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?

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... 

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.

I unbox, display, discuss and connect my new Roku Netflix video streaming player!

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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.