Being Electrocuted
October 30, 2008
Four Years later...Netflix on TiVo
I remember when TiVo and Netflix first announced that they were going to work together, i
n what seemed like the most logical extension of both of their businesses - rent movies, and stream them to your Tivo. I was excited, until it never happened, and TiVo partnered with Amazon Unbox. That was kind of cool, except for the fact that I had to pay $3.99 for most movies.
Four years later, it looks like it is actually going to happen. The best part is that existing customers of the individual services will be entitled to free downloads, so the next question consumers will ask is if they can get a packaged deal on subscription.
These are two of my favorite companies. Both created blue ocean opportunities and have been pretty successful at fending off generic attempts at competition from traditional industry players. When I finally set up an etrade account, these might be the first two stocks I purchase. ¶ 8:18 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
n what seemed like the most logical extension of both of their businesses - rent movies, and stream them to your Tivo. I was excited, until it never happened, and TiVo partnered with Amazon Unbox. That was kind of cool, except for the fact that I had to pay $3.99 for most movies.Four years later, it looks like it is actually going to happen. The best part is that existing customers of the individual services will be entitled to free downloads, so the next question consumers will ask is if they can get a packaged deal on subscription.
These are two of my favorite companies. Both created blue ocean opportunities and have been pretty successful at fending off generic attempts at competition from traditional industry players. When I finally set up an etrade account, these might be the first two stocks I purchase. ¶ 8:18 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
August 28, 2008
YouTube on Tivo!
Got the new Tivo update yesterday. They added a YouTube menu and the quality is pretty good for getting stretched to 42 inches.
We watched the always entertaining "Cat attacks Pit Bull".
We watched the always entertaining "Cat attacks Pit Bull".
Labels: tech
¶ 7:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
August 8, 2008
Stop lying to me NBC
I don't really care that much about the Olympics, but I honestly thought the opening ceremonies advertised for this evening were going to be live, in the evening, for us and tomorrow morning in Beijing. That just didn't seem too far fetched to me.
This morning I am online, with the TV on in the background as usual, and I am reading about the Opening ceremonies while NBC is pretending they haven't happened yet. I think most Americans are aware of Time Zones, and it's acceptable to show events in the middle of the night (online or on one of your several cable television channels) to at least give us the opportunity to watch it live. I have a feeling this is going to be a theme this year: Read the scores before you see the games.
An article in the NY Times gave a live report of the events in the early morning, here are a few reader comments:
This is really weird, and there really is no good excuse. Either NBC is technologically incapable of offering live feeds online, or they are not business-minded enough to figure out advertisers will still pay to advertise in the middle of the night, then they will pay again when you re-play the bigger events in primetime. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Go Team USA.
¶ 7:30 AM 1 Comments
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This morning I am online, with the TV on in the background as usual, and I am reading about the Opening ceremonies while NBC is pretending they haven't happened yet. I think most Americans are aware of Time Zones, and it's acceptable to show events in the middle of the night (online or on one of your several cable television channels) to at least give us the opportunity to watch it live. I have a feeling this is going to be a theme this year: Read the scores before you see the games.
An article in the NY Times gave a live report of the events in the early morning, here are a few reader comments:
Tape delay is becoming annoying in this day and age. We trade stocks 24/7 across time zones, we get news as it breaks, etc. NBC has got seven TV and cable channels, this ain’t 1988 anymore.
— Posted by Tom
I simply tired of NBC’s Olympic coverage. Over-exposure of American athletes, ridiculous behind the sport stories, and horrific timing. Remember Sydney? I was hopeful their online player would allow greater flexibility for schedules, but not showing the opening ceremonies online is further evidence of NBC’s “don’t worry, we’ll show you what we think is important” approach to the olympics. boo.
— Posted by killie42
NBC’s Olympic coverage is terrible across the board. Their TV stations don’t cover many events, case in point: this opening ceremony. Their Internet coverage is simply unaccessible.
I can’t say this is a bad thing as it further legitimizes and promotes piracy.
— Posted by NBC Dislike
July 28, 2008
Hey Cuil, Use a Robots.txt
Cuil.com is flooding my newsfeeds this morning. Reid already reported that their home page links are only periodically working. I, too, don't see my site on the first three pages of a vanity search. Also, looks like they need to add a robots.txt file to block other search engines from indexing their search results. This should work:
User-agent: *Honestly, who searches for search results? When I hear about a new website, the first thing I do, is a site: search. The second thing I do is check the robots.txt. Isn't that what all normal people do? ¶ 7:09 AM 3 Comments Links to this post
Disallow: /search
July 27, 2008
iPhoto woes
Sometimes iPhoto lets you import pictures, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you can find these imported pictures through Finder, sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can attach these photos using Gmail, sometimes you can't.
Apparently, this is is by design. I might be completely wrong, but from reading through a few forums, it seems that Apple wants you to use the Apple Mail application to send pictures, and only lets you access pictures from other applications if you first copy them onto the desktop from iPhoto. Seriously?
Trying to make iPhoto work better with Picasa Web Albums Uploader and iPhoto2Gmail plugins just doesn't cut it, especially since I have to re-discover them every time under the Export menu. I need Picasa for Mac! ¶ 8:26 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Apparently, this is is by design. I might be completely wrong, but from reading through a few forums, it seems that Apple wants you to use the Apple Mail application to send pictures, and only lets you access pictures from other applications if you first copy them onto the desktop from iPhoto. Seriously?
Trying to make iPhoto work better with Picasa Web Albums Uploader and iPhoto2Gmail plugins just doesn't cut it, especially since I have to re-discover them every time under the Export menu. I need Picasa for Mac! ¶ 8:26 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
July 13, 2008
Jitterbug
My mom made a funny joke. I asked if she was getting an iPhone for my dad. She said he'd probably be better off with a Jitterbug...
I forgot to blog about this last year when I saw it on TV. They show this commercial in Georgia and Florida, but I've never seen it out here. I'm surprised Earthlink or NetZero haven't scooped up this hot new technology and integrated into their marketing scams targeting the elderly. ¶ 7:14 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
I forgot to blog about this last year when I saw it on TV. They show this commercial in Georgia and Florida, but I've never seen it out here. I'm surprised Earthlink or NetZero haven't scooped up this hot new technology and integrated into their marketing scams targeting the elderly. ¶ 7:14 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
June 24, 2008
Mops
My sister-in-law is opening a hair salon in Chicago later this year, it's gonna be called Mops Beauty Shop. She even started a blog to chronicle the experience, which is an awesome way to start buzz online before you open. I told her to make sure she lists the place in Yelp and Google Maps as soon as they open. They're also definitely going to need to start a website with, at the very least, the hours, payments accepted, directions, and address. The kids these days love their internet.
I did a preliminary search for [Mops Beauty Shop] and it looks like they already have some competition:
Good Luck Krisi! ¶ 6:31 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
I did a preliminary search for [Mops Beauty Shop] and it looks like they already have some competition:
Good Luck Krisi! ¶ 6:31 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
April 13, 2008
How Last.fm made me hack my iPod Touch
I recently heard Last.fm was pretty cool, so I decided to try it out for myself. For those who don't know, Last.fm is a community of people who share their music playlists and recommendations with each other by installing a program that tracks it all for you. This is called 'scrobbling'. Confused yet?
Anyway, I signed up, installed the application on my iMac and laptops, and started listening. After verifying that my recently played tracks in iTunes were getting uploaded to the site, I next wanted to figure out how to send songs played on my iPod back to Last.fm as well. Simple, right?
Wrong. I dug through the help docs only to find that when you sync your iPod to iTunes, Last.fm will only transfer your recently played tracks if you use the 'Automatic Sync' setting in iTunes. Not cool. Manual Sync is the way to go if you use multiple computers or if you have more music on your computer than your iPod will hold. Both of these are me, so on to Plan B.
Since I can't tell my scrobbler what I've been listening to on my iPod, I searched around and found a cool iPod Touch application called Mobile Scrobbler. Mobile Scrobbler tracks the songs you listen to just like the desktop scrobbler, but instead of relying on syncing with iTunes, it uses the WiFi connection on your iPod Touch to send your tracks directly back to Last.fm. Brilliant.
One problem. This application requires a jailbroken ipod (that's 'hacked' for non-nerds). Apparently the newest version of the iPhone/iPod Touch hack is from Ziphone, so I downloaded and installed it. After two tries, it worked! The bad part was I had to do a restore midway through the first attempt and lost all my songs. The good part was MobileScrobbler is a recommended application in the Ziphone package, and I didn't have to push more than two buttons to get it downloaded and set up.
So, MobileScrobbler has been working great for the past couple days. Just finished uploading music back to the iTouch, and it's scrobbling and transferring everything to my profile seamlessly. If I manage this correctly, people will think I listen to really cool music. You can find me at http://www.last.fm/user/mattdougherty/. ¶ 8:01 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
Anyway, I signed up, installed the application on my iMac and laptops, and started listening. After verifying that my recently played tracks in iTunes were getting uploaded to the site, I next wanted to figure out how to send songs played on my iPod back to Last.fm as well. Simple, right?
Wrong. I dug through the help docs only to find that when you sync your iPod to iTunes, Last.fm will only transfer your recently played tracks if you use the 'Automatic Sync' setting in iTunes. Not cool. Manual Sync is the way to go if you use multiple computers or if you have more music on your computer than your iPod will hold. Both of these are me, so on to Plan B.
Since I can't tell my scrobbler what I've been listening to on my iPod, I searched around and found a cool iPod Touch application called Mobile Scrobbler. Mobile Scrobbler tracks the songs you listen to just like the desktop scrobbler, but instead of relying on syncing with iTunes, it uses the WiFi connection on your iPod Touch to send your tracks directly back to Last.fm. Brilliant.
One problem. This application requires a jailbroken ipod (that's 'hacked' for non-nerds). Apparently the newest version of the iPhone/iPod Touch hack is from Ziphone, so I downloaded and installed it. After two tries, it worked! The bad part was I had to do a restore midway through the first attempt and lost all my songs. The good part was MobileScrobbler is a recommended application in the Ziphone package, and I didn't have to push more than two buttons to get it downloaded and set up.
So, MobileScrobbler has been working great for the past couple days. Just finished uploading music back to the iTouch, and it's scrobbling and transferring everything to my profile seamlessly. If I manage this correctly, people will think I listen to really cool music. You can find me at http://www.last.fm/user/mattdougherty/. ¶ 8:01 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
March 27, 2008
Posting from the iMac
Welcome to my first post from the new iMac. It's been pretty fun re-acclimating to everything I seem to have forgotten. There's a lot of cool new stuff like the webcam, Expose and Dashboard. It still seems Apple is pushing this .Mac (dot mac) thing, which is annoying (Remember when Microsoft tried to push .Net and no one understood what it was?). Anyway, we installed Microsoft Office and, of course, it tried to set Entourage as the default mail client, so I guess they are even. When I installed Google Desktop Search, Picasa and Firefox, no one tried to sell me anything.
As an update to my previous posts, I also installed iConcertCal and macFUSE to to get my concert gadget working from this machine. Haven't tested everything yet to see if it works as seamlessly. In fact, the iMac is sitting on our kitchen table instead of the office. I need to make time to transfer everything of the ancient Dell.
The lack of posting here is due to my busiest week of school so far. Please don't panic. ¶ 7:27 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
As an update to my previous posts, I also installed iConcertCal and macFUSE to to get my concert gadget working from this machine. Haven't tested everything yet to see if it works as seamlessly. In fact, the iMac is sitting on our kitchen table instead of the office. I need to make time to transfer everything of the ancient Dell.
The lack of posting here is due to my busiest week of school so far. Please don't panic. ¶ 7:27 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
March 5, 2008
Ask Martha Stewart?
I woke up and had to pinch myself. Did I just have a bad dream? Did Hillary really beat Obama in Texas? Are the Gators really on the bubble? Did Sheryl Sandberg really leave Google for Facebook? Did this really happen to Ask.com...
"The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the Southern and Midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google."PS - Did I ever mention the designer of the Ask Jeeves logo lives two floors up? They already dropped the word 'Jeeves', hopefully they don't entirely retire his work.
Labels: tech
¶ 7:22 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
February 18, 2008
Bay Area Concert Feed Part 3: NetDrive to the Rescue
I think I found a solution. iConcertCal will save an ical file to a local drive on my PC. The problem is that Windows will not let you map an FTP location as a local drive. After searching around, I found NetDrive, an unsupported Novell product (I had to download it from a UIC download page). This allowed me to point a new virtual drive (W:\) to mattdougherty.com and move the exported ical file here. You can find it (and subscribe if you want) at http://www.mattdougherty.com/iConcertCal.ics. I created a new Google Calendar with this URL, and replaced the calendar in the gadget on this page. Hopefully the ical file will update automatically without problems.
Let me know if there are local shows you know about that aren't appearing, iConcertCal lets you add additional concerts and artists manually. Also, as a disclaimer in case something super-lame pops up, I'm letting this thing run off my (not all mine) entire music collection unfiltered. ¶ 7:57 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Let me know if there are local shows you know about that aren't appearing, iConcertCal lets you add additional concerts and artists manually. Also, as a disclaimer in case something super-lame pops up, I'm letting this thing run off my (not all mine) entire music collection unfiltered. ¶ 7:57 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
February 17, 2008
iConcertCal + Google Calendar Gadget
Done. That took about 15 minutes. The only problem I foresee is uploading a new iCal file to my Google Calendar every once in a while. The iConcertCal iTunes plugin should check the concert databases pretty often and update the iCal file stored on my hard drive, but I can't find a way to get Google Calendar to check that file and update. Hmmm
¶ 10:31 PM 0 Comments
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Concert Listings Feed
I've been missing a lot of concerts lately. Maybe this is because I sold out on the city a while back, or maybe it's because there isn't a good notification system for concerts that I might actually want to see. I've been trying to solve the problem by looking up venues I trust and wishing on a lucky penny that they have an RSS feed of their concert calendar. About half of them do, mostly those who get their booking through Live Nation. So, I created a shared feed out of those I could find and put a Google Reader Gadget up on my blog (to the bottom right). As you can see, I'm having trouble displaying the listings by concert date rather than feed date.
While digging up shared concert calendars in Google Calendar, I stumbled upon JamBase. I seriously didn't know this site was still around. They actually have a really thorough database (at least for the Bay Area) and include most of the venues I wasn't able to import into my shared Reader feed. The problem with their site is that you have to manually add concerts to your calendar, but you can export as an iCal file and import that into Google Calendar. With this solution, I would have to constantly peruse the JamBase listings and add shows to my calendar. Doesn't sound fun, does it?
Enter iConcertCal. I may be late to the train discovering this iTunes plugin, but this seems like a failsafe solution. It will actually use my mp3 library to search JamBase and other concert databases to find shows by artists I might actually like. As long as the exported iCal file can periodically update, it should work. I am going to install this tonight and figure out if it works. I'll report back.
¶ 9:07 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
While digging up shared concert calendars in Google Calendar, I stumbled upon JamBase. I seriously didn't know this site was still around. They actually have a really thorough database (at least for the Bay Area) and include most of the venues I wasn't able to import into my shared Reader feed. The problem with their site is that you have to manually add concerts to your calendar, but you can export as an iCal file and import that into Google Calendar. With this solution, I would have to constantly peruse the JamBase listings and add shows to my calendar. Doesn't sound fun, does it?
Enter iConcertCal. I may be late to the train discovering this iTunes plugin, but this seems like a failsafe solution. It will actually use my mp3 library to search JamBase and other concert databases to find shows by artists I might actually like. As long as the exported iCal file can periodically update, it should work. I am going to install this tonight and figure out if it works. I'll report back.
¶ 9:07 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
August 26, 2007
HOA Website
Between working and studying for the GMAT (Sept 22!), I've been slowly putting together a website for my Homeowners Association at www.mountvernoncourthoa.com. I'm using Joomla, the open source content management system and it's been going pretty smoothly. I'm slightly aesthetically challenged, so don't laugh. I'm hoping this earns me some serious cred around my block :). Most of the real content is behind the user login which is only available to other owners in our complex. I have noticed that Google indexed several of the calendar pages individually. I need to setup my robots.txt file to prevent that. I've also been helping Brigitta setup an unofficial work blog for her at www.smallgiftbigstyle.com. The idea is to promote the high end Sanrio stuff at Momoberry, or whatever. Like I know anything about Hello Kitty.
¶ 5:20 PM 0 Comments
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