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.

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. 

Two weeks ago, I posted a video podcast episode discussing the Roku player, how it worked, the ease of setup, and so on.  After having two weeks with the device, I thought I'd write a quick review regarding having the entity as a living piece of technology in the house.

First off, I still love the form factor of the player.  It's very small, smaller than most external USB hard drives I've got scattered around the house.  The built-in wi-fi is genius, the connection options are great, and the remote is so simple, a 4-year-old child could (and has, in my house) run it.

Disappointing, though, is the Netflix selection.  On Christmas day, I had a handful of family members over, movie buffs all of us.  With their curiosity fueling the fire, they tossed out movie after movie to me as I searched each one on Netflix to see if it was possible to stream.  Much to everyone's disappointment, 85% of the films they named were NOT available to stream.  Netflix would happily mail them to me, but not deliver them to my Roku on demand.  Now please note, these were not all brand spanking right from the box office movies like Iron Man or The Dark Night (neither are streamable at the moment).  We hit some oldies but goodies like One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest, Annie Hall, Dances With Wolves, Top Gun, and even Porky's for God's sake!  None were available to stream.  These movies are 20+ years old and any viable financial benefit to keeping them in the "for mail only" category is just flat out crazy!

Not being a business man, I really don't know much about how Netflix determines what they turn into streamable items and what they don't.  I'd sure like to know so if any of you have inside info or links to details, please post in the comments.  

So after two weeks with the Roku, I still give it a 10 for 10 when not taking the lacking Netflix content into consideration.  I'd have to give it a 4 of 10 when you do take into consideration the poor movie selection.  If Netflix would please be so kind as to focus on getting a LOT more movies in their stream queue and focus less on getting old episodes of Family Ties (yes, I'm serious...you can now get season 1 of Family Ties streamed to you....but no ALF?!?!  WTF?), they'll have a LOT more success selling Roku players.

On a good note, I can and have been streaming the first season of Dr. Who...and had I paid $4.25 per DVD (I think there are 4 episodes on a DVD) it would have already cost me about $15....so in terms of financial savings buying the Roku vs. renting from the local Hollywood Video, the Roku has almost paid nearly 1/6 for itself so far just in Dr. Who episodes alone.  Though it must be said I can't stream any Battlestar Galactica nor Stargate.  *sigh*.  Netflix, get your stuff together and start digitizing your ENTIRE library.  You will, only then, slay Blockbuster... 

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

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The Guild, a review of the web tv show located at http://www.watchtheguild.com

If you are not already in love with Felicia Day, then you're out of the loop! Who is she? Well, she's "Codex" on "The Guild", www.WatchTheGuild.com. She is also the writer and lead on this awesome web tv show. I stumbled onto this gem while chowing down a foot-long Blimpie's Best sammy over lunch about a month ago.

I had fired up the TV for a little G4TV on my cable system while destroying the sandwhich and they were doing an interview with Felicia about "The Guild". Being a former, and ever recovering, MMORPG geek, I was intregued immediately. After having spent nearly 3 years of my life sucked into the world of Everquest, only having given it up after my lovely bride politely told me that if I didn't stop playing the game, I'd be playing with myself for the rest of my life, anything I can live the MMORPG life vicariously through without actually logging the hours is right up my alley.

So that evening I watched the entire season 1 and as there were only two episodes of season 2 released, I added those to the night's viewing enjoyment. Note, each episode is only between 3-8 minutes long so knocking out the entire series up to this point is well worth the less than 2 hour investment. Much more entertaining than the 2-hour movie you've got 6 items down in your Netflix queue (trust me, I know).

Basically "Codex" (Felicia Day) is in a guild with a few other players. Vork (Jeff Lewis), Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda), "Zaboo" (Sandeep Parikh), "Clara" (Robin Thorsen), and "Bladezz" (Vincent Casso). Here's a direct link to the Cast Page.

This band of looters and raiders are all...special...in their own way. Zaboo leaves his mother's home to travel across the contry to pronounce his love for Codex, who is the least bit interested but still allows the creepy little sex pot to live in her house. His mother later comes into the picture as a mega-boss. In an effort to get some help from her guildmates, Codex arranges a real life get-together with these fine folks she's never met in person before. Hilarity ensues, as this group of social misfits, albiet a powerhouse of MMORPG goodness in-game, are a bunch of weirdos in real life. Hm...wonder if that's how things were back when I was rocking the Quellious Server in Everquest as a level 47 magician, "Skoalman".  Anyway, Bladezz holds the guild's loot bank hostage, Tinkerballa offers to babysit Clara's neglected children, Zaboo continues to attempt to make Codex fall in love with him pitifully, and Vork is trying to abide by guild rules not only in-game, but in real life.

One thing that the show is missing is some actual in-game footage. Maybe there's copyright reasons they aren't allowed to clip in some Warcraft video or whatever the flavor of the month MMORPG game is these days. It would sure be nice to see some "South Park"-esc game action here and there as this group struggles between real world problems and in-game guild obligations.

I've got to give this show a 10 of 10 for not only nerd humor, but the writing is great, the cast is outstanding, and the show is just an all around blast to watch if you can relate to the gamer mentality. Give "The Guild" just an episode or two of your time and see for yourself. I can promise you that you'll enjoy it as much as I do...if you're the least geeky or nerdy. And if you're here, you are.

-Corby-