England Patriots for their historic season. Now its on to the playoffs and hopefully, the Super Bowl!

Replacing SLI Systems Search with Google Mini

SLI Systems Search
Google Mini

For the last few years, we’ve used SLI Systems Search for web site search on both Fright Catalog and YumDrop. When we started the Import Costumes project, we decided that we’d try something different because of the increasing cost of using SLI’s service. The cost is based on the number of search queries, so the more popular the site’s become, the more the cost of search increases.

Instead of building out our own search functionality, we decided to purchase a Google Mini on the recommendation of a fellow e-tailer we know. They said the integration was fairly easy and for their searching needs, it fit the bill. So we decided to give it a shot. For the $1,995 that it cost, we’ll definitely save some money on search in the long term. We knew that we’d be giving up some of the features we get with SLI, most notably how SLI’s search algorithm “learns” different searching patterns and improves the results for any given search term as well as “automatic” related and suggested search terms.

The biggest task for the Mini’s integration was the refining of search queries. SLI allows us to refine by category and price, so we wanted to be able to do the same thing with the Mini. Luckily, you can do this by searching meta tags for different values. It took a while to figure out that some of the search parameters like as_q and partialfields weren’t working as I expected so I ended up building the query term much like you’d use on Google, i.e. site:importcostumes.com inmeta:price:$10.00..$20.00 parrot where you’re looking for parrot type products from $10 to $20.

Since product content doesn’t change all that often, we’ve also been able to cache search results as XML files on the file system. We keep them around for a 24 hour period, just in case something does change. This is great because it’ll keep some load off of the Google Mini while speeding up displaying results to our customers for popular search criteria.

We’ll definitely miss out on the learning capabilities of SLI and not being able to automatically have related and suggested search terms is a bummer. That might be something that the Google Search Appliance can do easier since you can upload data feeds to it. Maybe we’ll graduate up to that as we get more of our sites running search from the Mini. Adding them by hand is a pain, though you can batch upload them. Even with that, you still have to manually build your lists.

One other feature that I’d like to see from the Mini (if anyone from Google is reading this) is a way to automate the emailing of search reports on a regular basis. It’d be nice to have a report sent to me monthly with top search terms as well as the results they returned. This is great for deciding what product to buy and what product to sell aggressively.

Camino Browser Redux

Back in August I wrote about how I had switched to the Camino Browser for my every day browsing needs (I still use Mozilla Firefox for development because of the plugin architecture so I can use the Web Developer Plugin and Firebug).

Camino

For the most part, the experience is still an excellent one (i.e. I haven’t switched to something else yet). They seem to update it on a fairly regular basis and its performance still seems to be the best of all the available browsers on the Mac. That said, it still has some annoyances.

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I’m Now a Happy iPod Owner

iPod Nano Black

I had been putting of buying an iPod for quite some time now. The time just hadn’t come where I could justify spending the money when I wasn’t sure I was going to use it. But, I don’t have to wait any longer as I was a happy recipient of an 8GB Nano for Christmas! I’m really excited to have one now as its that time of year when its time to hit the gym (especially with a wedding coming up in 6 months). I’m also wondering if I’ll enjoy listening to it while mountain biking, though I’m wondering if that could be a tad dangerous.

The Nano’s have come a long way since the original iPod Mini. Obviously they’ve gotten smaller and have a larger song capacity than ever, but even the interface has gotten better. I think my favorite feature so far is the integration of Cover Flow when browsing the Nano. That’s how I browse my music in iTunes and being able to do that seamlessly on the Nano is key.