I’ve been streaming a lot of http://Live.Twit.TV when I get home from work in the afternoon and after recently discovering Boxee for the Mac and all of the great geek content on Revision3.com, which is built right into Boxee, I have been thinking about buying an Apple TV.

The idea was to install a browser on the device for streaming Live.Twit.TV + have Boxee to see other stuff.  After a few Google searches on browsers + Apple TV, I finally bit the bullet on Friday and bought the device from WalMart at $228.

I got it all set up, and then set out to hack the hell out of it, as it doesn’t come with a browser.  I know, how stupid is that?  First I had to enable SSH via a patch stick creator http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator Once done, I used a program called FUGU, http://www.freemacware.com/fugu to FTP the "couch surfer" program.  Then a variety of command line keyboard mashes and all of the sudden "couch surfer" appeared in the Apple TV menu.

Unfortunately, it never actually loaded anything.  It would either go to a black screen where nothing was shown, or it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  I tried several versions of the program and eventually even tried installing Firefox. Nothing worked.  After 3 days of reading blog posts and how-to’s I finally got fed up and decided I was going to try http://www.aTVFlash.com, who has a $50 USB stick that is guaranteed to not only install the browser, but Boxee and a few other things.

Now before I dish out $50 on something that who knows if it will work, I “found” a version of the patch stick program on the internet.  I “tried it out” with the intention of, providing it worked, actually purchasing from the website the USB stick.  Now the “found” patch stick program did indeed work, installed Boxee and XBMC, and the couch server browser!

So I was almost on my way….except after this patch stick was applied, the Apple TV’s menu became somewhat flakey, unresponsive, AND it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  This concerned me greatly.  The final nail in the coffin for my Apple TV experience came when I fired up the Couch Surfer web browser the patch stick had installed. I headed over to http://live.twit.tv, which uses a flash player to stream video of Leo Laporte, and saw a blue Lego block in place of where the video stream should have been.

Upon further research, there appears to be a OS X 10.4 Tiger only “framework” called CoreAudioKit.Framework that is required in order to enable flash on the Apple TV.  You can’t use the Leopard version from your installed Leopard OS, you can’t use the Leopard install CD to grab the files…you have to have a Tiger disk and depending on which conflicting blog post you read, you may actually have to have Tiger installed in order to get the proper coreaudiokit.framework files to Fugu over to the Apple TV. 

It was at this point that I began an hours long search for the CoreAudioKit.framework files on the internet, which didn’t net me any results.  I even tried my Leopard version of the file, for giggles, to no avail.  I failed, was unable to get Flash installed and then I had what the religious folks call a “coming to Jesus” moment….

I had spent 4 days straight reading countless blog posts and how tos trying to install a browser.  I had “patched” the Apple TV repeatedly to get SSH enabled, Boxee to work, XBMC to work, Couch Surfer installed, Flash Installed and all I got out of this entire experience was a very angry 4 days, a browser that didn’t do the one thing I wanted it to do, no way (aside from buying a copy of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, a 4-year-old OS by the way) to get Flash installed, and a jacked up Apple TV menu that was ½ the time unresponsive and would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself for no reason repeatedly.

Bottom line is that I reset the Apple TV to the factory settings last night, packaged it back up in its original packaging, located the receipt and Wal-Mart bag from my Friday purchase, and placed it upon the shelf near the door to take back at my earliest convenience.  Consequently, I hooked up an XP based laptop to my TV using an s-video cable and an audio cable going from the laptop to my TV and was streaming Live.Twit.TV in full screen glory on my 50” Sony 2 minutes later.  Granted, there’s not a Boxee for Windows available for download yet, but I can live with viewing Boxee on my Macbook for a while.

A late Feb. firmware upgrade released by Apple for the Apple TV has broken the Boxee install on Apple TV devices.  Talk in the nerd-o-sphere is that Apple is being hush hush on reasons.  Not much that I have seen will even speculate.  Others, like the lovely and talented Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV have flat out begged Apple to re-enable the functionality of the very cool Boxee open source software.

With a late Q1, early Q2 rumor about Apple releasing new hardware updates to a variety of their products, many of which are obviously overdue, I am willing to speculate that the reason Apple bricked Boxee is because of a potential relationship with Netflix.  Boxee ties directly to your Netflix account, a process I just completed within 1 minute.  Within the last 6 months, Apple and Netflix began to play nice, wen the Netflix streaming video functionality for their subscribers was brought to Safari.

So let's have a look.  Apple and Netflix are now smooching sisters.  "Sure, use our browser to stream your content."  "Hey thanks, this is working out well for us to deliver our stuff to your very loyal fan base."  Alright, so now lets toss Boxee into the mix.  "Hey, we're open source, we can put Boxee on anything."  Netflix says "Sure thing, butter cup.  This is a great idea because we, as Netflix, want our customers to be able to see our movies on any device.  We're even streaming to Microsoft XBox and some Blue Ray players, heck even some new LCD TVs!".

Apple takes a second look and low and behold, they are sort of taken out of the picture streaming Netflix to people's TV because Netflix is pushing the Roku player (oustanding device, video evidence).  If they are going to make a push to offer more Apple features on the upcoming release of Apple TV, wouldn't "Hey, stream Netflix too?" be a huge selling point?  YES.  But if you can stream Netflix without having to upgrade your current Apple TV hardware, why would anyone switch over?

I am convinced that Apple killed Boxee with the latest firmware because they have an Apple sanctioned Apple TV Netflix feature on the table and in an effort to sell the new, shiny hardware later this year, they had to disable Boxee on Apple TV in order to make their relationship with Netflix continue to grow positively, despite how such action might affect the Netflix / Boxee relationship.

Any thoughts are welcome.  I am not an Apple Insider, I'm a chubby guy on my recliner in Omaha....but this totally makes sense, correct?

Review: iCam from SKJM, LLC
Purchase with this button:

Back in December, I posted my iTunes App Store wish list.  To quickly recap my desired app, I needed a way to stream video from my unibody Macbook (unboxing) to my iTouch / iPhone (unboxing) Shortly thereafter, a commenter left me a message telling me about one app that might suit my needs, iCam.  Produced by SKJM, LLC , this app was exactly what I was looking for.

The initial setup of the $4.99 app was pretty simple.  First I installed it on my iTouch, then I install a client (iCamSource) on my MacBook.  These two pieces of software work together to stream my iSight camera video directly to my iTouch via my iTouch's wifi connection to my home network.   

Brian, my fellow Linux buddy at work, shot me over an email from his iPhone this morning with a photo attached.  He installed KDE4 on his Ubuntu 8.10 netbook, an Acer Aspire One that I have been jealous over for the last few months.  The device is cool as hell as is, but now he's got it dual booting between XP and Ubuntu 8.10 and he's got Gnome and KDE as options.

It is clear that the KDE4 desktop environment is much prettier than the 'poop' colored Ubuntu, as I have seen it referred to across the web.  The load screen changed to a pretty blue "Kubuntu" graphic instead of the orange Ubuntu one and following that, the loader has some cool fade-in effects as it comes up.  Overall it's got a very clean OSX-ish gloss to it.  It's a bit different to get used to KDE4 after having used GNOME for so long, but the prettiness of it outweighs the learning curve.

I told Brian that the last thing he needs to do on this netbook in order to become king of nerds, is to install OSX on the netbook, too.  If he does it, I'll let you know....in fact, if he does it, I'll video tape him triple booting the thing and stick it up on YouTube.

I recently decided I'd try out the Google Analytics service to see if it was any better than StatCounter.com, who I have used for years.  Much to my delight, the details were about the same.  What did throw me, though, was the key word searches that landed people here on Nerdnology.com.

The #1 item people have come here for was the short review I wrote of the iPhone game "Field Runners" and it seems that "field runners strategy" was the key to people arriving at this .com.  So apparently there is a large market for strategies on iPhone games...at least that iPhone game.  I think due to the fact that I, too, enjoy iPhone games and there is obviously a market for discussion of said games, I might try to do some more iPhone game review blogging in the future.

The second thing that has really driven traffic to this site lately has been the post I did regarding how to tell programmably how many leap years are between two dates. I don't find this overly surprising, as when I was googling suggested solutions prior to writing my own code, I didn't see very much.  It's nice knowing that spending the time to write code to solve my problem and sharing it with the world might be helping out some other programmers out there.

The biggest single day hit came when I posted about how my 4-year-old daughter was going to switch to Linux on her PC, the "orange one" as she refers to Ubuntu.  This hit didn't come from Google search terms, though.  It came from a posting I did over at www.digg.com, located here, and netted nearly 500 hits in a matter of a few days.  It also gained me the most Diggs for any of the 23 posts I've done over there with a whopping grand total of 59!  haha.  So there is also a blogging market for cute stories about 4-year-old girls preferring one OS to another.

Another interesting tidbit of information relating to traffic and this site is that the video podcast I worked on for a while and eventually published to YouTube, episode 1 of Nerdnology was about the Roku Netflix player, only netted about 550 views on YouTube.  Amazingly, though, my 9 minute long no audio, only songs playing in the background, unibody MacBook unboxing has had over 11,000 views on YouTube!

So taking these things into consideration, it appears that there is for sure a market for things written about the iPhone, iPhone games, cute stories of kids and computers, and people love to look at Macs.   And it seems that these are all things I enjoy too.  Knowing this, I may attempt to refocus this blog into something a little more friendly to people interested in such things and less on my quest for a Wii.  It would sure be nice to get traffic here on a variety of topics, though.  Perhaps I just need to adjust the way I ping the internet so Google will grab my posts in a more meaningful way.

That's all for now, just sharing... 

I was rocking some Keith and the Girl this morning, one of my favorite comedy podcasts…a couple in NYC doing a show from their home.  Great, great stuff...my daily delight.  15 minutes into Episode 896 and I hear a weird noise…then I hear nothing.  Nothing at all.  I glance at my iTouch screen and it’s black.  I try the center button, nothing.  I try the top reset button….nothing.  I try plugging it into my charger even though I know it’s got a full charge….nothing.

I quickly went through my mental checkbook, realized it would be 4 pay periods before I could part with $220 (recent Wii purchases have killed me financially), and nearly splattered my drawers.  2 months without an iTouch?  No way, can’t do it.  I’m too hooked.  My Podcasts, my Pandora, my AOL Radio, my other apps.  Just 13 months into owning my first piece of Apple equipment, the iTouch purchased in January 2008, I realize how much I need the iTouch.  After just a seconds worth of thinking about it, I need my October purchased MacBook. 

Apple HAS me.  I have become so dependent on my daily routines, which center around having the iTouch in my ear nearly all day and the MacBook connected to my fingers all night, that I can't fathom what it would be like not to have my iTouch...not to have my Macbook.  If it came right down to it, if my iTouch crapped out on me this morning, I'd be going to the Apple Store over lunch, buying the newest 8GB iTouch, and then spending the next 3 weeks eBaying things from around the house that "I don't really need" in order to finance the "emergency" iTouch purchase.  Am I disgusting?  Am I sick in the head?

Yea, I have a few other MP3 players laying around that would do the job (sort of) to get my daily podcasts pushed into my brain that I could use while I save up $50 at a time in order to pay cash for a new iTouch...but they're nowhere near as epic as the iTouch. I realy feel that going from an iTouch to anything else would be such a downgrade, such a step backwards, the perfect example of devolution that I just couldn't handle it.

Luckily after holding the button on front and the button on top for about 10 seconds, the lovely, glorious shiny, silver Apple logo appeared on the dark screen and moments later I was back into the Keith and the Girl episode.  Now, though, I am worried that the year old iTouch is on the brink of death.  I better start saving up for the inevitable now...

Apple flat out has me.

As you may have read, I have been having quite a bit of trouble over the last month regarding my 4-year-old daughter's computer.  So much trouble, in fact, that I have wiped the drive clean multiple times putting on Ubuntu, gOS, openSuse, and even Windows 7 Beta.  None of these OSes, would play "very well" ripped DVD backups of the movies in my daughter's collection.  And due to incredibly annoying wireless network card support not working right out of the box for any of the Linux fair, I never actually got her machine connected to the net with any Linux os.  A complaint for another post...

 Anyway, this whole time, I assumed there was an issue with the operating systems just not being suited to read the drive as well as XP always had in the past.

I should have known better....a quick peak at the external hard drive's remaining space using Windows 7 Beta's quick glance at remaining hard disk space feature, the one really cool thing about Windows 7 Beta, I noticed that I only had about 7% of free disk space left on the hard drive.  From past experience, I was aware such limited free space on any drive will cause problems so I decided first thing I'd do was to defrag the drive, move some movies off, then defrag it again.  Unfortunately, it appeared that the defrag option in Windows 7 Beta didn't work.  It froze up at 9% and never got any further, even after leaving it on all night.

Figuring it was a Windows 7 Beta problem, I broke down and put XP back on her machine (yet again) and tried to open the "My Book" drive for a quick view, but the drive wouldn't open.  Confused, I moved the "My Book" over to the Mac, connected it, and nothing happened.  Back to the XP machine for an additional confirmation and sure enough, the drive appears dead, dead, dead.

So I've lost all of the DVD backups of my daughter's movie collection.  It looks like the night for me will consist of hours and hours worth of rubbing tooth paste on old DVDs trying to buff out the scratches and then hoping they aren't damaged to the point where I won't be able to get a working movie file for playback on her computer.

Oh, as far as a Windows 7 review, it looks kind of pretty, very Vista like for my taste.  I was bummed doing something as simple as defragging a hard drive failed.  Oh, I was also incredibly disappointed that I had to use a Vista driver for my network adapter and that driver, apparently, sucked mucho poocho.  In attempting to stream Netflix via IE in Windows 7 Beta, the network connection dropped every couple of seconds, which forced Netflix to attempt to reestablish the connection.  This made streaming Netflix to Windows 7 Beta impossible.  Oddly, now that XP is back on the machine and the XP wireless network adapter is installed, streaming Netflix to the XP machine once again works fine (so far).  So it is entirely possible that the driver support for Windows 7 Beta is less than stellar.  Only time will tell.

It won't matter to me, though, because my next machines (for the foreseeable future) will probably all be Macs. 

The 5-year-old PC in my daughter’s room, her PBSKids.com and “Daddy, I want to watch a movie you ripped from my DVDs I’ve since destroyed because I can’t put anything away properly and they’ve all become scratched beyond repair” computer, pissed me off for the last time last night.

All I wanted to do was open up the E: drive, an external hard drive where I have all of her DVD movies backed up, a practice I highly recommend if you've got a child.  They WILL destroy their DVDs so if you don't want to be out the $20 each, make an .mpg backup of them!  For whatever reason, this simple task of loading a movie for her caused Explorer to freeze (not responding) and it was like pulling teeth trying to get it to quit being a pain in the neck with CTRL+ALT+DEL repeatedly.  After a few minutes of fighting with it, I actually pulled the plug out of the wall in disgust.  I have never been so angry attempting to do a task (start a movie) that should literally take 15 seconds (Click drive, click folder, click sub folder, click movie to launch VLC and play) as I was last night after minutes of angrily fighting with the idiotic, frozen XP box...  My poor daughter, who was looking forward to some Wall-E, was instead stuck watching the 50-year-old "Snow White" on VHS as her settle down for the night movie.

I am officially moving my iTouch to my Macbook this coming weekend (currently on my daughter’s XP box)…something I’ve been holding off doing but now will make it official.  I am putting the kid on Linux full time.  Installing VLC should handle all of the .mpg and .avi file formats http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ so I should be good to go.  It’ll even handle the DVDs she hasn’t yet scratched beyond repair.  She can have her PBS kids, she can watch her backup .mpg movies while using the original DVDs as coasters for her sippy cups, and if she does want to stream some Netflix, I am going to figure out how to get Safari to run on WINE and stream that way (as Netflix only works with Safari on a Mac and IE in windows).  http://phorolinux.com/how-to-run-safari-in-linux-using-wine.html

That's right, my 4-year-old daughter is switching to Ubuntu Linux.

Of the hundreds of iPhone applications I've downloaded to my iTouch, I have found many that I love.  Fieldrunner, Monkey Ball, AOL Radio, just to name a few.  Granted, most of what I download are free but I would absolutely be willing to pay for one particular creation.

What I am looking for is an application that would allow me to stream video from my Macbook to my iTouch using my home's wi-fi network.  Why would I want such a thing?  Well, for one, I have two daughters who enjoy super long baths.  If I were able to set up my Macbook's iSight camera to stream live video to my iTouch while I went around the house and cleaned things up, it would be amazing!  Also, I'd like to be able to do the same thing when the kids are in their play room.  Macbook in the corner, iSight turned on, iPhone app running catching the live video stream so I can see them playing at all times.

Now, I assume that if the iPhone was able to handle Flash, I could accomplish this task with ease by creating a free account at www.ustream.com or some other similar video streaming service and then access the URL through Safari to see the video in real time, but regardless of the rumor mill regarding Adobe Flash on the iPhone, nothing solid, proven, and definitive has been announced, at least for the near future.

So aside from my few examples, there could be hundreds of applications for such a streaming video feature from a Macbook (or PC for that matter) to an iPhone or iTouch, whether via an iPhone App or some sort of web-based service that would jive fine with Safari on Apple's mobile devices.  Have an employee out of the office that should be able to see the big meeting?  Want to stream a live video podcast and allow iPhone users to see it anywhere in the world in real time?  News networks could broadcast repeats of their evening news on their servers and have things accessible via the iPhone on demand.  Anywhere where there is content being created or action going on that someone not there might like to view, this "wishful thinking" iPhone application would be perfect for.

If anyone knows of any suggestions that would help me accomplish this sort of functionality using my iTouch, please let me know.  If you're a developer and you're working on something like this, let me know!  If you know more than I do about the potential of the iPhone/iTouch eventually getting Adobe Flash, let me know!

Since I got my new Macbook in mid October of 2008, I have been wanting to connect it to my 50" Sony Wega LCD TV.  At first, my interest was only out of curiosity but after recently discovering the Mac version of the Netflix streaming player my curiosity switched to that of necessity.  If I am able to connect the Macbook to my TV and stream Netflix movies, talk about a pig in mud!

After some research done over at my other blog, www.helpmeswitch.com, I figured the only way to do it was to connect via the mini display port out to a second connector.  Well I just got back from the Apple Store and here's the scoop.

Due to the fact that I already owned a DVI to HDMI conversion cable, I opted to drop $30 on a mini display port to DVI cable from Apple.  Once connected to the Macbook and the TV, I fired up input #7 on the TV.  POW, Leopard appeared on the television in all of it's glory.  Step two was to try to stream some video, as using an s-video cable and 1/8" to RCA (red/white) cable going from an XP laptop to the TV worked the same way....until I attempted to stream Netflix or, for that matter, run anything in Windows Media Player or VLC.  Both players left a black box in the center of the XP output on the TV.

Needless to say, Netflix fired up and I started streaming episode 1 of season 1 of Dr. Who.  But wha, wha, whaaat?  Where's the audio?  I have always been under the impression that HDMI handled both audio AND video but I appear to either A) be mistaken or B) have an issue with the mini display port to DVI to HDMI setup.  Perhaps the DVI downgrades the signal and only allows the video output.

So I reverted back to my old 1/8" to RCA (red/white) cable and went from the Macbook's Line Out to the TV's audio in....no luck.  No audio.  Video yes, but what good is it sitting across the room staring at the 50" big screen if I can barely here the Macbook's speakers cranked all the way up without hooking up some sort of external computer speaker arrangement?

So unless I can find a different audio cable to connect the Macbook to the TV, I may have to return the $30 mini display port cable to the Apple Store and find another solution.

That solution, from all of my research, is a device called The Roku.  The Roku is a small set-top device that connects to your home network (yes, it has wi-fi!) and your "watch instantly" enabled Netflix account (I believe this the $8.99/month, one rental at a time minimum to turn on the "watch instantly" capabilities).  So for 3 X the expense of the mini display port adapter, this device handles it all and is in all honesty MEANT to connect Netflix to your TV.

The $100 price point isn't too bad, considering renting a movie from the video store is over $4 a pop now...in a matter of a few months, the device would pay for itself even taking into account the $9/month Netflix fee.  Over a year or two, it would easily more than pay for itself in convenience alone!

As an alternative to the Roku, Blockbuster has just released their MediaPoint player.  What's the difference?  Well for the $99 you actually get 25 movie downloads....and each download is a la carte, which means that unlike Netflix, you actually fork out $1.99 for each video you download to the MediaPoint player.  So I guess the toss-up between the two devices would be the number of movies you watch.  If you watch a bunch, Netflix is the way to go.  If you watch very few, MediaPoint from Blockbuster might be you cup of tea.  

The remaining issue between these two players is the content library behind them.  Netflix claims 12,000 movies (less that they actually stream live) and Blockbuster claims 2,000...a rather large difference, if you ask me.

For my money, the Roku will probably be the way to go.  Once I take back this mini display DVI adapter to Apple and convince my lovely bride to allow yet another box to sit next to the TV, I'll write a report on the Roku.

If only my Tivo, which I have been a diehard fan of for years, would cooperate with Netflix....I know there was talk about this years ago, but nothing ever came of it...what a huge, huge, huge disappointment from both Tivo and Netflix.