All posts by jasonian

Netflix Player by Roku

I love Netflix. I’ve been a subscriber for about two years (on the three-at-a-time, unlimited plan). I list the movies I currently have at home on this site, along with an ad for them (if you sign up from the ad I get a small commission). I even own a bit of Netflix (NFLX) stock (which has gone up about 37% since I purchased it a few months ago).

My biggest complaint with Netflix has been my inability to use their service to stream video to my computer, because they don’t support Macs. That may all be moot now, since they’ve announced a new device that handles the streaming, directly to my TV.

Called The Netflix Player by Roku, it’s a tiny rectangular box you connect to your high-speed internet connection, and to your TV via HDMI, composite or component cables. In some ways it’s a competitor to Apple TV, TiVo & Amazon’s Unbox partnership and Vudu.

It’s biggest advantage though is its price: a mere $100. If, like me, you’re already a fan of Netflix and joined at least the $8.99 a month plan, there is no other cost. (If you’re not yet a Netflix subscriber, join up and try it for two weeks for free.)

Of the 268 titles in my Netflix queue, only 22 are available for streaming, including Funny Girl, Supersize Me, MI-5 Volume 1, and Superfly. Among the complete collection (about 10,000 titles of the 100,000 in Netflix) are the likes of 30 Rock (NBC), Passenger 57, and a bunch of old TV shows like The Incredible Hulk, Gimme a Break and Charles in Charge.

Not exactly a vast and exciting selection, and you won’t find many recent releases here like you would on Apple TV or TiVo/Amazon Unbox, but, like The New York Times suggests, The Netflix Player is the “first shot of the revolution“. It’s a one-point-oh product which can only improve as content selection and internet speed improves.

Apple TV is a better product in many ways, from the higher quality (720p HD with Dolby Digital 5.1) to new movies released the same day as the DVD. If you mostly watch new movies, don’t have Netflix, and own an HDTV, Apple TV is a better choice.

I’m a huge TiVo fan (I own three, one now decommissioned but operational), and can use the Amazon Unbox service with it, and yet I’ve never bought or rented a download through their service. I think it’s because I don’t like the idea of paying $3.99 to rent a movie for 24 hours, or $9.99 to own a movie when I could get the physical DVD for the same price. (Which is odd, as I have no problems buying music through Amazon and iTunes.)

If you already pay for Netflix, though, and like (or would like to see) classic or little-known movies and TV shows, or, like me, don’t yet have an HDTV (horrors!), The Netflix Player, at just $100, might make a nifty addition to your home theatre setup. I expect it’ll soon have a place in my home.

Several sites have already done reviews. Take a look at CrunchGear’s review (pictures, including approximate video quality), CNET’s video review, or engadget’s first impressions.

Proof that things never change

I bring you proof that a geek can’t change his spots. I came across some old blog entries from 2000, 2001 and 2002, back when I was experimenting with the concept (and Movable Type). Even then I loved the idea of self-publishing and content management systems. I didn’t write too many entries, but I thought I thought I’d add them to Jasonian.

Of course, the topic of interest was the same as what it is now: technology and how people react to it. And they’re written with what I like to think of as my trademark snarkiness.

What I find funny about some of these entries is how they feel like I could have written them yesterday. In Ultimate Re-cap, I wrote:

This has to be the sexiest laptop I’ve seen since the Sony Vaio. Unless you’re in the market for a new portable, don’t get anywhere near this baby. Sure, the long list of technical specs … are fantastic, but that’s not what had everyone who caressed this hotrod ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

The new MacBook Air? Nope, the original PowerBook G4 titanium, which measured up at a mere 1″ thick.

Or in One Airport Deserves Another, written just two years after Apple released their first Airport-enabled Macs:

I’ve believed for a long time that wireless internet connectivity is going to become ubiquitous, simply because the Internet has taken on such a central part of many people’s lives. We’re demanding the ability to find a decent Thai restaurant in a strange city, with ratings, prices and turn-by-turn directions at our carpal-tunnelled fingertips, and we don’t want to stroll through the yellow pages (or the wrong part of town) to do it.

Although it hasn’t become quite ubiquitous, there are fewer and fewer places where you can’t find a wireless hotspot.

There’s the obligatory Microsoft bashing (Reasons to hate Microsoft (today)), the expected Apple defending (Media delays facts about Apple) and a rant or two (This Is Not Mac OS 9). There’s even an early “Mac OS X sucks!” style entry (The Mac’s strength is its usability):

… using Mac OS X feels like we’ve stepped into the Way-Back Machine, to a time before many of the problems of previous Mac OS incarnations were not fixed…. The interface’s consistency has gone down the drain.

(This was written about the Mac OS X Public Beta; fortunately, the later versions of Mac OS X regularly improved on the interface consistency.)

Overall, these older entries show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I hope you enjoy them.

Ignoring Macs for parental controls

I’ve long been frustrated by San Francisco Chronicle’s “computer guy” column by David Einstein. He regularly ignores Macs in his columns, either willfully, through ignorance, or because he believes that his audience doesn’t care about Macs.

In his most recent set of questions and answers, from May 5, 2008 included a question about setting limits on computer usage for middle schoolers. In his response, he said:

If your computer is running Windows Vista, the User Accounts and Family Safety feature in the Control Panel will let you create a user ID for your child and restrict the time of the day when he or she can sign on.

If you don’t have Vista, don’t despair, because you still have options.

How disappointing that those “options” didn’t include anything other than Windows. The latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” has great parental controls, including the ability to limit total computer time (say, 3 hours a day), with separate limits for weekends, and prevent use during specified times (“bedtimes”).

You can also limit who your child emails and chats, allowing only certain email and chat addresses, and restrict which websites can be viewed. You can even limit which applications can be used.

Beyond what’s provided by Leopard itself, other applications include their own parental controls. For example, iTunes lets you restrict movies and TV shows by rating (G, PG, etc.) and to prevent purchase of “explicit”-tagged content. You can even prevent access to iTunes Store completely.

For parents, Leopard provides a significant control over how a child uses their computer. I don’t understand how Mr. Einstein could fail to acknowledge the Mac at all in his response, and it bugs me every time he does it.

You might not have a job tomorrow

If you don’t believe your life can change twenty-four hours from now, you’re deluding yourself. Twice in the last three weeks I was reminded in the most graphic way possible that you can be out of a job tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been with your company, or how invaluable you think you are. If you violate corporate policy, or your role is no longer important, or you just piss off the wrong person, you might find yourself job hunting, perhaps for the first time in 20 years.

So, what are you going to do about it?

I have a few suggestions.

  • Accept that your company has very little loyalty to you. You provide a service, and if you’re lucky, maybe even directly affect their bottom line, but if money’s tight, or they decide to go in a “different direction,” or maybe they get acquired by another, bigger entity, what little loyalty they did have will be replaced by cold, hard logic.
  • Get rid of anything personal residing on your work computer. If you’re unemployed tomorrow, you probably won’t have time to delete it, and who knows who’ll go through that stuff. Have a computer at home. A Mac mini is cheap.
  • Don’t keep your only copy of your baby’s first steps on your work computer. Really. If you understand the previous suggestion, this one follows logically. Your office machine should never be the only copy of important personal files. Grab an external drive, move your personal data onto it, and take it home.
  • Don’t be stupid. If you love watching naked jello wrestling, or think music ought to be free, pursue your predilections in the privacy of your own home. Don’t download copyrighted or objectionable material at work. That’s just dumb.
  • Keep notes on your successful projects. Key dates, accomplishments and other details are valuable reminders of the great job you did, should you find yourself putting together a new résumé. Keep in mind that some of that is company confidential, so making copies of your address book, email, project files, and other documents that belong to the company is probably a bad idea.
  • Prepare financially. Losing your only income is, to understate it, a bad thing. So, save some of it. Take a few dollars every paycheck and stick it in a savings account, or, if you’re a risk taker, the stock market. If you don’t have a few months of ready cash already, start building that up, now. Figure out how much you need to pay your monthly expenses, and get one month in the bank, then try for two months. Eventually three to six months would be ideal. Cut out those daily lattes for a few weeks.
  • Diversify your income. If your only source of income is your nine-to-five, brainstorm other ways you might generate some free cash flow. Buy growth or dividend producing stocks. Sell stuff on eBay or Craig’s List. Start a business online. Have some other way of bringing in money so losing your main gig isn’t a major setback.
  • Think about the future. Do you want to work for this company forever? Do you even want to work forever? If you want to retire eventually (or sooner), envision how you’d spend your tomorrows, and start planning for that today. Want to travel when you retire? Buy a condo somewhere else. Or get a credit card that gives you miles toward free tickets. Or join a hotel rewards program that offers free nights. Or star writing about travel so you can get paid to do it when you “retire”.
  • Realize you’re employable. You have this job, don’t you? You can always find another one.

I consider myself lucky. I learned these lessons over twenty years ago. Now, I’m not afraid to lose my job. I’m eminently employable, with a broad set of highly marketable skills and, putting aside salary, job satisfaction, and the vagaries of the job market, I could get a job almost anywhere. Not to mention all these business ideas rattling around in my brain.

I’m also lucky enough to have the financial wherewithal to withstand a sudden loss of income. I’ll still be able to pay my mortgage, put food on the table and even enjoy a brief vacation without worry. At least for a little while.

And most importantly, I know that I can count on my family and friends in a time of crisis. I know that, should the need arise, I could stay with The Girl for a few months. Or, as I joked to her recently, all it takes is a $500 JetBlue ticket back to the East Coast to stay with my parents.

I used to think I would never lose my job. I found out the hard way how wrong I was. I was reminded how true it remains. Now I’m prepared, without being paranoid.

Are you ready?

Garage door: busted

In case it ever comes up, this is not what a functioning garage door chain should look like. In fact, I would say that’s a really good example of the exact opposite of a working garage door chain.

Drooping like an old lady.

My garage door has been threatening to quit working for almost as long as I’ve been in this house, and today that threat was carried out. Proving that all things are connected, it was just three days ago that I repaired my front door (which I had to force open a couple of weeks back). I’m not certain if I should consider myself trapped in my home, protected from external forces, or prevented from experiencing the world.

I now await the arrival of a repair guy. I hope I make it into the office in time for today’s kickoff meeting for my annual conference.

Update: This is what the new hotness looks like. Notice, no chain.

Hard and stiff.

I hope this one lasts a while. A few hundred dollars here, and a few hundred dollars there, and pretty soon we’re talking real money.

Wine drinkers love Transformers toys

This cracked me up. While searching Amazon for a wine fridge, I came across this page:

Image from Amazon showing a wine fridge and a list of Transformers toys other customers also bought.

Anyone else find it amusing that wine drinkers also love Transformers? I can’t help but imagine a bunch of snooty wine drinkers sprawled on the floor, sloshed to the gills, and arranging pretend showdowns between Optimus Prime and Megatron.

It’s either that or there are a 14-year-old boys who really appreciate a properly chilled Gerwertraminer.

Death, Taxes and Data Loss

There are two types of people in this world: those who’ve lost data, and those who will. I’ve lost more data than I’d like to remember, and tonight, thanks to luck and some forewarning, I believe I’ve managed to avoid a catastrophic failure.

I’ve owned my black MacBook for just over a year, and it’s been a great machine with several flaws. Everything that’s gone wrong with the MacBook in general has gone wrong with mine: the case is loose on the left side; the case cracked on the front right; the battery lasted less than 90 minutes on a full charge; the screen flickers uncontrollably; and it has the Seagate hard drive that’s been dying in large numbers.

I suppose that’s the price for being an early adopter: I bought the ‘Book September of ’06, shortly after it was released, after my beloved 12″ PowerBook seemingly died. (I managed to recover that machine, but not before I’d place my MacBook order.)

When I first read about the Seagate hard drive issues, I started cloning my system. Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is a great tool, and has made it easy to keep a backup system going. Then tonight, I decided it was time to upgrade the MacBook to Leopard; it was my last machine (of four that I use; two personal, two work).

Because CCC has worked so well for me, I decided to abandon my normal policy of at least two partitions on my machines ( one System, one User, so I can blow away the OS when things went wrong) and went with a single partition. I cloned things to my (now spare) PowerBook, and wiped out my User and third partition using the Leopard Disk Utilities, expanded the remaining partition to fill the drive, and did an archive install.

Things seemed to mostly work, and I copied my data back to the MacBook, and rebooted to see all my files. Only upon trying to do some additional work on the machine did I encounter trouble, ending in a full out system hang. On reboot, the internal drive wasn’t there. It simply didn’t show up, like it was disconnected. Nothing I could think of would make it show up.

Sigh.

Were it not for the clone, I would have lost dozens of gigabytes of extremely valuable data, including the 1200 or so photos I took on my just-ended ten-day road trip. Had I not backed up tonight, I’d be drowning my sorrows in a bottle of single malt.

I now plan on doing a clone of my clone (paranoid? Hardly!) and get the spare PowerBook booting so I can at least have a portable machine while I take the MacBook into an Apple Store. I’m hoping though that they’ll simply replace the drive on the spot: it’s a couple of screws in the battery compartment. I’d do it myself but I don’t think I should pay the $100 or so for a new drive.

Let this be a warning to you: if you have data you care about, please back it up, then test that backup.

Interested in some backup solutions? Carbon Copy Cloner is great for creating bootable backups and works in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard). Synchronize! X Pro and ChronoSync are both useful for keeping two drives in sync, and provide more options (though not necessarily needed ones) than CCC. Time Machine (part of Mac OS X 10.5) is great for creating regular snapshots of your drive throughout the day.

Go forth and clone.

New York Times columnists duke it out over race

In 1948, Strom Thurmond formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka the “Dixiecrats”) with the express goal of having “Segregation Forever,” with the help of 35 Democratic National Convention delegates from Alabama and Mississippi.

In 1964, three men who were helping register blacks to vote were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan kicked off his bid to be president at a county fairground near Philadelphia, Mississippi, declaring “I believe in states’ rights”.

“States’ rights” has historically been a “code word” signifying support for racial segregation. It’s part of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” where they apparently court white, supposedly racist, Southern voters as a way toward success gaining the presidency and Congress.

I provide this bit of history because there’s some fascinating back-and-forth going on in the New York Times’ opinion columns recently. New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have been publishing essays on the “anti-black” G.O.P and the “states’ rights” phrase in their opinion pieces and in Krugman’s new book, “The Conscience of a Liberal”. Apparently the repeated use of the phrase to disgrace Reagan, and, by extension, the whole Conservative Republican party as racist, concerned fellow NY Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote his own column defending Reagan.

But NY Times columnists seemingly aren’t permitted to argue with each other by direct reference in print (or in their blogs); what we end up with is an intriguing, but difficult-to-follow asynchronous debate among respected journalists who can’t mention each other by name.

Krugman, in a September 24, 2007 essay entitled “Politics in Black and White,” opines:

Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

Herbert adds some color (no pun intended) to this argument in his piece a day later, “The Ugly Side of the G.O.P.” by stating:

In one of the vilest moves in modern presidential politics, Ronald Reagan, the ultimate hero of this latter-day Republican Party, went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 in that very same Philadelphia, Miss. He was not there to send the message that he stood solidly for the values of Andrew Goodman. He was there to assure the bigots that he was with them.

“I believe in states’ rights,” said Mr. Reagan. The crowd roared.

Other mentions over the subsequent weeks (and the many apparent references in Krugman’s book) eventually led Brooks to respond, in that “I can’t tell you who I’m referring to” manner, kicking off his “History and Calumny” piece on November 9 with:

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

A day later, Krugman “responds” in “Innocent Mistakes“:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

And two days after that, Herbert also “responds,” providing some historical context of the 1968 murders and the 1980 Reagan appearance in “Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?“:

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash.

I can’t wait to see how these columnists respond to each other (without responding to each other) in the upcoming weeks.

Interestingly, a non-NY Times author has jumped into the fray: American history professor Joseph Crespino, on History News Network, does a solid job summing up both sides of the argument, while coming down clearly on the side that Reagan knew what he was doing with his appearance and “states’ rights” line:

It was clear from other episodes in that campaign that Reagan was content to let southern Republicans link him to segregationist politics in the South’s recent past. Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance.

[…]

Reagan knew that southern Republicans were making racial appeals to win over conservative southern Democrats, and he was a willing participant.

Crespino also touches on other instances of Reagan’s methods of appealing to specific voters and voter fears:

Throughout his career, Reagan benefited from subtly divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts in the 1960s and 70s to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination. He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing and civil rights laws. He did it in 1976 when he tried to beat out Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he did it in Neshoba County in 1980.

I’ve long been fascinated by race discussions, and certainly using race to win in politics is nothing new and scarely a secret to anyone familiar with American history. If you’d like to learn more, you can read about the Mississippi murders (made into the Gene Hackman/Willem DaFoe movie Mississippi Burning), the Republican’s Southern strategy, Dixiecrats, and States’ Rights.

And, if you have the time, look for a copy of They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, a collection of retrospective essays from 1960s activists. You can read most of it for free on Google at the previous link, or you can pick it up at Amazon or your local used bookstore. And don’t forget Paul Krugman’s book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

Finally, a tip of the hat to John Gruber for bringing these columns to my attention in his Daring Fireball Linked List.

Gmail IMAP

Everyone knows by now that Gmail has opened IMAP up to everyone. Well, OK, perhaps not everyone. Someone people, like Ying, don’t have Gmail IMAP on their accounts. Ying is particularly upset, because I have it, she doesn’t, and she’s the one who invited me to Gmail in the first place, three years ago.

I almost never use Gmail. I have my own domain name (several, sadly). I run my own mail servers for some of those domains. I use barely 1% of my available account. And yet, I got IMAP the first night it was available.

I immediately set up my iPhone and OS X Mail, and they took forever to sync. After playing with it for a few minutes to make sure it worked, I promptly turned it off. What can I say? I have no need for Gmail.

Besides, I share way too much information about myself with Google. They know my searches, my websites, my destinations, my social security number (thanks to AdWords and AdSense)… I just don’t feel right giving them even more information about me.

I hope Ying gets her IMAP soon though. She’s been obsessively checking GMail three or four times a day. I fear she may lose her mind if IMAP doesn’t get enabled quickly.

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A Single Manila Folder

Fifteen years ago I sat through a multi-level-marketing sales pitch. I don’t remember what company or what product; I recall only two things: One, thinking “this is interesting, but what if I don’t sell any products or don’t find anyone for my downline?” (yes, even in my 20s I was jaded and cynical); and two, the sales guy, at the front of a room of 150 eager listeners, pitching the ultimate in freedom: walking to work every day with a single manila folder, with a single sheet of paper representing your sales.

I’ve returned to that latter image many times since then; it’s proven to be quite enduring.

Khoi Vinh, over at Subtraction.com, envied the “free spirits” who carried nothing with them as they strolled into work, unencumbered by large bags, and tried to emulate them. For a couple of days, he ditched his baggage, which consisted of

a bag or briefcase in which I carry a stack of papers, my checkbook, a wallet, a small attaché for credit cards, my New York Times identity card, a point-and-click digital camera, extra pens, my iPod and my iPhone, the latest issue of The New Yorker and my keys.

He didn’t stick with it, though, because his concern of not having a place for his stuff make him antsy. I think my girlfriend might understand where he’s coming from: hearing the list of items she carries every day might take the better part of your lunch hour.

I have a slightly different mentality. A year or so ago, spurred on by that fifteen year old memory and maybe a spark from 43Folders I went on a bit of a minimalist kick. Among other things, I ditched my bulking tri-fold wallet for a front pocket billfold. I eliminated as many credit, loyalty and ID cards as I could from my wallet and picked up a Lodis money clip. In that wallet I carry only:

* my driver’s license
* American Express (for 90% of purchases)
* MasterCard (for the other 10%)
* Bank ATM card (two; should reduce it to one)
* AAA card (in my wallet in case I lock myself out of the car)
* Healthcare ID and payment card
* A few bucks in cash

I have other cards, of course, like my Costco or Albertson’s cards: I keep them in my car. Since I never find myself in these stores without my car (or with someone who also has one of these cards), I don’t need to have it on my person at all times.

Beyond the wallet, I try to reduce the amount of stuff I carry on my person. My front door has an electronic lock rather than a traditional one, eliminating one key, and I keep my mailbox key in my car, eliminating a second one. The only keys I carry every day are for my car, my office and my girlfriend’s apartment (and I’ll probably move the latter to a separate keychain and keep those in the car too).

Alas, I haven’t quite eliminated everything from my person. On an average “leaving the house” day, I stuff my pockets with a fair number of items: my wallet, the keys, a Moleskine notebook, a Tul pen, my iPhone and my first-gen iPod nano (mostly for the car). I’m looking at ways of eliminating some of this, but the Moleskine and pen are very important for Getting Things Done.

(If Apple ever introduced a good way to capture random thoughts on my iPhone and sync it back to my computer, I might ditch the notebook. Maybe.)

Like Khoi, when going to work I still find myself tied to a shoulder bag to carry stuff, in my case, my MacBook, an external hard drive, a first-gen iPod shuffle-as-thumb drive (never used), a real thumb drive (used regularly), my company VPN token, a pen or two and usually a magazine or something I’ve printed from work to bring home. If I really tried, I could probably get away with just the Macbook and thumb drive most days.

I haven’t yet extended my minimalist ways to the rest of my life, unfortunately. I am still, by my nature, a pack rat, as one glance at my garage or home office will attest. I recently picked up an audiobook copy of It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life With Less Stuff. (In an irony perhaps only I will appreciate, it is, of course, unabridged.) I haven’t yet listened to it; perhaps it will provide some motivation for minimalizing beyond my wallet.